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Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.
Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US, yet it lags the US significantly both in GDP per capita (although I am not convinced that this is a very good metric) and also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).
Some possible counterarguments:
"The best talent of Europe came to the US." - But Germany, for example, has a higher average IQ than the US does. In any case, the IQ difference between the US and Europe, in either direction, does not seem to be large enough to be significant.
"Europe has been dealing with the aftermath of WW2." - But that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with, or why the US was not comparably harmed by its Civil War. The US Civil War killed a comparable fraction of the US population to what Europe lost in WW2, but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.
"Europe has been shackled by socialism." - But similarly to my objection to #2, this does not explain why Europe is, to begin with, more fond of socialism than the US is.
Am I getting something wrong? Is Europe more innovative than I give it credit for?
US/Northern Europe per-hour GDP is pretty similar, but US workers work a lot more, hence higher GDP per capita.
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The US Civil War occurred at the right point in history, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, to allow for this. While the South was economically devastated(and was so for at least a century afterwards), the Northern regions now had an entire breadbasket of cheap agricultural workhorses to harvest from without caring about the consequences.
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HBD isn't ever the only factor. North and South Korea are a great example of that. (But note that almost all Americans are recently descended from adventurers, while Europeans on the other hand are descended from the people who didn't go on adventure.)
The EU's economic (and to a point also social) policy is basically corporatism (in the old sense). That makes sense, because that's what Germany has always been like since the Kaiserreich, and France is ultimately quite similar even though it got there via a different route. It's better than communism as an economic system, but it's not going to get you the raw economic performance of USA-style capitalism. (Proponents will defend it on other grounds.) There's been some movement away from it - it was much, much more intensely so as late as the 90s - but only slowly and carefully.
More community cohesion might actually have a drawback as well. People are less independent. If you have to worry about what the neighbours will think, you're less likely to go and try something. The social response to ambition is often: "who does he think he is?". You're not supposed to rise above your station. If you try it you earn the ire of your peers; if you succeed then doubly so, and also your new peers won't quickly accept you.
The USA's quasi-libertarian foundation, though marred as it is by now, helps a lot. You're allowed to be ambitious. The system won't usually actively try to prevent you from succeeding. Worse average human capital - if that even is the case - is mitigated by the fact that the variance is allowed to be a lot higher. The people at the top of the bell curve get to invent things that improve the whole society, and become filthy rich in the process.
Your old friends will generally be proud, not envious. Your new peers will respect you for having managed to climb up, not look down on you for not having 1000 years of nobility behind you. The government won't - at least not nearly as much as in Europe - kick you right back down for interfering with the profits of the 1000 years of nobility.
The ghettos in the cities don't impede that process much. They could, if the problem gets too bad, but the USA is no South Africa yet.
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With respect to software there are large path dependence effects: large software companies already in the area attract high quality talent which means there's a larger pool of high quality talent to hire from for new companies and that the possibility of an acquisition exit exists, which in turn means VC is less risky and the system feeds back into itself. We'll have to see if the pandemic and the high crime has finally broken the spell.
It would be interesting to see how big of a difference remains when you take out the effects of the software industry.
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Germany is actually a strong example against this entire point. The Marshal Plan is a red herring, France and the UK got more from it than Germany. After the war everybody was predicting that the UK is going dominate Europe economically, because they were relatively unscathed (if I'm not misremembering, I think their economy actually grew over the course of the war). It turned out that Germany not only caught up, but overtook them.
In my opinion the impact of the war on economic development is grossly overstated.
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Another explanation - we like it that way. Small scale, cozy, with lots of time to relax, a bit slow? The US can clean it's prime IT hub from human feces. In Eastern Europe capitalism is still wild and people work themselves to the bone. The attitude is different in the west.
Also there are some small European companies that make absolutely critical components and have virtual monopoly. Netherlands with photolithography equipment. And we have the whole fashion thing and premium food and tourism going on.
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Europe is both destroyed by WW1 and WW2 and Socialism comparatively to the US. Yes.
The US's resistance to horrible welfare policies is probably due to white reluctance to extend bad policy to help blacks for many years. Yes.
Probably more importantly, a huge country with a common language is a great place to develop things makes for good. Yes.
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I think you're understating the effects of the most destructive war in history, and how close in history it still is.
WW2 did make Europe a US vassal, the ACW was a largely internal affair.
In any case, trying to fit large historical trends to current events is a fool's errand. We do not have the hindsight to judge these effects yet.
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This is just explained by multi factor analysis. Like the stock market. What are the main historic factors - small cap, value, momentum. I believe there’s like a hundred more.
What’s the big factors for per capita income?
Off the top of my head id guess: HBD, Degree of capitalism, and probably something for geography.
Why is N Korea poor and S Korea rich? Same hbd. One is communists. One is not communists.
What you are noticing is just multiple big factors (my guess is some form of those three are the big three). HBD isn’t the only factor but it’s an important factor.
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European civilisation arose over centuries from the post-apocalyptic mess left in the wake of the Roman empire and was accompanied by nearly ceaseless warfare. The US by contrast arose from a much more stable foundation and then expanded rapidly with the help of advanced technology that made it far easier to maintain and control large amounts of territory. This expansion also had the added bonus of allowing the nation to direct a substantial amount of its energy towards western expansion, rather than having to jostle with neighbours you've been fighting with since days long forgotten. These factors combine to allow the US government to control a substantially larger area than would ever be feasible in Europe, as WW2 quite nicely demonstrates. This control was often fairly loose, but largely unchallenged, resulting in a degree of stability that was not seen outside of the UK in Europe and over an area of territory several times larger.
For the record, I do not subscribe to the "IQ is the be-all and end-all" thing some people seem to around here, but I would describe myself as an ethno-nationalist. I would argue that the United States has succeeded in spite of not being an ethno-state, that its multiple massive advantages have been enough to overcome this disadvantage. Imagine what the US could have achieved with all the energy it has wasted squabbling over race, just think of the forests of trees and oceans of ink wasted on writing about it, the brainpower spent trying to find a way to put blacks and whites in a great collective "get-along-shirt", not to mention the smaller squabbles between the other races.
I often see people on here who look at the runaway success of the US and then draw the conclusion that the US way of doing things must simply be better in all the relevant fields. While I believe the US does lead the way in quite a few areas, I also believe that it is quite probable that many of the systems and methods used in the US either simply wouldn't work in a different enviroment or are actively hindering the US, but that again this is compensated for by a few truly staggering advantages. It's like having an 8 foot tall MMA fighter in a competition, you're probably not going to finish first if you're a rank amateur, but you don't have the same pressure to truly get your technique down if you want to win.
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One model I think works is that innovation = genius + reach.
Let's clone Archimedes and put him in Sub-Saharan Africa. How much GDP will he generate as a sheep-herder in Mali? My guess is - not that much more than a normal sheep-herder.
Now put him into a computer-science class at Stanford graduating in 1990. The same genius could easily generate billions in GDP.
The United States has a more strongly-connected market than Europe. A genius in the US can impact the world much more strongly than one in a small European country. That European may not even be a native English speaker. And Facebook for Luxembourg isn't exactly going to take off, is it? Not that it matters. As you rightly point out, the best ones often go to the US anyway.
The better question, IMO, is what about China? China has more than 3x the population of the US and an average IQ that is perhaps 5 points higher. I'm not going to do the math right now but I believe this would imply that China has something like 10x as many 145 IQ people as does the U.S.
If these people can connect with each other in meaningful ways, it's possible that Chinese-language research and technology will outstrip English-language equivalents in a completely irreversible way. There is no greater reservoir of high IQ people on the planet than China. These would-be world shakers are kept back by either the CCP or some fundamental attribute of Chinese culture/genetics. I think it's probably the CCP. Overseas Chinese like Terrance Tao perform as would be expected based on IQ.
My neighbors are Chinese and both are very intelligent working in high skilled fields. One is a biomedical engineering PHD working in research and the other is a math professor at a not-quite-Ivy level university. They blame Chinese culture at the base level for this and the actions of the CCP being a reflection and institutionalization of that same culture. Its similar to what we call "crab bucket" mentality, but not exactly that. According to them you can become wealthy in China, and many do, but after you reach a certain level of success it actually makes your life worse. If you achieve a level of financial success in China of say 1 million USD a year of more all of you immediate family will quit their jobs confident in the fact that you will support them indefinitely. Your parents, especially your mother, will expect their own standard of living to be comparable to yours immediately if not sooner. You'll be expected to at the least "find jobs" for dozens of cousins and other socially important members of your family's Guanxi ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi ). Your success wont be your success, it will be everyone's good fortune. So there is no point in working harder and smarter just to have an objectively worse life by becoming wealthy; your family and patronage network will never stop having their hands out as long as you have something to take.
Their solution was moving to the US and lying about how much they make. They send a few hundred USD a month to their parents, which is more than the parents make and represents the majority of their extended families income. If their parents knew how much they actually made they would demand much, much more. They still have to field relentless demands that they get family members into the US somehow, and they have to explain that the US doesn't work that way and they can't just "put in a word" with immigration or otherwise grease the wheels.
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I mean a big part of it might be that a higher percent of Chinese geniuses go into things that don’t directly contribute to the bottom line(like bureaucratic ass kissing).
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I'd like to see some backing data to support this.
With regards to the first claim, is there a European country with a white population of only 59.3% Also do we count Hispanic whites or not? Because that changes a lot.
I mean, Spain is pretty much 0% non-Hispanic white.
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The former is obvious. Per the 2020 census, non-Latino whites make up less than 58% of the US population. As for the latter, it is only slightly less obvious. Unlike the US, most European countries have historically defined themselves in ethnic nationalist terms; the "nation" in "nation-state" has historically been an ethnicity. Eg: In Germany until the 1990s, no one who was not ethnically German could become a citizen.
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What about reverse causation or common cause explanations or causal irrelevance?
Reverse causation: economic innovation tends to cause growth, which tends to cause immigration, which tend to cause greater racial diversity.
Common cause: 18th century liberal American values tend to cause both immigration and economic growth etc.
Causal irrelevance: historically contingent factors like slavery and the proximity of a relatively backward country (Mexico) led to large non-white populations in the US, but these were not essential contributors to US growth and innovation.
I'm not endorsing any of these, but suggesting them as alternative explanations.
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