Migrant Competence

Sunday, September 18th, 2016

James Thompson explores migrant competence:

Europe is experiencing enormous inflows of people from Africa and the Middle East, and in the midst of conflicting rhetoric, of strong emotions and of a European leadership broadly in favour of taking more migrants (and sometimes competing to do so) one meme keeps surfacing: that European Jews are the appropriate exemplars of migrant competence and achievements.

European history in the 20th Century shows why present-day governments feel profound shame at their predecessors having spurned European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. However, there are strong reasons for believing that European Jews are brighter than Europeans, and have greater intellectual and professional achievements. There may be cognitive elites elsewhere, but they have yet to reveal themselves. Expectations based on Jewish successes are unlikely to be repeated.

I am old enough to know that political decisions are not based on facts, but on presumed political advantages. The calculation of those leaders who favour immigration seems to be that the newcomers will bring net benefits, plus the gratitude and votes of those migrants, plus the admiration of some of the locals for policies which are presented as being acts of generosity, thus making some locals feel good about themselves for their altruism. One major ingredient of the leadership’s welcome to migrants is the belief that they will quickly adapt to the host country, and become long term net contributors to society. Is this true?

With Heiner Rindermann he analyzed the gaps, possible causes, and impact of The Cognitive Competences of Immigrant and Native Students across the World:

In Finland the natives had reading scores of 538, first-generation immigrants only 449, second-generation 493. The original first-generation difference of 89 points was equivalent to around 2–3 school years of progress, the second-generation difference of 45 points (1-2 school years) is still of great practical significance in occupational terms.

In contrast, in Dubai natives had reading scores of 395; first-generation immigrants 467; second-generation 503. This 105 point difference is equivalent to 16 IQ points or 3–5 years of schooling.

Rather than look at the scales separately, Rindermann created a composite score based on PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS data so as to provide one overall competence score for both the native born population and the immigrants which had settled in each particular country. For each country you can seen the natives versus immigrant gap. By working out what proportion of the national population are immigrants you can recalculate the national competence (IQ) for that country. Rindermann proposes that native born competences need to be distinguished from immigrant competences in national level data.

The analysis of scholastic attainments in first and second generation immigrants shows that the Gulf has gained from immigrants and Europe has lost. This is because those emigrating to the Gulf have higher abilities than the locals, those emigrating to Europe have lower ability than the locals.

The economic consequences can be calculated by looking at the overall correlations between country competence and country GDP.

[...]

The natives of the United Kingdom have a competence score of 519 (migrants to UK 499), Germany 516 (migrants to Germany 471), the United States 517 (migrants to US 489). There, in a nutshell, is the problem: those three countries have not selected their migrants for intellectual quality. The difference sounds in damages: lower ability leads to lower status, lower wages and higher resentment at perceived differences. On the latter point, if the West cannot bear to mention competence differences, then differences in outcome are seen as being due solely to prejudice.

Comments

  1. Sam J. says:

    Before the Germans attempted to throw out the Jews they took enormous amounts of them into the country. What happened? They took over the media and banks. Destroyed the currency and proceeded to criticize the Germans constantly. They attempted to overthrow the government in a Communist conspiracy and eventually the Germans got so fed up they wanted to throw them out.

    The USA took lots of Jews after the war and the Jews took over the media and banks. Collapsed the banks in the housing crisis. Constantly criticized the White former majority and subsidized mass immigration to such a level that Whites will become a minority. Let’s see what’s the next step?

    The Jews have been thrown out of every single country they’ve been to in any significant numbers for all of known history. Everywhere. Surely this must give anyone pause as the benefits of having Jews in their country no matter how smart they are. After all no one wants an evil genius running their country.

  2. Graham says:

    What did the Jews have to do with the four key decisions producing the German hyperinflation:

    1. Go to war against long odds
    2. Raise no taxes and finance entirely by debt
    3. Abandon gold standard and print money to facilitate #2
    4. Lose the war

    All decisions directly made or inevitable products of decisions directly made by the emperor, government, and Reichstag. Not especially Jewish organizations, though I assume some were in the Reichstag.

  3. Coyote says:

    Graham, your PowerPoint presentation of ahistorical points is eloquent testimony to our modern educational standards. We are now truly enlightened as to the non-involvement of Jews in “decisions” to lose WW I, start that war against long odds, and to have no involvement in the lending of money at usurious rates to the German government, and attempts to pay the interest on said debt with hyperinflation. And that Germany actually had an emperor. lolz.

  4. Graham says:

    Which one of those four points is “ahistorical”?

    1. Germany did make some major diplomatic mistakes in 1914, including the blank cheque to Vienna. Granted, they had few options by then to shore up their position, but then they’d contributed more than most to their own isolation in the previous decade. It is fair to say both that they elected war, even if I think their options were limited, and that they did so against long odds. Which they knew were long. That was part of the gamble they understood themselves to be making.

    2. Unlike some [France], Germany’s leaders chose to raise no taxes and finance entirely by debt. Stupid, unless you expect to win really fast, and stupid even then. A product of the fragility of the German political system, but still stupid.

    3. Nobody was going to maintain strict hard money under wartime conditions but still. Obvious contributor to postwar inflation, especially on the losing side.

    4. Indisputable battlefield verdict.

    I had been under the impression most German war finance was war bonds sold on the domestic market at an average of 5%. They had little to no access to the world markets after 1914. I suppose now you’ll tell me its the Jews’ fault for not letting them borrow in New York and making them borrow from mainly German sources.

    Also- what interest rate is usurious in this context? If they don’t want to pay it, don’t borrow the money. [Presuming they had borrowed any from "Jews" as opposed to GErmans, and presuming the rate was in fact usurious.] We’re not talking about some honest schmo trying to bridge paychecks and buy food here. We’re talking about a rich industrial nation that had options in front of it in 1914 and chose the risky ones in hopes of the big payoff.

    And they did lose the war. Considering they had lost the biggest war in history up to that point, postwar Germany didn’t suffer all that much. The losers’ fate was usually worse. Look what Germany put the Russians through. Brest-Litovsk is what a Carthaginian peace actually looks like in a modern context, and the collapse of the Russian state and society into revolution and civil war was a far worse fate than Germany endured.

  5. Lucklucky says:

    Graham you are arguing with lazy persons.

    “Usurious rate” is a typical socialist expression. Which is not surprising to see from said persons.

    If you don’t like the price, then don’t buy.

  6. Adar says:

    That it might even suggested that the recent wave of illegal migrants to Europe will emulate the Jews is absurd. The Jews for thousands of years have had a highly literate culture and society. These current illegal migrants come from nations and cultures that to the most part are illiterate or functionally illiterate.

    I might think also the number of immigrants to Finland is too small to make reasonable statistical inferences.

  7. Sam J. says:

    “…What did the Jews have to do with the four key decisions producing the German hyperinflation:…”

    The Jews owned the private banks and could create currency themselves. They did so in vast quantities until the government(Hitler) stopped them and then the Reich Marchs was issued without owing debt to the private bankers. While farmers were hanging themselves in their barns in Kansas Germans were going on vacations.

    I would trade the Jews for Muslims one for one any day. Every country they go to they destroy.

    As for Germany in WWI the Jewish communist rebellion, strikes and slow downs didn’t help the war much.

    As for financing all the belligerents thought the war would end quickly. Everyone always thinks this. It’s a fatal error that happens over and over.

    It also can be reasoned without too much a stretch that the Germans expected better terms than those that were finally agreed upon. If they would have known the final terms they probably wouldn’t have surrendered.

    The Jews betray everyone where ever they go.

  8. Coyote says:

    Socialist. Lolz. Is that, like being wayciss or something for you normies? Pepe sad.

    Usurious once upon a time meant charging any interest. Exceptions were, of course, made for princes and other of the noble elite, but when local economies collapsed when their war debts and interest could no longer be paid, it was simple to point out the evil loan sharks, and the peasants were happy to expel the handy scapegoats.

    We have once again reached a precipice of yet another economic collapse of a host empire, but all the normies are as yet uneducated as to who has finagled this chaos — again. When usury (of any kind) was strictly forbidden by the Catholic church, every little stagestop village in europe had a fine cathedral — a testimony to the labor and money they had, when they did not have to suffer under the chains of debt.

    Our cathedrals stand in Wall Street with the golden calf at their doors; our people worship the shekels and slave in this global debtor’s prison so the chosen “can sit, and eat, like effendi”. Oh! Maybe I do have something in common with some earlier National Socialists. They may not have been a “supreme” white race; neither were they too stupid to figure out who was turning nation into a decadent pit of despair and debauchery. Unlike our normies.

  9. Graham says:

    “The Jews owned the private banks and could create currency themselves. They did so in vast quantities until the government(Hitler) stopped them and then the Reich Marchs was issued without owing debt to the private bankers. While farmers were hanging themselves in their barns in Kansas Germans were going on vacations.”

    Ah, I assumed we were previously talking about the hyperinflation that came out of the first war and took place in 1921-4. The groundwork for this was laid by the aforementioned German government policies in which Jews played no significant role [possibly no role, but again I consider that there may have been Jews influencing Reichstag support for the government's war finance policy; still a marginal role].

    The London Ultimatum on reparations did set off the worst round of inflation, but then German policy both spurred that ultimatum and determined that hyperinflation would result from German compliance [printing money to buy foreign currency in which to pay reparations.]It was a German government scam to pay reparations faster in rapidly inflated marks, on the backs of the German people but with the desired end state of getting out from under the reparations faster. The marks involved were the government’s marks.

    Germany decided to finance the war with pure debt, Germany lost the war, Germany determined how to deal with its circumstances in the wake of defeat. And the hyperinflation was the natural, if not indeed inevitable, result. Desired, if not to that degree perhaps, by German ministers as a matter of policy to ultimately benefit the German state.

    As for any reference to the Hitler government’s policies, they would not be relevant at all. We were not discussing the effects in Germany of the post-1929 worldwide Depression, but rather the WW1-caused hyperinflation of 1921-4. Which was long over before 1929 and the Depression [note- DEPRESSION, not INFLATION] and had been dealt with by the Weimar governments. Hitler had no role in it.

    Hitler, in response to the later DEPRESSION, was actually running what in a free market would actually have been a massive debt-financed stimulus policy which would have had hyperinflationary effects of their own. Possibly a valid response to conditions of DEPRESSION, but if it had been the policy of the German government during a period of existing hyperinflation it would have made things even worse.

    Can’t see any evidence that “the Jews” owned Germany’s private banks at the time. You can find individual prominent Jews [Bamberger was a founder of Deutsche Bank in 1870]and I’m sure there was plenty of money, but not more than there were prominent non-Jewish Germans in the industry and, presumably, their money. At any rate, these institutions were not significant causes of the hyperinflation of 1921-4, which was over determined by German government policy alone.

    Worth noting as an aside that one of more of the biggest German banks was nationalized by the German state in 1931 [pre-Hitler] and subsequently privatized in 1937 by the Hitler government. I think it was Dresdner bank. Or Commerzbank. Hitler was not running a pure nationalization economy, and certainly not with regard to the big banks.

    I’d rather have gone on a strength through joy trip than hanged myself in a lonely Kansas barn myself. And that might be relevant in a discussion of German versus American responses to crises in agricultural prices and/or the rural environment in the Depression of the 1930s. Has nothing at all to do with German responses to the rather different [more or less opposite] financial problems of the early 1920s, or the entirely different causes at play.

    Not sure what you’re getting at about “owing debt to the private bankers”. Again, the currency involved in the hyperinflation was the government’s mark, the inflation was caused by economic circumstances pertaining to reparations in part, in part by German war policy, and in part by the government’s decision to print money in response to the reparations requirements, which got out of control fast. Government currency, government printing, government policy. Issued, overprinted, signed and sealed by Reich authorities.

    It’s hard to imagine any workers being happy by 1918, considering that government lack of planning and incompetence made Germany’s economic mobilization among the weakest of any power, and was generating shortages even of food from early in the war. Hardly surprising there would be unrest by the end. Most of these were not Jews. Most of the people striking and rioting were not Jews. DO they not have the right to be remembered?

    Communists and Jews were overlapping, not identical groups. And, again, most of the workers, soldiers and sailors were not Jews.

    Also, and I can’t stress this enough, these were not causes of defeat. Germany was defeated militarily already when all that got going. If Germany had had any chance of winning by October 1918, none of that unrest would have overthrown the government. Germany was not winning, it was obviously losing. Worse, Ludendorff set off a lot of the unrest when his premature panic and the tresulting German request for talks got leaked to the press. His army was clearly losing, and he made it worse at home by briefly panicking. If anything, he created the conditions for his BS stab in the back legend.

    Your general point about the optimism of powers entering wars and the general errors of war finance is spot on, as far as it goes. But Germany did a poorer job, made worse choices, and set themselves up for catastrophe. There’re two ways to see it. Arguably the Allies would have been in a slightly better position if defeated, insofar as they had more robust finances for some of the time and made more use of taxation. Germany erred in not doing the same. On the other hand, maybe the Allies would have done as badly if they had lost. Except they didn’t lose. Germany’s mistake was to finance the war on pure debt on the gambler’s assumption they would win against long odds, and then not to win.

    I’m sure the Germans did expect better terms. Although I don’t know why. They were not themselves known for generosity in such situations, and had in 1917 imposed a punitive peace on the Russians, with a Russian government they had effectively installed in order to make a Carthaginian peace possible [they sent Lenin back, they got a revolution and a peace at any price Leninist government, and they exploited that for all it was worth]. And, more generally, Germany was losing the costliest and most destructive war in history up to that point. With those two factors in mind, the Germans must have been insane to expect any better terms than they had given Russia. And, yet, they did get better terms than they had given Russia.

    Given the terms of the armistice they signed, the Germans should have had some additional inkling of what the peace might look like, if the above wasn’t enough clue. Perhaps they wouldn’t have surrendered. Except they had no choice- they signed the armistice because they were losing and they didn’t want to lose worse. The armistice made resumption of the war by Germany untenable- loss of their fleet, loss of occupied territory, loss of munitions, collapse of the army and government.

    The Germans signed the armistice because they were losing badly and needed to sign it. They asked for it and when it seemed harsh they knew they could not refuse. If they thought they could fight on, they would have. Once signed, they were unable to hold themselves together or maintain public support that could have taken them back to war, and had lost the means to do so.

    If they had skipped the armistice and fought on, they would have been defeated even more decisively on German soil in 1919 and they knew that perfectly well.

    None of which required the presence of any Jews.

  10. Graham says:

    I admit a certain fascination with the medieval concept of usury but it’s usually presented in terms that seem like a foreign language to me. There’s a whole literature on why it’s wrong to charge any interest on a loan of money because money is money is money and is not a thing or service, or some sort of witch-doctorish scholastic mumbo-jumbo.

    I simply cannot understand. If I loan you money, I’ve given you the use of something of value no less than if I’d given you a wagon to use. interest is the fee for service. If you don’t want to pay, don’t hire the money. If you do and then don’t pay, you are just a thief.

    My impression from some of the sources is that they assumed every loan of money should always be an act of charity, but for some reason this did not apply to the loan of anything else. One possible explanation is that a person who needs a wagon needs it to perform a gainful service and will make money, and should thus pay for the loaned thing. Or loaned service of work. But a loan of money would always be for survival needs only. And should be charity.

    I could see that in an economic system on the permanent edge of survival, but even then the distinction between money and everything else seems artificial. And in an economy with any kind of commerce at all, a loan of money could be for future economic gain no less than any other kind of loan.

    We now distinguish between asking for or giving charity, and asking for or giving a loan on business terms. That distinction makes things much clearer and no one should be confused by it.

  11. Graham says:

    Also, those cathedrals took a century or two to build, and required what amounted to forced labor. They are great monuments to faith and civilization, but the societies that built them had their own means of exploiting people, manual labor service among them.

    Anything of value that got built faster had some debt service behind it. Look at really rich places in medieval Europe like northern Italy or southern and Rhenish Germany. They could have built a cathedral faster and paid off the cost against agricultural surplus over decades, with terms written to allow for poor harvest years if they were smart.

    I assume I need hardly add that we all live far more comfortably and securely than any medieval peasant, or indeed prince, on the backs of what a commercial economy has given us.

    Like all humans since forever, we find ourselves in difficulty when we take on things we cannot afford. Now, poor men have to take out usurious payday loans to get food to feed their kids. You’re right- in the medieval world they could have escaped that usury. Their spare kids could just have died. And did. Our world is not crueler than theirs.

    In the modern world, we also have the option to plan our family and life choices a little more in advance than medievals did. Our responsibility to do so is thus greater. Nobody has to have more kids than they can feed. We can still suffer financial loss due to unexpected health crisis or injury, just as they did, but we can get insurance to cover some of it. They just died.

    We can suffer a crisis because of loss of income, and that can put us over the edge. So could they- they could have poor harvest, disease, war, what have you. And lose all. So could they.

    Our financial system does not make our world crueler than theirs. It indeed adds options they did not have. They are not risk-free options. But they are an improvement over nothing, and most people now have many more mistakes to make in life or more tragedies to suffer before needing them.

    And of course that all applies to a poor man or woman who needs money to bridge wages and get food for kids or self.

    Someone who is underwater on a house they couldn’t afford does not warrant any sympathy. That’s called poor planning and ambition exceeding resources. Probably the kind of thing the anti-usury measures were really meant to discourage, except that it was only nobles who then worried about acquiring large pieces of property under mortgage.

  12. Lucklucky says:

    “The Jews owned the private banks and could create currency themselves. They did so in vast quantities until the government(Hitler) stopped them and then the Reich Marchs was issued without owing debt to the private bankers.”

    Hilarious. So how much money did these Jewish bankers “create”? I suppose you mean by credit that people asked them for. A number.

    And as is typical in a socialist mindset, if the bankers, Jewish or otherwise, had not given them credit, they would have been accused of hoarding the money. The socialist always plays a double game to have an escape route from failure.

    “Socialist. Lolz. Is that, like being wayciss or something for you normies? Pepe sad.”

    Precisely. Karl Marx was a racist and anti-semitic — because he was a socialist.

  13. Lucklucky says:

    “The Reichsbank today issues 20 thousand milliards of new money daily. The note issue at present amounts to 63,000 milliards: in a few days, therefore, we shall be able to issue in one day two thirds of the total circulation.”

    Dr. Havenstein, President of the Reichbank, 1923.

  14. Lucklucky says:

    Now, let’s see what Germans made after WW2 instead of printing money and entering in speculative policy.

    Ludwig Erhard, against not only many Germans but also the Allied powers, lifted the price controls in 1948, and 20 years later the German economy destroyed by WW2, which they started, was already in a much better state than the paranoid British Fabian economy.

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