YOU'VE BEEN HIT BY THE

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|Truck full of Mexicans| '|""";.., ___.
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Sorry they have no insurance )-=

The technology argument is not a perfect one. Yes, technology IS a substitute for cheap labor, but if it was better than cheap labor people still have the option of using it. I think what you are trying to say is that the welfare gains from cheap labour are exaggerated since the brains always can substitute with capital.

But here is what Gald does not take into account:

1. The US is not an undistorted market, it is a social welfare state. Her simple model does not include the Braws living of welfare and committing 3-4 times as much crime as the Brains.
2. The economic gains from immigration mostly go to the immigrants, not the native population.
3. There are massive costs from uneducated poor Mexican voters turning the country more socialistic. Already 60% vote for the left, and the share is going to go up.
4. The ‘social securety’ argument is bunk. The Mexican workers are also going to get pensions some day, immigration can only “solve” social security if we have accelerating immigration forever.

But remember the 2000 comparison is highly misleading, 2000 was a very overheated year. In general labor force participation is normal to high right now.

(Although this is not an argument for or against immigration.)

Indeed - external effects are key here. And "brawns" tend to carry along massive negative external effects.

So the 5% difference in IQ that you are using between the US and China is strictly a function of the populations and the differences in the tests used to establish those numbers are less than 5%? Yeah right.

Yes, some of the rise in SSDI might be attributable to people discouraged from competing against illegals for job, but on the other hand some of the rise is almost certainly attributable to welfare reform. Welfare recipients faced with being removed from the dole have a knack for developing "disabilities."

As for the declining worker/population ratio, the trend toward early retirement deserves some further investigation. Retirement at 65 is an obsolete notion. Today 55 is the new 65, so to speak.

To follow up on my prior comment, note that the leading diagnosis categories among disabled-worker SSDI recipients are mental illness and muscloskeletal problems ("my aching back!")
These are, needless to say, the easiest "disabilities" to fake.

Just as an aside, I think the eugenic argument is really weak in this case. Immigrants from the third world, especially the tropical parts of the third world, almost certainly have had their intelligence affected by environment in pretty well-defined ways, like endemic disease and malnutrition while they were growing up, as well as missing out on whatever environmental causes have led the people in industrialized countries to have rising raw IQ scores over time. I don't think we really know what the average IQs of their grandkids will be, especially if they assimilate and are native English speakers.

The academic and economic gaps between Hispanics and Anglos are plenty noticeable in New Mexico: most of those Hispanics are fifth-generation US citizens.

Do you mean the native NM whites or the brains imported to Sandia and places like that?

This is my little hobbyhorse. But since it's one that gets bizarrely overlooked in these discussions I'll go ahead and repeat it ...

Depending on the poll, 60-80% of Americans think immigration rates are 'way too high and would like to see them cut 'way back.

I think the important issue that often gets overlooked in these discussions is respect for the preferences of the people you're sharing your country with.

Quick dumb analogy: You're sharing a house with 9 other people. 7 of you think that the windows are being kept open too much. It seems to me that whether they're right or wrong (in some kind of always-hard-to-determine abstract way) is irrelevant. There is an obligation to respect the druthers of the majority, particularly when it's a big majority. Which isn't to say you can't raise objections, try to persuade them otherwise, tell them they're wrong, etc. They don't even finally have to prevail -- some other issue could be bargained in exchange for this one, for example. But big-majority-preference, it seems to me, as at the very least to be respected and counted as an important factor ...

Hispanics in New Mexico score well below the national white average. Although there are more engineers and scientists in New Mexico than you'd expect, there are not enough to change the average much. Checking the numbers, the average white NAEP 8th-grade reading score in New Mexico is 271, while the national white average is 270.

Pesssimism and Occam's razor will give you a simple and powerful explanatory theory - but don't tell anyone.

Fair enough. Selective migration might actually make the immigrants smarter on average, but that's been going on to build the population that's here now, so whatever benefit we get relative to the population in Mexico, it's probably already there in the NM situation. Other environmental stuff may still affect the NM sample, but it sure seems like the 3rd world/1st world transition would swamp almost anything you'd see inside the US, outside of Indian reservations and the very worst ghetto.

Great post TangoMan - well thought out, well researched - all in a day's work at gnxp!

"When I read this analysis I couldn't help but think that Jane and Bryan are backing the Paul Erlich position in the Erlich-Simon Bet while those who favor rational immigration are backing the Julian Simon side."

This will no doubt come as a surprise to both Bryan Caplan, who idolized Simon, and the ghost of Simon himself who was notoriously pro-immigration.

The argument that technology can substitute for immigration is pure broken window fallacy. It overlooks the fact that the resources that would end up going into mechanization would be more profitably spent on other things if cheap labour were available as a less expensive substitute. Mechanization in Japan is a reaction to the scarcity of labour. By this same logic we ought to destroy petroleum reserves so that the market will be forced to come up with more efficient fuel technology. It makes zero economic sense.

I also continue to be vexed by the argumentum ad welfarum continually trotted out by anti-immigrant folk as if it were a point against immigrants rather than an argument against the welfare state. Granting that unskilled immigrants are net tax recipients -- but so are unskilled non-immigrants. The problem is not low-skilled immigrants, the problem is "low-skilled workers + expensive welfare state." Why do you focus only on the one half of the equation when it takes both to create a fiscal problem?

Also, who don't the massive benefits to immigrants get factored into the equation here? Surely their lives have as much moral worth as anyone's.

Matt,

Should your city also devote some large fraction of its police budget to hiring police for Mexico City? With probability approaching one, the crime problem there is worse than where you live, and surely the residents there have the same moral worth as you have.

Matt a person can be in favor of the welfare state, but at the same time prefer that as few people as possible are a drain on that state. So this is in fact a point against immigration and illegal immigration as it increases net tax recipients and who a drain on the state. You can say unskilled non-immigrants are also a drain, but how does this point favor adding unskilled immigrants and straining the state further? The term unskilled should be replaced by low-IQ. People with low intelligences are a burden on a country. They are on average more likely to be drop out of high school, be unemployed, on welfare, commit crime and have illegitimate children. Importing more dullards is one of the worst things a nation can do.

I don't think we really know what the average IQs of their grandkids will be, especially if they assimilate and are native English speakers.

hm. not to get into the details of this debate about the future, i still think that favoring influx of ppl like gc & i is more defensible :) our families after all have a proven track record in 3rd world hell :) an analogy would be east european jews who flourished whenever they were let out of the shtetl (eg., 19th century germany). of course depending on your values there is still an argument against high IQ immigration.

of course, i think that we should only be looking 2-3 generations into the future. monkeys with nuclear weapons are only sustainable for so long, we either evolve beyond monkeyhood or we blow our toys up and go back to bananas and poop.

Depending on the poll, 60-80% of Americans think immigration rates are 'way too high and would like to see them cut 'way back.

michael, this captures the direction of sentiment, but not the strength. you can find many weakly held opinions by the majority of a population. i remember reading scott mcconnell's dispatches in 2000 from the buchanan campaign, after that effort's puny success i simply am not convinced that the sentiment for lower immigration overwhelms the tendency of americans to look into the short term and get the cheap landscaper and dishwasher.

if a passion for the immigration debate was as deep as it was wide then steve sailer would be america's premier conservative columnist. that isn't happening anytime soon, far better the platitudes of george will....

I also continue to be vexed by the argumentum ad welfarum continually trotted out by anti-immigrant folk as if it were a point against immigrants rather than an argument against the welfare state. Granting that unskilled immigrants are net tax recipients -- but so are unskilled non-immigrants. The problem is not low-skilled immigrants, the problem is "low-skilled workers + expensive welfare state." Why do you focus only on the one half of the equation when it takes both to create a fiscal problem?


one half of the equation is actually tractible in terms of public policy. america has reduced immigration levels in the past. i do not know of any time when the welfare state has retreated to any extent (someone can correct me). just as michael pointed out that the majority of americans are against high levels of immigration, they are also against "big government." big deal, they still love their mortgage guarantees and federally funded pork programs, just like they hire jose to do landscaping because he'll take $5/hour while john demands $10/hour. i think getting rid of jose is a lot more feasible in the medium term than getting rid of pork projects. that's just my realistic assessment.

(i live in an area where latino labor has started to crop up non-trivially only in the past 5 years. there are vast swaths of america where native-born americans still do hotel work, for example [i've seen it in montpelier, VT]. on the other hand there is no part of america, that i know of, which isn't dependent on the teat of the state. big gov. is a bigger problem from where i stand, but it is a also a natural feature of the universe at this point i suspect)

re: selective immigration, in regard to mexico, my impression is that the middle and upper class stay put. so, america is receiving the working and farming classes of that nation.

one thing: i don't think the specialization of brawns and brains is symmetrical. i know many potential brains who work in brawny jobs for a variety of reasons (eric hoffer was a longshoreman and w.d. hamilton considered taking up carpentry and was even apprenticed). i do not know any brawns who do engineering or lawyering as their "day job." my point is that brainyness is a necessary precondition to being a brain, but brawnyness is not a necessary precondition of being a brawn (many blue-collar workers are not that large and powerful, for example). in fact, i have lived in 3 communities in the pacific northwest where the % of college educated people is far higher than the 25% national median. many brains do brawny jobs because they have to, but some brains simply got tired of the pressure of brainy jobs and do brawny jobs because of the constrained hours (e.g., LA corporate lawyer who left that profession and now works in a organic community supermarket).

The economists are mistaken that the illegals free up smart people to do more brain work.

Here are the reasons I say this:

1) Lower income people do not earn enough money to pay for the work of smart people for medical care for example or for teachers or detectives or prosecutors. Smarter people have to pay taxes to fund smart people to provide services and otherwise deal with the dummies.

2) When the dummies flood in a larger number of existing smart people have to get shifted toward intellectually demanding occupations which provide services. Doctors are the primary example. Therefore fewer smart people are available to do engineering, scientific research, etc.

3) Smarter people in their own lives regardless of whether they serve the dummies have to exert more effort (e.g. hours spent commuting, money spent on private schools and time spent taking the kids to those schools) dealing with the consequences of having so many dummies around.

4) The lower cost of low IQ labor shifts smarter people toward managing that labor. People who spend time managing lots of cheap labor are people who are not spending time figuring out how to use capital to lower production costs.

5) Capital that costs slightly more to do a job than cheap imported labor can fall in cost in successive design generations. The initial higher cost is a temporary thing. Forcing the market to innovate to reduce the need for labor will rise living standars in the longer term.

randall, but you leave out the added self-esteem for the smart as the average IQ of the population drops! you can't put a # on such intangibles :)

though seriously, i don't think econometric jousting in the details will get us far. people can bounce back and forth once the initial axioms are thrown out there. since you don't put numbers on your points i think i could make up vague counter-arguments if i had will (ie, i disagreed with you initially, which i don't). this is a KIS topic if we want it to be fruitful. what trumps what? if you are a zero pop person, or a keep-america-white-person, or keep-the-middle-class-doing-their-own-yard-work, or keep-america-protestant, the economic arguments are not particularly persuasive.

i'm a keep-america-less-religious (though latinos are not that catholic when they arrive, many of them convert to evangelical christianity soon enough, see one nation under god, 1994) and keep-america-empty and keep-american-middle-class-doing-their-own -lawn work. i was born in a nation where the elites have lots of people do their brawn work...and there is a nasty side to such economic efficiencies in terms of character formation in my experience. utility maximization needs to be bounded by human cognitive biases. and i'm keep-america-empty for obvious reasons since i've experienced massive density on a nation-wide-scale.

Razib,

I didn't put a lot of data on my points because I'm coming in here to write comments and post between bouts pruning vines (really). Now, you might say I would have more time to blog if I didn't do my own gardening. But the gardening is good exercise and I need the exercise to maintain good health. :>

I think the dilution of brains argument is pretty easy to make. Look at Griffe's Smart Fraction Theory. Doesn't the slope of his line support the argument that smart people are more productive around other smart people than they are around lots of dummies?

Leave aside countries that have oil or diamonds. In which countries with very low IQs do 120 IQ people make more money than they do in higher IQ countries?

oh but randall...you didn't address my point about "intangibles"! though seriously, my only point is that i don't think econometric analysis will convince most people. rather, my tack is to get people to state their assumptions and see if i can turn the argument around at them. eg., economic productivity arguments or externalities really don't get anywhere with liberals, but environmentalism or zero pop. growth do. the authoritarianism (in the "world's smallest political quiz" definition) of many latino cultures might be an argument to use with libertarians.

i tend to agree with your position, i'm just saying that i suspect there might be cognitive short-cuts that might be more fruitful than pure economic analysis :)

"It overlooks the fact that the resources that would end up going into mechanization would be more profitably spent on other things if cheap labour were available as a less expensive substitute."

This argument is fallacious nonsense. The resources that would end up going into mechanization would be the best just of those resources from the point of view of society and of the workers employed in the economy. The history of per-capital economic growth is the history of mechanism. Period. Otherwise workers would be as unproductive as their nineteenth century counterparts.

And do we have to point out that without mechanization, or the use of better tools we would not only have no industrial revolution, but no human society or progress, or suplus?

Unless we have productivity growth per employee we dont make the average joe richer. It is when labour is in short supply that we get that productivity increase. With an infinite supply of labour we would get Marxist style immiseration: and it was the internal migration from rural to urban in the nineteenth century in Europe that convinced Marxists, and others, of the theory, since it seemed to play out in practice - at least in the early days of the industrial revolution - and without colonization the "surplus population" of Europe ( Scrooge's bugbear, if you recall) would have probably gotten poorer, and more concentrated, and Marx would have been right.

(Americas story was different due to the availability of land, and resources)

Albatross -- Opportunity cost. Foreign aid does not exactly have a very good track record. As is generally the case, Mexico is made better off by free trade (particularly remittances) than by any amount of government transfers, and over the long run we're all made better off as well.

Mark -- That is a coherent point of view, but you'd have to colour me quite shocked if the generally right-leaning types around here were in favour of a massive welfare state.

Razib -- I think you're overestimating just how tractible the immigration side is. It's "tractible" in much the same way the drug trade is -- you can fight it, but the incentives are such that you're facing a huge uphill battle, and you have to ask whether it's actually worth the cost.

eoin, please don't lecture me until you've learned some basic economics. We are not made better off by creating artificial scarcity.

Razib,

I fully agree with you that arguments have got to be pitched to various political segments with their assumptions and values in mind. I didn't initially respond to that point because I try to avoid making responses that are too long.

As for the assumptions of various groups: What do you think the major groups are? I'm thinking one could make different lists of talking points on immigration for different subsets of the population. I've yet to try to do this systematically. I think it really needs to be done.

It's "tractible" in much the same way the drug trade is -- you can fight it, but the incentives are such that you're facing a huge uphill battle

i don't think the analogy is strong because drugs induce a physical addiction. additionally, drugs exist in all parts of the united states. day laborers do not (yet). certainly there are many in california and texas who could not imagine getting yardwork done without a trip to target, but that's still not the case in many parts of the USA. i do not know of any nation which has managed to marginalize drugs, but many nations do limit labor competition (japan and finland come to mind). in fact, i think the analogy between drugs and the leviathan state is stronger, they seem to be inevitabilities....

"eoin, please don't lecture me until you've learned some basic economics. We are not made better off by creating artificial scarcity."

Sure we are Matt - when that scarcity is labour, labour is made better off when it is scarce, "artificial" or not ( where "artificial" is a nation controlling it's borders in this debate I suppose).

In fact it is possible for a nation to have a reduction in population, and for individual workers to get better off with small gains in the overall GDP, or alternatively to have large increases in GDP, with little or no increases in GDP per capita.

I've seen both with my own lying eyes.

Matt,

Shortages and surpluses have both short run and long run effects. Shortages can and do make us better off in the long run.

Ben Franklin was right: Necessity is the mother of invention. I've also seen this with my own lying eyes.

Where I'm working at the moment I'm watching managers remove roadblocks to new product development because sales are going down. They were content to obstruct as long as they had safe jobs and sales were okay. Now they feel enough fear that they are pushing innovation and willing to listen to ideas from engineers that have been ignored for years. That is what necessity does.

Let the price of manual labor start rising and all sorts of little used and ignored innovations will get brushed off and tried. New innovations will be searched for and developed. Total production costs will fall more rapidly in the long run as a result.

is there a problem with the name field? i've fixed the anonymous comments, but let's remember from now on...makes it easier to follow the discussants.

Sorry, I showed up as Anonymous in the comment above that referred to Ben Franklin.

Razib,

I think the web site wasn't repainting the Name field after we post a comment. It still filled in the other fields. Now it is again filling in the Name fields.

yeah, haloscan tweaks out now and then, i was wondering since two people on the same thread within a 1 hour period suggests technical error.

What Matt's analysis is omitting is the allocation of costs and benefits from the labor side of the labor-capital equation.

By focusing only on the benefits of cheap labor versus the cost of mechanization development, the analysis focuses on the micro level and it distorts the macro level.

Consider this excerpt from the Samuelson link in the article:

In the early 1960s, growers relied on seasonal Mexican laborers, brought in under the government's "bracero" program. The Mexicans picked the tomatoes that were then processed into ketchup and other products. In 1964 Congress killed the program despite growers' warnings that its abolition would doom their industry. What happened? Well, plant scientists developed oblong tomatoes that could be harvested by machine. Since then, California's tomato output has risen fivefold.

Pre-1964 the labor-capital decision favored labor for there was no impetus to develop a mechanization alternative when labor was cheap, and possibly subsidized by society (not so sure about this back then, but subsidy is definitely the case today.) Now, if there was a limitation on subsidized labor today, then that shortage of labor forces a decision onto management and capital is often deployed as a substitute. The development and improvement of the technologies has historically yielded an improvement in productivity. It's interesting to note that even in the environment of subsidized labor that is prevalent in the agricultural market today, we never see the substitution of mechanization with cheap labor.

The actors in the labor-capital decision are not just management and labor, but also the subsidy providing taxpayer. If the taxpayer is not willing to provide the employee subsidy by way of allowing unrestricted immigration with the resultant rise in public services that result, then this forces the hand of management to either substitute labor at a higher market derived wage or to substitute capital for labor. If capital is chosen as the substitute then we usually see productivity increases that outstrip those seen by using ever cheaper labor.

If one wants to argue strictly on a micro basis, then one really needs to also propose legislation which strips illegals of any claim to public services. Most true-blue libertarians are probably on-board with a stripped down State, but in the immediate debate such a position is untenable, therefore so too is any argument that is presented as solely a labor-capital constraint without giving consideration to taxpayer subsidy.

also, just for the record, i'm not a zero-immigration person. my hypocrisy will only run so far :) nevertheless, i think there is a lot of space between 1 million per year and 0 per year, and, i think that rules are important. as humans we all can understand why the undocumented come to this nation, but the heart and the mind should not always speak with the same voice.

Razib,

On Haloscan: If I write a comment and post then it repaints with my name still there. If I reload to see who else has written comments then my name does not repaint. At least that is a sample of one try or two.

==="of course depending on your values there is still an argument against high IQ immigration.====

Have we touched upon that argument yet. What was the argument against high IQ immig.?

Wouldn't more - much, much, more high IQ(95-99th percentile) immigration be highly desirable for us?

The number of people in this country awarded S&E Ph.D's annually is very small, & within any particular area of specialization of S&E, little more than a handful . In my opinion, this is far too small. The more & brighter the scientists we have, the sooner we reach singularity.

Imagine the productivity & innovation hundreds of thousands, or millions, of high IQ(95-99th percentile) immigrants could bring to this land.


==="monkeys with nuclear weapons are only sustainable for so long, we either evolve beyong monkeyhood or we blow our toys up and go back to bananas and poop."===

Low IQ people have little access to nukes. Statesmen representing nations that do possess nukes tend to be a high IQ bunch(135 & above, i would guess). Since high IQ persons are usually rational actors, i see little chance of nuclear trouble occuring.

Besides, the singularity should make the world at least a little more peaceful.

The two largest contributing factors to Latin American suffering are average IQ and grossly uneven distribution of wealth. The former we can treat up to a point -- if we provided them w/ some aid, it might increase avg IQ to the level of Hispanics in NM. But that's risky since the corrupt govt might not use it to better the lot of the wretched. Short of war, we can't quickly alter the class structure of Latin America.

It's too much to absorb every country's huddled masses. It's at best a band-aid for the immigrants (since they still live in fear of being deported, toil hard for shit, etc.), and it's an injury to the absorbing country. Why should we have to raise someone else's "children"? Just slap some damn sense into their "parent" states, maybe threaten them (not using force), and presto.

So, let's provide nutritional & public health aid, plus work w/ natives to make their government & economy more egalitarian & transparent. That will better their lot w/o us having to take in a flood of immigrants.

Immigration from NE Asia and higher caste Subcontinental groups is totally fine, of course. My grandmother's a housewife from a podunk fishing village in Hokaido, who married a not very high-level American armed forces officer / truck driver, and all four of their kids are professionals w/ masters or doctorates. Not atypical.

Immigration from NE Asia and higher caste Subcontinental groups

i'm fine with high SES migration from everywhere. i can see the point of caplan's argument, but there are benefits from having non-knowledge workers having a decent level of g.

Stopping (in practice, greatly reducing) immigration from Mexico and points south would be easy and cheap. It's been done.

i'm fine with high SES migration from everywhere

I was about to say that, but I'd have to see some numbers on how many kids high SES Africans have. In the present, high SES Africans are of course fine.

However, w/ Chinese, you don't have to worry about regression to a mean lower than the US'. Even if you bring in a 130 Nigerian, over time his offspring will regress to the Nigerian mean -- unless he intermarries, or doesn't have many kids.

Even if you bring in a 130 Nigerian, over time his offspring will regress to the Nigerian mean -- unless he intermarries, or doesn't have many kids.

assortative mating can obviate this sort of worry. i know enough of gc's family and my own to offer that neither of us will have children who will regress to a mean of 80 for IQ (our high IQs are not just a function of developmental or environmental freakishness).* neither of us are outliers in our family (well, aside from my good looks). and what do you accept as the 'true heritability' for IQ? the higher it is the less you have to worry about regression via expect = (heritability X midparent mean deviation from the mean) + mean. i don't think that the endogenous african IQ is lower than 80 (correct for enviro inputs, etc.), so a 130 IQ nigerian engineer should bring enough social capital to get children above 100, which is what you want. it isn't like subsequent generations will orthogenetically drift down to 80. your point about east asians is well taken though, they succeed no matter what.

my point: a well crafted immigration system that screens for the young and super-bright can avoid most accusations of national-racial bias, while the small numbers are probably reasonable to asborb into the native substrate.

* your point about 'high caste' clearly acknowledges the importance of population substructure, but it isn't like this exists only in india. if you discourage immigration from indonesia you are probably operationally going to block the emigration of the chinese, not javanese or sumatrans.

The analogy to Paul Ehrlich is extremely weak. What's the similarity? That both failed to consider a particular factor in their analysis? That's true of virtually every failed analysis and prediction. The Ehrlich example does nothing to illustrate your argument. Simply claiming that she neglected to consider capital substitution for labor would have been equally effective.

The only reason to compare Jane Galt to Paul Ehrlich is to score a cheap rhetorical point by comparing her to someone who was clearly wrong and is generally distasteful. I believe you owe her an apology for that.

Imagine how few problems society, & the world, would have if *everyone* had an IQ that fell well into today's "gifted" range. (By the way, this should one day be a reality.) (super-powerful exocortexes will be available within the next 40 years, not to mention isolating *all the genes* controlling intellect, at this rate)

1.] Economic Prosperity(think of the innovation)

2.]Zero-Crime(No need for prisons, policemen, etc.

3.]A solution to virtually every problem that could possibly arise.

4.] The Singularity(Unimaginable bliss, entertainment, knowledge, problem solving, etc., at any time.

5.] Long life(anti-aging technologies)

6.]Space colonization, communties, etc.

Razib: "michael, this captures the direction of sentiment, but not the strength. you can find many weakly held opinions by the majority of a population."

True, and a good general point. I don't think it holds where immigration is concerned. For one thing, you've noticed that the subject is suddenly prominent in the news? It takes a lot of psychic oomph for that to happen. It also takes a lot (believe me) to get people in the MSM to take any note of immigration topics at all. So the fact that the topic has made to near the top of the agenda seems like evidence 1) that there's a lot of pent-up feeling about it, 2) that the MSM has done its best to resist taking note, and 3) that the cracks are finally beginning to tell.

Regarding the 130 IQ Nigerian engineer (or doctor or other skilled professional): first, what are the educational standards of the (Nigerian?) university he came from. Secondly, does the firm/agency/hospital who hires him, hold him to exactly the same standards as a white or Asian prospective employee? In other words, perhaps this 130 IQ Nigerian engineer is actually a 120 IQ Nigerian engineer who was hired for a 130 IQ job, because he fills a diversity requirement or expects less pay than a white or Korean. 120 IQ is still better than 100. However, as long as affirmative action and diversity drives exist, I consider all black and Hispanic immigrants to be, unwittingly, unfair -- i.e., typically less qualified -- competitors for skilled jobs.

It was agony for me to reject a man with a Spanish name as my general practitioner, opting for the female doctor with the Indian name instead. I don't regret the decision, but I severely regret having to make it (in the interests of my own health). Statistically, it's likely her MCAT was higher, though they both hold the same job. (And he may be a white Hispanic.)

FXKLM,

If Jane is offended by the comparison then I have no problem in apologizing. As I stated in my post the omission of capital substitution from the analysis was what triggered the comparison to the Simon-Erlich bet and if you can come up with a more dramatic example of capital substitution being ignored by prognosticators then let me know.

Regarding the 130 IQ Nigerian engineer (or doctor or other skilled professional): first, what are the educational standards of the (Nigerian?) university he came from.

good point. too bad IQ tests are verbotten....

So the fact that the topic has made to near the top of the agenda seems like evidence 1) that there's a lot of pent-up feeling about it, 2) that the MSM has done its best to resist taking note, and 3) that the cracks are finally beginning to tell.

you might be right, but i'm skeptical. i have lived in a predominantly republican area where everyone was against immigration. but it was a wide but shallow opinion. it might be different in places like california, i don't know. i think immigration is like free trade, there is strong populist agitation and sentiment against it, but it rarely gets translated into action via the democratic process.

Is it a good idea to take away highly intelligent people from a country with an already miniscule smart fraction while at the same time providing aid to that country? The size of the smart fraction is more important to a nation’s long term well being than humanitarian aid.

Narrow-sense heritability of IQ -- for public policy like this, I'd tend to err on the side of caution and guess .36 (.6 being the lowest estimate of broad-sense by behavior geneticists). Assume he assortatively mates w/ another 130 Nigerian, so midparent = 130 = +(10/3) SD if mean = 80. Expected IQ of offspring = .36 x 10/3 = +1.2 SD = 18 IQ pts + mean of 80 = 98.

If we wanted the expected value to be 115 -- the minimum for college work -- the midparent would have to be a whopping 177. To be fair, let's take the highest estimate of broad-sense = .8, then narrow-sense = .64, and for the expected value of the kid to be 115, the midparent would only have to be 135. If broad-sense = .7, midparent would have to be 150. But like I said, for something w/ potentially huge & irreversible consequences, I'd err on the side of caution, like 150.

As for S.Asians, I assume the kids of higher caste parents wouldn't be randomly sampling the population of lower castes, since the higher ones have been closing themselves off for thousands of years. National avg IQ of India (say) may matter for how it can develop, but if we're talking immigration to the US, we'd only let in higher castes, so the national avg would be useless. BTW, I just pulled Nigeria out of a hat -- if there's a millenia-old caste system there that I don't know about (very possible), then it was a bad example to choose. If so, substitute in some s-S African country w/o such a system.

OK, I realized I just demonstrated my ignorance of how to calculate narrow-sense heritabilty. But I just checked my (incorrectly arrived at) estimates, and something like .3 - .4 seems reasonable.

Is it a good idea to take away highly intelligent people from a country with an already miniscule smart fraction while at the same time providing aid to that country? The size of the smart fraction is more important to a nation’s long term well being than humanitarian aid.

should the high IQ bear the cross of pulling up a nation? but for the grace of god go you! let them break out of the jailhouse i say, we need soldiers to face off the dragon.

re: heritability, remember that it increases with SES. i suspect it would be rather high for third world elites since they gobble up all the enviro goodies.

I think the Joan Galt argument, even if true in the current economic sense, is wrong in general. A nation is a long term object, lasting hundreds of years. Settlers in an area leave their genetic imprint in the local population for thousands of years. For example, Haiti under the French colonists needed workers for the sugarcane industry and imported them from West Africa. The sugarcane industry is no more but French Haitians were pushed out of Haiti. South African English brought in Northern people to work on the mines, and in a hundred years they claimed and took over the country as their own.

If the high IQ were evenly distributed across the world the rate of technological advance would be much slower. Smart people in dumb countries do not spend much time doing science or engineering. They end up being managers, administrators, and service providers.

Is it a good idea to take away highly intelligent people from a country with an already miniscule smart fraction while at the same time providing aid to that country? The size of the smart fraction is more important to a nation’s long term well being than humanitarian aid.

Let's keep in mind that La Griffe's smart fraction theorem is still a theorem. I agree his theory fits the data well today but it was a just a static analysis. The theory does not say anything about how societies or countries evolve (economically) overtime.

Brains and Brawn, huh? But what do you do when some of the Brawn start getting smarter? You import more Brawn of marginal intelligence from Brawnland next door and teach the existing Brawn to breed with them.

At the same time Brains would tell theri own children that Brawns can never be trusted, for Brawns are all anti-Brainists at heart and would kill Brains in a second. That is the stick.

Of course there should be a carrot as well, perhaps teaching all the little Brains that God wants them to bring light unto the Brawns (but not actually breed with them -- perish THAT nasty thought) to keep at bay any rapacious tendencies to utterly exploit the Brawns.

As a kicker, the Brains could set up a little Brainland on the side to which all the Brains can legally escape in any Brawn-based anti-Brain emergency. Of course, any Brawn-onl tendencies would have to be brutally repressed, for without Brains at the helm of any country a free-thinking self-motivated Brawn peoplecouldarise, see its own merit and teach that heresy to Brawns all over the globe. No, any Brawnland must be suppressed.

With a few prophylactic measures like this, I don't see why there has to be any mixing, mingling and miscegenation between Brains and Brawns at all.

Add the element of historical job destiny (God wants Brains to be Warriors, Professors and Rulers, smart Brawns to be merchants, and dumb Brawns to shovel sh!t) and you have a system that could continue virtually in perpetuity with each group breeding true and pure: Brains getting brainier and Brawns getting brawnier.

This post seems a bit all over the place.

Commodities markets are not just responsive to technology. The fact is that there were plenty of unexploited commodities in the ground in the 1980. Efforts by coomodiites producers to follow the lead of OPEC and squeeze commodity consumers resulted in those unexploited resources being exploited. More bauxite reserves were found and exploited, coffee was planted in new places, oil was exploited in the North Sea, etc. etc.

How that history applies to the immigration question I can't say.

Also, the IQ question seems to me to be essentially moot. What do you think the average IQ of Italian, Polish Christian and Irish immigrants was in the 1800s? Quite low I'd bet--about as low as immigrants from other peasant cultures today. In the long run, IQ just doesn't matter here. There are plenty of jobs for people of more or less average intelligence: practically any job can be dummified. That's what this country was built on.

And those aggregate IQ numbers will change over time anyway.

BTW: How does Lynn defend himself against the criticism that the two measures he is correlating (present economic success and IQ) aren't essentially the same thing?

"How does Lynn defend himself against the criticism that the two measures he is correlating(present economic success and IQ) aren't essentially the same thing."

Check out some of Steve Sailer's stuff; he may have written about this.

Anyway, judging by the number of high IQ people who see Lynn's arguments as persuasive, i'd bet that he & his theories are correct. Present economic success is largely driven by IQ- the smart fraction if you will. They[ the high IQ] are what develops & advances an economy. Low IQ[dysgenic] people only pull a nation toward, or keep a nation in, poverty.

Rietzche:

So, what end of the bell curve do the current supporters of postmodernism come from? Similarly, what end of the bell curve supplied most of the supporters of Marxism in the West?

Just because a lot of smart people believe something, doesn't mean it's true, or even rational. Besides, isn't the whole joy of something like Gene Expression the opportunity to try to appeal to your own intelligence to decide what's really happening?

Just to be a little more specific, in his various discussions of the rise in IQ scores over time (Lynn-Flynn effect), James Flynn has laid out a number of factors that have some influence over IQ scores (Sailer talks about them in his (a href="http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/ wealth_of_nations.htm">review of Lynn's book on IQ and the wealth of nations).

These include stuff like intellectual stimulations and the ability to consider evidnece and make lots of choices. So these differences in IQ test performance may boil down to being exposed to the sort of life we live here in the West.

In which case the wealth of nations would strongly correlate to the similarity of your lifestyle (vis-a-vis those factors Flynn and Sailer talk about) to the West's. Or in short, the wealth of nations would strongly correlate to the wealth of nations.

Oran Kelley shows the sort of selective attention to detail and other research papers that the proponents of increased illegal immigration show when they claim that illegals do the jobs that Americans do not want to do. I must admit that I have used those arguments myself in the past, so the paper pointed to in the main article is useful.

Oran, why do you ignore all those papers showing that the heritability of IQ is high (60-80%).

You are essentially arguing that the US is a lucky fluke, given some sort of illegitimate leg up in the past, and that it now owes the rest of the unfortunates out there the same boost.

"Just because a lot smart people believe something, doesn't mean it's true, or even rational."

High IQ people are rationalists. When many gifted people believe something to be true, the likelihood that it is indeed true will be very high. We must not forget that the gifted are highly rational.
Arguments/theories that are widely persuasive in academic & intellectual circles are arguments that i would deem carry considerable weight. Gifted folk are most likely correct when everyone else is wrong.

The more gifted i see on the bandwagon, the more likely that whatever it is that they trust in is the truth.

Even if most gifted people were agreed that something smelled, tasted or looked better than something else, i'd place my bets with the gifted, not the with the non-gifted, thank you:) The gifted can be trusted to judge on subjective/aesthetic matters superiorly, certainly.

There's just no going wrong with those 99th percentilists, at least when the comparison is with lower percentilists.

There are two problems with this:

a. You're not really talking about a consensus among smart people--that would almost certainly go the other direction. You're talking about a very restricted sample of smart peoples' opinions--it's like going to a well-regarded Catholic university, polling the faculty about the existence of God, and then saying "see, all the smart people around me believe in God, therefore God exists."

For evidence of this, look at the academic reaction to Larry Summers' comments, or to _The Bell Curve_, or read Linda Gottfriedson's discussions on what kind of reactions she's gotten talking about intelligence.

b. Smart people as a group have a pretty dismal history of being right. Being intelligent doesn't make you immune to all the weird stuff that goes into holding silly ideas.

For example, from everything I've read, the majority of the overtly smart, educated people 60 years ago were strongly inclined toward socialism, and the USSR was widely seen as a great experiment.

In general, looking for oracles to tell you whether a controversial idea is right or not is pretty hopeless. It's not enough to see that someone smart believes it, because you also need to know why. No doubt there are very smart people who are convinced that the theory of evolution is some kind of grand conspiracy to undermine Christianity. The question is, why do they believe it, and what part of their reasons can you follow and check on your own?

RB: "The gifted can be trusted to judge on subjective/aesthetic matters superiorly, certainly."

I disagree strongly about this. In the last century, in Western-civ anyway, the gifted have made a terrible hash of judging aesthetic matters. They've created a gallery art that doesn't speak to anyone but insiders; a literary culture that's dying; an architecture world that defies common sense and has the effect of emptying cities; a high-music culture that's withering on the vine; a poetry world that speaks only to itself, etc etc. At the moment, what the elite/educated/"gifted" arts worlds need are infusions of down-to-earth info (about stuff like genetics and neurophysiology), and a strong dose of common sense.

I agree with albatross and Michael, and that's what I think is so great about GNXP.

Here you have a public forum, hosted by Razib and a few others - out of the goodness of their hearts - which functions as an open source generator of ideas, which are then subjected to a survival of the fittest regimen, via discussion, criticism, sometimes ridicule, or alternative ideas and explanations. So that each person can either reject, accept or put on the maybe list, each proferred idea.

So not only is this blog concerned prima facie with gene expression and evolution, but its format allows for free expression of ideas, which then compete evolutionarily against each other in a grand fitness contest.

For me it's all about reading posts, making comments and above all synthesizing new ideas, based on what I read here and my own further research into them.

In regards to illegal immigration I always hear:

"Though we might save 50 cents for a head of lettuce, the cost to the taxpayer is in the billions"

This is a fallacious argument, because the TOTAL cost savings (for services, products, vegetables, etc) for ALL the consumers might also be in the billions, in fact it may be that the TOTAL cost savings is more than what we pay in taxes. There are economists that support this argument.

"Given a high enough wage, Americans will do almost any job."

Though this might be true, people don't consider that the wage and benefits might not be sustainable. People might downplay the cuts in profits, but they don't realize that in the long run these industries might either go out of business or outsource.

"Wages are artificially low for certain jobs, middle class Americans are suffering as a result"

Lets say that we get rid of all illegal immigrants and replace them with Americans working at a higher wage. Though the middle class American will make more money, EVERYTHING (houses, services, vegetables, meat products, etc) will cost more so there might be no economic gain for them.

What is different nowadays than 20, 30, or 40 years ago is that we live in a GLOBAL ECONOMY, companies nowadays have the option of outsourcing. It might be cheaper for companies to import vegetables and other products than to grow and make them here in the US.

Unions are also making it difficult for employers to hire Americans, just look at the car industry, their union negotiated for a wage too high to be sustainable in the long run. So guess what GM has to downsize, even then it might lead to bankruptcy. Nearly all of the steel we use is imported because it is too expensive to refine it here in the US. Also the steel industry collapsed about 20 years ago, before the advent of increased illegal immigration. Look at the airline industry, many airlines went bankrupt because of pension expenses. Its not just a wage we are talking about here, it all the other things that go along with hiring American workers.

I've also heard, why don't farmers use robotic farming techniques, its better and cheaper than using illegals.

Think about this for a moment, besides the fact that robotics might not exist for certain crops, don't you think farmers pressed to make a profit would rather use a robot than illegals, if he/she was guaranteed higher profits??

The biggest problem with this argument is that America cannot put its agriculture on hold while we develop robots to pick the crops, we need guest workers to do this job in the meanwhile.

I agree we must control illegal immigration, we also must realize that we live in a GLOBAL ECONOMY, where we must make some provisions for guest workers.

John G.

John G,

I think if Mexican farm workers were stopped at the border tomorrow, then the cost of producing lettuce and other vegetables would go up overnight, but what would this lead to.

IMO, US farmers would be forced to look towards mechanized crop harvesters, whether robotic or not.

Likewise the Mexican peasant might discover that he could grow lettuce and other vegetable crops in Mexico and export them to the US profitably.

So, a win-win for everyone!

"You're talking about a very restricted sample of smart peoples' opinions--it's like going to a well-regarded Catholic university, polling the faculty about the existence of God, and then saying "see, all the smart people around me believe"

Albatross,
Yes, i am talking about a very select & restricted sample of smart people, namely those at the very extreme right of peak of the bell, the rationalists. I would highly doubt that faculty of a well-regarded catholic university occupy such an extreme position on the bell curve. They'd be brighter than average, but certainly not that bright, or rational for that matter. I've never associated cognitive dissonance with the gifted/rationality.

It is precisely that consensus among the very brightest-the cognitive elite-that one should use as his measuring stick in evaluating probability of truth of the matter.

When the gifted & highly rational disagree, this isn't because of intellectual dishonesty/supression of truth, & most certainly not because of stupidity, but probably because both camps' ideas hold some merit, & there are complexities/missing links.

Critics of, or those who disagree with Herrnstein's Bell Curve are simply hiding from the facts, & are probably intellectually dishonest, frightened of truth, or are idiots, period. The *facts* & *data* speak for themselves, & rational men know this. Books like the Bell Curve are likely to start controversy only among the factually disinclined, the intellectually dishonest. The book's full of facts & data which are fully explained & supported, in the notes & various appendices.

=="In the last century, in Western-civ anyway, the gifted have made ba terrible hash of judging aesthetic matters. They've created a gallery art that doesn't speak to anyone but insiders."===

Michael,
This is what we'd expect. High art is created for & by the gifted. You cannot expect wide appeal from a world of outsiders who are, by & large, dullards! What would/could dullards understand or appreciate about the high arts? It will wither & die out if expected to appeal to the wider audience - the idiots.

Also, Albatross,

Those reviled, hated socialists might have had a few valid points about capitalism, e.g., that Capitalism can be, or just is, high exploitative of the majority, increasingly concentrating wealth in the hands of those who *need* it least to survive. The owners of sufficient capital do not even have to work; they just live off the labor of the employee. It's a kind of slavery, in a fashion.

There are a number of vicious aspects to Capitalism, IMHO. But all the same, those vicious aspects to Capitalism don't make socialism the correct alternative.
Socialism was vicious in other ways, e.g, egalitarianism to excess, stifling creativity, others, etc. etc.

I don't know how long today's brand of Capitalism can last until the system burns out. I think it[Capitalism] would work better if everyone were gifted, but how much better it would work isn't obvious to me. For example, would we then have the fortunate gifted exploiting the less fortunate gifted?

John G:

I think allowing a free market in hiring immigrants is always going to win out in a purely economic analysis. Approximately, the lower wages for manual labor amount to a transfer of wealth from unskilled workers to their employers, but at lower wages, more labor is purchased and more things are done with it, and that's going to end up as pure gain in the economy. This part of the analysis is the same whether Mexicans are making cars in a factory in Mexico or waiting tables in a restaurant in Maryland.

The hard issues with mass immigration are spillover effects--importing third-world culture and poverty, having a big pool of people who for reasons of genes, culture, or both may stay poor for many generations, imposing costs on all kinds of government services, etc. It's not too clear how to measure a lot of this stuff or how to weight it against other concerns. It's also not clear to me that it makes any sense at all to have the government trying to manage a lot of those variables. Do we really want the state trying to manage what the culture looks like? Or what the genepool looks like? We're talking about Congress, the President, and a zillion bureaucrats doing this, not some benevolent and far-seeing king.

Rietche:

You're right, those incompetents like Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Michelangelo, Renoir, they just pandered to the masses, not to the elites. That's why no really smart people can find anything of value in their works, and why outside of ghettoes, trailer parks, and Indian reservations, you can't find anyone who still derives any enjoyment from their works.

Rietzche...
if you trust smart people to be right, then why do even really smart people disagree about things? Wouldn't there be more consensus as you moved up the intelligence ranks? Is that actually what we see? Oftentimes it seems merely that the more formidable the intellect, the more formidable the rationalizations.
In any case, while there might be something to your claim, I am wary of it. It's an easy two-step from that to someone arguing 'well, I'm smarter than you so I'm probably right'.

if you kick us out we will come back again. and if we don't then your economy will crash and burn!!
think about it who pick your berries for 17 cents a lb?

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