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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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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:

Even if you have cultural fears about immigrants in general, what exactly is culturally objectionable about Indians? I live in one of top centers of Indian migration in the United States, and no one here even claims that they’re clinging to their native culture of crazy driving and rampant littering. They’re definitely not unleashing stray cattle on us. Yes, I know Indian Americans are self-selected from high castes and top schools. But after ten days in India, I confidently declare that the children of randomly-selected Indians would do well here. Like the Indians who are already here, they’d adopt almost everything good about modern U.S. culture, while retaining the strong family values that Americans have been foolishly forgetting.

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.

Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:

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.

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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