Interview, Podcast
Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy
- Garrett Jones argues that the benefits of "open borders" or mass low-skilled immigration are often overstated because they can lower a host country's average skill level (mean/median IQ), thereby reducing national productivity and the positive externalities of innovation for the entire planet.
- Jones estimates the impact of migration to be roughly a 50/50 split between formal democratic influence (voting) and informal cultural influence (social norms), with the latter occurring through "spaghetti theory" where natives and migrants converge on intermediate cultural values.
- Empirical analysis by Jones and a student reveals a consistent negative relationship between an increase in migrants from corrupt nations and subsequent declines in a host country's economic freedom and institutional quality.
- While elite IQ is a strong predictor of national productivity (especially in non-democracies where the median voter is less relevant), Jones contends that lowering the median skill level in a democracy creates negative externalities that swamp the potential benefits of increased variance or the occasional arrival of a high-skilled elite.
- Jones suggests running open borders "experiments" in lightly populated, high-institutional-quality countries like Iceland or Northern Ireland rather than in innovation powerhouses like the US, to avoid degrading the "I-7" (US, Germany, UK, France, China, Japan, South Korea) innovation hubs.
- The "Deep Roots" literature predicts national prosperity based on State History (SA), Agricultural History (SA), and Tech History (T); Jones argues that the Tech History (T) component is often omitted by critics like Brian Kaplan, leading to erroneous conclusions about China and India's underperformance.
- Jones posits that the "Great Stagnation" in innovation does not justify lowering standards for high-skilled immigration, as the marginal value of preserving the US's exceptional innovative capacity is crucial for global welfare over 20–50 year time horizons.
- Regarding national IQ interventions, Jones supports public health measures (iodine, nutrition, lead reduction) and education as a "Flint cycle" to boost test scores, noting that while moving children to high-IQ nations closes the gap, the long-term institutional impact of lower-skilled adult migration remains a net negative if it lowers the host's mean IQ.
- Jones rejects the notion of "bondholder utopia" where markets perfectly price risk, asserting that US bondholders are currently pricing in a long-term fiscal resolution where the government balances its books by reducing benefits for the poor and middle class via tax hikes or spending cuts (e.g., VAT or Medicaid cuts) rather than hyperinflation.
- On the topic of elite control, Jones advocates for "10% less democracy" in rich nations, supporting technocratic independence similar to the Federal Reserve for agencies like the FDA, but warns that elite rule in developing nations often devolves into rent-seeking by the oligarchy.
- Jones notes that successful "monarchies" are effectively oligarchies in equilibrium, where power is shared between a "king and council," functioning more like a corporate board than a sole ruler.
- Regarding the Mormon community, Jones attributes high trust and wealth accumulation to historical selection for pro-sociality and frugality in the harsh 19th-century pioneer environment, which builds capital stock for future generations.
- Jones warns that high intelligence correlates with "Machiavellian intelligence" and endogenous pro-sociality in repeated games rather than inherent agreeableness, implying a higher risk of sophisticated, high-impact fraud (e.g., Enron) or strategic manipulation in zero-sum environments.
- Jones proposes a hypothetical immigration system where "Deep Roots" scores (SA and T) might eventually be used as a small "plus factor" in a points-based system, but explicitly states he would never use hard quotas or cutoffs given the current immaturity of the data compared to the early days of monetarism.