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1:03

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

1:06

My guest today is Garrett Jones. Garrett

1:08

is an associate professor of economics at George

1:11

Mason University. His interests include

1:13

macroeconomics, the micro foundations

1:15

of economic growth, IQ,

1:17

the power of culture,

1:19

and public choice economics. The

1:21

books we focus on in this episode are 10% Less

1:23

Democracy, Why

1:25

You Should Trust Elites a Little Bit More and

1:28

The Public a Little Less, and The Culture

1:30

Transplant, How Migrants Make the Economies

1:33

They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left.

1:35

We talk about the intellectual environment of George

1:38

Mason University, and we briefly

1:40

digress into a conversation about UAPs.

1:43

Then we get back to the meat of the discussion. We

1:45

talk about the benefits and drawbacks of

1:47

democracy. We discuss the possibility

1:49

of so-called benign dictatorships. We

1:52

talk about the crisis of expertise, the

1:54

electoral college, and then we move on

1:56

to the topic of immigration. We talk about

1:58

whether and in what way... ways immigrants

2:01

assimilate. We talk about the idea of

2:03

the melting pot.

2:04

We discuss high trust versus low

2:06

trust cultures and much more.

2:08

I find Garrett to be a provocative

2:10

thinker in the good sense of that word, though

2:12

I don't totally share his point of view on

2:15

cultural assimilation.

2:16

In any event, I hope that you enjoy this conversation

2:19

as much as I did. So without further ado, Garrett

2:21

Jones.

2:26

Okay, Garrett Jones, thank you so much for

2:28

coming on my show. Glad to be here. Thanks

2:30

for having me. So I've been following your work for a long

2:33

time. You are in the circle of GMU,

2:35

George Mason University, economists

2:37

like Tyler Cowen, Brian Kaplan,

2:40

I think Robin Hanson as well, right? Who have

2:43

really created this subculture

2:45

of extremely interesting

2:48

high IQ people that disagree

2:50

with each other on various really

2:53

interesting matters of import

2:55

and always play by the rules of

2:58

intellectual engagement. And you

3:00

just, you know, I think created a

3:02

really beautiful subculture that is really

3:05

fascinating to peer into as an outsider

3:08

and to enjoy the

3:10

fruits of as a reader. So congratulations

3:13

on being a part of that. And how does it feel

3:15

to be part of that kind of a rare

3:17

subculture? Yeah, it's obviously one of the

3:19

best things that's ever happened in my life, right? I've met other professors

3:22

who are at officially more prestigious universities who

3:24

tell me, you're really lucky to have with you

3:26

have at George Mason, right? This idea of an environment

3:28

of intellectual ferment where people who are smart,

3:30

who are trained in the best ideas and social sciences,

3:33

but don't waste their best decades

3:36

playing math games and journals and instead

3:38

engage with real ideas instead of engage in interdisciplinary

3:41

thinking. That's a great environment to be in.

3:44

And I'm glad that Tyler Cowen

3:46

and my other my department chairs have done so much to make

3:48

that possible. Seems you also have

3:51

created a subculture that really prizes

3:53

strong disagreement with friends. Such

3:55

that you,

3:56

Brian Kaplan, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson,

3:58

you can all write a

3:59

really barbed blog post or

4:02

tweet saying, strongly disagree with

4:04

my colleague here, and you'll lay out the reasons.

4:07

Whereas many other subcultures

4:09

prize conformity, right? And you don't

4:12

want to disagree too much with a friend or else

4:14

it's awkward. Yes, lately

4:16

the question of unmanned aerial phenomenon,

4:18

UFOs has been an opportunity for some back

4:20

and forth between a lot of us, especially

4:23

on Twitter and in blog posts. But

4:26

you don't have to other somebody, right? You can just

4:28

keep the discussion going. Because ultimately,

4:31

I think part of what all of us realize is that our audience

4:33

is not the three or four of us. It's the

4:35

greater intellectual community, right? And we should be

4:37

engaging with those folks in a useful

4:39

way. What's the disagreement about UFOs

4:41

or UAPs as they've been rebranded? Yes,

4:44

so it seems as though Tyler and

4:46

Robin seem to be more sympathetic

4:49

to the evidence. They seem to be more persuaded

4:51

by some of the evidence that these are something

4:54

interesting. Maybe they're putting it in the one

4:56

to two to 3% chance that it's actually something

4:58

alien. And I think it's fair to say

5:00

that Alex and I don't tend to look at

5:02

it that way. I was raised LDS. I've

5:05

seen a lot of evidence for that's a member of the Church of

5:07

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are a lot

5:09

of religions that have pretty interesting, miraculous

5:11

claims as part of their background. And

5:14

I evaluate these things. I evaluate these miraculous

5:16

stories. And I'm like, some things are just hard to

5:18

explain. I don't have to have an explanation

5:20

for a really unusual phenomenon. I don't

5:22

have to immediately say if I don't have an explanation for this

5:24

weird phenomenon, I'm going to assume that it's a miracle. I'm

5:27

going to conclude that it's a miracle. Some weird things are just

5:29

hard to explain. There are puzzles

5:29

that are beyond the reach of simple

5:32

explanations, at least in the course of a couple of minutes.

5:34

Yeah, I mean, I can see both sides of this. So

5:37

for example, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on this podcast.

5:39

And he was very, very dismissive

5:41

of the possibility that any strange

5:44

phenomenon we've seen are explained

5:47

by extraterrestrial life.

5:50

And on the one hand,

5:52

someone like him will say that it's

5:55

very unlikely we're alone in the universe, given

5:57

that we believe life is a natural.

5:59

naturally occurring process and not, it's

6:02

not that God touched one corner of

6:04

the universe and breathed life into it, but

6:06

it's probable that we came from some kind

6:09

of primordial soup which is in principle

6:11

replicable somewhere else and given

6:14

how many worlds there are, it's unlikely we're

6:16

the only instance of intelligent

6:18

life. On the other hand, I haven't

6:21

seen any compelling

6:23

evidence that the UAPs we've seen

6:25

are best explained by extraterrestrial

6:28

life. So for example, recently,

6:30

this podcast probably may not come out for

6:32

a couple of weeks after we're talking about it, but there's been

6:35

renewed attention on the phenomenon

6:37

of UAPs because I believe his name is David

6:39

Grutch. So David

6:42

Grutch has made

6:44

claims before Congress

6:46

now that there's been a kind

6:48

of decentralized program

6:51

within the US government of collecting

6:53

essentially

6:53

alien remains, remains

6:56

of space,

6:57

that's end of

6:59

alien beings. And there

7:01

was an article that first, a long article that

7:03

came out about it a few months ago

7:06

at this point.

7:07

Whenever the article I felt, well,

7:09

this is something definitely worth paying attention

7:11

to. But then when I saw the guy speak himself,

7:14

I had the,

7:15

just like the intuition that

7:17

one has, which you can't quite

7:20

put a finger on, but that you're witnessing

7:22

someone who's a crazy person. Now

7:24

that gut feeling, I'm

7:26

not claiming that my gut is somehow

7:29

super reliable, but I definitely downgraded

7:32

the odds that I think

7:35

he's going to show anything for his claims

7:38

once I saw him speak. Yeah, I mean, I,

7:40

partly I come at this as a Bayesian. I try to

7:43

ask myself statistically, if there were aliens

7:45

in the universe, they would either

7:48

likely be nowhere or they'd be everywhere.

7:50

The chances of them just showing up in

7:52

very hazy photographs on military

7:55

monitors, like that's a very narrow

7:57

range of evidence that should exist if they're really, if

7:59

there's other life in the universe, right? We should

8:01

be seeing either civilizations have

8:04

a tough time getting beyond their galaxy or beyond their

8:06

solar system or wherever, or on the other hand,

8:08

ultimately, everybody gets everywhere. Neither

8:10

of those are obviously what's going on.

8:13

It's possible that the former category

8:15

is what's happening right now. It's possible that there have been

8:17

alien lives that have gone and risen

8:20

and fallen away over the course of the billions of years

8:22

of the

8:24

universe's existence, right? That's totally possible.

8:26

We obviously know that it's not the case that aliens are everywhere

8:29

and obvious, that they're reorganizing galaxies,

8:32

spinning them in unique colors, turning

8:34

galaxies into looking like the number pi, something

8:36

like that, right? So the idea that they're just in this

8:38

tiny little area is very weird. Also, there's

8:41

the more my jokey answer to this is

8:43

that if our government

8:45

is a, if our government were able to actually

8:47

keep secrets and be competent at things, then

8:50

there wouldn't have been a press conference held at Four Seasons

8:52

Total landscaping, right?

8:55

So like the level, like our government makes a

8:57

lot of mistakes and its foul

8:59

ups easily get found out quickly. I mean, the

9:01

Watergate burglary would be one, Iran Contra would

9:03

be another. So the idea that my government

9:06

is competent enough to keep something like

9:08

that under wraps for decades. Well, I wonder if there isn't

9:10

like a seen and unseen fallacy

9:12

there because like by definition, we don't know

9:15

about the things governments have successfully

9:17

hit. That's true. Right. We only know about the

9:19

ones we found out.

9:20

But we do, we should ask ourselves, like, if

9:22

you've worked in government, if you do you think that these are the kind

9:25

of people who can keep a secret for that long, right?

9:27

And would it have leaked out by now? Would Jimmy Carter

9:29

have let us know? Would Donald Trump

9:32

have let us know? I just don't see the incentive

9:34

to hide, right? I think obviously

9:38

Bill Clinton had a large incentive to try to

9:40

hide his blowjob and failed about failed.

9:43

And, you know, Nixon had a huge

9:45

incentive to hide Watergate and failed.

9:47

And those are all instructive examples.

9:50

But like,

9:50

where's the incentive to hide this

9:53

from the public? I suppose

9:55

you could argue the first person to get their hands

9:57

on novel technology. some

10:00

kind of arms race, but I mean,

10:02

still, this seems in

10:04

the category of things that any

10:08

typical patriotic government

10:10

official would very much want to inform

10:13

the top brass of

10:15

very quickly. And then by definition,

10:18

it would become difficult to hide. And of course,

10:20

there are almost 200 countries in the world. And so

10:22

aliens, the idea that governments all around

10:24

the world have been successfully keeping this hidden is

10:27

strange credulity too, right? As

10:29

does the theory that for some reason, the aliens only crash

10:31

land their planes in North America,

10:34

right? These are all sort of basically what one needs a lot

10:36

of crazy to line up in a row in order to get

10:38

just the set of facts that the conspiracy theorists

10:40

are pushing. The UAP diehards would say like

10:43

there's cattle prodding in Brazil and stuff. Yeah,

10:45

but

10:45

I mean, that gets that gets really strange.

10:48

I mean, aliens that just they're able to get all the way across

10:50

the galaxy, but then they just crash land once

10:52

they get to Earth. That's really I mean, that's that's

10:54

real. That's like something out of a 1940s radio serial. On

10:58

the other hand, I thought of this analogy

11:00

in the past. If you were a Native American looking

11:02

at Europeans hundreds of years ago,

11:05

you'd say these guys got all the way across

11:07

the Atlantic Ocean and then they just like like

11:10

they landed here. And now they have no idea what

11:12

to do with themselves. And yeah, and they're dying

11:14

for a while, right? And their

11:15

shipwrecked. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. So it's

11:18

all it's all possible. So I mean,

11:20

I would categorize myself as in principle,

11:23

open minded to UAPs

11:26

stemming from extraterrestrial life. But

11:29

every past example and

11:31

current example of the evidence

11:33

being right around the corner has turned

11:35

up, in my view, wanting. And

11:38

I expect that to be the case for

11:40

for the most recent one as well. Though, you

11:43

know, again, I don't have the best explanations

11:45

for,

11:45

you know, I've seen the tic tac UFO. I've

11:48

seen all of the all

11:50

of the evidence. And

11:52

I this is just something I'm not going to explain

11:55

it by extraterrestrial life until there

11:57

really is the smoking gun. And

11:59

in this case. In this case, David Grush has said, you

12:01

know, we actually have

12:04

biological material that is provably

12:07

non-human. Now, if that is true, that

12:09

is an extremely easy claim to prove.

12:12

All you'd have to do is ship a few

12:14

examples of this to a few different

12:16

teams of chemists or physicists that could

12:19

confirm, yes, this is a source that

12:21

could not possibly have been created given

12:23

the current state of human knowledge. The

12:26

thing that hasn't been done in this case is extremely

12:28

suspicious to me, given the claims that he's

12:29

made. Yeah, I think that we should be good Bayesians

12:32

about this and say extraordinary claims require

12:34

extraordinary evidence. My base level

12:37

of belief is that this is a wildly

12:39

extraordinary claim. So it should require

12:41

wildly extraordinary evidence. And

12:44

they're not even at sort of like basic mid-levels of evidence. So

12:47

I mean, if this is the level of evidence it takes to believe in aliens, I

12:49

should be believing in a lot of religions right

12:51

now. A lot of miraculous claims were

12:53

like weird things happen. Somebody saw something

12:56

and it's hard to explain and I can't come

12:58

up with a legitimate easy explanation. I

13:00

think to me one lesson of this is that the

13:02

human demand to come up with explanations

13:05

is overrated. We

13:07

shouldn't be insisting on coming up with answers for things. We

13:09

should be like people who are trying to explain the origins

13:11

of life and where life came from and how all

13:13

the species came to be. If we were living in the

13:16

1400s, if I was living in the 1400s, I would

13:18

really want an explanation for why there are all these species

13:20

around and why, you know, like seem to produce

13:22

sort of like, you know, lions seem to have lions

13:25

and tigers seem to have tigers. Like why is all this happening? And, you

13:27

know, what's where did life come from? And

13:29

why is there why there's so many species? You

13:31

can see why religions came along to give people easy answers

13:33

for that. The right answer, if

13:36

you lived in the 1400s would be I shouldn't

13:38

come up with an answer. I should just wait for a few centuries and maybe

13:40

somebody else would come up with one. So just embracing

13:42

ignorance is, I think, an intellectual virtue

13:45

that is underrated in our age. Underrated in

13:47

every age, I think. OK, so I didn't expect

13:49

to start there, but really, I got you

13:51

on the podcast to discuss your most

13:53

recent two books surrounding

13:56

the topics of democracy and culture.

13:59

and taking positions on

14:02

those that are probably counterintuitive

14:05

to some people, maybe upsetting to some

14:07

people, but really based on

14:10

lots of research and careful thinking.

14:12

In America, we have this idea

14:14

that democracy is basically a sacred

14:16

value. Democracy

14:19

is at the core of what, for many people,

14:21

it means to be an American. And as a

14:24

sacred value, the idea is

14:26

that more democracy is always better.

14:28

Every example of an American failure,

14:30

of an American problem, is solved, or

14:33

at least not hurt, by having more

14:35

democratic control, by having public

14:37

opinion closer to the lever

14:39

of policy outcomes. You

14:42

come along and you are saying, actually,

14:45

sure, democracy is good to

14:47

an extent, but there are actually very

14:49

important ways in which more

14:51

democracy is bad and less democracy

14:54

would be good. So

14:55

how do you substantiate that? Well,

14:57

part of the way I look at it is that I was trained in monetary

15:00

economics, right? And so my dissertation was

15:02

on the Fed. And if there's one thing that economists have

15:04

learned just by looking at the data over

15:06

the last few decades, it's that countries

15:08

that have central banks that are kept far

15:11

away from the politicians, far from the voters,

15:13

tend to get better outcomes, and not better

15:15

outcomes at the expense of the masses, but it seems

15:18

to be a totally free lunch. So countries

15:20

that have what we euphemistically call more

15:22

independent central banks, banks where the

15:24

elected politicians can't just fire the head of the bank, they seem

15:26

to have lower inflation, and they probably

15:29

have fewer financial crises too. So

15:31

anytime you can get a free lunch, you should take it. So

15:33

we take it for granted. But you might think that's just us

15:35

economists saying, well, we're smart, you should put us

15:38

in charge. But I have to say the evidence backs

15:40

us up on this, right? Having elected

15:42

politicians making decisions on interest

15:44

rates right before an election would probably not be good

15:46

policy. That's why we delegated to the nerds. Independent

15:50

judges, right, independent Supreme

15:52

Courts that have long terms that are kept

15:54

away from the heat of government. That

15:56

seems to be a free lunch or something close to

15:58

a free lunch where we get better governance, we

16:01

hand over a bunch of big decisions to elites

16:03

who can't be recalled by the voters very easily at all.

16:05

And this is part of what we call, we

16:08

call it an independent judiciary. But when we

16:10

talk, when we celebrate the independent judiciary,

16:13

what's it independent of? It's independent of voters.

16:15

So, you know, I look at the Senate,

16:17

for instance, and I was actually

16:20

a Senate staff for a long time ago for Orrin Hatch.

16:22

And senators in the US have six year terms,

16:24

members of the House have two year terms.

16:27

And one thing that everybody knows when you work on

16:29

the Hill is that senators seem to have a longer time

16:31

horizon than members of the House. Senators

16:34

are, they're willing to act like, you

16:36

know, to be a little glib, they act like statesmen the first

16:38

four years, and then they act like pandering politicians the

16:40

last two. And that seems to be pretty good

16:42

for governance overall. It turns out that

16:44

there's a study that shows that senators are 10

16:46

percentage points more likely to vote for a free

16:49

trade agreement when they're further from an election.

16:51

So Hillary Clinton, for example, voted for every

16:53

free trade, every free trade deal in her first

16:55

four years as a senator, and she voted against every

16:58

free trade deal in her last two years as a senator

17:00

when she was just coming up for reelection. Right. So politicians

17:03

pay attention to voters and often what voters want

17:05

is bad. So I'd say those are some

17:07

key forms of evidence, like looking at the Senate

17:09

shows us the value of a little bit of distance from the

17:12

voters, judges and independent judiciary

17:14

is strangely something we celebrate as democratic,

17:17

but it's quite undemocratic, right? Nobody

17:19

wants key judicial decisions made by fiat

17:21

or by excuse me, by plebiscite, by mass

17:24

vote. If you picture a system

17:26

where we could remove a Supreme

17:28

Court justice by referendum,

17:30

by national referendum, probably every

17:33

single current Supreme Court justice

17:35

would have been removed at some point in time

17:37

or another. Yeah. Certainly, if you zoom

17:39

out to the past like 20 years, there's almost no doubt.

17:42

But even more democratic would be to just have the citizens

17:45

make the Supreme Court decisions. So

17:48

it would be more democratic debt. Now, I would have to say

17:50

that jury decision making, you know, which

17:52

is, you know, jury trials are a right that we have

17:54

in the United States for almost everything. A

17:56

jury trial is pretty democratic, right? But

17:59

there we have a small number of people

18:01

who know that they're the decisive voters, you know, usually 12

18:03

people, right? So that's a form of democracy

18:06

that seems to get the best parts of

18:08

democracy, getting the people's voice

18:10

in there, but getting rid of the one of the weaknesses

18:12

of democracy, which is where everyone's free

18:14

riding off of everyone else's hard work, right?

18:16

When you're one of the 12, you know, you're one of the key

18:19

decision makers. When you're one of millions, you're like,

18:21

doesn't really. In fact, you often know that your vote

18:23

de facto doesn't matter. Right?

18:26

Like I

18:27

know that New York's delegates

18:29

are going to go blue. My vote doesn't

18:31

matter in that context of a presidential

18:34

election, right? I mean, whenever an election

18:36

is decided by more than one person, by more

18:38

than one vote, your vote didn't matter, right? So

18:40

the 10% less democracy is really about

18:44

pointing to a lot of empirical evidence, a lot of real

18:46

world evidence that in a lot of areas voters

18:49

are short-sighted. And when

18:51

we look at the real world and we look at the evidence, it looks like

18:53

keeping decisions a little bit further away from

18:55

voters has a good payoff. There are big benefits

18:58

to democracy. Now I should point out the thing we

19:00

usually call democracy today is not wouldn't be democracy

19:02

by the standards of the Greeks, right? We are using

19:05

representative democracy with longer

19:07

terms than Romans would have, than Greeks would have ever wanted,

19:09

right? The ancient Greeks, for them a one-year

19:11

term was pushing it. I'm not kidding,

19:13

right? So, and so the

19:16

moving beyond those simple questions, I

19:18

move a little bit further later in the book and I say, you

19:20

know, if you just look around, Alexander

19:23

Hamilton was right. And having a national

19:25

debt is a way of making sure that the

19:27

international pool of money is keeping an eye

19:29

on your government's policy. It's a way of

19:31

getting the financial markets vote on

19:33

your government's policy. And that's a good idea

19:36

because those folks have a long time horizon.

19:38

They have skin in the game and you

19:40

should pay attention to what they have to say about the likelihood

19:43

of success or failure of your, of at least the economics

19:45

of your government policy. It's not the same as morality, but

19:47

it's something at least worth paying attention to. So, you know, having

19:50

a debt is a way of basically constraining

19:52

your voters. And again, it's something that

19:54

a lot of democracies do. When countries

19:56

get in financial

19:57

trouble, they treat the debt that

19:59

they have to

19:59

pay and how the bondholders feel the way

20:02

that a lot of companies treat their management consultants.

20:04

They say, well, you know, I really don't want

20:06

to have to fire you, but these expensive management consultants

20:08

we just hired say we've got to, right? It's a way

20:10

of having somebody to pass the buck to. And that's

20:12

part of how people we govern each other is

20:15

we want to be the good cop. And so we outsource the bad

20:17

cop. So having the international pool of money, the bondholders

20:20

be a bad cop is actually a good part of governance,

20:22

I think just another reminder that

20:24

purely having the voters making the day to day

20:26

decisions of a government is nobody's bliss point.

20:29

We want to outsource a lot of decisions

20:31

to experts and we want to make it hard for the voters

20:33

to recall those experts by large.

20:39

This is Jason from Team Coleman. If

20:41

you are looking to learn more this year, then we recommend

20:43

the How to Academy podcast, a biweekly

20:46

show from London's home of big thinking.

20:48

The How to Academy invite the world's most

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20:53

to share their ideas for transforming our lives

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and the world. Past episodes include

20:58

Bill Clinton and James Patterson on creative

21:00

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21:02

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21:05

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have episodes

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and experts shaping our world.

21:45

Interesting. So I want to sort of

21:47

ask what are the areas

21:51

where the voters are most ignorant

21:53

and what are the areas where the voters are

21:55

most correct? Oh, that's really

21:57

good. I mean, of course, it'll change century by century.

21:59

century, right? I would say that, you

22:02

know, going back to my colleague, Brian Kaplan's

22:05

book, Myth of the Rational Voter, he pointed

22:07

out that voters have a strong

22:09

anti-foreign bias. They seem to be way

22:11

more hostile to free

22:13

trade, to low tariff barriers compared

22:16

to what professional economists think. And

22:19

it seemed, I agree with professional economists

22:21

on this. So basically, regular voters

22:23

are too hostile to free trade. They're too hostile

22:25

to foreigners more generally. They're too

22:27

hostile to the boss.

22:29

I mean, I can picture a scenario like

22:32

let's say,

22:33

let's say that because there are going

22:35

to be winners and losers, right? Even if

22:38

on the aggregate, free trade is a very good thing

22:40

for a population, there are going to be some losers

22:42

from that. People who are going

22:44

to be facing higher competition precisely

22:47

from the consequences of free

22:49

trade. If all of them are

22:51

voting very strongly against

22:54

it, it may look like a population

22:56

has a sort of the wrong opinion.

22:59

Whereas if let's say 100% of economists

23:01

understand the big picture, but 20% of people

23:03

who don't benefit from it are voting against it,

23:06

you can say, well, the population is 20%

23:08

against this policy. They should be 100% for

23:11

it if they were as accurate as the economists. So

23:14

is it a function of legitimate

23:16

self-interest that the voters are, sort

23:18

of have the wrong opinion or does

23:20

it go beyond that just into outright ignorance?

23:22

That's a good question. So I think all the evidence

23:24

points started going far beyond raw self-interest

23:27

to just ignorance. So people who are basic,

23:30

for instance, people who are retired from say,

23:32

auto making industries are who

23:34

used to make cars, but don't make cars anymore, right?

23:37

Those folks are not excited

23:39

about free trade. Now they're just car buyers.

23:41

They're not car makers anymore, right? So to give a, that's

23:43

a glib example, but people who live in towns

23:46

that might be impacted by this seem to, you

23:48

can understand them having a self-interest, but the

23:50

level of hostility is much more than say, the 20%

23:53

you're thinking about. It seems to be more than

23:54

can be explained. And it seems to be because people don't

23:57

understand the possibility that they

23:59

don't understand.

23:59

I understand sufficiently how

24:02

the market creates new opportunities, right?

24:05

So if you're

24:08

a 45 to 65 year old person who's working

24:10

on an assembly line, on net free trade is probably

24:13

pretty bad for you, right? But younger

24:15

people actually can and do readjust

24:18

and they do it at a pretty high level and

24:20

they're not sufficiently supportive of free trade. I mean, they're

24:22

the ones getting the inexpensive stuff at

24:24

the stores and they're not sufficiently excited about it.

24:27

So another one that's more, that's a bigger deal

24:29

is all the labor market regulation stuff, right?

24:32

Europe, of course, has much Europe and

24:34

actually East Asia both have much stronger labor

24:36

market regulations than, you know,

24:39

economists would generally support. And those are really

24:41

popular. People really don't trust the boss,

24:44

right? So this is something that comes out in sort

24:46

of Alberto, late Alberto Alissino's work

24:49

that a lot of hostility to

24:51

a lot of demand for government regulation, the labor

24:53

market comes from not trusting the boss. So

24:55

in high trust societies, people are willing, more willing

24:58

to allow the boss to fire somebody

25:00

because they think that while the boss might be a good guy and

25:02

low trust, lower trust societies, people are like, I

25:04

don't want to, but overall people just aren't, they

25:06

really dislike the prospect. They

25:08

have a, I would say it's a version of the endowment effect,

25:11

right? They're thinking like behavioral, like the way

25:13

behavioral economists describe people when

25:15

people get a job, they have this endowment and they're really

25:17

thinking about like this job that I have as

25:19

a treasure that I want to keep and I don't want somebody to take it away from

25:21

me. So why don't we make it really hard for me to be fired? And

25:24

those rules seem to overall just reduce a lot

25:26

of dynamism. They make it hard to have the kind of creative

25:28

destruction that's at the heart of innovation.

25:31

So it's still the case that, for instance, in

25:33

Western Europe, when people lose their jobs,

25:35

they're still getting replacement rates of their

25:38

old income of like 75% of their old income

25:40

for like a year or two. And it's unbelievable, right?

25:43

So and that keeps the unemployment rates really

25:45

high. In the US, it's just so much lower. We're

25:47

fortunate in the US that voters and

25:49

the opinion differences between the US and Europe

25:51

aren't that high on this. So we're just lucky

25:54

that American institutions don't

25:56

give American voters what they want when it comes to labor

25:58

market regulation. We probably be. We'd have higher

26:00

unemployment rates and we'd have a lot less

26:02

business dynamism. So if I think about

26:05

something like crime, in that case,

26:07

how does expert opinion differ from voter

26:09

opinion and is there as

26:11

big a divergence? That takes me outside

26:14

of my area of expertise because I actually

26:16

don't know surveys of say criminologists.

26:18

So, I mean, if I just go by, so one

26:21

thing that I have to do in this line of work is make

26:23

sure that I'm not treating say the New York Times

26:25

and the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages as the elites,

26:27

right? I take something much more like Brian

26:30

Kaplan's approach, which is I want to look at experts in

26:32

the field and see what they think. So I mean, I

26:34

know when I look at recent literature reviews

26:36

in the economics of crime, which overlaps a lot

26:38

with criminology, I mean, they're generally finding

26:41

that more police actually reduce rates of

26:47

crime. There is some debate

26:49

on the incarceration effects on crime actually

26:51

does, the incapacitation effects of crime

26:54

are pretty obvious. There are some complicated

26:56

discussions of

26:59

what the optimal amount of time is for a person to

27:02

be in prison, but I'll go to my colleague,

27:04

Alex Tabarok on this, who knows

27:06

literature quite well. And his view is

27:08

that higher numbers of police on the street, so

27:10

you increase the probability of individual

27:13

criminals being caught in the short run and having

27:15

individual folks on police on the street deterring crime,

27:17

that seems to have a large payoff. That

27:20

is, there's still some debate on three

27:22

strikes you're out, long sentences. But

27:26

I'd say I think it's safe to say that experts in the field

27:28

are hostile to the view that cutting

27:31

police budgets as a way will have minimal

27:33

effect on crime.

27:34

And I think that fits with the masses thing. Yeah. I

27:37

mean, my take on this would be people are far too

27:39

pessimistic when they're thinking about the country

27:41

in general. This is what they call the optimism

27:43

gap. You ask people, how is the country

27:46

doing with regards to crime? And they will give you

27:48

the pest, the most pessimistic possible story

27:50

based on the fact that they've been watching the news

27:52

lately. And there's always enough crime for the news. But

27:54

if you ask them what's going on in your neighborhood,

27:57

they will have a pretty accurate take. But

28:00

if you look at voters being upset

28:02

with their local DA with things

28:04

like this, I think they tend to be pretty

28:07

correct in terms of responding

28:10

to changes in local conditions. But

28:12

if you ask them to make an assessment

28:14

globally, they're probably going to be far worse

28:17

than the experts, which is a moot point in

28:19

the case of crime because crime is local and

28:21

crime policy is local. Your local

28:24

police station is largely what you

28:26

have to have to control. Is

28:29

there any sense, how do you view

28:32

the kind of populist

28:35

spirit that has taken

28:37

over a lot of places? The core idea of populism

28:40

is that the people

28:42

know what is best and you're going to

28:45

channel the popular will through

28:47

an individual that has some kind

28:49

of magic line

28:51

into the will of

28:53

the people. Yeah, it's a disaster.

28:56

It's a disaster. Populism is quite generally

28:58

a disaster, right? I mean, our last

29:00

populist movement got

29:03

us prohibition, right, depending on how you want to

29:05

blend together populism and progressivism. And

29:10

I think the new wave of populism

29:12

that is hostile to trade, hostile

29:15

to any kind of insider

29:17

decision making, and hostile

29:19

to following, to actually believing

29:22

results of elections that seem to be

29:24

fairly run about as well as things get

29:26

run in the real world. I

29:28

mean, it's a lot of wish fulfillment, I think, right?

29:31

So I understand

29:33

why people don't want to say like there's other

29:35

people who know more than I do about this and the

29:38

world might not be the way I think it is. But I mean, a

29:40

huge part of my intellectual development, a huge

29:42

part of the number of the gifts that I've been given in life

29:44

have come from the fact that I kept

29:46

the door open to learning that I was wrong about things.

29:50

And yeah, the human soul does

29:52

not contain all knowledge, right? And

29:56

so we have to learn things from each other and we

29:58

usually have to learn things from people who've been thinking.

29:59

thinking about it a long time. Not from any one person, but

30:02

from a sort of an invisible hand that pulls together

30:04

knowledge from a lot of people. So I'm

30:07

trying to think of examples where I think the expert

30:09

class is just atrocious

30:12

and arguably worse than public

30:14

opinion. So for example, I

30:17

pay a lot of attention to the racism literature.

30:19

And if you were to pull the

30:22

racism experts who teach at the

30:24

Ivy League colleges and so forth, my

30:26

sense is you would get a picture of reality

30:28

that is so far from the truth that

30:31

it would make sense to devalue the

30:33

weight of the expert class in that field.

30:35

Economics may not be the same, but

30:38

if you look at like the broader landscape of the expert

30:40

class, there are a few critiques that I

30:42

think are legitimately leveled at it. One

30:44

is that in certain instances has been

30:46

captured by a wokeness

30:49

and social justice or other ideologies

30:52

that have fundamentally warped its attitude

30:54

towards empiricism. So that would be

30:56

true, for example, of gender

30:58

and race, I would say.

30:59

And another different critique

31:02

that would get leveled at it is that the experts

31:04

have been captured by industry, which is

31:06

to some extent people's critique

31:09

of drug experts, right? The experts

31:11

who scientists that need to get their next

31:13

grant from the NIH or the NIAID

31:16

and have a kind of revolving

31:18

door phenomenon with the industries that

31:21

they're delivering information about. To what

31:23

extent do those, you can

31:25

take those critiques sort of one at a time,

31:27

to what extent do those undermine the idea

31:29

that the experts know more than the people?

31:32

Well, for one thing, when I compare them to the

31:35

people, I want to be comparing them to all the

31:37

people, right? Not just a

31:39

subset of the people that happen to be sort of on

31:41

my side or on my political party or

31:43

following my podcast. People who often

31:45

prefer the people over the elites often quickly

31:48

dive into some subset of the people, right? So I wanna

31:50

do that first. So I don't know what the people think

31:52

on a lot of these issues if I just surveyed all of the

31:55

American people, right? I would probably get pretty

31:57

diverse views on issues of both race and gender,

31:59

right? And the average might not

32:02

be that far from those elites. Second, you're

32:04

right, I do think, I do have a bias

32:06

toward quantitative fields that use

32:08

statistical methods, which kind of pulls me in the direction

32:10

of econ. That's a fair point. I

32:13

do see that when economists,

32:16

well, I will say this, Leo

32:18

Strauss has had a lot of, the philosopher

32:20

Leo Strauss, the late philosopher, has had a big

32:22

effect on a lot of us at George Mason. And Leo

32:24

Strauss thought that on controversial topics,

32:27

many philosophers sort of spoke

32:29

in code, sort of speak about, out of both

32:31

sides of their mouth. And part of the reason they do this is because

32:33

the first great philosopher Socrates tried speaking

32:36

his mind and he was given a cup of hemlock

32:38

for it, right? And so the

32:40

Straussian take is that sometimes you have to read between

32:42

the lines. And I've found that

32:44

to be extremely useful when I'm reading

32:47

an areas of research. I mean, I've

32:49

done research on IQ, and I've

32:51

done research on culture, I've done research on immigration.

32:54

And in these areas, I find that I often

32:56

have to make a distinction between the public

32:58

pronouncements and what's included

33:01

in table three, right? So I've noticed

33:03

this on quite a number of issues and

33:06

too long actually covered a podcast. And so

33:08

it is a reminder that the public statements

33:11

of some of these folks, you're right, it's fair to say,

33:13

like sometimes they can't be trusted and you

33:15

have to talk to some of these folks over

33:17

a couple of drinks when the after

33:19

the cell phone batteries have died. Yeah, no,

33:21

that is definitely true. That's definitely my experience too,

33:24

dealing with all kinds of institutions, like

33:26

the truths you will get out of

33:28

people over a drink

33:30

are just diametrically different than what

33:33

they will tweet the very next day or what

33:36

they will say publicly. And I, but I have to say, econ

33:38

has been pretty good on this. Like we've had recent lit reviews

33:41

on the economics of crime and punishment and

33:43

policing. And like, you can learn a lot

33:46

of really good things out of them. And there it's

33:48

not tucked away in table three too much. On

33:50

the most explosive issues where people fear their

33:52

careers being destroyed, I think there is a special

33:54

reason for caution about that and for how we

33:56

interpret things on that. It should be issues. We're

33:58

saying that, you know, everyone.

33:59

hates economists in

34:02

the Academy. Like you're not the most popular.

34:04

No, we are often not

34:07

that popular. Precisely in some

34:09

way because you have preserved

34:12

the empirical spirit

34:14

and that

34:14

sometimes takes you in directions which are not

34:17

congenial to people, not congenial to ideology.

34:20

Yeah, I mean, it's one of the great

34:22

things about being an economist is that especially

34:25

a tenured economist, that you have a moral responsibility

34:27

to tell the truth and you also have some

34:29

intellectual tools that help you think about

34:32

how do you understand the world when you don't really get to

34:34

run experiments very often but you really want to learn about

34:36

cause and effect. So the tools really

34:38

do help you and they've, I mean, I started getting them

34:41

over 25 years ago, started studying in a serious

34:43

way over 25 years ago and it's been paying

34:44

off ever since. So a good intermediate macro book

34:47

and intermediate microeconomics book can change your world.

34:49

So you've pointed to all these examples like

34:51

an independent central

34:53

bank, Supreme Court justices

34:56

or judges in general that serve long terms

34:58

and can't be fired.

35:00

All these examples where taking things out

35:03

of the control of the voters is actually

35:05

good for not just the voters, but the

35:08

entire society.

35:09

Why not take this all the way and just say

35:12

autocracy is better? Oh, and the

35:14

core reason for this is that, you know, as Amartya Sen,

35:16

the Nobel Laureate showed, there's never been a famine

35:18

in a democracy. And one thing that democracies

35:21

are really good at is making sure their citizens don't starve

35:23

to death in famines. And so India's, he

35:25

studied India, of course, and India's last famine was

35:27

just a few years before independence. And

35:30

since India's independence, I mean, it's not like

35:32

they switched to becoming a capitalist utopia

35:34

or anything, right? They stayed quite socialist

35:37

for quite a long time with bad economic policies for

35:39

decades. But nonetheless, they managed to

35:41

never have a famine again. So Amartya Sen's result

35:43

has held up in broad terms that

35:45

basically voters care about not make,

35:48

they care about one thing that autocrat might

35:50

not care about, which is making sure that large numbers

35:52

of citizens do not starve to death. Another point that Bill

35:54

Easterly made, the NYU economist, is

35:57

that democracies don't kill their citizens very

35:59

often. So I'd say those are the two big ones. There

36:01

are other questions that are more debatable about whether democracy

36:04

causes this or that good outcome. But democracy

36:06

is not murdering their own citizens in large numbers, and

36:08

democracy is not letting their people

36:10

starve to death. Like we'll give you the equivalent

36:13

of food stamps or relief aid or something

36:15

rather than let people die in a famine. Those seem like

36:17

they're good enough that I wouldn't want to trade those off for any other

36:19

alleged benefits of autocracy. I mean, I think

36:21

more generally, it's worth remembering that even

36:24

so-called autocrats are never

36:26

really autocrats. This is one of the big findings

36:28

of studies of dictatorships and monarchies

36:31

more generally is that the equilibrium, as my

36:33

late colleague Gordon Tullock pointed out, equilibrium always seems

36:35

to be king and council. Kings always have some

36:37

kind of senate around them, some kind of body of advisors

36:40

who are actually powerful enough to say no at times

36:42

and powerful enough to stop the leader. So this

36:44

is a reminder that there really is no option of

36:46

autocracy. It's the question of the real

36:49

trade-off that we should be thinking about is not pure democracy

36:52

on the one hand versus oligarchy on the other, not

36:55

a single leader. We romanticize single leaders.

36:57

I think we might have some kind of tribal ancestral

36:59

instinct as human beings to want the one leader. But

37:02

in practice, oligarchy is the only real

37:04

other pole if we're not going to democracy.

37:07

And Aristotle saw this. And so he thought

37:09

that perhaps, he argued that

37:11

perhaps the best practical form of governance was something

37:14

he called polity, some kind of blend of

37:16

democracy with oligarchy. And that's really what

37:18

we have in the rich countries today is we have some

37:20

kind of blend of democracy with oligarchy. And

37:23

getting that balance, I think we can improve that

37:25

balance by moving just a little bit in the direction of oligarchy.

37:28

So it sounds like you're saying,

37:29

and I agree that really the central

37:32

benefit of democracy is avoiding

37:34

worst case scenarios, which are famine,

37:37

mass killing. Democracies are very

37:39

good at preventing those things from happening,

37:41

but not good at choosing the

37:44

best policies on the more mundane

37:46

issues. So is another

37:51

benefit of democracy preventing

37:53

civil unrest in some way? Because this is an

37:55

idea people have had that by having

37:58

frequent elections.

37:59

and especially multiple parties,

38:02

people can discharge their

38:04

kind of civil tensions

38:07

in a nonviolent way, whereas

38:09

in an autocracy or a one-party

38:12

state, things just bubble up over decades

38:14

and then end in bloody revolution. So is there evidence

38:16

to support that idea? I actually don't

38:18

know of evidence to support that, even though I've heard of

38:20

it for decades, right? It's an important idea. I

38:22

actually teach it to my students. I say, the great thing about

38:25

democracy is that it's a regularly scheduled revolution.

38:27

And you're right. It seems to be some kind of release

38:29

valve that moves the government in the

38:32

direction of the masses and social

38:34

pressures in small degrees as

38:37

the voters are changing their views. And if there's one

38:39

thing that, my

38:41

colleague Richard Wagner at GMU, he

38:43

talked about politicians as entrepreneurs. And

38:46

it's obvious that when you actually see politicians

38:49

and watch them working, they do have this

38:51

entrepreneurial spirit. And part of being an entrepreneur is listening

38:53

to your customers. Like they're always trying to

38:55

read the tea leaves. They're trying to put their ear to

38:57

the ground. They're trying to sense what's going on.

39:00

So they can predict, like give these voters

39:02

what they want. I mean, the will of the voters

39:04

is kind of incoherent, difficult

39:06

to quantify in any serious way. And

39:09

politicians are trying to get the best

39:11

information they can to sort of move in that direction. So

39:13

the idea that politicians aren't at all responsive to

39:15

voters, you can only think that if you've never actually,

39:18

never actually talked to a politician, right? I mean, part

39:20

of their job is to act like they're all confidence in everything,

39:22

but they want to, they like to win and

39:24

they really like to win by more than 60%. So

39:27

when you look at senators, for example, and you

39:29

see

39:29

in their first four years, they act

39:32

quote unquote more like statesmen and the last two

39:34

years they act like, well, doing

39:36

whatever they can to get reelected, pandering

39:38

as you. Celebrating

39:41

democracy as you're supposed to say, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

39:43

I mean, in their first four years though, are

39:45

they governing from a sense of

39:47

their own wise, like

39:50

their own wisdom or are

39:53

they favor trading with interest

39:55

groups? Oh, they're doing a lot of that, right? So

39:57

it's not that these guys are saying.

39:59

the first four years, disinterested,

40:02

noble, public servants,

40:04

the first four years. It's that some

40:06

mix of forces gets them to act the way

40:08

economists want them to act, right? So the

40:11

trade deal thing is one of them. But

40:13

they're not doing that because they remember

40:15

their freshman Econ class. They're doing that- They're

40:17

probably doing it because they're lobbyists who are like, hey, we'd

40:19

love to have these tariffs lowered,

40:22

and we might give your son a job. And it just so

40:24

happens that in that case, the lobbyists

40:27

have a view that expert economists would tend

40:29

to agree with. Yeah. So when people complain about

40:31

the swamp and they complain about corruption in government,

40:33

I'm like, a lot of that stuff is working out

40:35

just fine. But they're also handing out corn subsidies

40:38

and stuff that economists wouldn't agree with,

40:40

right? And alas, because we live in a democracy,

40:43

we're going to keep those corn subsidies forever, right? Because

40:45

everybody needs to win Iowa, right? We're stuck with that.

40:49

That's a case where if you did have an autocracy, you probably

40:51

would get rid of the corn subsidies in Iowa. I don't

40:53

want to do that. I'm just willing to take having

40:56

85% ethanol as being the price of a democracy. So

40:59

what do you make of

40:59

the possibility of benign dictatorship?

41:02

And people, I mean, not that Singapore

41:04

is a dictatorship, it's kind of a hybrid, interesting

41:08

case, but people will point to a

41:10

Singapore as an

41:12

example, or many, many decades

41:14

ago, South Korea as an example, where

41:17

autocracy coincided with

41:19

very high economic growth, and

41:22

will kind of romanticize the idea

41:24

of just not being a democracy full

41:27

stop. So what do you make of that idea? Well,

41:29

we have,

41:29

I like to romanticize Singapore, but I also at

41:32

the same time do not recommend it to others, right? Singapore

41:34

is an incredibly impressive country,

41:36

right? And they do not have anything like a full democracy.

41:38

It's very hard to run a competitive election against

41:41

the government. So they have some seats, but

41:43

they're not, they're kept from winning anymore. So

41:45

it is the case that many countries

41:48

that industrialize, industrialize when they're not a

41:50

democracy, and then they get, they

41:52

switch to democracy later on. That fits a

41:54

theory that democracy is sort of a luxury

41:56

good that countries buy, right? And

41:58

it's a reminder that when we're with these, when people

42:00

want to say democracy causes growth, well,

42:03

A, look at a lot of these development miracle countries

42:05

and realize they went for democracy after

42:07

they'd gotten a lot of growth already. But it is a sign

42:09

that, you know, whenever someone plots

42:11

a simple correlation and tells you it might be causation,

42:14

you should say, maybe it's going the other way around. I have to,

42:16

similarly, I have to look at South Korea's example. I mean,

42:18

I spoke to someone who grew up

42:20

in that I taught at George Mason University's Korea

42:23

campus for two semesters. It was a great experience. And

42:25

I talked to someone who grew up there during the dictatorship

42:27

era. And this person saw

42:30

people he loved suffer under

42:32

the dictatorship. But at the same time, he

42:34

knew that the dictator Park Chung-hee, like,

42:37

saved his country from being a wreck. That was his

42:39

theory, right? I have to look at the data and say,

42:42

I think South Korea would have done just fine. Otherwise,

42:44

East Asian countries that were not dictatorships

42:47

did fine, right? Japan

42:49

industrialized after World War Two, real

42:51

democratic elections, where parties were allowed

42:53

to go in and out of power. Maybe the communists were kept

42:55

out. But so it's the

42:58

causal effect of either democracy or

43:00

dictatorship is pretty weak. Here's what I can

43:02

say that's empirically has better evidence.

43:05

Dictatorships are high variants. Dictatorships

43:08

are basically you can get a big up or a big down. Democracies

43:11

are basically the bond

43:13

market fund of political governance systems.

43:15

It's safer. So that's the I

43:18

think most most people should be discouraged from

43:20

taking the risky bet when it comes to governance. And

43:22

so that's why I think that the autocracy

43:24

story, the celebration of autocracy ignores

43:27

the many, many bad cases that happen on the downside.

43:29

Our brains just can't keep all the facts in our head at once. That's

43:32

why some glib statistics can go a long way on something

43:34

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slash Coleman50 to get 50% off. So

45:27

in the context of the 10% less

45:29

democracy

45:30

idea, the

45:35

idea that there are certain ways in

45:37

which experts and elites

45:39

actually should wrench a little bit more

45:41

control away from public opinion

45:44

and voter control, how do you view the

45:46

influence of the electoral college? Because

45:48

it's a perpetual fantasy

45:50

of some to get rid of it, especially

45:52

when Democrats have, say, just lost an election

45:55

as a result of the electoral college

45:57

distortions or seemingly as a result.

45:59

influence your kind of view?

46:02

Well suppose let's imagine a scenario where it

46:04

happens like day of sex machinists. Suppose the Supreme Court

46:06

just declares it illegal we have to go proportional voting right?

46:08

It would just straight straight voting for the president. All

46:11

that would happen is that the vote the poll the poll

46:14

are two big political parties would just switch their positions a little

46:16

bit to win right? So I mean it would

46:18

have very little net effect I think. The big effect

46:20

of the what we need to think of with the Electoral College

46:22

is we should we should really be thinking about the European Union

46:25

when we think about the Electoral College right? The

46:27

Electoral College was a deal that was struck to get

46:29

the Constitution written and you know

46:31

if you were creating it from scratch and you didn't have to buy

46:33

off the support of nine of 13 states

46:35

you would never written the Electoral College right? It was

46:37

a gimmick that was written to get up to get the Constitution

46:40

done. Similarly in the European Union they

46:42

had to give a lot of veto

46:45

rights to individual states much stronger than our

46:47

than veto than filibusters in

46:49

the Senate just to get the European Union

46:52

going right? So sometimes we'll make big

46:54

ugly deals in order to get something going and

46:56

it's a little bit of a deus ex machina to imagine

46:59

it's a crazy counterfactual to imagine what would

47:01

it be like if that had never happened right? Like well you wouldn't

47:03

have the you I wouldn't have the EU if everybody had

47:05

to have every vote was given one equal weight.

47:08

I wouldn't have the United States and

47:10

if every vote was given equal weight. So

47:12

if it happened today if I just imagine

47:15

it what are you gonna get you're gonna give a lot less rate to work

47:17

a lot less weight to rural areas right?

47:19

Suburbs and the cities would get more weight.

47:22

I think I'd be in favor of that I think that would probably

47:24

give me better policy. I think I would probably get less

47:26

romanticization of agricultural life

47:28

and less agricultural subsidies. Do I think it would change

47:31

things dramatically? No.

47:32

So let's talk a little bit about about your

47:34

other book which is the Culture Transplant.

47:37

What what was it that drove you to become

47:40

interested in this subject of sort

47:43

of cultural assimilation the stickiness

47:46

of cultures over time the effect

47:48

of importing migrants on

47:51

the long-term culture of a

47:54

nation and so forth? Well it really

47:56

was a result in a way it's a sequel to my

47:59

first book Hive Mind.

47:59

Which is about IQ. I mean thing is that

48:02

I have a lot of there's a lot of good experimental evidence

48:04

that Intelligence has big positive

48:06

spillovers that smarter groups

48:08

are more cooperative that as my

48:11

colleague Brian Kaplan showed smarter individuals

48:13

are more likely to favor Market-oriented policies by

48:15

normal IQ measures thing is that as an economist

48:18

these are all like very short run measures, right? Something

48:20

somebody's taking a test in a lab and I'm watching them do

48:22

play a game I'm looking at the savings rates

48:25

if I'm really interested in economic growth over centuries

48:27

I need to some have some kind of measure that tells me how something

48:30

Reliably and in a trustworthy way how

48:32

something get changes over time over

48:35

centuries even decades I'd be happy

48:37

with decades and so there I couldn't tell

48:39

a lot about how IQ changed

48:41

over time Especially over things like centuries right

48:44

oldest IQ tests are about a century old So I wanted

48:46

some way to say something about growth and development and

48:48

how policies change outcomes That

48:50

looked at the very long run and it turned out there's this

48:52

whole literature that was getting built up from about 2010 onward

48:55

just as I was sort of finishing up my IQ book and This

48:59

part of this literature

48:59

looked at how migrants from different

49:02

countries behaved in America But

49:04

not just how those migrants behaved how their descendants

49:06

behave, right? So for instance, there's a new study

49:09

that's been out that shows that Second

49:11

generation migrants people who are born in the US who

49:13

come from high savings rate countries are Tend

49:16

to save more than people who come from low savings

49:18

rate countries and this is in the second generation, right?

49:20

There's similar studies showing this for in Germany

49:22

and in the UK And so people are importing

49:25

savings behavior from their countries

49:27

of origin And it's not just that the migrants

49:29

have

49:29

it It's that their children who were born in the new

49:32

country have that so this is getting

49:34

me at multi-generational questions

49:36

that I think we should be concerned about if we're interested in

49:38

like where prosperity comes from people import

49:41

part of their savings rate with them is like a good an

49:43

important finding that people should know and That's

49:46

that's the kind of information that I wanted to be able to convey

49:48

to people so that they don't fall for

49:50

these silly romantic views that people

49:52

assimilate and that the melting pot is real

49:54

and That people just become

49:57

that migrants become indistinguishable from

49:59

other folks within a generation

50:01

or two. I mean, my LDS

50:04

ancestors came from Wales. A

50:06

lot of Mormons came from Sweden.

50:09

They moved to Utah. There's still a lot of Swedish

50:11

and English and Scottish and Welsh

50:14

stuff going on in Utah, all these, you know, more

50:16

than a century later. Aren't Mormons a little bit of

50:18

a special case though, in the sense that, and

50:20

I mean, you can obviously tell me

50:22

more about this, but my perception is

50:24

that

50:25

Mormons and certain other cultures

50:27

are more invulnerable to influence

50:30

from other cultures. And that's actually a

50:32

particular feature of certain cultures, right?

50:35

Like the extreme cases, the Amish

50:37

or the ultra-orthodox, the Hasidic

50:39

Jews, that's not like the general

50:41

case of a migrant. Totally true, you're right.

50:44

That's why I like to stick with the broad generalizations

50:46

of big statistical studies, right? Like

50:49

I'll use a personal anecdote as an illustration,

50:51

but really what I should believe is the general research. And

50:54

so for instance, within Europe,

50:55

it turns out that people migrating

50:57

from one European country to another in the second

50:59

generation tend to hold attitudes

51:02

that are a lot like those back home when it comes to the proper

51:04

role of government. So do I think the government should take

51:06

care of people or do I think people should take care of

51:08

themselves? That's something that is like, probably

51:11

has an effect on how people vote, right? Probably

51:13

has an effect on people's political opinions. And how

51:15

people answer a survey question like that is moderately

51:18

carried over from the country of origin. So the

51:20

way that methodology works is you

51:22

ask people in, you

51:24

ask people in Italy, for instance, how much

51:27

should the government take care of people or should people take care of themselves?

51:29

And then you ask second generation, say Italian

51:31

Americans, should the government take care of people

51:34

or should people take care of themselves? And you see a sort of matchup.

51:36

Italian Americans a lot like Italians in Italy in the

51:38

second generation. So when you say a lot like, I mean,

51:40

I'm trying to remember the figures from your book,

51:43

but you were talking about correlations of

51:45

like between 0.5 and 0.25 or something. Something

51:48

like that, yeah. So like you get some that are higher

51:51

and some that are lower. So I would say

51:53

like, yeah, 0.25 to 0.5. So

51:55

I would say, I think of those as explaining, say, a

51:57

quarter to a half of the data by normal measures.

52:00

So so there's there's too much

52:02

to ignore and even when we have

52:04

evidence from up until the fourth generation Which

52:08

doesn't come in on a lot of studies, but it does come in and

52:10

one study of trust Even there

52:12

the you get this sort of 40% persistence Lasting

52:15

into about the fourth generation on people bringing

52:18

their home country attitudes toward trust to

52:20

their new country So there and I also

52:22

learned from your book there

52:24

on different traits. There's a different

52:26

levels of persistence So for example general

52:28

trust seems to be kind of persistent

52:31

Savings rates seem to be persistent,

52:34

but religion strangers Attitudes

52:38

toward whether women should work doesn't is that

52:40

persistent a priori I

52:42

would expect that to to be the opposite.

52:44

I would expect religion to be one of the

52:46

most persistent and say

52:49

like saving savings rate to

52:51

be Kind of environmentally

52:53

contingent or even trust level to be environment I

52:56

mean environmentally contingent I can picture

52:58

taking someone from a very

53:00

high crime low trust environment If

53:02

they move to Sweden and they realize actually

53:04

everyone is nice here I can finally afford

53:07

to be trusting it

53:08

would seem within one Trenton within

53:10

one generation

53:11

You would get a more trust trust

53:14

trusting person What is your theory

53:16

of why those certain traits don't persist

53:18

which traits persist in which don't yeah? That's

53:21

I'm glad to speculate on it. I will say

53:23

that for instance There's here's one that doesn't

53:25

persist at all is basically can I trust the police and

53:28

that fits what you're saying? Does it where it's like it's

53:30

what happens right around you on the police from

53:32

our trustworthy in some places than in others? And

53:35

your opinion is mostly shaped based on what you're

53:37

seeing right in front of you, right? So it's an opinion

53:39

of somebody else right a sort of can

53:41

I trust my local government might be much something?

53:44

That's much more that moves with the country that you're

53:46

in also language is not very persistent Exactly

53:48

you're not gonna find a generation is

53:50

really high right third generation that

53:52

um, so thanks the home Leah

53:55

Buston in her research she

53:57

makes a big point of the fact that in the among Among

54:00

US migrants in the second generation, there's a lot of

54:02

name assimilation, right? And further

54:04

on, I'm sure there's even more in name assimilation. And so

54:06

you can imagine sometimes it's something as simple

54:08

as I want my kid to fit in in school, right? I

54:11

don't want my kid to get picked on. So, and it's unfortunate

54:13

the kids do that, but that ends up shaping some assimilation

54:15

as fear of the other. So I don't

54:17

have a grand ultimate theory, but I do know

54:19

that some of the ones that do fit line up

54:22

with things that look more

54:24

like simple economic parameters, right? So

54:26

in economics, we have this one idea that actually

54:28

I first learned from Austrian economics, the idea of the rate

54:31

of time preference, how patient a person is, how much

54:33

you give thought for the morrow. And that

54:35

seems to be something that people sort of carry with them from

54:37

one country to another, that sort of rate of patience,

54:39

that's going to be shaping your level of frugality.

54:42

Like how much, you know, do I spend on things

54:44

right now? Do I help out my family right now? Do

54:46

I help out my loved ones right now? Or do I say no, I

54:48

got to say no to that because there's something might

54:50

happen in the future. What do you make of the fact

54:52

that

54:53

people that leave a country to go to another

54:55

country are in the general case, let's say

54:57

economic migrants are a very

54:59

non-random sample of the countries that they come

55:02

from. And therefore, you

55:04

know, naively, I wouldn't necessarily

55:06

expect there to be a big correlation. Well,

55:09

it may be as simple as the basic. So

55:11

let's be optimistic about this, which is

55:13

fair enough here. Let's assume that the people who come to America

55:16

are on average, like, you know, in the top third of

55:18

the countries they're coming from, right? Like it's plausible,

55:21

right? But then they'll

55:23

each be the top third of their own country and

55:25

their countries will each differ on those traits. So

55:27

my hunch would be, for instance, that say second

55:30

generation Italian Americans

55:32

will be more trusting than other Italians

55:35

and but still less trusting than the

55:37

Swedish Americans. Right. So and that

55:39

actually is what ends up happening in the data when you look around.

55:42

So basically, we're getting the selection ends up,

55:44

in many cases, bumping people up, but you still get

55:47

the correlation. So it's a, if you think in old

55:49

high school algebra terms, y equals mx plus b,

55:51

we're shifting up the slope, but we're we're

55:53

we're keeping the same slope, but we're shifting the intercept.

55:55

So let's say I come from a very low

55:57

trust country, probably a country where

55:59

it makes sense to be low trust. And

56:02

then I moved to my sort

56:04

of an immigrant enclave in the new country. So

56:07

for example, to take my grandparents

56:09

from Puerto Rico, moved to the South Bronx

56:11

in the late 50s.

56:13

They are now in a neighborhood,

56:16

largely with other people from low trust

56:18

countries and in context where it

56:20

still makes sense to be low trust. Now, if you

56:22

measure the trust of the entire country,

56:25

you're gonna say, well, these are the low trust migrants

56:28

have remained low trust. They're bringing

56:30

their culture with them, but they are bringing

56:32

their culture with them in the sense that they are around the same

56:34

people from the mother country. So

56:36

it kind of, they haven't really necessarily moved

56:39

into yet the segment of society

56:41

where it no longer makes sense to be

56:43

low trust. They're still in the immigrant enclave.

56:46

So what would be interesting to me is if you could

56:48

parse the difference between say, and

56:50

to keep with the example, the

56:53

descendants of Puerto Ricans that have now

56:55

moved to places in the country that

56:57

have no crime, that are high income, do

57:00

they remain low trust relative

57:02

to their peers or relative

57:04

to the Puerto Ricans that stay in

57:07

immigrant enclaves with other Puerto Ricans

57:09

who are all from a low trust mother

57:11

country? So A, that's an important question,

57:13

but B, if I'm writing a non-utopian

57:15

book, I don't wanna spend that much of my time

57:17

thinking about scenarios that aren't actually

57:20

happening, right? If for instance,

57:22

it is very common for folks to stay in ethnic conflict,

57:24

conclaves, and that keeps down their

57:26

trust to their initial country of origin levels,

57:29

that's something I want to report, right? So

57:31

there might be a reason why assimilate, if merely

57:34

finding a reason why assimilation is not happening

57:36

doesn't mean assimilation is happening, right? No, but

57:38

it does importantly changes the causal

57:40

mechanism because under one reading,

57:43

the

57:43

thesis is just that immigrants

57:45

don't assimilate full stop. Culture

57:48

is sticky. The culture of your mother, of your parents

57:50

just goes to you with high likelihood regardless

57:53

of what happens in the country

57:55

you're moving to. The other

57:57

would say, well, no, there's nothing inherent.

57:59

and it's definitely sticky about culture.

58:02

It's the fact that if you create

58:05

a little Puerto Rico in the new place you go to,

58:07

you're gonna stay very similar to Puerto Rican.

58:09

Whereas if you actually move to a different

58:12

environment where you are now a minority

58:15

shoulder to shoulder with a totally different

58:17

culture, your kids will turn out like the

58:19

new culture, not the old one. Those are very different

58:21

causal mechanisms. Those are, you're right. Yeah. Absolutely.

58:24

Yeah. I mean, some of this- And one would, I mean,

58:26

so like, the second causal

58:28

mechanism would imply

58:29

that low rates of immigration

58:32

properly handled so as to avoid

58:34

enclaves would actually lead

58:36

to like, more

58:39

assimilation per person than high rates

58:42

of immigration that you allow to

58:44

become enclaves, for example.

58:46

In some cases, I might not want assimilation,

58:48

right? If I'm bringing in folks who are higher savings

58:51

rates, who have higher savings

58:53

rates and better attitudes toward government, I don't want

58:55

them assimilating to the crummy attitudes of other Americans,

58:58

right? My longstanding claim is that I believe

59:00

in open borders for anyone

59:02

who believes in Uber surge pricing,

59:05

right? And if I give

59:07

instant green cards and instant voting rights to anyone who

59:09

comes to America and believes in Uber, just because

59:11

they believe in Uber surge pricing, I don't want them coming to

59:13

America and getting contaminated by the

59:15

crummy anti-market views of the average American.

59:18

So there's, so notice we quickly

59:20

have to start having to quickly become social planners

59:23

once we're going down the path you're describing. And I don't

59:25

object to trying it out as an example, right?

59:27

As a mental exercise. But if

59:30

my goal is to make America the best

59:32

country it can be, I want to bring in folks who have

59:34

better attitudes than the folks who've got here. Not just

59:36

people who are no worse than the current folks.

59:39

Yeah, so let's talk about open

59:41

borders because this actually, in my

59:43

view, connects to both of your books. One

59:46

of the

59:46

problems that I've highlighted

59:49

with open borders in the past is

59:51

that it takes immigration policy

59:54

out of democratic control. That's actually,

59:57

it may not be a problem according to your view, but

59:59

it's a, it's.

59:59

It's a fact. The people who come to this

1:00:02

country on the southern border are not determined

1:00:04

by the voters or by the representatives of

1:00:06

the voters, but largely by the push

1:00:08

factors in Central America. If

1:00:11

there's a civil war in Guatemala tomorrow,

1:00:14

a lot of people are going to flee and they're going to end up

1:00:16

in Texas and Arizona, right? Because

1:00:19

we don't have great border control. We don't

1:00:21

have very solid border control there. If

1:00:23

I were someone that was very pro-democracy

1:00:25

and felt everything should be under

1:00:28

Democratic control, I would want a

1:00:29

very strong border so that the

1:00:32

profile of immigrants that come to the country

1:00:34

are decided by the voters, just like we

1:00:36

would decide healthcare policy or school

1:00:39

funding or anything like that. So, if you

1:00:41

would agree with me that currently our de

1:00:43

facto immigration policy is out of Democratic

1:00:46

control, nor is it in expert

1:00:48

control, for example, what would be

1:00:50

the implications of

1:00:53

having a strong border for our

1:00:55

immigration policy? Of

1:00:58

bringing it under Democratic control, in other words.

1:00:59

To point out, if the

1:01:02

idea is that anything that changes our country a lot

1:01:04

should be under Democratic control, then we're going

1:01:06

to have to have the government in charge of fertility policy and I

1:01:08

definitely don't want that, right? Who are all these people having kids

1:01:10

without government permits? I definitely don't want

1:01:12

that. So, there are a lot of personal decisions that

1:01:14

should be not under government control. And

1:01:16

so, part of being in a democracy is,

1:01:19

part of living in a country that has something like a bill of rights

1:01:21

is saying there are certain rights that

1:01:23

we all agree on that are just outside of

1:01:25

debate. And so, one question is, should certain forms

1:01:28

of migration be outside of debate, just

1:01:30

like what religion you are as part of debate, out of debate,

1:01:32

thank goodness. So right now, we have open borders between

1:01:34

all 50 states, right? If

1:01:36

there's really high crime in Washington DC and people

1:01:38

decide to move to Northern Virginia, nothing people in Northern Virginia

1:01:41

can do about that, right? So we just live with that. That's

1:01:43

just part of the deal. Again, that's part of the 1789 deal in a way, right? So,

1:01:47

if now, take your hypothetical seriously

1:01:49

though. If the United States

1:01:51

were like literally able to be in

1:01:54

control of the southern border and could, basically

1:01:56

it would be just like coming in at the airport at LaGuardia,

1:01:58

right? They can decide whether what the deal is with

1:02:00

each individual person who comes in. It seems pretty obvious

1:02:03

that the American voters

1:02:05

would still favor a pretty

1:02:07

soft family reunification policy. The

1:02:09

average American really likes for families

1:02:12

to be together. So I suspect that in terms

1:02:14

of net total flows, if we

1:02:16

actually had voters in charge, we would

1:02:18

have a lot of people would be continuing

1:02:20

to come from Mexico

1:02:23

and to some extent from Central America, more or less

1:02:26

matching the flows of people who've arrived in the last

1:02:28

generation or two. And American voters have been

1:02:30

really unwilling to separate families

1:02:32

or to say like your sick grandpa or your uncle

1:02:34

or your nephew who's trying to go to college shouldn't

1:02:37

be allowed to come in. So I actually have my doubts about

1:02:39

whether the total flows would change that

1:02:41

much. I mean, I'm just speculating here, but American

1:02:43

voters are a bunch of softies deep down. They

1:02:46

might not like, they don't seem to like seeing

1:02:48

a lot of chaotic activity in

1:02:51

border towns. They feel sorry for the people in those border towns and

1:02:53

what they have to put up with. If you regularize that, can

1:02:55

you imagine them saying like you can't bring your two year

1:02:57

old kid along to America? No, I can't.

1:03:00

Yeah. I think that I can definitely, I can definitely

1:03:04

imagine Americans voting for a

1:03:06

de facto, like tough

1:03:08

for a single male economic migrant

1:03:10

to get access with no, with no family.

1:03:12

Yeah, you're right. You would probably get a lot less of that. And

1:03:15

I mean, it might be, I mean, if I were just speculating,

1:03:17

it would probably be more female biased. The

1:03:19

voters would probably be more, you know, more open to creating

1:03:22

opportunities for female migrants, partly

1:03:25

because bias is against men overall, right? Men do

1:03:27

commit a lot more, you know, like 10 times the violent

1:03:29

crime of women, right? So, and,

1:03:31

and a lot of family reunification. And if a lot

1:03:33

of that family reunification is folks who are, you know,

1:03:35

under 25, they're going to be raising families here too. So

1:03:38

I just have a hunch about that, that like, that might not change things much.

1:03:40

I mean, that wouldn't be my utopian policy from

1:03:42

the point of view of making America the best nation it

1:03:44

could be forever might be part of it. How

1:03:47

big is the gap between public opinion on immigration

1:03:50

policy

1:03:50

and economist opinion

1:03:52

on immigration policy? Oh, this is, this

1:03:54

is, this is one where I can't really, I

1:03:56

don't really know what economist opinion is for real on

1:03:58

immigration policy because all the.

1:03:59

questions are phrased in weird

1:04:02

ways when economists get asked them. And I think there's

1:04:04

some Straussian stuff going on, some like hiding

1:04:06

of their true views. So I mean,

1:04:09

it does seem as though, you know, economists

1:04:11

are very excited about high skilled immigration. So

1:04:14

economists, I mean, like a lot of policy

1:04:16

activists and entrepreneurs, they are aware

1:04:18

of the fact that you're a lot more likely to get a lot of

1:04:20

positive externalities, lots of positive

1:04:23

spillover effects, more on the things that

1:04:25

they'll highlight, not precisely what I'll highlight

1:04:28

is you'll get a lot more people who are

1:04:30

scientists, engineers, you have less,

1:04:32

fewer fiscal concerns about people taking more out

1:04:34

of the public till than they're putting in. In

1:04:37

fact, it's the other like they might be putting in much, much more, right?

1:04:39

This is one of the things I try to have to remind people of when

1:04:41

we're talking about immigration policy. Why not the best?

1:04:44

What? I mean, there are a lot of people who'd like to

1:04:46

come to America. Why not bring in the folks who are going to pay 10 times

1:04:48

more in taxes than they're going to drain out

1:04:50

so they can take some of the burden off of me. So

1:04:52

I think that some version of high skilled

1:04:54

immigration seems to get a lot of support from

1:04:57

economists because it has clear positive spillovers

1:04:59

for the whole economy and it eliminates a

1:05:02

lot of concerns about being any kind of drain

1:05:04

on the fiscal, on the FISC. Concerns

1:05:06

about low skilled immigration, drawing on the

1:05:09

government's debt or maybe overrated some it

1:05:11

gets a little complicated, but why not just pick the thing

1:05:13

that's not debated at all?

1:05:15

So when you talk about the importance

1:05:17

of trust and the stickiness of attitudes towards

1:05:19

trust among migrants and immigrants,

1:05:22

your colleague, Brian Kaplan, who wrote a book called

1:05:25

Open Borders for which I had him on the

1:05:27

podcast a while ago at this point, he

1:05:29

made the point in that book that ironically,

1:05:32

like democracy, there may be a kind

1:05:34

of lafer curve for trust where like a

1:05:37

certain amount, there's an optimal amount. Yeah,

1:05:39

there isn't. There isn't. So you disagree with that

1:05:41

study wrong. She read that study wrong. Okay.

1:05:44

Well, just just briefly.

1:05:45

If you look at income levels across countries, it's like this. He

1:05:47

picked something weird. Okay. So

1:05:49

I think what he said in that book was like, if you look at the highest trust

1:05:51

states, like the Dakotas, they're not the highest productivity

1:05:54

states. Yeah. Whereas New York,

1:05:56

Boston. The US things are kind of weird. Yeah. Okay.

1:05:59

How does that all hang together though?

1:06:02

Yeah, I mean,

1:06:03

part of it is that trust is

1:06:05

only one part of my story. So I

1:06:07

think it's better to spend more

1:06:09

of our time on the things that are really easy to measure

1:06:11

concretely, like savings rates, and something where

1:06:14

we know it's more likely to have an effect on

1:06:16

policy, like your view on the role of government. So

1:06:18

yeah, it's a reminder that there's more than one thing

1:06:20

going on. The Dakotas

1:06:23

are not a great place for people to take on high productivity

1:06:26

projects. And so you have some folks there

1:06:28

who tend to come from ethnic groups that are quite

1:06:30

high trust. A lot of people of Scandinavian descent

1:06:32

who by any measure are on top of these ratings on

1:06:34

trust. But entrepreneurs

1:06:37

aren't excited to launch the highest productivity

1:06:40

projects there unless it

1:06:42

comes to fracking. So yeah,

1:06:44

the coastal cities have been

1:06:47

magnets for high innovation

1:06:49

projects, and they get the

1:06:51

benefits of American institutions that are created by

1:06:53

people all across America, that are voted on by

1:06:56

politicians all across America. And

1:06:58

that's great. Yeah, it's just

1:07:00

a reminder that when you're looking within

1:07:03

the United States, the amount of variation

1:07:05

is restricted in a way. You're looking

1:07:07

at one of the best places in the world. Let me tell you what it's

1:07:09

like, actually. Here's one of my favorite correlations.

1:07:11

You hear this all the time online. Do you know that within the

1:07:13

NBA, there's no correlation between height

1:07:15

and how good you are at the sport? Yeah. So

1:07:18

basically, America is one big country like that. There's

1:07:20

a term for this. Is it a restricted range

1:07:22

problem? It's not just restricted range,

1:07:24

right? It's because so you're right

1:07:27

about that restriction range is a big problem in a lot

1:07:29

of statistics. That's when you're only looking at a group

1:07:31

of super smart people so that the correlations get

1:07:33

weaker. That could be the whole story here. But I

1:07:35

have a hunch that it's more than that. When we talk

1:07:37

about the NBA case, it's that the reason you're letting

1:07:39

the NBA is because you're good, not because you're high.

1:07:42

So height does help. But there are other people who are really

1:07:44

good at doing great things in the NBA who do

1:07:46

make it up through some other way than height. So basically, it's

1:07:48

that X anti selection. So I don't

1:07:50

know if that's what I doubt that's really what's going on in

1:07:53

the US like what is the economic

1:07:56

engine of the United States has always,

1:07:58

you know, New York has always

1:07:59

New York City since it's its Central

1:08:02

Chicago. Yeah. Yeah. And even New York, just

1:08:04

compared to all of the other early cities was clearly,

1:08:07

it was different from Boston and Philadelphia. I

1:08:09

would assume it's always been lower trust than Boston

1:08:11

and Philadelphia too. I don't know that that's true.

1:08:14

Yeah, it seems plausible. Yeah. It seems plausible just

1:08:16

because of the history of New York and the, the

1:08:18

grittiness, the immigration, the

1:08:20

quote unquote unwashed masses, the

1:08:23

crime, the crime, Ellis Island, everything,

1:08:25

right? But notice the institutions that

1:08:27

New York lives under are designed in the United

1:08:29

States as

1:08:29

a whole, right? They're living under the constitution. They

1:08:32

appeal to federal courts that are no part

1:08:34

of which, you know, New Yorkers are only a small

1:08:37

part of the federal judiciary and the people voting for the federal

1:08:39

judiciary. So part of my story is that

1:08:41

voters in the Midwest, voters in Wyoming, voters

1:08:44

in Texas, they're all building this America

1:08:47

and the American institutions that New Yorkers

1:08:49

get to take advantage of. I mean, I was just walking around town this

1:08:51

morning and I saw, I saw a US federal court, right? Right

1:08:53

down there, just a couple of blocks Southeast here. And

1:08:56

that US federal court exists through

1:08:58

the legal, through the voting

1:08:59

behavior of people far from New

1:09:02

York. They're building the institutions. I would agree with

1:09:04

that. So New Yorkers are building a small part of American institutions. I

1:09:06

agree with that. At the same time,

1:09:08

if I, if I think of the

1:09:11

prototype of the ambitious entrepreneur

1:09:14

who can flourish best

1:09:16

in a high trust system with courts and

1:09:19

enforcement of contracts and so forth, nevertheless,

1:09:21

that ambitious entrepreneur is not a particularly

1:09:24

high trust person. And in

1:09:26

some ways is kind of a low trust person. So

1:09:29

how does that hang together? Is it that

1:09:31

the ambitious entrepreneurs that,

1:09:34

who provide the kind of energy exists

1:09:37

best within paradoxically a very high

1:09:39

trust, predictable system that is sort

1:09:41

of in some way run by people that

1:09:43

are unlike him? I'm a big fan of the view

1:09:45

that trust is a large party measure

1:09:48

of trustworthiness. And a large, a lot

1:09:50

of what you need to run in a society is

1:09:52

you don't need people who are trusting. What you need is people who

1:09:54

are trustworthy, right? And so an entrepreneur

1:09:57

who's skeptical of other people still would prefer to

1:09:59

work with people who. be trusted and don't have to be

1:10:01

monitored that much, right? A whole lot of game theory,

1:10:03

a whole lot of information economics is about the

1:10:05

so-called principal agent problems. Like how can I lend

1:10:07

a hundred dollars to somebody to take on a project

1:10:10

and be pretty sure the person is going to actually work on

1:10:12

the project? How can I hire an employee to

1:10:14

work at the yogurt shop and not have the guy just

1:10:16

give away yogurt to all his friends? You need some trustworthiness

1:10:19

in order to make the yogurt shop work. Otherwise, you're going

1:10:21

to have to put in cameras. So having

1:10:23

employees who are relatively trustworthy,

1:10:26

having business partners who are relatively trustworthy,

1:10:28

turn out to be an important part of

1:10:30

being able to run a business, many businesses at least,

1:10:33

in an efficient way. And so if we treat trust

1:10:35

as a proxy for trustworthiness in many cases,

1:10:38

you'll see something important there. That shows up in a fair amount of the

1:10:40

literature.

1:10:40

So one really interesting fact from your

1:10:42

book was that the cultural

1:10:45

differences which are sticky, such as

1:10:47

trustworthiness and some of the others

1:10:49

you mentioned, savings rates,

1:10:51

are much more sticky from mother to child

1:10:53

than from father to child. Yeah, that's one

1:10:55

study that shows that. I found another one after the book came

1:10:58

out that found the same thing. Yeah.

1:11:00

So is that just a function of the common

1:11:02

sense point that a lot of fathers aren't around,

1:11:04

fathers are more likely to disappear?

1:11:07

Or is it actually, is

1:11:09

it the case that even in split culture

1:11:12

families, you're inheriting more of your

1:11:14

mother's culture somehow? I've

1:11:16

got two studies now finding this, right? And I

1:11:18

can't say that's definitive, right? We shouldn't be, we

1:11:20

like five or 10

1:11:21

or something run with different data sets.

1:11:24

But to me, A, I think

1:11:26

the first thing I'll say is that the idea of fathers

1:11:28

being completely absent isn't enough, that's not

1:11:30

happening enough in the data for the matter. B,

1:11:32

it does raise the likelihood that this

1:11:34

really is a cultural, child

1:11:37

rearing environment you're in

1:11:39

kind of phenomenon, right? Rather than, rather

1:11:41

they, what some might think is, hey,

1:11:44

a lot of this stuff must just be genetic. It's just

1:11:46

code for genetics. And I'm sure it is. A lot of people online

1:11:48

will tell, will say this, right? The fact that this is

1:11:50

showing up mother to child

1:11:51

is really a strong sign that

1:11:53

like the hundreds of hours of parenting

1:11:56

are changing how the child turns out and

1:11:58

how that child treats others. At least on those days.

1:11:59

At least on those dimensions. I don't know if that's going to be true

1:12:02

with savings, right? I don't know if that's going to be true with

1:12:04

views toward government, but at least it should

1:12:06

be opening my mind toward it, right? So

1:12:08

how would this interact with the body of research,

1:12:12

which has generally found

1:12:14

that, so not

1:12:16

talking about the genetic influence from parent to child,

1:12:18

but

1:12:19

the rest of the variants that most

1:12:21

of that comes from the quote unquote

1:12:24

non-shared environment. Non-shared environment, right? Right. The

1:12:27

mystery of sight, right? The shared

1:12:29

environment would by definition be like the home and the

1:12:31

parent, but to the extent

1:12:33

your case you're

1:12:35

making is true, that would imply that maybe

1:12:38

more of the shared environment is having

1:12:40

an influence on kids than like

1:12:42

Judith Rich Hill

1:12:44

would have said. So for instance, I mean, one

1:12:46

area where shared environment turns out to matter more than

1:12:49

a lot of people would suspect if they know behavioral genetics

1:12:51

is actually education, for instance, right?

1:12:53

It doesn't show up as much with IQ, but it does

1:12:56

show up with education, years of education. And

1:12:58

education does seem to have some causal effects.

1:13:01

So basically what family you get adopted into has some

1:13:03

effect on how much education. If you get

1:13:05

adopted into a really smart family with a lot of education,

1:13:07

you probably get more education. I'm adopted myself, so

1:13:09

I can kind of, I live a lot of the behavioral genetics

1:13:12

literature on a daily basis. But that,

1:13:15

we're pretty sure by now that education

1:13:17

does have a causal effect on say social attitudes,

1:13:20

on like multicultural type, wokeness attitudes

1:13:22

in a way, you might say. Not too much on economic

1:13:25

policy issues, but on these sort of social issues.

1:13:28

Similarly, it looks like this trust, trust may be

1:13:30

another one where just your acculturation matters.

1:13:33

And to go back to something you said earlier, right? Language

1:13:35

is obviously something where the

1:13:37

local culture you're in matters a huge amount, right?

1:13:40

You end up speaking a language that you're raised around. And so figuring

1:13:43

out which the culture

1:13:45

transplant ends up discussing a lot of attitudes

1:13:47

that are along this continuum of things that are heavily

1:13:50

culturally influenced, like the language you speak, to

1:13:52

things that normal

1:13:53

behavioral genetics people would say,

1:13:56

you know, a lot of that's got to be genetic. And

1:13:58

so, but we've got things all over the map.

1:13:59

here. And I'm

1:14:02

hoping that this ends up turning into an area of

1:14:04

future research for behavioral

1:14:06

geneticists, for anthropologists,

1:14:08

for social scientists, trying to figure out

1:14:11

which cultural traits persist and why over

1:14:13

the generations.

1:14:15

So it's my understanding that Mormons have

1:14:17

very high savings rates. Is that correct?

1:14:19

You know, like higher than the American average? I

1:14:22

actually don't know about that. I mean, they're really

1:14:24

good at tithing, right? But I've seen data

1:14:26

to that effect.

1:14:28

And you said you grew up Mormon.

1:14:30

Yeah. Are you still

1:14:32

Mormon? No, no, I went to BYU, I had a great

1:14:34

experience there. Was Mormon missionary

1:14:37

for four months and decided I didn't

1:14:39

believe in it, but decided that Mormons were

1:14:41

still better than the average American. So I didn't like

1:14:43

leave Mormonism and say, Oh, you guys are bad. I left

1:14:45

Mormonism saying, wow, you guys are maybe better than me.

1:14:48

Yeah. So I just don't. Well,

1:14:50

you know, the high social capital is really

1:14:52

fantastic, right? The fact that loneliness

1:14:55

among the elderly is really, really diminished among

1:14:57

Latter-day Saints just by having congregations

1:15:00

that are just the right size where people see each other on a regular

1:15:02

basis socialize a little bit, but not too much. They

1:15:04

really seem to have hit a sweet spot of basically

1:15:07

finding a strong community. And

1:15:09

then also the fact that the church

1:15:11

is really run by volunteers means that

1:15:13

even young people are given small to

1:15:15

medium size opportunities for leadership.

1:15:18

So it really is a good leadership training process.

1:15:20

And I think those are both really

1:15:23

important. The fact that the LDS

1:15:25

have this missionary program that gets young people to

1:15:27

go learn a language and try something kind of crazy when they're 19,

1:15:29

that has big social

1:15:31

pluses too. You end up building a lot of social capital,

1:15:33

but not just social capital in this sort of touchy

1:15:36

feely sense, but organizational capital. It's no surprise

1:15:38

to me that the Latter-day Saints do well working in a lot of organizations.

1:15:41

So I've never been a Mormon that wasn't very

1:15:44

nice. Yeah, yeah, it's a culturated.

1:15:46

And so you look at it and you're like, well, maybe

1:15:48

it's because a lot of them are from England and maybe there's some

1:15:50

kind of normal culture transplant thing going on

1:15:52

there, like Swedes or whatever. Maybe

1:15:55

it's that kind of thing going on.

1:15:58

because

1:16:00

I'm sure if you took the other immigrants

1:16:02

from those same places, they would not measure

1:16:04

up to Mormons in terms of niceness, community

1:16:07

ties, close-knitness.

1:16:09

Getting

1:16:10

five, six hours a week of practice in different church

1:16:12

meetings, behaving that way for

1:16:15

decades probably has a payoff, right? So

1:16:17

when you decided you didn't believe

1:16:19

anymore, what triggered that? I was really

1:16:22

driven by religious epistemology. So

1:16:25

I took the LDS truth claim

1:16:27

seriously, and I weighed them. There

1:16:30

are two key claims, right? One is you can learn

1:16:32

the truth of the religion through a private

1:16:34

spiritual experience. Mormons often use the term testimony

1:16:36

for that. The second is, boy, the Book of

1:16:38

Mormon's really hard to explain. So there

1:16:41

you get something much more like Christian apologetics. Does

1:16:43

this book look like a miracle? So I spent some

1:16:45

time figuring out whether the personal

1:16:47

spiritual experience was a valid way of learning the truth.

1:16:50

And I ultimately decided it wasn't. I had too many

1:16:52

good spiritual experiences toward other faiths

1:16:54

to

1:16:55

keep it short there.

1:16:56

And on the Book of Mormon, similarly, I

1:16:58

realized a little bit like the unmanned aerial

1:17:01

phenomenon thing. I realized I don't quite

1:17:03

know how this book was written, but it doesn't seem like

1:17:05

it has to be a miracle. And there are a lot of other books

1:17:07

that are written in really impressive ways, often

1:17:09

through a method called automatic writing, where people get in trance-like

1:17:12

states and dictate all books. So some

1:17:14

books get dictated by automatic writing, it turns out,

1:17:16

trance-like states where people write books that seem

1:17:18

like it was beyond their capability.

1:17:20

I don't have an explanation for how automatic writing works.

1:17:22

I just know people can write non-miraculous books with it.

1:17:24

Apparently, Jane Eyre, one of the Bronte sisters,

1:17:27

was wrote that way. So yeah, learning that

1:17:29

the world was intellectually more complex than

1:17:32

I knew at a young age, and learning that

1:17:34

spiritual experiences were kind of a dime a dozen,

1:17:36

those were formative experiences, and that's what pushed me

1:17:38

out. How old were you when?

1:17:40

I was 19. I was knocking doors as a missionary one

1:17:42

day.

1:17:43

I was like, hm, nice people.

1:17:45

Have you ever seen the Book of Mormon? Oh, yeah, I went

1:17:47

and saw it while I was still in previews, the musical, yeah, yeah. How

1:17:49

did you feel about it? I mean, I thought it was good

1:17:51

fun. So it was too optimistic at the

1:17:54

end, because at the end, they say, kind of

1:17:56

the message at the end of the Book of Mormon, the musical, to spoil

1:17:58

it, is, well.

1:17:59

We're just going to have a new made up book and

1:18:02

we don't need to believe it anymore. And our religion

1:18:04

won't have any rules now, but we'll still be nice Mormons.

1:18:07

And it was the idea that you can take

1:18:10

the parts of religion out that you don't like and

1:18:12

keep the rest and the religion will still stay there. I'm

1:18:14

a big fan of what's known as the strict church theory

1:18:16

of Rodney Stark, my former colleague, Larry Anaconey.

1:18:19

The reason organized religions work is

1:18:21

because they have some rules. They weed out the people

1:18:23

who are just going to free ride, who are not

1:18:25

going to give anything to the community. And so the

1:18:27

strict church theory, I think holds up pretty well. You

1:18:29

need to have a religion with rules in order to make it, in

1:18:31

order to get people to contribute to the public good.

1:18:34

To bring, a religion needs to weed

1:18:36

out the people who bring potato chips to the church

1:18:38

potluck and they need to weed in the people who

1:18:40

bring good casseroles to the potluck. And a

1:18:43

little bit of fear of God is one way to get people to bring a

1:18:45

good casserole to the potluck. If I think of my

1:18:48

friends who are, for example, reformed

1:18:50

Jews,

1:18:51

and I grew up in a heavily Jewish area,

1:18:54

they seem to have a sense

1:18:57

of community without any sense of fear

1:18:59

of God. Yeah. Is that

1:19:01

an exception that proves a rule or is there some

1:19:04

way that that works into the strict church

1:19:07

theory? Without knowing, I mean,

1:19:09

I've

1:19:10

learned something about reformed Judaism over time.

1:19:12

I find it very appealing. And the

1:19:14

idea of trying to keep the best parts of your faith while

1:19:16

adapting to modernity. I think the strictness,

1:19:19

if I can speculate on this, just wildly without

1:19:21

any expertise, it's that reformed

1:19:24

Judaism is held together by the need to

1:19:26

keep Judaism alive. Reform

1:19:28

Jews, like most

1:19:30

Jews the world over, know that it's really important

1:19:33

to make sacrifices to keep Judaism

1:19:35

alive. They know that there are forces in the world

1:19:37

that would absolutely love for very

1:19:39

evil reasons

1:19:40

to destroy Judaism as a whole. And

1:19:43

I think that gets a level of commitment and it gives a

1:19:45

willingness to sacrifice for the group

1:19:47

that very few, that perhaps no other religion can

1:19:50

muster up in this world. And there may be a confound

1:19:53

of just the historical consciousness

1:19:55

that Jewish people have, the

1:19:57

recency of the Holocaust, the fact that

1:19:59

it

1:19:59

that in many ways is an ethnicity as well.

1:20:02

So those things may help hold it together in a

1:20:04

way that- It gives enough focal points for people to know. So

1:20:06

that it maybe doesn't need fear

1:20:08

of God. It's possible, it's possible that's

1:20:10

what's going on. Knowing that

1:20:12

there are people around the world currently, hopefully

1:20:15

small in number, who would like to destroy you, but that there

1:20:17

recently have been incredibly powerful people

1:20:19

trying to destroy you. That creates, that

1:20:21

solves, I think, the strict church theory

1:20:24

in a way that I hope no one ever has to solve

1:20:26

again. So I'm assuming you're an atheist

1:20:28

now at this point. I'm an atheist enough,

1:20:29

yeah.

1:20:31

So do you have kids? No, no.

1:20:33

So if you did have kids, and given

1:20:36

that you have this kind of strict church

1:20:38

theory, like you sort of can't get the good without

1:20:40

the, I don't know if you would say bad

1:20:43

necessarily, but without like the dogma,

1:20:45

enforced, socially enforced dogma, would

1:20:48

you want to raise your kids in a context

1:20:50

to get the nice aspects of, say, Mormonism?

1:20:53

Would you just bite the bullet and say, okay, well,

1:20:55

I'm not gonna

1:20:57

inculcate them about the skepticism of the faith

1:21:00

because I want them to enjoy the boons of the community.

1:21:02

How do you think that you would manage that trade-off?

1:21:05

No, I think that if I were in a situation

1:21:07

like that, I would have found some sort of soft religious

1:21:10

commitment that was easy to drift in and out

1:21:12

of on some level, but that would give my kids

1:21:14

a religious background. So, and it might

1:21:16

actually have been Reformed Judaism. I have my maternal

1:21:19

grandmother, a blessed memory was Jewish. And

1:21:22

so I also have some interest in, say,

1:21:25

Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism. So

1:21:27

Catholicism, some sort of

1:21:30

Christmas and Easter Catholicism could have been appealing. I

1:21:32

don't know what path it would have taken me, but definitely something

1:21:34

that exposed, like I might, here's

1:21:37

the secret story. The secret story is I would

1:21:39

want to, it would only be worth my time if

1:21:41

it would end up also teaching them some of

1:21:43

the, you know, greats of the Western humanistic

1:21:45

tradition, right? So if they

1:21:47

end up reading the Bible along the way,

1:21:50

ended up being exposed to great art along the way and

1:21:52

great music, that really makes it worthwhile. Because

1:21:54

I feel like the humanities training that I got from

1:21:56

being raised LDS, from getting to read the scriptures

1:21:59

at a young age.

1:21:59

and for being exposed to good music of

1:22:02

a variety of eras. That was really valuable

1:22:04

and I wouldn't have gotten it otherwise. Okay, so

1:22:07

I guess that brings me to the end of my questions for now. It's

1:22:10

been great to have you on. Before I let you go, where

1:22:12

should I direct

1:22:13

my followers that may want to encounter some more

1:22:16

of your work? Sure.

1:22:18

My website is easy to find. It's jonesgarrett.com

1:22:21

and my Twitter, I'm Garrett Jones.

1:22:24

And easy to find there. One R,

1:22:26

two Ts. If you type two Rs, you'll find

1:22:28

the former Yankees player. I think I did

1:22:30

that. Yeah, Garrett with one R is me. All

1:22:33

right. Thanks so much, Garrett. Thanks for having me.

1:22:39

Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations

1:22:41

with Coleman.

1:22:42

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