Garett Jones has finished his Singapore Trilogy, Hive Mind, 10% Less Democracy, and The Culture Transplant:
One way to think about the book is to think of the person vs. situation debate in psychology. The question was this: what explains people’s behaviors better, their current life situation broadly speaking or their stable persona? The latter we now call trait theory — because it is about people’s stable psychological dispositions — and won the evidence debate, at least, academically. Things haven’t improved much for situationism since then with the downfall of previously popular experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment, and Rosenhan’s psych ward study. So instead of thinking just about typical westerners, we can also think of humanity at large. Sometimes people move around (immigrate). Thinking of each ethnic group as a person to be explained, we can thus look at whether the same ethno-person behaves similarly in different situations, say, whether they live in Somalia, Sweden, or USA. Here we must clarify that there are some issues with measurement of many psychological traits. We don’t really, in general, have perfect scales so that we can track people’s absolute standing on some trait across time and place (we simply don’t know how to construct such tests). We can, however, track relative differences. So we can see whether Somalis living in Somalia (taken as a country) perform well economically, and we can check whether Somalis who moved to USA or Sweden perform well economically. In each case we find that they do rather poorly everywhere we find them, again, taken as a group. We can repeat this method for any other set of natio-ethno groups across various countries, to see whether the relative differences remain relatively consistent across situations.
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Anyway, so if you count patents or anything else really, you will find that a few large and relatively productive countries produce most of everything new in the world.
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The world in general depends on the right tail inventing, innovating, researching, and building. This is just as true within a country as it is between them. As such, everybody loses when the few clusters in the world that contain the most such right tail people are disrupted. We see this disruption all over the Western world, but especially in the most critical places. Time and money is wasted on diversity (read: anti-meritocratic) hiring, communist-like indoctrination, and the parading of the mentally ill in public spaces (drag shows, pride events). This must come at a cost of progress. Criminal and unproductive foreigners are imported to the most productive places on Earth where they can cause maximum disruption (the capitals of Western Europe, Californian cities). This is crazy and not even in migrants’ own long-term interest. However, modern Western politics seems to have forgotten everything about long-term interests (massive COVID debts, short-sighted democratic vote buying). I could go on, but you get the point.
Jones spends a chapter talking about the unique Chinese experience in Asia. This is basically just the thesis of
World on Fire by Amy Chua, but from a positive perspective. Not about ethnic conflict, but about how much better off the South Asians with more Chinese neighbors are. The Chinese may own most of their countries, but if their own salaries and standard of living increases by some substantial percentage, we have to ask ourselves how much self-determination is worth.[…]
Obviously, ‘culture’ that transfers with people even when they lose their native language (and native culture in any normal sense), and also stays present across sometimes 200+ years in a new country, this doesn’t sound a lot like culture, but it does sound like genetics.
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He seems to want to stay within the Overton window, but go pretty close to the edge, so that the reader will draw their own conclusions, and perhaps seek out some of the evidence slightly to the right of the evidence the book covers
It doesn’t take a book to realize that when First World nations import the Third World, the First becomes like the Third. Import the Third World, become the Third World.
“the parading of the mentally ill in public spaces (drag shows, pride events).”
How true.
To this one can add the explosion in social media where mentally-deficient people can garner praise for ranting about things they either know nothing about or simply ‘feel’ without real awareness of life. Coupled with protestors who can behave badly while masked (and to a large degree are encouraged by weak politicians) but who have never had a job that requires them to show discipline and fortitude, then we have too much in the public space.
Albion says:
Those are merely visible symptoms. They are far downstream of the causes that made them pretty much inevitable.
To expand the view just a little bit… remember the Prohibition movement, or the “white feather” vultures in UK, or old style feminists like Valerie Solanas. The bomb-throwing (and mostly fake) anarchists. No doubt you could add more loons.
Were all those a whole lot saner than the drag queens and “pantifa — always in a bunch”?