In Ek's excellent new @JPolEcon piece on migrants to Sweden, he reports a "significant dispersion in human capital across countries [of origin] with a 90/10 percentile ratio of 3.2."
So, which are at the 90th percentile?
The ethics review board wouldn't let him tell us.
🧵:
The screenshot above is from his ReadMe file here, part of a ZIP that includes all of the replication data.
These words should be enough to find the files via a Google search:
"Replication Data for: Cultural Values and Productivity"
You can see the replication folder includes the cross-country data in an Excel file-- with countries listed by number, not name.
"FodelseLandnamn" translates to "Birth country name," so that might have been the one column Ek was required to change by the Lund ethics board.
I'm glad economists are usually still allowed to candidly, openly report their findings.
Candid scholarly inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations can enrich humanity.
I'm sorry to see the Lund ethics board becoming a barrier to such scholarly inquiry.
Ek's excellent new paper in @JPolEcon is an important contribution to cultural transplant theory.
He finds evidence that economically important cultural differences migrate and persist.
My one hope is that future researchers receive official permission for full candor.
~fin~
Coda:
From Ek's @JPolEcon paper itself:
"To obtain the release of country (and parents’ country) of birth at a more detailed level than Statistics Sweden normally allows, I have agreed to the condition that no results are presented with individual countries named."
"Therefore, [because of the requirements unfortunately imposed by others] I will present only results that are related to country characteristics and never point to specific countries."
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"A great example of Jones’s descriptive abilities lies in a description of task diversity.. by Adam Smith.. The positive channels of diversity are limited to specific settings, while the negative channels of diversity are broader & more likely to be realized."
"Jones’s greatest strength is in his ability to distill novel research into easy-to-understand concepts... His examples are excellent and easy to follow, and he frames the problems in a way that promotes further curiosity and exploration."
"Cardinal Richelieu [favored] talent importation, encouraging... the establishment of small, industrious communities of Spanish conversos... and discreetly shielding these economically productive ‘peregrinos’, or wanderers, from persecution."
Saint-Simon on how banning Protestantism hurt French productivity:
"The revocation of the Edict of Nantes... depopulated a quarter of the realm, ruined its commerce, weakened it in every direction... banished our manufactures to foreign lands, made those lands flourish and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Bryan Caplan:
"[N]one of the.. papers on [immigrant assimilation] I’ve read seriously worried that self-reports.. severely understate assimilation."
From the paper I cite on Page 20 of TCT:
"[S]avings rates might suffer from self-reporting bias. To address such a concern..."
If Bryan Caplan is concerned that self-reporting bias of subjective attitudes might be driving cultural transplant findings...
....Then I hope he chooses to focus on the transplant of savings behavior I report in Chapter 1 of TCT.
Page 25 of The Culture Transplant:
Caplan has never AFAIK mentioned the Thrift Transplant.
Notably, he also hasn't discussed the evidence in TCT that across Southeast Asia, the Chinese diaspora has not fully assimilated --and that lack of assimilation has very likely been a boon to prosperity in the region.
The private return to AGI will plausibly be as low as the private return to HGI:
About 1% more output per IQ point.
So an IQ 400 AGI can do about 20X of an average person.
If you're looking for god-tier AGI, that ain't it.
The paradox of IQ is that the private return to IQ (a measure of human general intelligence) is pretty low, but the payoff to IQ at the national level is pretty high-- enough to explain half or more of the percentage differences across countries.
So smarter groups get a lot more done than smart individuals-- on a per-person basis!
Same will plausibly be true for AGI: individual payoffs to AGI will be modest--like the 1 IQ point = 1% more output-- so a single superintelligence won't be unrecognizably more productive IRL.
The Deep Roots literature, first summarized in this 2013 piece in the Journal of Economic Literature, is a big obstacle to Nowrasteh's views on immigration policy.
And he knows it.
So here's a short thread on key mentions of "ancestry" in this famed paper.
From the abstract of the first Deep Roots literature review:
"A growing body of new empirical work focuses on… the effects of historical variables on contemporary income by explicitly taking into account the ancestral composition of current populations." scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…
Summing up empirical work showing that when predicting prosperity, the history of people matters more than the history of places:
"the basic lesson… is that one cannot abstract from the ancestral structure of populations when trying to understand comparative development."
"In.. The Culture Transplant.. Jones.. points out that just 7 countries (the US, China, Japan, South Korea, France, Germany & the UK) are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s patents, research grants, scientific publications, & Nobel prizes."