The Culture Transplant

Economist Garett Jones's third* book of his Singapore Trilogy, The Culture Transplant - How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left just came out last month and is making quite a stir. It should. 

"So full assimilation on political and social attitudes within two generations is unambiguously a myth and deserves to be torn out of our textbooks and torn out of our ideology."

Jones sees three strong attitudes which persist in cultures even after they have arrived in America: generalised trust, frugality (savings in the old country versus savings in the new country) and planning for the future, and role of government in an economy.

People from high-trust countries - Scandinavia is prominently mentioned - have more robust market economies because less energy has to go into regulation and especially, enforcement. Low-trust countries such as Italy, especially Sicily, have multiple layers of policing because people still have the "family value" of sticking up for their family no matter what, even when they are criminals. It's called amoral familism. 

What makes it fun is that Americans keep immediately thinking that this must all be wrong because it doesn't fit their political and cultural need to believe that everyone is melted in after 2 generations or so.  There is some assimilation, yes. We all move to the middle and adjust to each other, certainly.  But the old attitudes persist, and there is good evidence that you can still see it centuries farther out. Jones is careful (or tactical) in making sure that he draws much of his data from the Chinese Diaspora around the world. "At a first pass, you can predict the prosperity of a country in Asia and Oceania from what percentage of its population comes from China, as far back as 1500." The dispersion took place after the peak of the Ming Dynasty and basically spread the attitudes of that collapsing giant to about a third of the world.

Interestingly, he speculates what the role of China in the world would be now if the KMT had won in the civil war. The communists, at 50,000 feet, have been a disaster. He speculates that a more democratic China entering the Cold War balance would now be the dominant player on the world stage, and wonders whether that would have been a good or a bad thing. (2/3 good, he guesses.) He further notes that after all the noise is made, there are seven nations in the world that are innovators: US(sorta Canada); Three in Europe and Three in Asia. If we want world prosperity we should move the poor people of the world to the other rich but non-innovating countries, and unleash the engines that make us all prosperous. China is an innovator only because of size and government force, but he believes it could have occurred naturally, as it did in Japan. Very radical, never going to happen, but worth thinking about.

People from northern European countries keep thinking that Americans must be doing something wrong and teaching bad attitudes because we can't have the sort of general trust that they do and regulate themselves accordingly. They don't dare think that it's because not everyone here is Belgian. That is not an allowed thought. It must be our guns or our love of money or our focus on making things big. 

I caught the interview with him over at Razib, for the record.  I have one more one-month promotional gift subscription to hand out to that substack if anyone is interested, and probably will have three more in another three months, as that seems to be Khan's method.  so let me know if you want the last one this round.

*The other two are Hive Mind, how IQ matters more for groups than individuals, and 10% Democracy, how oligarchy is slightly underrated. The issues among the three are interrelated.