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Notes -
The longer version of Bryan Caplan's take still seems reasonable to me:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-india
There are serious problems with Indian governance. And the Soviet style experiment that you think can easily be shaken off is still influencing them to have awful agricultural policies.
The difference between the worst poverty in the world and one of the richest countries in the world is not biocapital it's government policy. It's most clearly visible in Korea, where the DMZ separates two governments, not two people. And the difference between them is as stark as things get.
This is a common fallacy in the nature v. nurture argument.
Just because it is possible to mess up a high IQ society does not mean it is possible to redeem a low IQ society.
Communism can ruin North Korea. But good government can't fix India. At least, not if the Indians are allowed to vote.
Consider this analogy. You could raise Lebron James in a cave and starve him of nutrients and thereby ruin his athletic potential. But that doesn't mean you can take an average person and turn him into an NBA player with great training. Nature determines your potential. Nurture helps you realize it.
Are the English a high IQ society? I'd consider them middling at best. Germany and Switzerland are both probably better off, and most Jewish sub communities within Europe, like in Hungary were easily way higher.
The industrial revolution started in England. It was undoubtedly good policies and culture that got them there, because their smart neighbors had to play catch-up rather than leading the way. And they were arguably filled with a bunch of malnutritioned low-IQ idiots breathing smoke and drinking alcohol constantly while they accomplished the whole thing, its possible they were much worse off in "biological" potential than India is today.
In your analogy you are talking about a zero sum competition: "being an NBA player". There are limited spots and not everyone can do it. But I don't think that applies to having a high standard of living and a working civilization. In the analogy it would be more like "can you learn to play basketball at all". I think a 4ft tall not very bright child can learn to play basketball. And I think having a working civilization requires about a similar level of biological potential.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that getting the culture and the policy correct is the actual really difficult part.
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms suggests eugenic selection pressures as the primary reason behind the industrial revolution starting in England.
One can always quibble with an analogy. I can easily break a glass cup by throwing it. It's much more difficult to assemble a bunch of glass shards into a cup. Dropping a baby would be an easy way to lower its expected IQ, not so easy to improve a baby's IQ beyond the basics of housing, feeding him or her, sending him or her to school or homeschooling. As dictator you can at your leisure lower the IQ of your country by Pol Potting the smart fraction, not so obvious how to improve your country's IQ, or a segment of your country's IQ. Stateside progressives have been trying for decades with taxpayer money, resources, and children.
Clark's point raises the question "why Britain in the late 1700's?". The selection effect he talks about has been in place just about everywhere in history. The rich upper class reproduced in high numbers and crowded down the poor into subsistence and eventually starvation. Why not a continental European country? Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England.
I don't think I was "quibbling" with the analogy. I do think that happens sometimes, when you can stretch the analogy to make a point that doesn't make any sense in reality. But my point stands outside of the analogy: a working civilization does not require a high IQ population. It requires good culture and policy. Reproducing those things is hard, but does not require high biological potential.
Is there one—or better yet, multiple you can pick—or any arbitrary continental European country(ies) I can pick and you demonstrate as such like Clark did with England?
To circle-back to a basketball metaphor, this does not sound too different from from the claim height isn't required to be good at basketball, it just requires good skills and feel for the game. It dodges the empirical finding that height, is in fact, quite vital and overwhelmingly so to being good at basketball, and crowds out other factors, despite height not being ex-ante necessary nor sufficient for being good at basketball.
France.
And I'm tempted to just rewrite exactly what I wrote above. Working civilization is not a zero sum game like competitive basketball. It's not about being better than everyone else, it's about being good enough to cross a threshold. More like can you shoot a basket, rather than can you win a game of basketball.
Okay, and France how so? Along the lines of the evidence of what Clark described.
Please provide more than argument by assertion. I shouldn’t have to ask. Nor am I wedded to Clark’s hypothesis.
And it’s noted that you tried to dodge your previous claim of “Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England,” and the basketball metaphor in general, skipping over the possibility that I select the country or countries to be evaluated. Maybe I was too charitable in leaving you a potential out.
Ditto… one can always re-assert.
Ah I had a reversed understanding of what you were asking. Like I was gonna pick a country and you'd demonstrate why it doesn't work.
But no I'm not really gonna put that level of investment into this discussion.
I'm gonna gesture at things and ideas, and in return I'll not expect much more than other people just gesturing at things and ideas.
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What's your basis for saying that?
Not necessarily - there are some other pretty compelling arguments as to why it was specifically 18th century Britain where the factors leading to the industrial revolution converged (i.e. the access to coal, and economic viability of mining it)
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Mostly spearheaded by Scots, IIRC.
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The average IQ in Europe is about 100 (tautologically, most of the IQ tests are normed here), the average IQ in India is 76.
What India has (thanks to the caste system) is thousands of different ethnic groups, some of which are clearly very intelligent. It hardly makes sense to talk about Indians as an ethnic group, any more than it makes sense to talk about Americans as an ethnic group.
Could the industrial revolution have started in East Asia if their economic policies and political systems were different? Absolutely. Could it have started in India? I'm skeptical. An intelligent smart fraction (that is kept smart through not intermarrying with the masses) can certainly do a lot (see South Africa), but median must matter too. If it didn't, we would see a lot more wealthy countries than we do.
Europe's average IQ is 100 today. And that "100" has been a has changed in meaning over the last century with the Flynn effect.
We don't know what it was in 1800, because the test didn't exist at the time. We do know that a bunch of things with negative impacts on IQ were part of their daily lives. Everyone was drinking beer and wine, since it was the main way to get clean water. Which means alcohol during pregnancy, and early adolescence. They were burning coal and wood constantly to keep warm, that destroys health. There were rolling famines in Ireland, and refugees from it were suffering from malnutrition in early childhood.
I would not be surprised if the average IQ of Britain was in the 75-85 range in the late 1700s. They dealt with it and built a world spanning empire because of superior culture and policy.
Well the developed world has also had dysgenic fertility since the 1800s, so it could well be a case that the two things balance out.
You have to also consider that the rest of the world also had famine, disease and pollution in 1800. You're comparing India now to (a rough outline of) Britain in 1800, as opposed to comparing India in 1800 to Britain in 1800.
India's average IQ is far too low to merely be a product of not having gone through the full Flynn Effect. Maybe once it's more developed it'll be 86 instead of 76, but India is not going to see IQ scores like we see in East Asia, the gap is too vast.
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Its common because it it is observably true. Whatever effect "biocapital" might have is small when compared to the effects of culture and policy.
The million dollar question that everybody here seems to be dancing around is that IF all this nonsense about "bioleninism" and "elite human capital" are true, why are the "best" in India struggling with issues that the "middle" in states like Mississippi and Alabama solved 100 years ago when said states are supposed to be degenerate backwaters only barely removed from the third-world?
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While I think Bryan Caplan, Noah Smith, and co are correct that with reasonable economic policies India could climb above the deepest rungs of poverty i.e. no more shitting in the street, basic literacy, and an end to chronic child malnutrition, and that this is something the rest of the world ought to encourage and celebrate, they are far too bullish on its long-term convergence with industrialized nations.
Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:
First off, this man has apparently never told an Indian Uber driver that he's in a hurry to get to the airport. And as a supporter of elite Indian immigration (we can certainly quibble on what "elite" means, since that's really the crux of the issue here), I must strenously oppose the claim that we can just import randomly-selected(?!) people from any country and expect a good outcome, economic, cultural, or otherwise. We in fact have a pretty good idea of what importing random Indians looks like, in the form of Guyana and Trinidad, and it isn't pretty.
As for North Korea, I think the fact that in their current state they are still able to build and test nuclear missiles and field an impressive IMO team, among other achievements, is a testament to the inherent biocapital of the Korean people, and something we don't see in other nations with similar regimes like Eritrea or Turkmenistan. With nations as with individuals, you may sabotage someone with the potential to be intelligent and successful by starving them as a child or hitting them in the head with a hammer, but I have yet to the see the opposite.
I'm never sure what to make of Caplan. He's clearly contrarian enough to acknowledge that genetics and IQ matter (see The Case Against Education) but he also states explicitly that he believes in Magic Dirt (or as he describes it, 'Magic Institutions') in The Case for Open Borders.
He also seems to believe that a migrant increasing his wages by moving to a rich country is actually increasing his productivity, rather than just benefitting from cost disease.
I remember reading one of travel pieces about Japan, and there were a lot of comments asking him to square what he noticed about Japan (the trains run on time, people are hyper-polite, there is no crime) with his support for open borders. The one I remember was something along the lines of 'Should Japan open its borders to Somalia? If yes, is this because it will benefit the Somali migrants or because it will benefit the Japanese?). I can't find the comment now, so I guess he deleted it. But looking here, he seems to be mostly interested in the gains for migrants.
He seems to believe that open borders will turn the whole world into the USA, rather than turning the whole world into South Africa.
He works for libertarian think tanks, so you should think of him as ‘a propagandist for rich people’. The arguments are just spins for increasing immigration, which benefits his employers by providing them with cheaper labor.
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I think Caplan is the worst sort of individual; an isolated elietist living in a gated community that will never have to face the reality his choices make for everyone else, who's intent on maximizing his investments, regardless of the wider consequences.
If that wasn't clear enough, I think he's abhorrent and deserves alot of things, none of them good.
There was a documentary that someone did on the efforts of a Chinese engineer contracted to build a road in the Congo and all the trials and tribulations he had to deal with in regards to the locals. I wonder how he'd react to that. I'm sure it would be telling.
Caplan doesn't believe in the blank slatism, nonetheless he attempts to justify his position with a mix of libertarian autism, utilitarian autism and hypothesized GDP maximisation.
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The governance is a result of the people though. Policy no doubt makes a difference but we have to realise that some things just can't work. You can't for instance have stable families and high tfrs post sexual revolution if you're a liberal secular democracy.
With India, envy, revenge and clan loyalty will never go away.
Boy if you're mad at the way the US educated elite have steered our country, get a load of how they got directed since independence.
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The biodeterministic hypothesis effectively asks us to believe that there is some magical property of the 35th parallel that causes Koreans born above it to be genetically predisposed towards Communism and Koreans born below it to be genetically predisposed towards Capitalism. Ditto the border between the former East and West Germany.
Do you believe in magic?
It absolutely does not, that's an absurd strawman.
Nobody is literally 100% biodeterminist (in the sense that your genetics determines things like what language you speak). Biodeterminists believe that genetics matters a lot, not that it is literally the only thing that matters.
It's not an "absurd strawman" it's the logical consequence of the claim being made by multiple users in this thread (including the one i was responding to) that "bioleninism" will always trump policy and culture.
My point is that unless these people are prepared to argue that the observed disparities in quality of life between North and South Korea, East and West Germany, Red States and Blue States, etc... are all biological in origin I am going to argue that thier hypothesis has been falsified via experimentation, and that the best thing the "policy and culture don't matter" crowd could do for thier cause is to stop attracting attention.
No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin. That the gaps in wealth between North and South Korea or East and West Germany are explained by economic policies alone is self-evident. That does not mean that biological and cultural differences don't exist or matter.
Looking at communist countries alone we can see the difference between those with high human capital (East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea), which are able to maintain an orderly society with advanced weapons manufacturing and scientific research and pose a credible military threat to their neighbors, and those with lower human capital (Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia), which are a threat to no one but their own miserable inhabitants.
They are though, or rather they are arguing that people become capitalist or communist due to biology. Which then begs the question, what is it about the 35th parallel or the border between East and West Germany that causes genes to express themselves one way on one side and a different way on the other?
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To some degree, but the Korean situation proves there's more to it than that. There's no way the North Koreans are just genetically suited to Juche.
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