That is true, but if you are going to let global markets determine your economic and immigration policies, then the United States will be lowered to the lowest common denominator.
"Consider the alternative—essentially open border policy of the Biden Administration."
In the first place, there is more than one alternative. You are too quick to choose the cheap-labor option. Pay these 'genius' immigrants the going rate for homegrown wages.
Regulating wages and prices is a distortion of the private sector that I do not support.
Allowing the private sector to screen immigrants for economic value is in my view better than the unrestricted immigration we saw under Biden and would dramatically reduce the flow of immigrants.
In fact, I would argue that it might be overly restrictive.
In practice, that seems to lead to abuse by employers and to fake jobs. A simpler system that lets the marketplace decide is to have immigrants pay (market rates) for their residence permits.
I have no objection to that, but such admissions should be subject to a criminal background check. We have a surplus of domestic criminals; we don't need to import more.
The goal in my view is to minimize the number of immigrants who become taxpayers and maximize the number who become taxpayers. I'm pragmatic about the means to that end.
Yes, fake jobs are handed out left, right, and center in the good ol' USA. Immigration activists are...active. Gotta keep that federal tax money flowing to those nice Lutheran and Catholic ladies, bless their souls.
Let's say for a minute that we replaced out entire elite with a foreign non-white elite. Does anyone think that wouldn't have a huge impact on our country?
Let's take East Asians. We'll just assume IQ = 105 and STD = 15.
If we could somehow replace out entire society with East Asians, the % of people with IQ > 130 would double. The % of people in the underclass would shrink dramatically.
Would this not create some kind of super country?
But what does actually East Asia look like? Excluding China which is still growing (but looks to be on a very similar path).
Its GDP/capita is 60% of ours.
Growth rates have stalled.
Rates of innovation per capita are relatively low for the IQ.
So the absolute BEST immigrant class, East Asians, haven't managed to build a society as good as ours despite higher IQs. And it gets a low worse outside East Asians.
There is a reason that we consider things like cultural fit in addition to IQ.
Yeah, and what could that mythical "cultural fit" be? Culture = patterns of thinking and behavior. Which reduce to genetics, especially over the long term.
Western Europe probably wasn't more intelligent when it led the Industrial Revolution than the Chinese were at their peak. What was it then? Some other traits - more individualism, less conformity, more openness to experience, moral universalism? Perhaps. We don't have the perfect measures. But I'd bet if the countries were to fully "culturally" isolate themselves, most of the world would regress to where they were before the West spread its civilization, culture, and technologies there. 98% of Africa would go extinct in 10 years. Yes, even the East Asians would regress. They can diligently copy; invent - not so much. Only Western Europe and US would remain democratic.
So if a HongKonger scores 120 and a Nigerian scores 125 on an IQ test with reliability of 0.8 and my only admission standard is "true IQ" > 115, I should admit the HongKonger and reject the Nigerian. Because their expected true IQs are ~118 and ~113, respectively.
Reality sure generates some "racist" priors.
Two additional points:
1. The children of immigrants will regress to their population mean. Assuming true IQ of their Nigerian parents = 113 and IQ heritability of 0.8, the children will have IQ = ~104. So to get White mean of 100, one should admit only Nigerians with measured IQs of around 120+.
2. One should consider other important pro-civilization traits in which populations clearly differ. Empathy, honesty, future orientation, diligence, impulse control, psychopathy, aggressiveness... If one selects for all of these, virtually no Blacks and very few Browns would meet the admission standards. Testing only for cognitive ability (even if perfectly) probably means importing slightly more intelligent civilizational burdens.
Precisely—wrt behavioral/cultural characteristics. I assume here IQ is used because we have studied and discussed such for a century. I maintain that most of our current problems with immigration of vastly different cultures is *now* two-fold (in the main): too many, too soon, and of cultures that are abhorrent to American values. As you’ve said, “more intelligent civilization burdens”.
<blockquote>' Dwarkesh wisely illustrates an key problem in social science: It's almost impossible to have a candid discussion about why some countries economically succeed and others fail, beyond near-tautologies like "productivity" and "institutions." Perhaps best to not discuss the topic. ' </blockquote>
The Jensen quote says specifically that measurement errors are normally distributed, and of course IQ scores are fitted to a normal distribution (100/15) for the population as a whole. I am guessing that generating your graphs required you to also make assumptions about the IQ distribution of the subpopulations, e.g. Nigerians (70/15)? Which sounds reasonable to me, but I'm curious as to whether it's checkable.
All data were simulated as normal with varying means and 15 SD. The errors were also normal, yes. You can read the code in the link in my other comment.
I am curious. Using the United States as an example, what jobs can not be filled with native people? And which countries can supply immigrants with the qualities necessary to perform these jobs? To make this fair, consider that immigrants are to be paid the same rate as native US workers. Otherwise, this is just an effort to get cheap labor.
If the Bar and other assorted professional tests can be run with an acceptable rate of cheating, it should be well within feasibility to run a written comprehension test in your embassies abroad.
The simple solution is to limit legal immigration to those who secure jobs prior to entry. Let the marketplace decide.
It's not a bad solution. Denmark does in fact use this for one of our visa types ("pay limit scheme", https://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work/Pay-limit-scheme). However, it can be undermined by activist groups handing out fake jobs (at their own cost).
Or co-ethnics hiring their own through fake companies.
Yes, but it is expensive since they would have to pay over the market rate if these jobs aren't paying 514k DKK (a quite good salary).
"Let the marketplace decide."
But the market will decide— Cheap Labor.
That train has left the station. We are in a global marketplace. Consider the alternative—essentially open border policy of the Biden Administration.
"We are in a global marketplace."
That is true, but if you are going to let global markets determine your economic and immigration policies, then the United States will be lowered to the lowest common denominator.
"Consider the alternative—essentially open border policy of the Biden Administration."
In the first place, there is more than one alternative. You are too quick to choose the cheap-labor option. Pay these 'genius' immigrants the going rate for homegrown wages.
Regulating wages and prices is a distortion of the private sector that I do not support.
Allowing the private sector to screen immigrants for economic value is in my view better than the unrestricted immigration we saw under Biden and would dramatically reduce the flow of immigrants.
In fact, I would argue that it might be overly restrictive.
The United States' economy is in a mess, and a large part of that mess is caused by cheap foreign labor.
This does not address the immigration culture problem.
I think it does. You're entitled to your opinion.
In practice, that seems to lead to abuse by employers and to fake jobs. A simpler system that lets the marketplace decide is to have immigrants pay (market rates) for their residence permits.
I have no objection to that, but such admissions should be subject to a criminal background check. We have a surplus of domestic criminals; we don't need to import more.
The goal in my view is to minimize the number of immigrants who become taxpayers and maximize the number who become taxpayers. I'm pragmatic about the means to that end.
We have similar programs in the States.
Yes, fake jobs are handed out left, right, and center in the good ol' USA. Immigration activists are...active. Gotta keep that federal tax money flowing to those nice Lutheran and Catholic ladies, bless their souls.
R code for those curious. https://rpubs.com/EmilOWK/immigration_selection_priors
Let's say for a minute that we replaced out entire elite with a foreign non-white elite. Does anyone think that wouldn't have a huge impact on our country?
Let's take East Asians. We'll just assume IQ = 105 and STD = 15.
If we could somehow replace out entire society with East Asians, the % of people with IQ > 130 would double. The % of people in the underclass would shrink dramatically.
Would this not create some kind of super country?
But what does actually East Asia look like? Excluding China which is still growing (but looks to be on a very similar path).
Its GDP/capita is 60% of ours.
Growth rates have stalled.
Rates of innovation per capita are relatively low for the IQ.
Productivity is low and working hours are long.
TFR is apocalypse levels.
Suicide rates are very high.
A you know this is how they respond to a crisis:
https://news.sky.com/story/people-in-japan-who-got-used-to-face-masks-during-covid-are-attending-smiling-lessons-12896588
So the absolute BEST immigrant class, East Asians, haven't managed to build a society as good as ours despite higher IQs. And it gets a low worse outside East Asians.
There is a reason that we consider things like cultural fit in addition to IQ.
Yeah, and what could that mythical "cultural fit" be? Culture = patterns of thinking and behavior. Which reduce to genetics, especially over the long term.
Western Europe probably wasn't more intelligent when it led the Industrial Revolution than the Chinese were at their peak. What was it then? Some other traits - more individualism, less conformity, more openness to experience, moral universalism? Perhaps. We don't have the perfect measures. But I'd bet if the countries were to fully "culturally" isolate themselves, most of the world would regress to where they were before the West spread its civilization, culture, and technologies there. 98% of Africa would go extinct in 10 years. Yes, even the East Asians would regress. They can diligently copy; invent - not so much. Only Western Europe and US would remain democratic.
So if a HongKonger scores 120 and a Nigerian scores 125 on an IQ test with reliability of 0.8 and my only admission standard is "true IQ" > 115, I should admit the HongKonger and reject the Nigerian. Because their expected true IQs are ~118 and ~113, respectively.
Reality sure generates some "racist" priors.
Two additional points:
1. The children of immigrants will regress to their population mean. Assuming true IQ of their Nigerian parents = 113 and IQ heritability of 0.8, the children will have IQ = ~104. So to get White mean of 100, one should admit only Nigerians with measured IQs of around 120+.
2. One should consider other important pro-civilization traits in which populations clearly differ. Empathy, honesty, future orientation, diligence, impulse control, psychopathy, aggressiveness... If one selects for all of these, virtually no Blacks and very few Browns would meet the admission standards. Testing only for cognitive ability (even if perfectly) probably means importing slightly more intelligent civilizational burdens.
Taking into account regression towards the mean requires a lot of additional assumptions I didn't want to go into here.
Precisely—wrt behavioral/cultural characteristics. I assume here IQ is used because we have studied and discussed such for a century. I maintain that most of our current problems with immigration of vastly different cultures is *now* two-fold (in the main): too many, too soon, and of cultures that are abhorrent to American values. As you’ve said, “more intelligent civilization burdens”.
Read The Culture Transplant by Garett Jones. It deals with this exact question. It should be the basis for immigration policy.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/garett-jones-finishes-his-trilogy?utm_source=publication-search
Thankfully, Garett Jones knows. https://x.com/GarettJones/status/1947673414824546677
<blockquote>' Dwarkesh wisely illustrates an key problem in social science: It's almost impossible to have a candid discussion about why some countries economically succeed and others fail, beyond near-tautologies like "productivity" and "institutions." Perhaps best to not discuss the topic. ' </blockquote>
Also, thankfully, the idea that immigrants' national origins matter is a mainstream conservative view. So we don't have both sides playing this game. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/country-origin-matters/
The Jensen quote says specifically that measurement errors are normally distributed, and of course IQ scores are fitted to a normal distribution (100/15) for the population as a whole. I am guessing that generating your graphs required you to also make assumptions about the IQ distribution of the subpopulations, e.g. Nigerians (70/15)? Which sounds reasonable to me, but I'm curious as to whether it's checkable.
All data were simulated as normal with varying means and 15 SD. The errors were also normal, yes. You can read the code in the link in my other comment.
I am curious. Using the United States as an example, what jobs can not be filled with native people? And which countries can supply immigrants with the qualities necessary to perform these jobs? To make this fair, consider that immigrants are to be paid the same rate as native US workers. Otherwise, this is just an effort to get cheap labor.
A potential non-racial approach: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01073115
Sure, but then the government would have to test your relatives too, or at least assess them on whatever composite scale they are using.
I think this is my only uncited paper.
Explains why results of audit studies do not necessarily show irrational discrimination.
See: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23554-005
If the Bar and other assorted professional tests can be run with an acceptable rate of cheating, it should be well within feasibility to run a written comprehension test in your embassies abroad.
What is the most efficient way to achieve greater reliability? Can you do it with a battery of different tests and take the average?
Longer test and computer adaptive testing.