I think people have poor understanding of nuances of statistical concepts like mean and they apply it like blunt tools. Kierkegaard is doing that here in my opinion based on how DDF has characterized his arguments.
Mean should always be interpreted in the light of other statistical properties of the variable. For example mean height of students in a school district has different signals than mean height of students in grade 5.
Nations are extremely diverse groups. India is a very large country and allegedly has one of the lowest average IQ. Yet, historically the nation has achieved a lot and its people are generally seen as pretty smart ones when they come as immigrants. Part of the reason is that it has a huge population so even if mean IQ is lower it likely has more individuals with IQ 130+ than say UK or Mexico.
But India is also ethnically very diverse. Which means different regions of India has drastically different average IQ levels than others. Bihar which has per capita income lower than nearly every sub saharan nation has 3rd highest IQ in India. Where as the richest and smallest state Goa is on number 5.
When it comes to immigration, IQ is a flawed measure. We need more average IQ plumbers than high IQ doctors. Benefits of 10 plumbers to society might be equivalent to benefits brought by 1 doctor.
But this plays out very differently when you consider groups. Let us say your prioritize immigration from nations with high mean IQ. Chances are that the poor people in UK (who might also have low IQ) will move to USA because the difference between being poor in UK and being poor in USA is pretty sharp. Where as a high IQ rich doctor working for NHS in UK might not find it worth moving to USA as being rich in London is same as being rich in SF. Reverse might be true for poor and lower mean IQ nations. A smart Nigerian or Indian might be more interested in moving to USA to make it big rather than an uneducated village bumpkin.
We already tried Prop 187, restricting the welfare state from immigrants, in California. It failed spectacularly.
Jim Crow is basically the most evil thing every in the American mindset and your basically proposing Jim Crow for immigrants.
And don't all immigrants eventually become citizens, at least their kids.
The hardest thing is that the immigrants themselves, like all people that tend to receive on net from the welfare state, tend to vote in favor of the welfare state. Thus it becomes a self perpetuating loop. Immigrants come for the welfare state, they provide more votes for the welfare state, which attracts more immigrants that want to sponge off the welfare state.
I think it's easier to just recognize that the potential upsides to lots of low IQ labor aren't particularly high, and that the potential downsides are huge. Just let the first world be the first world.
Very grateful for this post, as I find reading Emil K. often too convincing for my (or his) good. - Here in Germany the courts have decided that our constitution (§1: human dignity über alles) requires the state to provide the minimum needed to take part in society life (not merely survival): Section 1 SGB XII: “The task of social assistance is to enable those entitled to benefits to lead a life that corresponds to human dignity.” And this includes refugees from Georgia and Somalia as well as Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan. (We do even worse: first 3 months any work is strictly verboten, the first 4 years one needs to apply for being allowed to take a job. With the job-centers actively discouraging opening your own little business.)
The compromise you suggest would not work because there would be no way to guarantee that the government would keep its promise and not start providing the welfare benefits later.
Why would it be in the interest of a government first to make the rules I suggest and then to change them? The costs and benefits of the alternatives wouldn't obviously change.
In case it isn't obvious, what I am proposing is pretty nearly what the US had for most of its history. It isn't until the 1920's that there are immigration restrictions, aside from those on Chinese immigrants, and it was pretty much a laissez-faire system prior to the New Deal in the 1930's.
What are the relevant changes? Transportation is cheaper and faster, but a lot of the current attempted immigration is from Latin America which was just about as doable then.
It's Kirkegaard, not Kierkegaard. (Kierkegaard is the philosopher.) If you search Chisala's site with the Kirkegaard's name spelled correctly there are a couple of hits.
Good discussion, but I wonder what Kierkegaard, Chisala, Friedman, and Sowell would be called if they were a band? 3 Bruds and a Dud? Atomic Grapefruit? Suggestions?
My experience teaching for 20+ years in a very diverse college that drew heavily from Detroit Metro was that the problems evinced by my American-born Black students was not that they had lower IQ but that had been much less well-prepared in K-12. Even grad students.
I had plenty of second generation immigrant students, and they appeared, on the surface at least, to be of IQ similar to American-born white students.
Much more indicative of struggle vs success was which school system they came out of.
Where were your second generation immigrant students from? Kierkegaard is a European, thinking mainly in terms of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, although there are estimates of average IQ for lots of other places.
Lot of Middle Easterners, about 30% non-Muslim. A lot of Indians, mostly from the northern areas (and as children of professional parents typically high IQ). Quite a few West Africans. Not many Hispanics of any kind.
In a laissez-faire economy, it will be legal for people to make gifts, and to donate to voluntary charities. Either could permit immigrants to consume more than they are paid for their work.
Yes. I didn't think it worth going into that. Arguably if you give a gift or donate to charities it is because doing so increases your utility, so it doesn't undercut my argument.
I don't think that putting it in terms of utility is a satisfactory emendation. Consider, for example, raising children. It's a very expensive and time consuming activity, but that very fact is a measure of the utility parents gain from it, which exceeds (at least ex ante) the utility of the time and money. But still, infants and small children and, in our society, children for quite a few years beyond that are consuming more than they produce. I don't think it's reasonable to say that they are "producing" something for their parents just because their existence raises their parents' utility; I think defining "production" as broadly as that leaves it devoid of meaning.
I think the real point amounts to "open borders, a welfare state, or fiscal viability: choose two." And I think your comment points at that. But I'm just haggling over the price, so to speak.
One example would be the gypsy beggars from SE Europe that have populated Swedish streets for the past decade or so. This would seem like a clear negative-utility arrangement for the Swedes.
On one hand, if the Swedes are choosing to give to them, making their trade viable, those gifts presumably have positive utility for the Swedes.
On the other hand, it could be asked to what degree the Swedish government is subsidizing those beggars, by providing them with funds in addition to what they get from begging. Or enabling them, by allowing them to threaten their donors, so that the "gifts" aren't really voluntary, and go unpunished and unrestrained. In either of these cases, it's not a laissez-faire economy.
Does the Swedish government have legal rules, such as a minimum wage law, that make employment less available to Romany immigrants?
I gather that in the US and Canada Romany tended to support themselves by a mix of farm labor and fortune telling, along with some con games. I don't think I have noticed any beggars that were obviously Romany.
There's no minimum wage in Sweden (instead there are powerful unions and collective-bargaining agreements, but I don't think those would directly affect e.g. farm labour), but begging seems to be the only job that gypsies come to Sweden for in large numbers (and maybe prostitution?). In some cases, the begging seems to take the form of salaried employment. In others, the headman makes money by renting out begging spots, which I suppose might be an interesting case of emergent anarchic property rights.
Yes, and this is a traditional occupation for Swedish Gypsies, but it seems unlikely that the foreign Gypsy beggars, who do not speak Swedish (or even English), would have much success in this field. To me, it seems reasonable to assume that they are acting rationally and that this is simply the best job for them, although there are other options open to them, such as picking oranges in Spain (which was apparently something some of them did in the 00s, before the Swedish border opened), which might seem preferable to those from a different cultural background.
They're not subsidized by the government; it's pretty much laissez faire. It's a market failure in that the positive utility they give to donors is internalized whereas the negative utility they give to everyone else is not.
That usage of "market failure" strikes me as overbroad. It implicitly compares the utilities people have with the utilities they could have in a hypothetical world where everyone could trade off to improve their positions vis-à-vis everyone else with zero transaction costs. That's not the world we actually inhabit. In the actual world, if there is no way to carry out a transaction to make two people mutually better off, that's not a failure of the market; it's just the way markets work, given that human beings are not omniscient. I might even say that it's inherent in the existence of markets, because if human beings were omniscient we wouldn't need markets: we would just all converge to the ideal equilibrium instantaneously.
When I studied thermodynamics, we learned about reversible reactions, when take place in infinitesimally small steps that never generate any entropy increase. But we also learned that all reactions are irreversible in some degree, and that reversible reactions are simply an abstract model that we use to help analyze actual energy relationships. The same is true of general equilibrium, and of perfect competition, and of non-"failed" markets.
If you prefer some other phrase over "market failure", I'm not going to argue semantics. I think most people would agree that Sweden, which has been laissez faire on migrant beggars, has had worse outcomes than countries that have been less liberal, and I think the explanation is that the externalities are too big for markets to handle in a good way.
I don't know about the situation in Sweden, and can't comment on it.
I'm not even attempting, here, to argue over whether "laissez faire" is the better policy or not. My point is simply that if you have laissez faire, it includes not only the freedom to engage in trade and production, but also the freedom to make gifts. It seems possible that you agree, given that you seem to view Sweden as "laissez faire" and it sounds as if they allow people to donate to beggars.
The existence of white flight would seem to indicate that (3) is true at least on the neighbourhood level, i.e. it appears that people are willing to pay not to live near low-IQ immigrants, not to have their children in schools where their children would have to interact with the children of low-IQ immigrants, et cetera.
And there is nothing wrong if a bunch of people voluntarily agree to go somewhere and either buy property from someone or do first homesteading of an unowned property. What would be an issue - if these people try to stop the immigration nationwide even for those who want to associate with immigrants (like buying or selling goods and/or services with immigrants).
Another issue is the zoning regulations and subsidization of suburbs which lead to inefficiency in the economy. Deregulation of the housing industry is seriously important.
EDIT - The info that I find seems mixed. I was actually incorrect about my first claim (that you are incorrect about that). I am agnostic about your claim now.
"Samuel Kye (2018) cites several studies that identified "factors such as crime and neighborhood deterioration, rather than racial prejudice, as more robust determinants of white flight".[99] Ellen and O'Regan (2010) found that lower crime rates in city centers are associated with less out-migration to suburbs, but they did not find an effect on lower levels of crime attracting new households to the city.[100] " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Crime
"In 2018, research at Indiana University showed that between 2000 and 2010 in the US, of a sample size of 27,891 Census tracts, 3,252 experienced "white flight".[30] The examined areas had "an average magnitude loss of 40 percent of the original white population." Published in Social Science Research, the study found "relative to poorer neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population presence."[31]"
I'm not convinced. E.g. I'd expect much more white flight from South Asians in the UK than in the US because the US has selected for IQ to a much greater extent for this racial group.
At least where I live, in Silicon Valley, I don't think there is any white flight from South Asians, of which there are a lot, enough to support multiple Indian/Pakistani supermarkets.
The info that I find seems mixed. I was actually incorrect about my first claim about you being incorrect. I am agnostic about your claim now.
"Samuel Kye (2018) cites several studies that identified "factors such as crime and neighborhood deterioration, rather than racial prejudice, as more robust determinants of white flight".[99] Ellen and O'Regan (2010) found that lower crime rates in city centers are associated with less out-migration to suburbs, but they did not find an effect on lower levels of crime attracting new households to the city.[100] " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Crime
"In 2018, research at Indiana University showed that between 2000 and 2010 in the US, of a sample size of 27,891 Census tracts, 3,252 experienced "white flight".[30] The examined areas had "an average magnitude loss of 40 percent of the original white population." Published in Social Science Research, the study found "relative to poorer neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population presence."[31]"
I think more generally their culture. I would prefer that my children not go to a school where most of the kids think studying is for wimps, even if there is no crime.
Are there really schools like this? I can easily imagine some, especially expensive prep schools where parental wealth guarantees lots of money available, but pushing to do more partying and less studying isn’t so anti-studying. There are majority black schools where kids who study get beaten up, and more where they’re mocked, studying makes one “too white”. I think crime is a problem in almost all of these real schools.
IMHO it has to do with race only indirectly: the actual critical variable is culturally acceptable behavior that is different for racial-cultural groups. White people do not flee from people with dark skin if they are Nigerians or Indians but when they are African Americans. Related to this is the fact that people seriously underestimate the degree to which IQ is culturally mediated. Richard Lynne argues with a straight face - so speak, I've never seen him - that the average IQ of the bushmen of the Kalahari is 59. An IQ of 59 means you are incapable of independent living in any civilization. This is prima facie nonsense. You have to socialize the young into practicing and prizing abstraction. Many a cross-cultural neuropsychologist like me had his or her comeuppance in trying to quantify cognitive capacity or impairment in people who had little or no schooling. A friend of mine did a regression analysis and found that any measurement by testing on people with less than 8 years of schooling is meaningless.
The point is that the average Kalahari Bushman doesn't function in life like someone who obtains a valid IQ of 59 in any educated society that has comparable schooling to the places where IQ tests were invented. If he doesn't function far better, he won't survive. Giving him an IQ test is not a valid assessment of his cognitive potential and skills.
We associate an IQ that low with severe developmental abnormalities because that is often what is needed for a European to get that low. You can have low cognitive ability, but not be disabled, just as a pig has a far lower IQ than humans, but still functions.
No, you can't have a valid IQ that low as a human and not be disabled and you can't use the difference between humans and other species to suggest that members of the same human species but only of a different race, have an average IQ difference of 2.5 standard deviations. People, in other words, who are untrainable for literacy and arithmetic, or for driving a car safely, but otherwise appear to have the same brain and can interbreed with Asians and Europeans. That's quite something.
Yes, except that Warne is too optimistic IMO, in the sense that it takes much more schooling for the various tests generally in use to get meaningful results than one would believe after reading his article. It has also been well documented that the less African American subjects are identified with the mainstream culture, the more they will obtain scores on testing that would suggest brain impairment in other subjects. You don't have to go visit the Kpelle or the Uzbeks. BTW, Google Luria and "the Uzbeks don't have any illusions". You'll appreciate the story.
Friedman says: "He points out that Sowell’s data was from 1969, at which time his claims were true, and suggests that one reason they are no longer true is that later generations of West African immigrants assimilated into the African-American population and adopted its culture, including elements that led to lower incomes. That supports Sowell’s view that the reason for the poor performance of African-Americans is cultural not genetic."
I'm not sure why we should conclude that "the poor performance of African-Americans is cultural not genetic" from this data. Immigration is selective and it's entirely possible that West African immigrants differ genetically from the existing African-American population. This could explain why earlier generations do relatively well. But then regression to the mean sets in, and the children of immigrants regress toward the average of their populations of origin. Does Sowell have any means of distinguishing his cultural explanation from the genetic one? If not, then I think that the genetic one is more plausible since the underlying mechanism (regression to the mean) is well-established, while the cultural one strikes me as more speculative.
The very sensible argument that only citizens of the country should be allowed to receive welfare payments is like water off a duck’s back when you put it to opponents of immigration. It simply does not fit into their narrative that poor immigrants will always have a negative impact on both gov’t finances and society in general. Better to continue with the welfare payments to foreigners so that you can continue to blame them for all the ills of society, apparently.
The Economist wrote in 2011: "High immigration is threatening the principle of redistribution that is at the heart of the welfare state. ... Matz Dahlberg, of Uppsala University, reckons that immigration is making people less willing to support redistribution." I personally find that an extremely good argument in favour of more immigration, not less.
A crafty elite seeking immigrants for usual HLvM reasons would, sensing itself beaten for now, agree to your proposal, let many come in and then qualify them for welfare with sob stories in ten years anyways. Many caveats here, but in the main that's why right wing parties think nothing of such compromises.
"Since Kirkegaard quoted Chisala long before he wrote the reply to me I interpret his failure to deal with the argument he knew Chisala had made as evidence against his willingness to respond to the strongest arguments against his position."
I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding. Chisala and Kirkegaard pretty much agree when it comes to specifically to Nigerians specifically in the UK. Unfortunately the UK doesn't regularly collect data broken down by country of origin. But they are probably a highly selected group with high intelligence.
More broadly responding to Chanda and the issues with non native speakers. You can have a look here: https://psyarxiv.com/3txk4/download?format=pdf depending on the dataset Black samples are broken down to UK born, English as first language, occasionally country of origin. In all those cases the African-White IQ gap is still about 5.5, restricting only to Black English Speakers/UK born. (Higher for Caribbean).
Regarding your last point about immigration and the welfare state, the UK has partially implemented this, with some categories of immigrant (including legal immigrants) having "no recourse to public funds." It's only to a fairly limited extent though, and not combined with open borders.
"The immigrants’ net contribution to society is positive even though their contribution to government revenue is negative."
Similarly, while the Erie Canal was profitable, the various feeder canals (Black River, Chenango, Chemung, Oswego, Oneida, Champlain) were not profitable (their contribution to government revenue was negative), but the canals' net contribution to society is positive.
Our society needs to focus on how we want low IQ people to live: do the quite hard work of reading so as to graduate from HS/ GED, get a job and keep it for a year or more, get married before having kids, obey laws/ don’t commit crimes.
We’re doing sub-optimal on all of these, especially for the many many low IQ people.
Keeping a McDonald’s job for a year counts, but there should be more govt support for low wage jobs, like the govt paying the SS contribution for the company, or worker, or both; and the govt playing the unemployment tax.
We should be replacing no-work welfare with a Job Guarantee. Even if it costs a little more, tho I’m sure it won’t. Workers all earn some amount of Self-Respect, which no program can “give”.
Why do you assume everyone should go to high school or equivalent? There are lots of productive activities that don't require that sort of education. Amish normally leave school after seventh grade and most of them manage pretty well.
I am convinced that if a child has become proficient in reading, writing, arithmetic, logical reasoning -- which a good system can impart by age 12 or 13 -- then in the modern age, he or she has the ability and the opportunity to learn whatever skill(s) of choice since all the instructions are easily available on the internet. The main necessary bit is that the child has been taught how to get "the pleasure of finding things out" (as Feynman put it). Meaning if the system messes up the primary and secondary schooling, then there's little hope in the later stages; conversely if the child learns the love of learning, then learning is guaranteed. Which implies that early mentoring is necessary and almost sufficient for success in school and beyond. Culture matters enormously; therefore home environment matters.
I’m supporting Free Will and the choice, or not, of following the Success Sequence:
1) graduate from High School/ GED
2) get a job and keep it for at least a year
3) get married before having kids
And sometimes 4) don’t commit crimes
There are virtually no poor people in America who have followed this sequence, as Forrest Gump sort of did.
While our society is failing to hold young people responsible for the choices they actually make, I choose to consistently support the feasible good, rather than argue for what might be a more perfect Success Sequence.
It might be that 7 or 8 grades, Jr. High School, is plenty for success and thus the Sequence would be more perfect with that as step 1.
The perfect being the enemy of the good—and thus failing to achieve any improvement at all. A good explanation of my own migration from L-Libertarian to, more like Milton, R-Republican & l-libertarian.
Because of my own belief that a lot of the value of HS is the babysitting function for minors, I would argue that the 18 adult age of most HS grads is likely actually better in the Sequence, but certainly that’s more basic education than the minimum. Given that a large number of HS grads can’t even read or do math at the 7th grade level, adding education reform/ failure to an argument about increasing social and govt support for low IQ jobs, defeats that argument.
Reading the new Rob Henderson book, Troubled, and his claim that a stable family is more important than education. (Sorry for late reply)
I think people have poor understanding of nuances of statistical concepts like mean and they apply it like blunt tools. Kierkegaard is doing that here in my opinion based on how DDF has characterized his arguments.
Mean should always be interpreted in the light of other statistical properties of the variable. For example mean height of students in a school district has different signals than mean height of students in grade 5.
Nations are extremely diverse groups. India is a very large country and allegedly has one of the lowest average IQ. Yet, historically the nation has achieved a lot and its people are generally seen as pretty smart ones when they come as immigrants. Part of the reason is that it has a huge population so even if mean IQ is lower it likely has more individuals with IQ 130+ than say UK or Mexico.
But India is also ethnically very diverse. Which means different regions of India has drastically different average IQ levels than others. Bihar which has per capita income lower than nearly every sub saharan nation has 3rd highest IQ in India. Where as the richest and smallest state Goa is on number 5.
When it comes to immigration, IQ is a flawed measure. We need more average IQ plumbers than high IQ doctors. Benefits of 10 plumbers to society might be equivalent to benefits brought by 1 doctor.
But this plays out very differently when you consider groups. Let us say your prioritize immigration from nations with high mean IQ. Chances are that the poor people in UK (who might also have low IQ) will move to USA because the difference between being poor in UK and being poor in USA is pretty sharp. Where as a high IQ rich doctor working for NHS in UK might not find it worth moving to USA as being rich in London is same as being rich in SF. Reverse might be true for poor and lower mean IQ nations. A smart Nigerian or Indian might be more interested in moving to USA to make it big rather than an uneducated village bumpkin.
Looks like if I'm not mistaken that the US already did some limited form of barring immigrants from welfare: https://www.nilc.org/issues/economic-support/overview-immeligfedprograms/#:~:text=Federal%20Public%20Benefits%20Generally%20Denied,paid%20for%20by%20federal%20funds.
We already tried Prop 187, restricting the welfare state from immigrants, in California. It failed spectacularly.
Jim Crow is basically the most evil thing every in the American mindset and your basically proposing Jim Crow for immigrants.
And don't all immigrants eventually become citizens, at least their kids.
The hardest thing is that the immigrants themselves, like all people that tend to receive on net from the welfare state, tend to vote in favor of the welfare state. Thus it becomes a self perpetuating loop. Immigrants come for the welfare state, they provide more votes for the welfare state, which attracts more immigrants that want to sponge off the welfare state.
I think it's easier to just recognize that the potential upsides to lots of low IQ labor aren't particularly high, and that the potential downsides are huge. Just let the first world be the first world.
Very grateful for this post, as I find reading Emil K. often too convincing for my (or his) good. - Here in Germany the courts have decided that our constitution (§1: human dignity über alles) requires the state to provide the minimum needed to take part in society life (not merely survival): Section 1 SGB XII: “The task of social assistance is to enable those entitled to benefits to lead a life that corresponds to human dignity.” And this includes refugees from Georgia and Somalia as well as Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan. (We do even worse: first 3 months any work is strictly verboten, the first 4 years one needs to apply for being allowed to take a job. With the job-centers actively discouraging opening your own little business.)
The compromise you suggest would not work because there would be no way to guarantee that the government would keep its promise and not start providing the welfare benefits later.
Why would it be in the interest of a government first to make the rules I suggest and then to change them? The costs and benefits of the alternatives wouldn't obviously change.
In case it isn't obvious, what I am proposing is pretty nearly what the US had for most of its history. It isn't until the 1920's that there are immigration restrictions, aside from those on Chinese immigrants, and it was pretty much a laissez-faire system prior to the New Deal in the 1930's.
The world has changed a lot since 1900.
What are the relevant changes? Transportation is cheaper and faster, but a lot of the current attempted immigration is from Latin America which was just about as doable then.
For one thing, it's easier to get a story about a more starving immigrant deprived of welfare to go viral.
> Why would it be in the interest of a government first to make the rules I suggest and then to change them?
Because the government isn't a unitary person.
It's Kirkegaard, not Kierkegaard. (Kierkegaard is the philosopher.) If you search Chisala's site with the Kirkegaard's name spelled correctly there are a couple of hits.
Good discussion, but I wonder what Kierkegaard, Chisala, Friedman, and Sowell would be called if they were a band? 3 Bruds and a Dud? Atomic Grapefruit? Suggestions?
My experience teaching for 20+ years in a very diverse college that drew heavily from Detroit Metro was that the problems evinced by my American-born Black students was not that they had lower IQ but that had been much less well-prepared in K-12. Even grad students.
I had plenty of second generation immigrant students, and they appeared, on the surface at least, to be of IQ similar to American-born white students.
Much more indicative of struggle vs success was which school system they came out of.
Where were your second generation immigrant students from? Kierkegaard is a European, thinking mainly in terms of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, although there are estimates of average IQ for lots of other places.
Lot of Middle Easterners, about 30% non-Muslim. A lot of Indians, mostly from the northern areas (and as children of professional parents typically high IQ). Quite a few West Africans. Not many Hispanics of any kind.
In a laissez-faire economy, it will be legal for people to make gifts, and to donate to voluntary charities. Either could permit immigrants to consume more than they are paid for their work.
Yes. I didn't think it worth going into that. Arguably if you give a gift or donate to charities it is because doing so increases your utility, so it doesn't undercut my argument.
Perhaps, but it makes it more precise.
I don't think that putting it in terms of utility is a satisfactory emendation. Consider, for example, raising children. It's a very expensive and time consuming activity, but that very fact is a measure of the utility parents gain from it, which exceeds (at least ex ante) the utility of the time and money. But still, infants and small children and, in our society, children for quite a few years beyond that are consuming more than they produce. I don't think it's reasonable to say that they are "producing" something for their parents just because their existence raises their parents' utility; I think defining "production" as broadly as that leaves it devoid of meaning.
I think the real point amounts to "open borders, a welfare state, or fiscal viability: choose two." And I think your comment points at that. But I'm just haggling over the price, so to speak.
One example would be the gypsy beggars from SE Europe that have populated Swedish streets for the past decade or so. This would seem like a clear negative-utility arrangement for the Swedes.
On one hand, if the Swedes are choosing to give to them, making their trade viable, those gifts presumably have positive utility for the Swedes.
On the other hand, it could be asked to what degree the Swedish government is subsidizing those beggars, by providing them with funds in addition to what they get from begging. Or enabling them, by allowing them to threaten their donors, so that the "gifts" aren't really voluntary, and go unpunished and unrestrained. In either of these cases, it's not a laissez-faire economy.
Does the Swedish government have legal rules, such as a minimum wage law, that make employment less available to Romany immigrants?
I gather that in the US and Canada Romany tended to support themselves by a mix of farm labor and fortune telling, along with some con games. I don't think I have noticed any beggars that were obviously Romany.
There's no minimum wage in Sweden (instead there are powerful unions and collective-bargaining agreements, but I don't think those would directly affect e.g. farm labour), but begging seems to be the only job that gypsies come to Sweden for in large numbers (and maybe prostitution?). In some cases, the begging seems to take the form of salaried employment. In others, the headman makes money by renting out begging spots, which I suppose might be an interesting case of emergent anarchic property rights.
Is fortune telling legal?
Yes, and this is a traditional occupation for Swedish Gypsies, but it seems unlikely that the foreign Gypsy beggars, who do not speak Swedish (or even English), would have much success in this field. To me, it seems reasonable to assume that they are acting rationally and that this is simply the best job for them, although there are other options open to them, such as picking oranges in Spain (which was apparently something some of them did in the 00s, before the Swedish border opened), which might seem preferable to those from a different cultural background.
They're not subsidized by the government; it's pretty much laissez faire. It's a market failure in that the positive utility they give to donors is internalized whereas the negative utility they give to everyone else is not.
That usage of "market failure" strikes me as overbroad. It implicitly compares the utilities people have with the utilities they could have in a hypothetical world where everyone could trade off to improve their positions vis-à-vis everyone else with zero transaction costs. That's not the world we actually inhabit. In the actual world, if there is no way to carry out a transaction to make two people mutually better off, that's not a failure of the market; it's just the way markets work, given that human beings are not omniscient. I might even say that it's inherent in the existence of markets, because if human beings were omniscient we wouldn't need markets: we would just all converge to the ideal equilibrium instantaneously.
When I studied thermodynamics, we learned about reversible reactions, when take place in infinitesimally small steps that never generate any entropy increase. But we also learned that all reactions are irreversible in some degree, and that reversible reactions are simply an abstract model that we use to help analyze actual energy relationships. The same is true of general equilibrium, and of perfect competition, and of non-"failed" markets.
If you prefer some other phrase over "market failure", I'm not going to argue semantics. I think most people would agree that Sweden, which has been laissez faire on migrant beggars, has had worse outcomes than countries that have been less liberal, and I think the explanation is that the externalities are too big for markets to handle in a good way.
I don't know about the situation in Sweden, and can't comment on it.
I'm not even attempting, here, to argue over whether "laissez faire" is the better policy or not. My point is simply that if you have laissez faire, it includes not only the freedom to engage in trade and production, but also the freedom to make gifts. It seems possible that you agree, given that you seem to view Sweden as "laissez faire" and it sounds as if they allow people to donate to beggars.
And we should not stop private charities from helping people. See also GiveDirectly's research - https://www.givedirectly.org/
GiveDirectly is liked by lots of effective altruists and seems to always get very high charity rating. See also my post on immigration - https://rajatsirkanungo.substack.com/p/a-post-to-my-friend-ives
The existence of white flight would seem to indicate that (3) is true at least on the neighbourhood level, i.e. it appears that people are willing to pay not to live near low-IQ immigrants, not to have their children in schools where their children would have to interact with the children of low-IQ immigrants, et cetera.
You are incorrect. It has more to do with race or ethnicity than IQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#
And there is nothing wrong if a bunch of people voluntarily agree to go somewhere and either buy property from someone or do first homesteading of an unowned property. What would be an issue - if these people try to stop the immigration nationwide even for those who want to associate with immigrants (like buying or selling goods and/or services with immigrants).
Another issue is the zoning regulations and subsidization of suburbs which lead to inefficiency in the economy. Deregulation of the housing industry is seriously important.
Voluntary segregation is mostly alright, but it is the government or national segregation or government law enforced segregation that is very bad. https://rajatsirkanungo.substack.com/p/a-post-to-my-friend-ives
EDIT - The info that I find seems mixed. I was actually incorrect about my first claim (that you are incorrect about that). I am agnostic about your claim now.
"Samuel Kye (2018) cites several studies that identified "factors such as crime and neighborhood deterioration, rather than racial prejudice, as more robust determinants of white flight".[99] Ellen and O'Regan (2010) found that lower crime rates in city centers are associated with less out-migration to suburbs, but they did not find an effect on lower levels of crime attracting new households to the city.[100] " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Crime
"In 2018, research at Indiana University showed that between 2000 and 2010 in the US, of a sample size of 27,891 Census tracts, 3,252 experienced "white flight".[30] The examined areas had "an average magnitude loss of 40 percent of the original white population." Published in Social Science Research, the study found "relative to poorer neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population presence."[31]"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Academic_research
I'm not convinced. E.g. I'd expect much more white flight from South Asians in the UK than in the US because the US has selected for IQ to a much greater extent for this racial group.
At least where I live, in Silicon Valley, I don't think there is any white flight from South Asians, of which there are a lot, enough to support multiple Indian/Pakistani supermarkets.
The info that I find seems mixed. I was actually incorrect about my first claim about you being incorrect. I am agnostic about your claim now.
"Samuel Kye (2018) cites several studies that identified "factors such as crime and neighborhood deterioration, rather than racial prejudice, as more robust determinants of white flight".[99] Ellen and O'Regan (2010) found that lower crime rates in city centers are associated with less out-migration to suburbs, but they did not find an effect on lower levels of crime attracting new households to the city.[100] " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Crime
"In 2018, research at Indiana University showed that between 2000 and 2010 in the US, of a sample size of 27,891 Census tracts, 3,252 experienced "white flight".[30] The examined areas had "an average magnitude loss of 40 percent of the original white population." Published in Social Science Research, the study found "relative to poorer neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population presence."[31]"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Academic_research
> You are incorrect. It has more to do with race or ethnicity than IQ.
Like Uwe said it's not race or ethnicity. It's how the groups in question behave, most notably their tendency to engage in violent crime.
I think more generally their culture. I would prefer that my children not go to a school where most of the kids think studying is for wimps, even if there is no crime.
Are there really schools like this? I can easily imagine some, especially expensive prep schools where parental wealth guarantees lots of money available, but pushing to do more partying and less studying isn’t so anti-studying. There are majority black schools where kids who study get beaten up, and more where they’re mocked, studying makes one “too white”. I think crime is a problem in almost all of these real schools.
Crime might be a problem in such schools, but the same attitude would be a problem even without the crime.
IMHO it has to do with race only indirectly: the actual critical variable is culturally acceptable behavior that is different for racial-cultural groups. White people do not flee from people with dark skin if they are Nigerians or Indians but when they are African Americans. Related to this is the fact that people seriously underestimate the degree to which IQ is culturally mediated. Richard Lynne argues with a straight face - so speak, I've never seen him - that the average IQ of the bushmen of the Kalahari is 59. An IQ of 59 means you are incapable of independent living in any civilization. This is prima facie nonsense. You have to socialize the young into practicing and prizing abstraction. Many a cross-cultural neuropsychologist like me had his or her comeuppance in trying to quantify cognitive capacity or impairment in people who had little or no schooling. A friend of mine did a regression analysis and found that any measurement by testing on people with less than 8 years of schooling is meaningless.
> An IQ of 59 means you are incapable of independent living in any civilization.
An IQ of 59 in a European means that since a lot has to go wrong for a European to obtain an IQ that low. This is not the case for a Kalahari bushman.
The point is that the average Kalahari Bushman doesn't function in life like someone who obtains a valid IQ of 59 in any educated society that has comparable schooling to the places where IQ tests were invented. If he doesn't function far better, he won't survive. Giving him an IQ test is not a valid assessment of his cognitive potential and skills.
We associate an IQ that low with severe developmental abnormalities because that is often what is needed for a European to get that low. You can have low cognitive ability, but not be disabled, just as a pig has a far lower IQ than humans, but still functions.
No, you can't have a valid IQ that low as a human and not be disabled and you can't use the difference between humans and other species to suggest that members of the same human species but only of a different race, have an average IQ difference of 2.5 standard deviations. People, in other words, who are untrainable for literacy and arithmetic, or for driving a car safely, but otherwise appear to have the same brain and can interbreed with Asians and Europeans. That's quite something.
Did you understand my comment? Education has nothing to do with it.
That's a mistaken assumption. You can go up this thread, look at the exchange and had with another reader, follow his links and go from there.
I also saw Russell Warne argue that being taught abstract thinking from early age through basic education can influence IQ - https://russellwarne.com/2023/04/29/stupid-no-unfamiliar-yes-the-meaning-of-low-mean-iqs-in-developing-nations/
I think it is plausible or reasonable.
Yes, except that Warne is too optimistic IMO, in the sense that it takes much more schooling for the various tests generally in use to get meaningful results than one would believe after reading his article. It has also been well documented that the less African American subjects are identified with the mainstream culture, the more they will obtain scores on testing that would suggest brain impairment in other subjects. You don't have to go visit the Kpelle or the Uzbeks. BTW, Google Luria and "the Uzbeks don't have any illusions". You'll appreciate the story.
Friedman says: "He points out that Sowell’s data was from 1969, at which time his claims were true, and suggests that one reason they are no longer true is that later generations of West African immigrants assimilated into the African-American population and adopted its culture, including elements that led to lower incomes. That supports Sowell’s view that the reason for the poor performance of African-Americans is cultural not genetic."
I'm not sure why we should conclude that "the poor performance of African-Americans is cultural not genetic" from this data. Immigration is selective and it's entirely possible that West African immigrants differ genetically from the existing African-American population. This could explain why earlier generations do relatively well. But then regression to the mean sets in, and the children of immigrants regress toward the average of their populations of origin. Does Sowell have any means of distinguishing his cultural explanation from the genetic one? If not, then I think that the genetic one is more plausible since the underlying mechanism (regression to the mean) is well-established, while the cultural one strikes me as more speculative.
The very sensible argument that only citizens of the country should be allowed to receive welfare payments is like water off a duck’s back when you put it to opponents of immigration. It simply does not fit into their narrative that poor immigrants will always have a negative impact on both gov’t finances and society in general. Better to continue with the welfare payments to foreigners so that you can continue to blame them for all the ills of society, apparently.
The Economist wrote in 2011: "High immigration is threatening the principle of redistribution that is at the heart of the welfare state. ... Matz Dahlberg, of Uppsala University, reckons that immigration is making people less willing to support redistribution." I personally find that an extremely good argument in favour of more immigration, not less.
I made that argument quite a long time ago:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2006/04/welfare-and-immigration-flip-side-of.html
A crafty elite seeking immigrants for usual HLvM reasons would, sensing itself beaten for now, agree to your proposal, let many come in and then qualify them for welfare with sob stories in ten years anyways. Many caveats here, but in the main that's why right wing parties think nothing of such compromises.
"Since Kirkegaard quoted Chisala long before he wrote the reply to me I interpret his failure to deal with the argument he knew Chisala had made as evidence against his willingness to respond to the strongest arguments against his position."
I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding. Chisala and Kirkegaard pretty much agree when it comes to specifically to Nigerians specifically in the UK. Unfortunately the UK doesn't regularly collect data broken down by country of origin. But they are probably a highly selected group with high intelligence.
More broadly responding to Chanda and the issues with non native speakers. You can have a look here: https://psyarxiv.com/3txk4/download?format=pdf depending on the dataset Black samples are broken down to UK born, English as first language, occasionally country of origin. In all those cases the African-White IQ gap is still about 5.5, restricting only to Black English Speakers/UK born. (Higher for Caribbean).
Regarding your last point about immigration and the welfare state, the UK has partially implemented this, with some categories of immigrant (including legal immigrants) having "no recourse to public funds." It's only to a fairly limited extent though, and not combined with open borders.
"The immigrants’ net contribution to society is positive even though their contribution to government revenue is negative."
Similarly, while the Erie Canal was profitable, the various feeder canals (Black River, Chenango, Chemung, Oswego, Oneida, Champlain) were not profitable (their contribution to government revenue was negative), but the canals' net contribution to society is positive.
Our society needs to focus on how we want low IQ people to live: do the quite hard work of reading so as to graduate from HS/ GED, get a job and keep it for a year or more, get married before having kids, obey laws/ don’t commit crimes.
We’re doing sub-optimal on all of these, especially for the many many low IQ people.
Keeping a McDonald’s job for a year counts, but there should be more govt support for low wage jobs, like the govt paying the SS contribution for the company, or worker, or both; and the govt playing the unemployment tax.
We should be replacing no-work welfare with a Job Guarantee. Even if it costs a little more, tho I’m sure it won’t. Workers all earn some amount of Self-Respect, which no program can “give”.
Why do you assume everyone should go to high school or equivalent? There are lots of productive activities that don't require that sort of education. Amish normally leave school after seventh grade and most of them manage pretty well.
I am convinced that if a child has become proficient in reading, writing, arithmetic, logical reasoning -- which a good system can impart by age 12 or 13 -- then in the modern age, he or she has the ability and the opportunity to learn whatever skill(s) of choice since all the instructions are easily available on the internet. The main necessary bit is that the child has been taught how to get "the pleasure of finding things out" (as Feynman put it). Meaning if the system messes up the primary and secondary schooling, then there's little hope in the later stages; conversely if the child learns the love of learning, then learning is guaranteed. Which implies that early mentoring is necessary and almost sufficient for success in school and beyond. Culture matters enormously; therefore home environment matters.
I’m supporting Free Will and the choice, or not, of following the Success Sequence:
1) graduate from High School/ GED
2) get a job and keep it for at least a year
3) get married before having kids
And sometimes 4) don’t commit crimes
There are virtually no poor people in America who have followed this sequence, as Forrest Gump sort of did.
While our society is failing to hold young people responsible for the choices they actually make, I choose to consistently support the feasible good, rather than argue for what might be a more perfect Success Sequence.
It might be that 7 or 8 grades, Jr. High School, is plenty for success and thus the Sequence would be more perfect with that as step 1.
The perfect being the enemy of the good—and thus failing to achieve any improvement at all. A good explanation of my own migration from L-Libertarian to, more like Milton, R-Republican & l-libertarian.
Because of my own belief that a lot of the value of HS is the babysitting function for minors, I would argue that the 18 adult age of most HS grads is likely actually better in the Sequence, but certainly that’s more basic education than the minimum. Given that a large number of HS grads can’t even read or do math at the 7th grade level, adding education reform/ failure to an argument about increasing social and govt support for low IQ jobs, defeats that argument.
Reading the new Rob Henderson book, Troubled, and his claim that a stable family is more important than education. (Sorry for late reply)