A Capital Writing interview with the author of The Culture Transplant.
A Capital Writing interview with the author of The Culture Transplant.
As part of a project for Capital Matters, called Capital Writing, I’ll be interviewing authors of economics books for the National Review Institute’s YouTube channel. This time, I talked to Garett Jones, a professor of economics at George Mason University, about his book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left. Below you will find an edited transcript of a few key parts of our conversation as well as the full video of our interview.
Dominic Pino: In the title The Culture Transplant, what do you mean by a transplant? Why is that the word that you chose for what happens when someone moves to a new country?
Garett Jones: When you think about research by modern economists about how migration changes societies — for instance, one term Daron Acemoglu uses is “neo-Europes.” When Europeans moved to the New World, they did not assimilate to the cultural norms and institutional norms of the people who were already there. They violently imposed new rules. And that’s why we call these countries, whether it’s the U.S. or Canada or New Zealand, we refer to them as neo-Europes. The question is whether this is a generalizable phenomenon, something that’s happened in many places, not just in a couple of places where there was imperialistic, violent conquests. And here, there’s a literature that looks at this question of whether migrants carry their attitudes from their home country to their new country.
A couple of my favorite papers look at savings behavior. When migrants come for a low-savings-rate culture that places low value on thrift compared to other values, do they bring those low savings rates, on average, and pass them on to the second and third generations of migrants? My book really isn’t about first-generation migrants very much at all. It’s more about the children and grandchildren of migrants. It turns out that whether we’re looking at savings rates, attitudes on trust, views on labor-market regulation, people tend to pass on values and carry them from the country of origin to the grandchildren of the people who moved to those countries. Italian-Americans are a lot like Italians in Italy. Swedish-Americans are a lot like Swedes in Sweden. So there’s a partial and persistent culture transplant for many traits that are important for the wealth of nations.
DP: A couple of the ones that you mention are social trust, savings rates, and family values. Those are things that seem to transfer very strongly and seem to stay with people when they move. What are some other ones that have a strong relationship?
GJ: Here’s one that kicked off the literature. It’s not central to my book, but I think it might be interesting because it’s so easy to test. It has to do with fertility rates and gender differences in labor-market participation. Part of the way this literature kicked off is that people checked to see if in countries where there are big gaps between the rates of men and women working in the workforce, do the children and grandchildren of migrants tend to import those attitudes toward gender differences into their new countries? So rather than just asking people some survey question, you just check and see. They found out that there was moderate but substantial differences. Again, not just looking at the migrants, but looking at the children of migrants. It shows up with gender differences in labor-market participation and cross-country differences in fertility. Between that and the savings-rate issue, we’re looking at concrete behaviors. We’re not just looking at, well, what do you think about this or that? It’s showing up in the things we can measure, and it’s showing up in things that are more political or values-type questions.
DP: Obviously, not everything is going to come across. We know just from experience that when people move to a new country, they change as well. What are some of the things that have a weaker relationship and people are more likely to change when they move?
GJ: There’s a European study that looks at intra-European migration, and that finds quite a few results where things don’t persist very much at all. One of them is basically, how do you feel about migrants? That one doesn’t persist very much at all because people bring their first-generation attitudes and then they kind of fade away. Another one is basically, how do you feel about the police? And, how do you feel about trust in different local organizations? So some attitudes persist and some don’t. I’m not monolithic about this. Some are super persistent across generations; we usually can check it most reliably to the second, sometimes beyond. And sometimes there really is assimilation. My colleague Bryan Caplan likes to point out that migrants assimilate on language. By the second or third generation, there’s a lot of assimilation on language, so that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m interested in the traits that more reliably shape the wealth of nations: attitudes toward government regulation, savings, these things keep showing up.
DP: You open the book by basically saying that economic research shows that a pretty good economic development plan for extremely poor countries would be to have lots of Chinese immigration because we just know that no matter where Chinese people move, they do quite well in whatever country they go to, and they end up making the country they go to wealthier as well.
GJ: Part of the reason to focus on China is that it’s the last poor country, now we’d say middle-income country, that had a really high level of technological success in 1500. The other countries that had high levels of technological success are mostly successful nowadays, except for North Korea, for obvious reasons. China has over a billion people, about half of them are nowhere close to middle-income levels of prosperity. You might imagine a world where a large number of folks living in Communist China might be willing to entertain the idea of moving to a poorer country and taking a stab at a better life there. If I can recommend one book on this, it’s China’s Second Continent, by a New York Times reporter, and he reports on Chinese migration to sub-Saharan Africa, and how these Chinese migrants are creating new stories and building an economic success there, on a small scale, but still noteworthy.
Across Southeast Asia, it’s well known that Chinese migrants, on average, [though there are] many exceptions, have become what Amy Chua of Yale refers to as “market-dominant minorities.” Whether we’re talking about Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, or the Philippines, the Chinese minority communities there are disproportionately economically successful, disproportionately likely to be millionaires, disproportionately likely to be leaders of large, successful industries that engage in a lot of international trade.
This isn’t just a story about U.S. Chinatowns, as important as they are. The U.S., of course, would have done much better in the 19th century if we had welcomed Chinese migrants rather than imposing the racist exclusion acts. But the U.S. was a country that was already destined for some level of economic success by then. The rest of the world could use a dose of that level of economic success.
It’s worth remembering: China is by far the poorest majority-Chinese country in the world. We have Singapore, we have Hong Kong, rest in peace, we have Macau, we have Taiwan. We have four other countries that are majority Chinese, all much more successful economically. That’s a signal for us about the ability of Chinese folks when they are not under the thumb of a communist dictatorship. When they’re in the majority, we see strong, market-friendly countries that do well on economic-freedom ratings that libertarians rightly value, and when you look at countries with substantial Chinese minority populations, there’s a fairly good correlation between percent of Chinese ancestry, by multiple measures, and levels of prosperity and levels of economic freedom. The Chinese diaspora is creating economic miracles around the world, and if there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s more economic miracles.
DP: Your book is not in favor of open borders, but clearly you do not support closed borders, either.
GJ: Not at all, that’s ridiculous. The poorest countries in the world, in particular, should be trying to find ways to welcome voluntary, peaceful migration from people who can bring skills, whether it’s traditional human-capital measures or parents’ and grandparents’ experiences living under market-based free societies with good institutions. This is one way to create success: Bring in people who have great experience with success. Since we know from the Deep Roots literature that many of these traits persist across generations, maybe even centuries, that this is a reminder that a country can help steer its own economic destiny by choosing its migration policy now.
DP: And so really that’s just an argument for a relatively conventional immigration policy. We’re going to have a border, we’re going to enforce it, but we’re also going to choose who we want to come in, subject to a certain set of criteria.
GJ: Yeah, think of the points-based systems that are used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a few other countries, where you get points if you have skills that are needed in the country, if you have high education levels, if you have some kind of technical certification, no criminal record, these kinds of things. Points-based systems work a little like college admissions, where nobody’s going to worship one particular number or have one ironclad cutoff. Some of my critics make up these scenarios where if you use a ridiculous ironclad cutoff, you get ridiculous outcomes, to which I would say, “Of course, that’s why you wouldn’t do that.”
Points-based systems are a better way to think about it. The traditional merit-based or skills-based migration, I have no particular qualms with that. What I’m here to point out is that those are metrics that look at the first generation. If I’m a migrant and thinking about moving to Japan, if I can show them I have a Ph.D., I have a pretty good chance of getting some kind of visa to live there. But what are my children and grandchildren going to be like if I ever have any? That’s what a country should be thinking about. It should be using whatever crummy, noisy indicators are available to give you some ability to forecast what might happen two, three, four generations down the road. And if we know that people who come from high-trust countries are more likely to pass on high levels of trust and trustworthiness, on average, to their children and grandchildren, that’s a really nice thing to know.
I don’t care whether that transmission is cultural, meme-based, genetic, I don’t know anything about that. I just know that it works in the data. I was trained in time-series forecasting methods at UC-San Diego. You can do a lot of forecasting without knowing the mechanism of action, without knowing how it works. We know that a lot of these attitude measures persist across generations, and we should make a little bit of use of that. On average, what country a person has come from gives us some predictive power about what their children and grandchildren will be like in the voting booth, at the marketplace, and at the bank. So we should make use of that, as a small weight, I would say, add this on as a small weight, to any skills-based migration policy.
DP: You talk in the book about how only about a half-dozen countries in the world do most of the world’s innovation. As a result of that, it is in the entire world’s best interest that those seven countries do well because if they have even a small decline in their quality of government or quality of business environment, it’s going to lead to a disproportionate amount of loss because they are doing a disproportionate amount of innovation. Which countries are those, and what should they be doing in order to make sure that they can continue to be this engine of innovation for the world?
GJ: I call them the I7, the Innovative Seven. One of them is the U.S. Three in Asia are China, South Korea, and Japan. And three in Europe are the U.K., France, and Germany. Between these seven, you have the vast majority of the world’s Nobel prizes, economically useful patents, and research and development. This is a case where scale matters, where the actual amount of population in a country really matters, because to find a lot of gold, you need a lot of people looking for gold. These ideas that are mostly invented in these seven nations get shared the whole world over.
A lot of open-borders advocates say that the benefits of migration are huge to the person who moves to the country, and so if there’s some small cost to the people who already live there, that’s worth it, because the small loss against huge gain is a net positive. And that seems reasonable to me. But what if the country that they’re moving to is a global innovation powerhouse, and what if over the course of a generation or two, past patterns continue, and institutional quality moves in the direction of the newest wave of migrants? A poorly chosen migration policy could hurt innovation in any of the I7, and that would impose a cost on the entire world. So instead of looking at the benefits to the migrant and the costs to the so-called native, we’re looking at the benefits to the migrant against the costs to the planet as a whole, and it turns out that institutional quality is incredibly important for innovation.
Cross-country inequality in patenting and R&D is much greater than cross-country inequality in income. There’s basically just a couple countries in the world that do all this stuff, so we really need to protect the institutional quality in those few countries. A well-chosen immigration policy that doesn’t place institutional quality at risk is part of that. This is why I unironically suggest that open-borders advocates should push for open borders for Iceland. Iceland is a great place, super great institutional quality, it’s the size of Kentucky, and you could fit a lot more people there than the 300,000 who are there right now. Thinking that through helps you realize just how much is at stake if we lose the institutional quality or innovation even slightly in the U.S. because that has costs for the planet as a whole. We should think about the world’s long-run wellbeing, and that means protecting and improving institutional quality in the I7.