This piece and your reply to Noah Smith strike me as a really good complement to all the empirical data cited in Coming Apart and similar works, which document the effect of *regional* IQ-selective migration among White Americans.
That effect is, unsurprisingly, exactly what you predict for international IQ-selective migration: the places that are destinations for the cognitively gifted are much more pleasant and functional than the places they'd have lived a generation or two prior (albeit with a lot of untempered neuroticism), and the places they leave behind are going to hell in a handbasket.
Since you find yourself needing to re-state your rebuttal, I will repeat my own comment on that original piece [edited a bit for brevity].
The only sane immigration policy for an rich society to adopt would have been to filter/select for the immigrants who could convincingly show a very positive identification with the VALUES of the host society. (Immigration to19th/early 20thc. America was approximately that way....or am I romanticising?) They would not necessarily have had to be intellectually top notch....just keen to contribute. You could even make a case that the emigrant culture would benefit from off-loading some of its more culturally alienated citizens (although not a strong case I suspect). I have said "would have been" because - in the US and much of Europe - that horse has long ago bolted in the wake of the unfolding tragedy of 'multiculturalism'.
"Immigration to19th/early 20thc. America was approximately that way....or am I romanticising?"
Not really, in fact not at all. It's just that having the only Europeans filter limited the extent to which one could get truly incompatible immigrants, and the absence of widely available welfare encouraged those that sucked to leave. Roughly a third of our arriving Italian immigrants went back to Italy, when they couldn't make it here. But even then, America was almost immediately transformed from a limited government country, to the exact opposite.
It's true that the same happened in the UK, but that can be attributed to it's unique level of involvement in the world wars, and the resulting war socialism that never really ended.
About 90% of Dubai's residents are immigrants, with a quite noticeable IQ range, from many different countries, some of which might be expected to be incompatible. They all contribute, and Dubai's rise has been meteoric. I can't say that many immigrants share the values of the Emiratis, but they share some core values of *Dubai*: notably, they are grateful for the opportunity, unlike us whinging expats in Germany (maybe we feel entitled because we pay high taxes).
Nowadays in many countries it would be hard to get agreement on their core values. Dubai, Switzerland....
The externality argument is really good. Also, the "ability" needed to be an entrepreneur in the country they leave is way lower than in the country they go to.
Why don’t you guys ever praise low skilled immigration as helping the countries that they leave?
It seems to me that each brain drain argument has a flip side. Assume people have positive or negative externalities based on their IQs.
Restrictionists then become selective in what they focus on. If the issue is high skilled immigration, they say isn’t that bad for the country they’re leaving? They ignore benefits to the receiving country. If the issue is low skilled immigration, they focus in the country people move to, saying they reduce national IQ. But they completely ignore the possibility that poor people leaving can improve the IQ of the third world.
Another thing is that restrictionists always are talking about how they care about their own country first or exclusively. Now, suddenly, when it’s high skilled immigration, you shift to caring about the well being of other countries!
I don't dispute that low-skilled emigration is good for sending countries. Here's what I wrote in 'The fundamental problem for immigration activists':
"The types of immigration that are most beneficial for the host country are the ones that are most harmful to the sending country. And conversely, the types that are most detrimental for the host country are the one that are most benign for the sending country."
A nice way of putting it. Hannania's Nietzchean, extreme libertarian world view helps you understand where he is coming from. He's wicked smart with emphasis on the wicked.
It's a libertarianism I'm not familiar with. Certainly not small man democratic capitalism of some positive, humanist Jukiam Simon type. Definitely more interested in demography (i.e. collectivist) and IQ, and how societies are shaped by such. Prior libertarianism was all methodological individualism and division of labor/comparative advantage. Biological/genetic stock was massively downplayed or ignored.
If I move 100M Africans to Japan, Africa is still going to be a low IQ shithole and not change much, but Japan will be trashed too.
As to brain drain its fine. The smart fraction of these third world hellholes is swimming uphill, and we don't necessarily need high IQ people trying to babysit dumbs. Just enough to ensure the natural resources can get siphoned out of the ground. The rest should move to the first world.
The real question is if smarts from the third world are culturally compatible with first world countries. A smart person who isn't compatible can do a lot more damage than a dumb.
There is internal brain drain also within countries, as young educated people move from the provinces to the capital. I have seen this in Croatia, whose young people move from the provinces to Zagreb, and on to the EU. Very sad. Perhaps you would support the "Raspredelenie" system of the Soviet Union, whereby college graduates had to go work in some provincial town for three years? It had many benefits: some people met their future spouses there, and ended up staying. This system could be modernized, e.g. distribute college graduates in order to maintain a uniform average IQ across the country. Low-IQ people could also be moved around.
There is a bit of Berlin Wall logic in the argument presented. "You do a disservice to your countrymen by exiting with your talents. You owe the rest of us."
I live within walking distance of the Berlin Wall. In the old days, West Germans men who didn't want to serve in the military would move here, because only in West Berlin was military service optional. That "pacifist drain" helped contribute to Berlin's unique culture.
The Berlin Wall was a symbol of many things, including the levels of absurdity that meddlers are willing to go to.
“As a libertarian, Nowrasteh has a strong presumption in favour of liberty.”
I think this is suspect. If we had fully-restored freedom of association and private ownership of highways, roads, streets, parks, etc., open borders (as conceived by Nowrasteh) would be impossible. Instead, under the current Woke state, we have world ownership of what should be privatized.
Haiti is an extreme test caste. Last I heard there is scarcely a college graduate left in the country. Meanwhile Harvard's new president is a second generation Haitian immigrant.
Navigating the jungles of self incrimination when seeking to be selfish without putting a target on one's back is the key to modern discourse. Of course when you strip mine a territory without any regards to the externalities it may cause is going to have an effect, it's the entire strategy of what Lasch espoused as picking off the talent and centralizing. The larger the scale, the larger the abstraction, and the larger the abstraction, the easier it is to ignore the ppl most effected. Line goes up but line in the Pareto sense means the top garner more and centralize further to the point where resistance to total accumulation becomes untenable (a very desirable outcome for the pathologically selfish but a tough sell unless it becomes tipping point asymmetric)
I'm not sure that questions of this nature are going to be resolved purely by a priori reasoning. It is likely that empirical data would reinforce one or the other side of the argument. But, so what if positive externalities are enhanced by a high IQ individual remaining. Can not his or her wishes be allowed to enter the equation? And, if not, just what sort of attitude towards individual liberty sits at the base of the argument?
This piece and your reply to Noah Smith strike me as a really good complement to all the empirical data cited in Coming Apart and similar works, which document the effect of *regional* IQ-selective migration among White Americans.
That effect is, unsurprisingly, exactly what you predict for international IQ-selective migration: the places that are destinations for the cognitively gifted are much more pleasant and functional than the places they'd have lived a generation or two prior (albeit with a lot of untempered neuroticism), and the places they leave behind are going to hell in a handbasket.
It's a solid article.
Since you find yourself needing to re-state your rebuttal, I will repeat my own comment on that original piece [edited a bit for brevity].
The only sane immigration policy for an rich society to adopt would have been to filter/select for the immigrants who could convincingly show a very positive identification with the VALUES of the host society. (Immigration to19th/early 20thc. America was approximately that way....or am I romanticising?) They would not necessarily have had to be intellectually top notch....just keen to contribute. You could even make a case that the emigrant culture would benefit from off-loading some of its more culturally alienated citizens (although not a strong case I suspect). I have said "would have been" because - in the US and much of Europe - that horse has long ago bolted in the wake of the unfolding tragedy of 'multiculturalism'.
"Immigration to19th/early 20thc. America was approximately that way....or am I romanticising?"
Not really, in fact not at all. It's just that having the only Europeans filter limited the extent to which one could get truly incompatible immigrants, and the absence of widely available welfare encouraged those that sucked to leave. Roughly a third of our arriving Italian immigrants went back to Italy, when they couldn't make it here. But even then, America was almost immediately transformed from a limited government country, to the exact opposite.
It's true that the same happened in the UK, but that can be attributed to it's unique level of involvement in the world wars, and the resulting war socialism that never really ended.
About 90% of Dubai's residents are immigrants, with a quite noticeable IQ range, from many different countries, some of which might be expected to be incompatible. They all contribute, and Dubai's rise has been meteoric. I can't say that many immigrants share the values of the Emiratis, but they share some core values of *Dubai*: notably, they are grateful for the opportunity, unlike us whinging expats in Germany (maybe we feel entitled because we pay high taxes).
Nowadays in many countries it would be hard to get agreement on their core values. Dubai, Switzerland....
The externality argument is really good. Also, the "ability" needed to be an entrepreneur in the country they leave is way lower than in the country they go to.
Why don’t you guys ever praise low skilled immigration as helping the countries that they leave?
It seems to me that each brain drain argument has a flip side. Assume people have positive or negative externalities based on their IQs.
Restrictionists then become selective in what they focus on. If the issue is high skilled immigration, they say isn’t that bad for the country they’re leaving? They ignore benefits to the receiving country. If the issue is low skilled immigration, they focus in the country people move to, saying they reduce national IQ. But they completely ignore the possibility that poor people leaving can improve the IQ of the third world.
Another thing is that restrictionists always are talking about how they care about their own country first or exclusively. Now, suddenly, when it’s high skilled immigration, you shift to caring about the well being of other countries!
I don't dispute that low-skilled emigration is good for sending countries. Here's what I wrote in 'The fundamental problem for immigration activists':
"The types of immigration that are most beneficial for the host country are the ones that are most harmful to the sending country. And conversely, the types that are most detrimental for the host country are the one that are most benign for the sending country."
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-fundamental-problem-for-immigration
A nice way of putting it. Hannania's Nietzchean, extreme libertarian world view helps you understand where he is coming from. He's wicked smart with emphasis on the wicked.
It's a libertarianism I'm not familiar with. Certainly not small man democratic capitalism of some positive, humanist Jukiam Simon type. Definitely more interested in demography (i.e. collectivist) and IQ, and how societies are shaped by such. Prior libertarianism was all methodological individualism and division of labor/comparative advantage. Biological/genetic stock was massively downplayed or ignored.
The same goes for immigration advocates
If I move 100M Africans to Japan, Africa is still going to be a low IQ shithole and not change much, but Japan will be trashed too.
As to brain drain its fine. The smart fraction of these third world hellholes is swimming uphill, and we don't necessarily need high IQ people trying to babysit dumbs. Just enough to ensure the natural resources can get siphoned out of the ground. The rest should move to the first world.
The real question is if smarts from the third world are culturally compatible with first world countries. A smart person who isn't compatible can do a lot more damage than a dumb.
Migration effects apply also internally, most obviously in large countries, but I have seen it in small ones. So migration of any kind is bad, mkay?
There is internal brain drain also within countries, as young educated people move from the provinces to the capital. I have seen this in Croatia, whose young people move from the provinces to Zagreb, and on to the EU. Very sad. Perhaps you would support the "Raspredelenie" system of the Soviet Union, whereby college graduates had to go work in some provincial town for three years? It had many benefits: some people met their future spouses there, and ended up staying. This system could be modernized, e.g. distribute college graduates in order to maintain a uniform average IQ across the country. Low-IQ people could also be moved around.
There is a bit of Berlin Wall logic in the argument presented. "You do a disservice to your countrymen by exiting with your talents. You owe the rest of us."
I live within walking distance of the Berlin Wall. In the old days, West Germans men who didn't want to serve in the military would move here, because only in West Berlin was military service optional. That "pacifist drain" helped contribute to Berlin's unique culture.
The Berlin Wall was a symbol of many things, including the levels of absurdity that meddlers are willing to go to.
“As a libertarian, Nowrasteh has a strong presumption in favour of liberty.”
I think this is suspect. If we had fully-restored freedom of association and private ownership of highways, roads, streets, parks, etc., open borders (as conceived by Nowrasteh) would be impossible. Instead, under the current Woke state, we have world ownership of what should be privatized.
Haiti is an extreme test caste. Last I heard there is scarcely a college graduate left in the country. Meanwhile Harvard's new president is a second generation Haitian immigrant.
Navigating the jungles of self incrimination when seeking to be selfish without putting a target on one's back is the key to modern discourse. Of course when you strip mine a territory without any regards to the externalities it may cause is going to have an effect, it's the entire strategy of what Lasch espoused as picking off the talent and centralizing. The larger the scale, the larger the abstraction, and the larger the abstraction, the easier it is to ignore the ppl most effected. Line goes up but line in the Pareto sense means the top garner more and centralize further to the point where resistance to total accumulation becomes untenable (a very desirable outcome for the pathologically selfish but a tough sell unless it becomes tipping point asymmetric)
It is a great article that I believe reaches the correct conclusion. But, I did notice that the potential for culture clashes was not addressed.
I'm not sure that questions of this nature are going to be resolved purely by a priori reasoning. It is likely that empirical data would reinforce one or the other side of the argument. But, so what if positive externalities are enhanced by a high IQ individual remaining. Can not his or her wishes be allowed to enter the equation? And, if not, just what sort of attitude towards individual liberty sits at the base of the argument?