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Jan 1, 2023·edited Jan 1, 2023Liked by Alex Nowrasteh

Great read.

Your emphasis on the importance of institutions made me think of charter cities: https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/

The possibility of lifting people out of poverty by creating new cities with good institutions for them to move to is really exciting, in my opinion. In line with DFES, perhaps it'd be smart to focus on getting the right founder population before opening up immigration.

Maybe the best way to accomplish all of this is to enshrine the idea of sanctuary cities as federal policy somehow, and create a legal framework by which individual cities can create guest worker programs. Taking both deportation and electoral participation off the table seems like a compromise both sides could agree on.

Would be great to redirect all of the energy around the controversy from Texas and Florida governors sending migrants to other states in a constructive direction.

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I’m writing from a phone, so this will need to be brief.

1) COMMUNISM!

It’s really darn obvious that china was poor because it was wracked by external and internal war for a century and then wasted decades on communism.

All of us agree that war and totalitarianism can hold back a high iq people.

What can’t hold back a high iq people is a merely imperfect government or mild socialism. Most of the East Asian tigers were softish authoritarian, it didn’t matter.

China is obviously on track to be as rich as the other Asian tigers, it just takes time.

2) a review of Singapore would show a complete rejection of your thesis by LKY.

I also think it’s disingenuous to talk about “foriegn born”. A deep dive into Singapore’s population does not lead to the thesis (let’s import a billion low iq Africans or Arabs). A lot of Singapore’s foreign born are highly skilled professionals and Chinese ethnics.

3) I think we need to question whether western democracies can actually implement a two tiered apartheid state the way gulf monarchies or authoritarian Asian city states can

4) saying “X %” of the world population is meaningless as your mostly talking about first world countries l, and few people want to immigrate across first world countries.

Immigration is all about whether we let in more low iq third worlders.

6) the only significant source of high iq immigration is from China (some Indian subgroups have high iq but most Indians do t). This is a temporary state of affairs, and if they stay in China within a generation they will be in a high income country.

7) I wrote about this elsewhere but I think the idea that there is a “yellow man’s burden” to move to poor southeast Asian countries and become their smart fraction is flawed. Long run I think Chinese are better off staying in China, having a billion smart people contributing to human advancement is more important then having smart people waste h th die lives away trying to duck tape together third world countries.

8) with so many internal examples of immigrants changing things domestically in the west (just look at what blacks did to Detroit) I don’t know why this is a debate at all.

9) the answer to your question on th e USA is that non-whites pull down the average in the USA, but they are still a minority that can’t yet drag down our solid smart fraction (however, where they become a critical mass like in Detroit, they can)

10) iq would be better then jones obvious proxy for iq, but you know how it is

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I am not familiar with literature on this subject . I can imagine that 1st generation born Americans are a successful group of Americans that contribute greatly to our economy & culture.

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