1. Since we can't figure out how to make poor countries rich, should we just move the people to countries that are?
2. Will polygamists start using sex-selection technique to cull surplus boys?
3. Why is this funny?
« You're getting warmer | Main | Memento mori » Thought provoking questions11 Sep 2007 09:11 am Comments (18)
Re: #2 I don't think that sex selection would be desireable. Every polygamist group needs some boys to grow up into polygamist men. So why not have all the boys God provides, and simply wait for the most amenable ones to present themselves, and chuck the rest out? I see it as far more tolerable from the persepective of the religious principles they supposedly hold. Sex selection is interfering with God's plan, while throwing out troublesome boys enforces it. 
Re: #2 What's missing from the equation are Shakers. Link up a polygamist community with a Shaker community and the boys have a place to go. After that sifting and resifting, I imagine Spencer Tracy needs to make an appearance.
aid workers furtively dodge the bottom billion because most find life unglamorous in outposts such as Bangui and Vientiane. - Clemens on Collier I don't know Bangui, but Vientiane is a lovely city, and would be an aid workers' favorite except for the fact that the Laotian government is largely lazy, incompetent, and hostile, and makes it really hard to get anything done. Anyone claiming that the reason why Phnom Penh is crawling with aid workers, while Vientiane has few, has something to do with "glamor" needs to rethink their thesis. The best thing for their prospects may simply be to get out--to leave for a place where growth has already commenced. One problem here would have to do with a sin I'd think a libertarian would be least likely to commit: picking winners. Who would have confidently said in 1992 that Bangladesh was a candidate for sustainable growth? Why is Chad more of a terminal case than Mongolia? Jeffrey Sachs has a great passage in "Ending Poverty" about giving a speech in India in 1993 or so, trying to reassure skeptical Indian intellectuals that deregulation and free trade will catalyze their economy. "What export industries will grow?" they ask. Thank goodness, he says, it was the market that decided, and not him -- he would have picked labor-intensive manufacturing; in fact, it was wired white-collar services, which no one could have imagined. Togo is a basket case at the moment, but it's next door to Ghana, which is a stable democracy with consistent 5% growth.
Re #1: your assumption is that poor countries are poor completely independent of their population. Genes and culture have nothing to do with poverty. It's just bad luck, over and over again. That's quite far fetched. We know, for example, that there are memes that are deeply inimical to wealth-building. If we allow people carrying those memes to immigrate, then we change the memepool here. Our memepool is resistant, but how much? There is also strong evidence that people in much of the third world are dumber than the first world average. Some of this is environmental, an effect of real poverty, real privation (something we don't have). Better nutrition would probably raise their IQs 5-10 points on average. But some of it is either not environmental, or else it is "deep" in the sense of looking a lot like it is genetic: very resistant to any intervention. Check out "IQ and the Wealth of Nations". Importing masses of dumb people is another risk. It may be that they integrate and then absorb the magic dust that makes us all so smart, and meld in. But blacks have not done so after hundreds of years being here, and 40 years -- 2 generations -- after gaining full citizenship. They still lag whites in IQ by a standard deviation, same as they did in 1965, and this despite intensive efforts towards education. That our inner cities look a bit like the third world may not be a coincidence. How much risk are you willing to take on my behalf? Is, say, risking a 1 in 100 chance that mass immigration will drag down America into a socialist hellhole acceptable to you if it helps a million people out of poverty? Who is to decide and how? Let me make a humble proposal here: just let's wait for 10 years. That is all. Geneticists are currently hot on the trail of IQ, tracking it back into the genome. They already have found a few genes that correlate with IQ. In 10 years, we'll probably know 100 times more than we do today as to whether IQ is genetically based. (Most scientists who know much of anything suspect it is, but more evidence would be nice, including specific genes and their specific phenotypic effects.)
I think it should be pointed out that one could accomplish the same thing one would by having First World countries import a Third World underclass by having Third World countries import a First World overclass. Not that all in it's what I'd be for.
"Since we can't figure out how to make poor countries rich" But what makes you think that it is knowledge that is lacking? I think that the technology is there, but the political will in the countries themselves is missing. There are too many vested interests in those countries, and unfortunately it takes time to modernize legal, political, economic and financial systems. The Millenium Challenge Account is a much better approach than the old system of rewarding the governments that produced the most poverty. The incentives are wrong, and we should do what we can to improve them, rather than trying to bail out bad governments around the world by paying for their mistakes.
But we have made many, many, many poor countries rich. The data actually implies we are rather good at it. Why in the world would you think otherwise?
Incidentally, it should be noted that the 150 billion dollars per year the US is currently spending on the Iraq war alone would be enough to lift every one of the 1 billion people in the world living in absolute poverty (under 1$/day) above the absolute poverty level. The mechanics of getting that money to all the recipients without vitiating the effort through various distortions would be difficult, perhaps insoluble. But it's pretty clear that doing this is not out of the scale of what the world's rich countries could decide to do, if they wanted; it could hardly leave us worse off than throwing that sum down the toilet in Iraq.
j mct - it has been tried...
Ugly Truth - I would not put too much faith in genetics. Barbados and Haiti both have populations almost entirely decended from West African slaves. According to Wikipedia, Barbados has a GDP per head of ~$17610. Haiti has a GDP per head of ~$435. Race clearly is not the only thing at work.
By the way, according to Robert McNeil's "Story of English," Barbados slave owners, being farthest east, had first pick of all the slave ships. They bought slaves just from African tribes reputed for being cooperative and efficient. Then they sent the hard cases on to Jamaica and the United States. This may explain a lot about why Barbados is so much nicer than Jamaica.
Megan writes: "Since we can't figure out how to make poor countries rich, should we just move the people to countries that are?" First, there were in 2006, according to the CIA World Factbook, 5,043,000,000 people living in countries with lower GDPs per capita (ppp-adjusted) than Mexico's GDP per capita. Immigration absolutely cannot be anything other than the merest drop in the bucket in terms of affecting global living standards unless the West is to be overwhelmed by not millions but by billions of immigrants. Second, the two countries where there have been the most important reductions in poverty in recent years, China and India, had minimal emigration as a percent of the total population. So, economic growth is possible, if poor countries get their acts together. Third, there's a lot of evidence that heavy emigration subsidizes bad policies in the sending countries such as Mexico, home to the world's richest man. We actually do know how Mexico could grow faster -- e.g., the many monopolies reduce growth by a 1% per year -- but the Mexican elites use the border as a safety valve to avoid fundamental reforms that would upset their cushy situation.
4. Would those who promote #1 be willing to post their current wealth and liberty as well as that of all their descendents in the form of a bond if doing #1 doesn't work out? That is, if we do #1, and it doesn't work out, those who pushed the plan either overtly or covertly would lose all their wealth and their liberty and the same would apply to all their descendents. Sure, the ideas a bit on the Derb-ish side, but I think if we could arrange that while it might affect risk-tasking to a fair extent, it would also cause promoters of things like #1 to examine their ideas in a bit more depth than they currently do.
Why not try a similar experiment on the micro-level? We could get a few dozen affluent, intelligent, young egalitarian bloggers such as Ms. McArdle, Matt Yglesias, etc., and have them each adopt a child from sub-Saharan Africa. Then we can see if these children grow up to be as smart and successful as Megan, Matt, etc.
Actually #1 is at work every day in the US. With a few well-publicized exceptions, older cities continue to stagnate and lose population despite decades of urban renewal schemes designed to save them. What has worked for many of the former inhabitants of those cities and their descendents is migration to either the suburbs or another part of the country. Those folks did not wait around for the latest school reform panacea to work in their city, they moved to places that already had better schools. They did not wait for the latest redevelopment project to generate something more than temporary construction jobs, they went to places already looking for workers. Sure, Carlos Slim and his cronies benefit by the export of Mexican workers to the US, but the US probably benefits even more by the application of ambitions that were thwarted in the old country.
"Sure, Carlos Slim and his cronies benefit by the export of Mexican workers to the US, but the US probably benefits even more by the application of ambitions that were thwarted in the old country." No: the owners of certain labor-intensive business benefit, but the externalities are a big net liability for the country as a whole. See, for example, this study by the Center for Immigration Studies:
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Re: 1)
This solution only works if you assume two things. The first is that the reason poor countries are poor only has to do with some combination of local institutions and geography and nothing to do with the culture of the people themselves. The second is that moving one billion poor people from impoverished countries to wealthy countries would not appreciably change the culture of the wealthy countries.
The first assumption is questionable, and the second one is completely daft.
Posted by Bill H | September 11, 2007 9:42 AM