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What about the possibility that the distribution of traits may vary between populations due to genetic differences between populations? If it is those traits are driving long-run growth, and those traits cannot be easily copied due to their partial genetic basis, how does that affect the analysis you've been making in this series and your views on open borders?
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First off, I just want to say that I enjoyed the reading club, and I hope you do these again in the future, it was very informative.
While I tend to agree with your assessments, I do have one reservation. Most of these measures are simply looking at the ancestry of the populace, and correlating it with current levels of productivity. But what about institutional impacts? That is, what impact do you think ancestry plays in forming social norms and government policy? Which could then have these observable impacts in productivity.
For example, if ancestry measures were as predictive as anti-immigration advocates often imply, then we would expect to see homogeneous nations (in terms of ancestry), like Europe, outperform their heterogeneous counterparts: the US. On the whole, I tend to think the opposite is true: heterogeneity outperforms homogeneity.
However, if ancestry impacted institutions, and not merely productivity levels, we might observe this phenomena. While the US is significantly more heterogeneous than it's European counterpart, it's political landscape has largely been dominated by the same European ethnicity through most of it's history. Thus, while the US is more heterogeneous in terms of ancestry, it's institutions are still largely European, maybe even selectively so (as not all Europeans immigrated to the Americas).
While I think most arguments against the open borders movement are weak, I do think one of the more powerful arguments is that of "political externalities". While I suspect both you and I agree that these externalities are best internalized, we do live in modern democracies, for better or worse. So I have one final question: given the two options, open borders or open borders given that immigrants from backwards countries (measured by "SAT", IQ, or another relevant measure), and their descendants, are barred from voting, which would you choose?
1. What seems to you to be the most promising avenue for future research in this area?
2. The addition of latitude controls drastically affected the coefficients on the various ancestry variables. Do you think this powerful effect of latitude holds today at our much higher technology level?
Thanks for doing this by the way.
Has any objective research or even informed speculation been done on why latitude effects are so strong? Agriculture concerns would have been important in past centuries, but probably not so much in the past 50 years. Plucky New Englanders might suggest that experiencing the seasons sets our resolve to be more productive (or something).
Question about your "The Equator in Comin, Easterly, and Gong" post:
It doesn't look like the distance from equator metric, or any of the other geographical controls, are migration-adjusted. So the correlation could be due either to geography having an immediate effect, or to populations being affected by geography only over a long period of time. In the latter case, the long-term effects of migration might be the same, but the short-term benefits might be much smaller.
Do you think the results would be much different if you looked at current location controlling for location of ancestors? Has enough data been released to do that analysis?
I second the question about genetic differences.
Furthermore, do you think that the authors ignored the genetic argument for political reasons?
Caplan, what would be the minimum evidence needed from this and suchlike research for you to be convinced that Open Borders is inferior to the Status Quo?
Bryan,
Might you address the the first set of comments by David Weil, about your blogpost on Putterman & Weil (2010)?:
You observe that (a) long-distance migration is rare, (b) long-distance migration is bimodal, and (c) large-scale, civilized (voluntary, peaceful) migration is an extreme historical rarity. Those observations would seem to reinforce Prof. Weil's point that long-run historical evidence provides little guidance for policy debate about open borders. What do you think?
Being statistically illiterate, I expect I'm just confused, but I got the impression that at least some of the ancestry research was was interpreted to show that institutions don't matter, or, don't matter very much. That seems implausible to me, if only because of the contrast between North and South Korea. Can someone please straigten me out? Thanks.