I think part of the issue is how the notion of being a libertarian is defined. To be on the left or right is generally about just agreeing with enough of those policies. You can be on the right or left and have quite a few heretic views. But the difference between a libertarian and someone who is socially liberal and economically deregul…
I think part of the issue is how the notion of being a libertarian is defined. To be on the left or right is generally about just agreeing with enough of those policies. You can be on the right or left and have quite a few heretic views.
But the difference between a libertarian and someone who is socially liberal and economically deregulatory is basically about consistency. The label libertarian is applied not based on just agreeing on a few big issues or some weighted average but about thinking that a certain principle should dictate how we decide questions of politics.
That kind of adherance to principle is in tension with personality traits we seem to regard as open and friendly. No, it's not logically incompatible but it requires a disposition (what you were saying about autistic) to find logical thinking more important than emotional salience.
A libertarian the kind of person who tends to react by pulling back and asking 'ok but does that emotional reaction really make sense' rather than going with the emotional reaction. That doesn't mean they aren't perfectly nice people over coffee but when they are discussing political matters it necessarily means their first reactions and instincts are to point to cold logical principles not emotional appeals.
That means that in the contexts where their being libertarian is salient they are likely to be seen as less warm and sympathetic.
Libertarian's have emotional reactions. I think Bryan's Open Borders stance is largely emotional rather than logical.
And that's fine in a way. I think that there are a lot of limits to pure reason that have been articulated by others in depth. I enjoy an emotionally reflective rejection of unjust authority as defined by libertarian emotional priors nine times out of ten.
As I mentioned above, in art I prefer Mike Judge style libertarianism. The first episode of King of the Hill is about Hank getting enraged over a state official trying to interfere with his raising his son. It's an emotional reaction. In other episodes his "enemy" isn't the government at all, its authoritarian cultural trends, callous bosses, beuaracracies, or misguided individuals. Sometimes the enemy is anarchy (think the episode with the overly "fun" parents). Hank sometimes understands these on a logical level, but really seems to get them at an unconscious level. He has a small L libertarian *instinct* that applies to all social and personal forces not just government without descending into paranoia or anarchy (say, Dale).
Yes, sorry I don't mean to imply they don't. Indeed, I think (well at least for me) the move toward sorta abstraction and principle is an emotional mechanism. It's often a way to feel safe in a subject where those emotions might otherwise overwhelm. But it's interpreted by others as unsympathetic.
>> I think Bryan's Open Borders stance is largely emotional rather than logical.
Why do you think that? As someone who used to be against open borders (even after reading Michael Huemer) and who did a 180 precisely because of Caplan’s arguments, I strongly disagree.
Open borders = mass immigration of low IQ people = degradation or even degeneration of innovation leading first world societies.
I consider it a low upside / high downside proposition. I suspect it would destroy rather than create trillions of dollars in value.
I view the negative externalities of the low IQ to be very high, especially at scale, far more then Bryan's proposed gains from comparative advantage of their low skill labor.
I think this is obvious and Bryan denies it due to ideological, social, and branding commitments.
“I think this is obvious” is not an argument. You can certainly argue that Caplan is wrong, but you went further than that by claiming that his position here is emotional rather than logical.
And all this post shows, if anything, is that your position partly relies on a claim you think is “obvious,” when in fact, this claim is profoundly difficult to prove.
Really? The negative externalities of immigration you named are far higher than the positive consequences it would bring? And you can tell this for certain just from thinking about it in your head? How could you possibly do such a thing?
Looks to me like your own anti-immigrant bias is in full display here.
Your right. I didn't lay out the entire anti-open borders position here with all of my citations. I mean I've laid it out in other comments on this sub stack. And it's been laid out in studies and books by plenty of authors that I've cited in the past. But you're correct, I didn't publish an entire essay in the sub stack comments every single time someone brings the topic up. Nor do I plan to every single time some fresh faced libertarian autist stumbles upon me.
As to the obviousness, its pretty clear to me that low IQ people ruin every place they go to, and that the entire reason the third world is a shithole is because its full of low IQ people. If we become a low IQ country, we will be a shithole too. Places in the first world full of low IQ people (like the ghetto) are shitholes. One has to contort oneself and "live in a beautiful bubble" to ignore such obvious data points.
My friend, I am originally from one of those shitholes, as you call them, so I suspect I have as much real world experience as you with how they are and I have not, in fact, lived in a beautiful bubble.
The assertion here that the third world is the way it is because it is full of low IQ people is hardly supported by the evidence. Unlike you, I will bother to cite my sources. Most notably, the research that people like Daron Acemoglu have done.
In his textbook, Introduction to Modern Economic Growth (a standard intro to macroeconomics for first year PhD student in some top universities), he lays out the case in chapter 4 that the fundamental cause of growth is the nature of institutions.
This chapter substantially overlaps with work he’s done elsewhere, so you can look through the citations in the chapter for more of the evidence he presents. Or you can read the chapter he coauthored in The Handbook of Economic Growth. Or you can read a book like Barriers to Riches.
In my own experience, having a high IQ is vastly overrated. It is obviously not useless. IQ is a reliable predictor of success in any complex field. But IQ does not mean being hard working, nor does it mean being a good person. It doesn’t even mean being rational. Very intelligent people, as far as I can tell, are just as likely as the rest of us mere mortals to be biased.
Congress is full of people who graduated from Harvard Law and other top law schools. You can’t do that unless you have a profoundly high IQ. And what a good job these people are doing running the country. I am far less concerned with these low IQ people you are scared of than I am of high IQ people who think they can tell me what’s best for me, or people like you who think the less intelligent are beneath him.
At any rate, your rant here against “low IQ immigrants from shitholes” is pretty good evidence it is your position on the matter that is motivated by emotion, not mine or Caplan’s.
1) Institutions are a reflection of the IQ of the participants.
2) Low IQ people can't build good institutions, especially over the long run.
3) Your correct that an individual's IQ isn't nearly as important as the IQ of their peer group (since its the peer group, not the individual, that builds institutions). See Hive Mind.
4) For all the faults of congress, we live in a first world country. They haven't gone full Venezuela or anything like you see in the shithole countries.
1.) Institutions are a reflection of a complex number of factors, including historical ones. Putting the entire blame on a single factor, low IQ people, is beyond absurd.
2.) Why not? Besides, even if that’s true, all you need is a few people (few by comparison to the entire population) to set up the institutions. Is it really your claim that there is no one in these third world countries that has a high IQ?
4.) As I recall, Hugo Chavez found support from Noam Chomsky whose IQ is most definitely not low. Many of the destructive ideas socialists keep pushing are supported by very high IQ people in academia. Do you really think Karl Marx had a low IQ?
The people currently in Congress did not set up the institutions. And since there is about as many on one side of the aisle as there is on the other, they largely cancel out each other. This helps maintain things more or less the way they were originally set up, or in a way that resembles, even vaguely, the original setup.
Give up control to a bunch of AOCs, who graduated college with honors and is probably at the very least of average IQ, and I am convinced you will indeed transform the U.S. into a shithole.
1) Yes, they are. And yet no low IQ country has developed first world caliber institutions.
2) There are lots of countries out there with a huge low IQ underclass and a small subset caste of high IQ people (think South Africa or India). They are third world shit holes.
For one it's just not very stable to try and engage in authorities rule over the dumbs when they are a super majority. Apartheid broke down in South Africa.
Secondly, any system that this tiny high IQ elite design has to be used by the low IQ. If you give a well designed hammer to a toddler they can't build a fence. They can smash it into your wall or break dishes though. All those mid-tier average IQ white/asian middle class people are necessary for a well functioning system.
3) Communism can strike anyone, it's true. But it's the low IQ countries that constantly seem to go through this cycle over and over again. And it's usually the low IQ that provide the most mass public support for this stuff. Either with their votes or their rifles. Chavez appealed to the dark skinned losers of his society on egalitarian grounds did he not.
The consistent opponents of these extremist ideologies are ordinary middle class people of average first world intelligence.
1.) Maybe, but that’s called correlation, not causation. You keep making logical errors even low IQ people shouldn’t make.
2.) The so-called high IQ voters in the U.S. consistently believe idiotic things and vote for policies that have been known for a long time to be detrimental to the economy. I am pretty sure it’s been known since Adam Smith that free trade is better. Why do we still have protectionists?
3.) Where is the evidence that low IQ people are disproportionately the ones who support this stuff? In my experience it’s precisely the opposite. What low IQ person is even going to bother reading Marx? This stuff is for high IQ people with nothing better to do than to tell everyone else how much better he is from his ivory tower.
For all your standing on a higher intellectual ground, your arguments leave a lot to be desired. You are confusing high IQ with something like being rational and understanding what’s good for a nation, with little evidence (at best) that there is a correlation or a causal link between the two.
You don’t seem to take into consideration the incentives and constraints each country faces, nor the human nature aspect of the matter that makes it so many people will resist change, even positive change, nor the historical and political realities of these countries, all of which (and more) would be what you’d expect to see from a serious thinker.
IQ seems to be your version of what discrimination is to leftists: an all encompassing cause for anything bad that ever happens anywhere under the sun. In reality, you are just xenophobic. And to quote my favorite philosopher, “if this is the best the brights can do, I think I’ll stick with the dims.”
I think part of the issue is how the notion of being a libertarian is defined. To be on the left or right is generally about just agreeing with enough of those policies. You can be on the right or left and have quite a few heretic views.
But the difference between a libertarian and someone who is socially liberal and economically deregulatory is basically about consistency. The label libertarian is applied not based on just agreeing on a few big issues or some weighted average but about thinking that a certain principle should dictate how we decide questions of politics.
That kind of adherance to principle is in tension with personality traits we seem to regard as open and friendly. No, it's not logically incompatible but it requires a disposition (what you were saying about autistic) to find logical thinking more important than emotional salience.
A libertarian the kind of person who tends to react by pulling back and asking 'ok but does that emotional reaction really make sense' rather than going with the emotional reaction. That doesn't mean they aren't perfectly nice people over coffee but when they are discussing political matters it necessarily means their first reactions and instincts are to point to cold logical principles not emotional appeals.
That means that in the contexts where their being libertarian is salient they are likely to be seen as less warm and sympathetic.
Libertarian's have emotional reactions. I think Bryan's Open Borders stance is largely emotional rather than logical.
And that's fine in a way. I think that there are a lot of limits to pure reason that have been articulated by others in depth. I enjoy an emotionally reflective rejection of unjust authority as defined by libertarian emotional priors nine times out of ten.
As I mentioned above, in art I prefer Mike Judge style libertarianism. The first episode of King of the Hill is about Hank getting enraged over a state official trying to interfere with his raising his son. It's an emotional reaction. In other episodes his "enemy" isn't the government at all, its authoritarian cultural trends, callous bosses, beuaracracies, or misguided individuals. Sometimes the enemy is anarchy (think the episode with the overly "fun" parents). Hank sometimes understands these on a logical level, but really seems to get them at an unconscious level. He has a small L libertarian *instinct* that applies to all social and personal forces not just government without descending into paranoia or anarchy (say, Dale).
Yes, sorry I don't mean to imply they don't. Indeed, I think (well at least for me) the move toward sorta abstraction and principle is an emotional mechanism. It's often a way to feel safe in a subject where those emotions might otherwise overwhelm. But it's interpreted by others as unsympathetic.
>> I think Bryan's Open Borders stance is largely emotional rather than logical.
Why do you think that? As someone who used to be against open borders (even after reading Michael Huemer) and who did a 180 precisely because of Caplan’s arguments, I strongly disagree.
In Short:
Open borders = mass immigration of low IQ people = degradation or even degeneration of innovation leading first world societies.
I consider it a low upside / high downside proposition. I suspect it would destroy rather than create trillions of dollars in value.
I view the negative externalities of the low IQ to be very high, especially at scale, far more then Bryan's proposed gains from comparative advantage of their low skill labor.
I think this is obvious and Bryan denies it due to ideological, social, and branding commitments.
“I think this is obvious” is not an argument. You can certainly argue that Caplan is wrong, but you went further than that by claiming that his position here is emotional rather than logical.
And all this post shows, if anything, is that your position partly relies on a claim you think is “obvious,” when in fact, this claim is profoundly difficult to prove.
Really? The negative externalities of immigration you named are far higher than the positive consequences it would bring? And you can tell this for certain just from thinking about it in your head? How could you possibly do such a thing?
Looks to me like your own anti-immigrant bias is in full display here.
Your right. I didn't lay out the entire anti-open borders position here with all of my citations. I mean I've laid it out in other comments on this sub stack. And it's been laid out in studies and books by plenty of authors that I've cited in the past. But you're correct, I didn't publish an entire essay in the sub stack comments every single time someone brings the topic up. Nor do I plan to every single time some fresh faced libertarian autist stumbles upon me.
As to the obviousness, its pretty clear to me that low IQ people ruin every place they go to, and that the entire reason the third world is a shithole is because its full of low IQ people. If we become a low IQ country, we will be a shithole too. Places in the first world full of low IQ people (like the ghetto) are shitholes. One has to contort oneself and "live in a beautiful bubble" to ignore such obvious data points.
My friend, I am originally from one of those shitholes, as you call them, so I suspect I have as much real world experience as you with how they are and I have not, in fact, lived in a beautiful bubble.
The assertion here that the third world is the way it is because it is full of low IQ people is hardly supported by the evidence. Unlike you, I will bother to cite my sources. Most notably, the research that people like Daron Acemoglu have done.
In his textbook, Introduction to Modern Economic Growth (a standard intro to macroeconomics for first year PhD student in some top universities), he lays out the case in chapter 4 that the fundamental cause of growth is the nature of institutions.
This chapter substantially overlaps with work he’s done elsewhere, so you can look through the citations in the chapter for more of the evidence he presents. Or you can read the chapter he coauthored in The Handbook of Economic Growth. Or you can read a book like Barriers to Riches.
In my own experience, having a high IQ is vastly overrated. It is obviously not useless. IQ is a reliable predictor of success in any complex field. But IQ does not mean being hard working, nor does it mean being a good person. It doesn’t even mean being rational. Very intelligent people, as far as I can tell, are just as likely as the rest of us mere mortals to be biased.
Congress is full of people who graduated from Harvard Law and other top law schools. You can’t do that unless you have a profoundly high IQ. And what a good job these people are doing running the country. I am far less concerned with these low IQ people you are scared of than I am of high IQ people who think they can tell me what’s best for me, or people like you who think the less intelligent are beneath him.
At any rate, your rant here against “low IQ immigrants from shitholes” is pretty good evidence it is your position on the matter that is motivated by emotion, not mine or Caplan’s.
1) Institutions are a reflection of the IQ of the participants.
2) Low IQ people can't build good institutions, especially over the long run.
3) Your correct that an individual's IQ isn't nearly as important as the IQ of their peer group (since its the peer group, not the individual, that builds institutions). See Hive Mind.
4) For all the faults of congress, we live in a first world country. They haven't gone full Venezuela or anything like you see in the shithole countries.
1.) Institutions are a reflection of a complex number of factors, including historical ones. Putting the entire blame on a single factor, low IQ people, is beyond absurd.
2.) Why not? Besides, even if that’s true, all you need is a few people (few by comparison to the entire population) to set up the institutions. Is it really your claim that there is no one in these third world countries that has a high IQ?
4.) As I recall, Hugo Chavez found support from Noam Chomsky whose IQ is most definitely not low. Many of the destructive ideas socialists keep pushing are supported by very high IQ people in academia. Do you really think Karl Marx had a low IQ?
The people currently in Congress did not set up the institutions. And since there is about as many on one side of the aisle as there is on the other, they largely cancel out each other. This helps maintain things more or less the way they were originally set up, or in a way that resembles, even vaguely, the original setup.
Give up control to a bunch of AOCs, who graduated college with honors and is probably at the very least of average IQ, and I am convinced you will indeed transform the U.S. into a shithole.
1) Yes, they are. And yet no low IQ country has developed first world caliber institutions.
2) There are lots of countries out there with a huge low IQ underclass and a small subset caste of high IQ people (think South Africa or India). They are third world shit holes.
For one it's just not very stable to try and engage in authorities rule over the dumbs when they are a super majority. Apartheid broke down in South Africa.
Secondly, any system that this tiny high IQ elite design has to be used by the low IQ. If you give a well designed hammer to a toddler they can't build a fence. They can smash it into your wall or break dishes though. All those mid-tier average IQ white/asian middle class people are necessary for a well functioning system.
3) Communism can strike anyone, it's true. But it's the low IQ countries that constantly seem to go through this cycle over and over again. And it's usually the low IQ that provide the most mass public support for this stuff. Either with their votes or their rifles. Chavez appealed to the dark skinned losers of his society on egalitarian grounds did he not.
The consistent opponents of these extremist ideologies are ordinary middle class people of average first world intelligence.
1.) Maybe, but that’s called correlation, not causation. You keep making logical errors even low IQ people shouldn’t make.
2.) The so-called high IQ voters in the U.S. consistently believe idiotic things and vote for policies that have been known for a long time to be detrimental to the economy. I am pretty sure it’s been known since Adam Smith that free trade is better. Why do we still have protectionists?
3.) Where is the evidence that low IQ people are disproportionately the ones who support this stuff? In my experience it’s precisely the opposite. What low IQ person is even going to bother reading Marx? This stuff is for high IQ people with nothing better to do than to tell everyone else how much better he is from his ivory tower.
For all your standing on a higher intellectual ground, your arguments leave a lot to be desired. You are confusing high IQ with something like being rational and understanding what’s good for a nation, with little evidence (at best) that there is a correlation or a causal link between the two.
You don’t seem to take into consideration the incentives and constraints each country faces, nor the human nature aspect of the matter that makes it so many people will resist change, even positive change, nor the historical and political realities of these countries, all of which (and more) would be what you’d expect to see from a serious thinker.
IQ seems to be your version of what discrimination is to leftists: an all encompassing cause for anything bad that ever happens anywhere under the sun. In reality, you are just xenophobic. And to quote my favorite philosopher, “if this is the best the brights can do, I think I’ll stick with the dims.”
Good day.