The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left

by Garett Jones

A provocative new analysis of immigration's long-term effects on a nation's economy and culture. Over the last two decades, as economists began using big datasets and modern computing power to reveal the sources of national prosperity, their statistical results kept pointing toward the power of culture to drive the wealth of nations. In The Culture Transplant , Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands―toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government―that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential. Built upon mainstream, well-reviewed academic research that hasn't pierced the public consciousness, this book offers a compelling refutation of an unspoken consensus that a nation's economic and political institutions won't be changed by immigration. Jones refutes the common view that we can discuss migration policy without considering whether migration can, over a few generations, substantially transform the economic and political institutions of a nation. And since most of the world's technological innovations come from just a handful of nations, Jones concludes, the entire world has a stake in whether migration policy will help or hurt the quality of government and thus the quality of scientific breakthroughs in those rare innovation powerhouses.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Sociology, Nonfiction, Political Science, Cultural

213 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2022

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well argued but brief presentation of a very simple (but controversial today?) idea -- migration affects both the migrants and the societies into which they migrate.

Primarily, the author uses the examples of European migration (colonization/settlement) of the Americas, Australia, etc., as well as the Chinese diaspora elsewhere in Asia, to show how groups high on a particular score (SAT*, but particularly the technological development of the society in the year 1500), when traced through to where they live today, are very predictive of what those societies are like now.

The author almost exclusively uses the "positive" cases like these, rather than lower development groups moving into higher development areas, for two reasons -- until very recently, not developed culture would have permitted this to happen to them (and thus there isn't enough time to see the consequences), and presumably, a desire not to end up the next Charles Murray.

He argues convincingly for diversity of skills, ethnic background, etc., but not of values, as positives for a society. (Calling the skill diversity "Firefly diversity" after the great sci-fi tv show was maybe pandering to the audience a bit much, but I appreciated it!)

This is a major counterpoint to the Bryan Caplan/left-libertarian open borders argument that societies are so powerful at integrating and assimilating migrants that they will largely only be improved. This always seemed absurd to me -- especially on political/voting basis, it's very obviously not true; on an economic or skill basis, it's more ambiguous. Multiple studies are cited within this book to show overall immigrant groups retain 30-50% of their views even after multiple generations; varies by group and domain, but seems relatively well supported. It's pretty clear that moving people from dysfunctional societies into the "I-7" of highly-industrious, inventive nations is great for the migrants individually in the short term, but Jones argues it's potentially worse for everyone long-run by making those special societies less productive and thus producing fewer technological public goods.

[Don · Rating 2 out of 5]

The advent of ‘managed migration’ as a paradigm for controlling the movement of people across national frontiers has assigned the task of sorting out the sheep from the goats primarily to economists. Equipped with the science that supposedly allows them to determine what given country ‘need’ in terms of the functioning of its labour markets, some of the bolder sorts of bean counters have ideas about the types of people and the places they come from who might fill the vacant slots.

Garett Jones offers up the view that closest attention needs to be paid to the cultures of the peoples who make up the migrant flows to determine whether they, and indeed their descendants down to indefinitely extended generations, are likely to provide the qualities that the economy needs. Being keen to avoid simplistic interpretations of ‘culture’ which will make the argument open to the accusation of a ethnic bias, he takes the reader through a series of ‘tire-kicking’ exercises which are intended to adjust for the superficial impression that the proportion of the population of European heritage is a key indicator of economic success. No - what it seems we are really looking for from our migrants is their association with regions of the planet that have a long history of ‘good government’, because the values of ‘good government’ migrant along with the people who have had its values instilled into their world views.

Countries which can de demonstrate an association with good government and ‘good ideas’ are the places where we should expect to find the best immigrants. Jones is a fan of Singapore and his argument comes to a crescendo with a call to make its denizens the archetype of the migrant which countries need. The closer the fit to this go-getting, super-industrious fragment of humanity into your migration flows then the better assured you can be that you are dealing with good immigrants and have a template for excluding those furthest away from this description.

What is totally absent from the reviews of research papers that make up the bulk of this book is any consideration of any objective other than the economic benefit of migration to the receiving country. Nothing is said about the impact of the movement of people on the regions from which people migrate, whether this might provide mechanisms for redistribution and the reduction of inequality, or even more radically, as reparations for environmental and climate damage and historical injustice. Setting a policy objective which aims to make migrant receiving countries look a little more like Singapore seem take an impoverished ambition in an area where so much more is needed in the modern world.

[Suria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book -- easy to read and digest. The thesis is clear and well-supported by evidence spanning many countries and time periods. Would recommend reading the rest of the "Singapore trilogy" (Hive Mind & 10% Less Democracy) as well!

[Matthew Adelstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've said everything I intend to say about this book here https://benthams.substack.com/p/again.... It's among the more serious criticisms of immigration, but still quite unconvincing.

[Dominic · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you still believe that migration leads to economic benefits, or that diversity is our strength, this is another book for you among many others that have appeared in recent years to address the pro-migration propaganda that has been forcibly fed to everyone in the Western world. Jones has written several books on this topic, with this one saying the quiet part out loud.

Assimilation

Before diving deep into comparative statistics, Jones makes several points about how migrants assimilate and how they don’t. The fact of the matter is that migrants at large, even when fleeing economic and societal disaster from their homeland, will vote and change their new country to make it as similar as possible to the one that they left. He provides a few examples of this, most notably in Argentina when it faced up to a 30% demographic replacement of syndicalists from abroad. Within one generation, Argentina began extreme economic overhaul into a socialist one. Whether or not you agree with socialism is not the point; the point is that the migrants changed the nation they migrated to. Even in less extreme examples, the cultural and economic effects on migration are noticeable. One example Jones gives is of a Danish woman who, upon visiting the U.S., left her baby in her stroller outside while she and her family went shopping. The woman was dumbfounded when she was arrested for child neglect, because in Denmark such things are common. Low crime and high trust-rate among strangers means that Danish people have no fear of adults doing harmful things to children in their country. “Who would steal a baby?” she likely thought. But living in such a desirable country had made her naive to the cultural differences abroad, in a country like ours where there are many more evil people who would do such a heinous crime.

SAT Scores For Countries

No matter how many examples one gives similar to those above, a pro-migration fanatic will dismiss them as inconclusive evidence. So then, Jones looks into research done by other economists to see if we can find some hard evidence to vindicate the assumptions made so far. One way he does this is by looking at a nation’s SAT score; not the kind of SAT you are thinking of though. The three categories Jones and other economists use to measure economic strength the predictability level of the average income per person in a given nation are:

State History since 0 AD
Agricultural History in thousands of years
Technological History since 1500

These measurements are largely based on the preliminary work done by Diego Comin of Harvard, Bill Easterly of NYU, and Erick Gong of U.C. - Berkeley. This group, henceforth referred to as “Comin,” had a wider range of measurements and while they had reached useful conclusions were setback by the limitations of their research model. Nevertheless, their findings were reported as (scale of 0 to 1):

Europe (Eastern and Western): 0.86
Asia (East and South): 0.66
Africa (North and sub-Saharan): 0.32
Americas (North and South): 0.14

A summary of every advanced civilization:

1000 BC 0 AD 1500 AD
Western Europe: 0.65 0.96 0.94
China: 0.90 1.00 0.88
India: 0.67 0.90 0.70
Arab world: 0.95 1.00 0.70

The year 1500 is the benchmark for many economists doing this type of research because that was the time in which mankind was on the brink of global migration. (For those who are interested in this research, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia covers much of the same material). As mentioned, while these findings are useful, they still have their limitations. Jones wants specific nations and to use the SAT model. Yet even the standard SAT model must be modified. Jones notes that other research suggests the T category is much more important than the S and the A, because technologically advanced societies earn higher wages and have better economies. Jones provides the SAT score of every single nation in the appendix, which I will show here with the top ten and the bottom ten. Tiebreakers will be determined by the nation’s non-modified SAT score.

Top Ten
United Kingdom (1.00)
Spain (.96)
Portugal (.95)
Australia (.92)
Norway (.91)
Denmark (.90)
Belgium (.90)
Sweden (.89)
Costa Rica (.89)
Netherlands (.88) and South Korea (.88)

Bottom Ten
Uganda (.18)
Zambia (.16)
Cameroon (.12)
Lesotho (.12)
Benin (.11)
Botswana (.11)
Gabon (.09)
Sierra Leone (.08)
Mauritania (.07)
Papua New Guinea (.0)
*The Netherlands and South Korea are identical even when accounting for non-modified SAT.

Jones notes that China and India are anomalies, not being in the top ten. The main reason for this is due to overpopulation, which leads to an unsustainable economy. I see Costa Rica as the anomaly, but he doesn’t comment on it. At any rate, one could refer back to the preface of the book where Jones explains how to save a nation facing economic disaster. He uses hypothetical examples of how to do this, but we can use the data here. Let’s say we want to rescue one of the nations in the bottom ten… how would we do this? We take the ethnic people of any of the nations in the top ten category and migrate them to one of the bottom ten countries, ideally 2% of the population for about a dozen years. The migrants will organically begin to increase wages and technological development. The inverse is also true, that importing people from the bottom ten into the top ten will lead to economic disaster. However, the migrants from the bottom ten would benefit from being in a top ten nation because they get to feed off the infrastructure, welfare benefits, the education system, etc., that is, until they make it like the one they left. The natives have no benefits, only their own detriment. So when people argue in favor of migration, they are arguing for a one-way relationship. You can probably think of real-world examples of the data here. One of the more obvious ones is the Dutch settlements in South Africa and English settlements in Rhodesia. The establishment and maintenance of Rhodesia was quite remarkable, but after the Africans kicked out the evil white “colonizers”, all of it fell apart. The same is true of South Africa.

Diversity

Despite all the evidence suggesting diversity is a net-negative for society, some will still argue it is beneficial because we can pull together those who are highly skilled from around the world. The issue is that even in such an environment, diversity will cause strain in the workplace. Jones references Kenya, one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Jonas Hjort conducted research on diversity in Kenya for this reason and found that when the Kikuyu and Luo people are forced to work together, “they were 5 percent less productive than ethnically homogeneous pairs - and productivity dropped by 8 percent when the supplier and the processors were from different ethnic groups.” Even worse, when it came to voting for national policy, each tribe was willing to vote for political measures that would hurt their own pay if it meant it would hurt other tribes’ pay! Political violence and racial riots are rife in Kenya and other African countries due to diversity. Note that we are talking about diversity in Africa, where they are all African, and so not only can they not blame whites for any of this, but they recognize ethnic differences even among other blacks. This is true for all racial groups. Of course when the larger racial group is threatened, however, the different ethnicities will band together.

But is this an anecdotal example? No. Jones provides many other instances of racial riots and self-discrimination. As another aside, Jared Taylor writes about many of the exact same things Jones does in his book White Identity, and yet that book has been banned from Goodreads and Taylor has been deplatformed. Further, Willie Sutton who has conducted similar research on diversity in the workplace has noted that the data that allegedly demonstrates diversity leads to better outcomes is deliberately misleading because it conflates correlation with causation. Placing unfit and unqualified workers in a thriving environment and watching it continue to perform well is nothing but exploiting a controlled variable for a biased outcome. Additionally, it means those who benefit from forced diversity measures do so not of their input but to the work of those who do perform well, in this case, the natives of the wealthier nations.

Criticisms

Although the book is great throughout, there are two criticisms I had, the first having to do with the legal prescriptions of forced diversity. Jones mentions that the reason elites push for diversity is because they have access to certain tools and measures to filter out diverse people who don’t fit the bill, whether that be their talent or something else. During recruitment and hiring processes, for example, it may benefit these businesses to look for talent outside their own nation to find the diamond in the rough, whereas the local mom and pop stores aren’t able to implement such strict vetting systems. While all of this may be true, he largely ignores the fact that people in important positions of power implement forced diversity for malicious reasons. A serious discussion of this must be had whenever the topic of immigration and diversity is brought up.

The second issue is Jones’ fixation on free-market capitalism. He believes that a country’s success is above all dependent on its cultural cohesion, but also how lenient it is in the capitalist schema. Again, I don’t deny this is true, but there is much nuance to this. There are many countries that rank well in the SAT scores that have heavily regulated economic measures, what some may call “socialist.” There may be a semantic difference here, but semantics are important in this case lest someone reads a book like this and is convinced that Meta monopolizing social media and BlackRock buying out entire neighborhoods is good for the country.

Conclusion

The more books I read about immigration, the more I realize that all of this data and research is self-evident in our everyday lives. You don’t need to be a statistician or an economist to know anything that is presented here, or in We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, or anywhere else. It is obvious which nations are better, which cultures are better, that diversity is bad, that migrants exploit the countries they move to and participate in neocolonialism, and so on. If these things were not intuitively obvious, then none of us would be alive because our ancestors would not have progressed.

The issue is that those in positions of power hand-wave the common man’s skepticism and complaints of diversity as “paranoia” and “bigotry” and whatever else. So then, men like Jones, Borjas, Comin, Gong, etc, do serve a purpose in that sense. They are experts we can appeal to in order to counter the other “expert” claims and propaganda. Yet do these propagandists care? No. Joe Biden could have chosen any of the aforementioned men as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, yet who did he pick? Jared Bernstein, whose expertise is not economics, but music, and played a huge role in our migration problem.

We can draw certain conclusions from this book, that not all nations are equal, and not all cultures are equal. Migrants will disproportionately vote in favor of their own interests, even if those interests are the exact reasons they fled from their country. Humans innately work better with those closest to them in terms of genetic similarity, and do worse when working with others. Migration can destroy a country’s economy if it imports people who are incompatible with its culture, political scheme, and ethnicity. These facts are conclusive in the research put forth here.

[Wej · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book takes on a provocative question: import the third world, become the third world. How much truth is there to this claim? Jones argues that quite a lot, and his analysis will not surprise anyone who has ever wandered into neighbourhoods of otherwise wealthy cities that feel transplanted from the developing world.

Jones unpicks the slogan diversity is our strength and suggests that while diversity may benefit elites, it does not necessarily work the same way for the rest of society. He distinguishes between cognitive diversity, which he sees as genuinely valuable, and ethnic diversity, which he treats with far more scepticism, especially in the way management consultancies such as McKinsey promote it.

This brief book, the third in his Singaporean trilogy, revisits the SAT framework for predicting national success, based on State capacity, Agriculture, and Technology History. Adjusted for population, these long-run measures help explain present-day GDP, with Technology proving the strongest predictor.

Jones insists that it is ultimately people who matter, more than abstract notions of states or borders. Migrants and their descendants often retain distinctive behaviours and beliefs for generations, particularly around trust, savings, and family structures. He gives extensive examples, especially of Chinese migration, where industriousness, market orientation, and individualism tend to translate into prosperity both for the migrants themselves and for the societies that host them.

The most straightforward policy conclusion he offers is that countries seeking rapid development, particularly in Africa, could benefit from encouraging Chinese immigration. Whether one agrees with him or not, the argument is sharply put, easy to follow, and grounded in a blend of economic history and contemporary data.

[Izalette · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good ideas, summaries of papers, explanations, but I loathe the writing style.

US people buy stocks that they can’t control the company; in Italy people have low trust so mostly family-run corporations.

Country of origin predicts the frugality of their descendants.

Ethnic diversity can hurt productivity (e.g. Kenya).
Diverse neighborhoods have lower trust.
Ethnic diversity reduces demand for gov, shifting spending to more private goods for the politically favored ethnic groups.

International country risk guide (icrg) measures government quality whether a nation is likely to pay off its debt.

Malaysia seems like the golden example of successful Chinese diaspora. However, what about India? Would be interested to study Indians too

Market dominant minorities (Chinese) provide bigger tax base, bigger pot of good for government to distribute to others.

Germans is the most conform when it comes to cooperation and the role of gov. Mexican and Poles are the least.

1st of all, all the data and papers cited are 2010 (the latest was 2013) which is 13 years behind. 2nd unnecessary metaphors and analogies. For example, there is a whole page going on typo in bible manuscript to DNA copying process to genetics distance. Even though the purpose is to explain, genetic distance, it feels loquacious. Another example “If the extremely ancient past matters, it will matter for the “less recent past”, not just for today.”Why can’t you just say “it will matter for the past” what does “less recent pass” even mean?

Non-NHW (non Hispanic white). Can’t he just call it Hispanic white? I mean …

I’m tired of the tire kicking horse racing repetition.

[Unsympathizer]

It's hard to rate a book like this. Garett Jones makes some very convincing claims about the prosperity of nations in relation to the quality of immigrants they receive. His core argument is that the number one predictor of immigrant success is if that immigrant came from a society that was technologically advanced in the year 1500. He notes that many immigrants retain the attitudes they have in their old country, sometimes even for generations, and that 100% assimilation is basically a myth. And finally, he introduces the concept of the I-7, seven countries that drive most of the innovation in the world, and argues that those countries cannot have open borders, as mass low-skilled immigration to them would hamper innovation for the entire world. He does encourage people from the I-7 to immigrate to lower-performing countries in order to bolster their economy.

Now, I can't attest that this thesis is entirely correct. Bryan Caplan and Alex Nowrasteh have argued against some of Jones's points. But perhaps the main issue with his arguments is that he only considers the economic side, that he thinks that increasing wealth is the only thing that matters for a country. Both support and opposition to immigration is heavily driven by cultural factors, and his failure to make cultural arguments weakens his book, despite how strong his economic points are.

So I would recommend this book for those who want a fresh and astute analysis of the economic impacts of immigration, and not much else.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short book on an interesting idea. It feels like an extended article with digressions rather than a proper examination on the matter. Dr Jones is an economist and so focuses on the economy, for better and worse. It is a shame that the cultural baggage immigrants take with them is brushed over as Dr Jones is willing to discuss soberly some quite startling data. I have two main problems with the book. First, the case study of Chinese migrants in SE Asia. Whilst remarkable, this case study does not feel detailed enough to really make its case. It ignores the proximity of these communities to China, and more uncomfortably, IQ. IQ is understudied and has been battered by critiques, somewhat valid, of its racial biases. But this would be worth looking at, especially the relation between IQ and certain values. I also dislike some of the writing style, especially as it goes on. Too many uses of 'kicking the tyre' and most egregiously the book ends on a discussion of the """"excellent"""" Thor Ragnarok. Still, has some interesting ideas backed by studies even if the book could definitely have been fleshed out more.

[Christian Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise book that you can read on a day off. The author’s thesis is that cultural traits—such as trust in strangers and attitudes toward the role of government—persist across generations, even when people migrate to different countries. Thus, immigration will make the country receiving immigrants more like the places from which those immigrants come. Garett Jones distills evidence from multiple papers and presents it in a simplified form, which still involves discussing regression and statistical methods. So, if you’re not at all mathematically inclined, this book might not be the best choice for you.

What I got out of this book is lots of evidence contradicting the dogma that immigration is an unalloyed good. The conclusion of the book, rather, is that if a country chooses to accept immigration, it should preferably come from societies with a long history of technological development and with values not too dissimilar from its own.

[Mehmet Kalaycı · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book important for understanding the economic behavior of migrants in the destination country. Nevertheless, there are many more factors that determine the evolution of migrant behavior, such as the protection of mother tongue and customs, which better define whether a person is integrated or assimilated into a society over generations.

[Adebayor Brasil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read. Simple exposition of the theory and its building blocks. Focus is on macro concepts and not on the micro stuff why people take their culture with them when migrating and keeping it for generations.