"Today I have the pleasure of speaking with  Garrett Jones who is an economist at George   Mason University. He's most recently  the author of The Culture Transplant:   How Migrants Make the Economies ..."

"First question. Isn't the cultural transplant a  continuation of your argument against democracy?   Because isn’t one of the reasons we  care about the values of migrants,   the fact that we eliminate..."

"I'll cheat a little bit because we  don't get to run experiments on this,   so I just have to make an informed guess. I'm gonna call it 50-50. The way citizens   influence a country through formal dem..."

"who are disrupting the whole process. The risks  of crime from the lower end is a probabilistic   risk. It's not like some zero to one switch.  We're talking about something probabilistic.  The median..."

"Hmm. Interesting. Does that imply the fact that,   at least in certain contexts, that elite IQ  matters more than the left tail? Does that imply   that we should want a greater deviation of IQ in  a c..."

"Can we just apply this line of reasoning to  low skilled immigration as well then? Maybe   the average IQ of your country goes down if you  just let in millions of low skilled immigration   immigrants..."

"Yes but if you get rid of their migrant's  ability to vote, let’s assume you could do   that, what is the exact mechanism by which  the, the, the cultural values or the lower   median is impacting the..."

"Native Americans certainly changed in  response to the movement of Europeans.   English Americans certainly changed  in response to the migration of German   and Irish Americans. So this meeting in th..."

"estimate you could run. Change on change. Change  in one thing predicts change in another. They   somehow never got around to running that very  simple statistical analysis. One change predicts   anot..."

"got. And sometimes it's just up for debate. So if you had to guess what percentage of the   world has cultural values that are equivalent  to or better than the average of America’s?  Equivalent to or..."

"US level on all three. Why do they have to be   higher? Why not just equivalent? Part of the reason is because the   entire world depends on US innovation. So we  should make America as good as possib..."

"better but the median is a little bit  lower. Because the median's shaping the   productivity of the whole team. This is what  it means when you believe in externalities.  But if you have somebody who..."

"are coming from people from countries with low  S A T scores. And by the way, you can explain   what S A T means for the audience who's not  familiar with how you're using that term.  Oh yeah. So ther..."

"on institutional quality I don't really quite  understand. If we had good data on North Korea,   North Korea would be even a bigger sort  of deep roots outlier than China is.  ‘Don't have a communist ..."

"When Brian Kaplan made the claim that the ancestry  scores, the deep root scores don't predict   the low performance of India and China he only  checked the S and the A in the S A T scores.   Which le..."

"Okay, interesting. The puzzle goes away. Somehow   these guys just never seem to run the simple  things, the transparent things. I don’t know.  The one you mentioned, what was it? Nowrasteh?  The name..."

"Does the ideas getting harder to find stuff and  great stagnation, does that imply we should be   less worried about impinging on the innovation  engine in these countries that people might wanna   mi..."

"rather than none. So obviously that's nice. But  instead, I would prefer to have open borders for   Iceland. If the Open borders advocates are  right and we'll have no noticeable effect on   instituti..."

"agglomerations of talent and capital and other  things, which is not true of Iceland. Right?  No, no. I thought the whole point of open borders  is that there's institutional quality and there's   som..."

"No. Take the simple version of my story,  which is the median of the population ends   up shaping the productivity of everybody in  the country. The mean skill level ends up   shaping the productivity..."

"open borders for everybody who's over 85? This ends up being a math problem that’s a little   hard to solve on a podcast. It's a question of do  I want a smaller country with super high average   prod..."

"order of effect seems good? And moving  somebody who's in a poor country to a   rich country. I don't know how the third and  fourth order effect shapes out but the first   order effect seems good. So..."

"check and see what happens in Iceland. And I use  Iceland as a metaphor, right? People are obsessed   with running it in America like there's some kind  of need. I don't know why. Let's try it in Fran..."

"a poor country with lower s a t scores. In a better world, you can do this with   North Korea too, but the population of North Korea  isn't big enough to make a big dent in the world,   right? China's..."

"Fortunately we've done a fair amount to  reduce the amount of environmental lead   in a lot of poor countries. That's probably  having a good effect right now as we speak   in a lot of the world's poo..."

"Well, that's a classic short run versus  long run effect. Libertarians and open   borders advocates tend to be focused  on the short run, static effects.  You're right, moving kids from poor countries..."

"rarely interested in that kind of timeframe. Is there any evidence about the impact of   migration on innovation specifically? So not  on the average institutional quality or the   corruption or whate..."

"There was a blogger who took a look at your 2004  paper about the impact of National IQ on GDP.   They were just speculating, let's say you  cloned a million John Von Neumann’s and assume   that John ..."

"Because one answer, and I guess this  is the default answer in our society,   is you just send them where they can  get paid the most because that's a   good enough proxy for how much they're  contrib..."

"people leave Kentucky and go to San Francisco? I'm a big agglomeration guy. The internet makes it   easier but being in the room is still important. There's something both Hansonian and Girardian   he..."

"Are you a fan of genetic selection for  intelligence as a means of increasing   national IQ or do you think that's  too much playing at the margins? If it's voluntary, people should  be able to do wha..."

"sign that a lot of mundane, even fairly complex,  moderately complex human interactions can be   simulated by a large language learning model. And I think that's gonna be rough news for a   lot of peo..."

"If you look at something like the FDA, it's  also somewhat insulated from democratic   processes but it seems to not work as well.  Controlling food democracy, what determines   how well an institutio..."

"Mm-hmm. The European Union is an interesting  example here because they also have these   appointed technocrats, but they seem more  interested in creating annoying popups on   your websites than with..."

"What do you think explains the fact  that Europe as a whole and the voters   there are less market friendly than Americans? Compared to the planet as a whole, they're pretty   good. I never get that e..."

"more open to laissez faire than Europe would be. Does that overall make you more optimistic about   migration to the US from anywhere? The same story Yeah, ceteris paribus. America gets people who   a..."

"and steer everything toward themselves and  not give a darn about the masses at all.  A lot of elite control in any kind of democracy is  gonna have a good effect if you're really looking   at somethi..."

"of the entrepreneur who owns the firm, or the  monarch who has the long-term interest in being   a stationary bandit. In real life, there's this  sort of muddled thing in between that works out as   t..."

"Over the long run, should we expect all of  the tensions of ethnic diversity to fade away?   Nobody today worries about the different Parisian  tribes in France butting heads at the workplace.  Yeah, ..."

"some of these things will fade with time. The  problem with human beings, one of our great evils,   is that we are always looking for a focal point. People will use visible appearance as a horrifying ..."

"in 10% less democracy was the  chapter on bond holder democracy.  I'm curious, corporations are obviously  an example to use here where they do have   bond holders who hold them accountable but the  a..."

"Why are yields on 30 year fixed treasuries so low?  Because theoretically, investors should know that   we have a lot of liabilities in the form of social  security to baby boomers and that we've radi..."

"the middle class. That's probably the most  likely outcome. Hence no hyperinflation.  So are you expecting the welfare state to  shrink either in quality or quantity over time?  In relative terms, com..."

"fiscal policy credibility and they'll take action. What are the deep roots of Mormonism? Why do   they have such high trust and  such tight-knit communities?  I think part of it is that they reflect  ..."

"helping make us all more productive, which I think  is something that fits in with Mormon values.  Yeah. I think people have pointed out that people  should be spending more money given the fact that ..."

"your personal skill, and education and things like No, I'd wanna launch a 10 year, maybe 20 year   research project of figuring how to turn  the deep roots scores into something useful.  Right now wit..."

"How was the SBF thing? Did he  just say “I'll fly you out?”  I was there for the EA Bahamas  and then while I was there, I   talked to somebody who knew him and I'm  like, “Hey, I would love to interv..."