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satt comments on Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That argument seems to me non-responsive, fallacious, or at least inadequately fleshed out, in three different ways.
Immigrants needn't be representative of their country of origin, in which case arguments about the average citizen in that country of origin aren't automatically relevant.
The "average citizen of the old country" needn't be "as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination" for NancyLebovitz's point to go through; they just need to generate a net gain (however one operationalizes "a net gain") at the margin.
Something like a fallacy of composition: a priori, "the average citizen of the old country [being] as capable of doing good as the average citizen of the destination" doesn't automatically imply that "the old country [isn't] the kind of place one needs to leave to do significantly better". Given, say, increasing returns to scale & specialization, it's quite possible that denizens of a tiny country would be outperformed by those of a bigger country, but would nonetheless be quite capable of matching their new neighbours if they moved to that bigger country.
Yes, it was a Baysian not a mathematical argument.
They are unless you have reason to believe the immigrants are above average.
Comparing per-capita GDP with populations suggests we have decreasing returns to scale.
One way to see the problem with Nancy's argument is to consider the following question: If most people from country X want to move to country Y then wouldn't it be easier for country Y to simply annex country X? You save on relocation costs and the people are now in country Y.
You do. (For a particular sense of "above average" that's appropriate here.) The people who choose to leave country A to seek their fortune in country B are going to be (on average) atypical in a bunch of ways.
They will tend to be more optimistic about their prospects in country B and maybe less optimistic about their prospects in country A. It's not immediately clear what we should expect this to say about them overall, but let's "change basis" as follows: they will tend to have a higher opinion of how much better they'd do in B than in A, and this seems like it should correlate with actual prospects in B if it's a healthier country than A.
They will tend to be more proactive, more go-getting. This seems like it should also correlate with productive work.
They will tend to be actually able to get themselves from country A to country B without starving, getting arrested by overzealous police in country A or B or in between, failing to get past border controls, etc. This all seems like it would correlated with effectiveness in getting stuff done. (Both directly, and because their ability to do this will be affected by the resources they have in country A, which for multiple reasons will correlate with their ability to get things done.)
There will probably be differences in their relationships with other people in country A, but I'm not sure which direction the overall effect goes. (Maybe they have looser ties, and that correlates with being less good with people, and that correlates with doing badly; maybe they have good friends and family making them feel well supported and confident, and that correlates with doing well.)
Having got from A to B, they are then going to be strongly motivated to make the trouble and expense worth while, which probably means that whatever their underlying competence they will work harder and more resourcefully in country B than they would have in country A.
So there are lots of reasons to expect people who have emigrated from dysfunctional country A to more-functional country B to be more effective workers in country B than the population average in country A.
(Note: I don't think this is by any means the dominant reason to agree with Nancy and disagree with Azathoth on this point.)
Something like that was formerly more true. Now I suspect part of the problem is that improvements in transportation have made it "too easy" to immigrate.
I suspect you mean "formerly."
Thanks, fixed.
Ahem
I don't quite understand - Bayes is maths.
One could require immigrants to have demonstrable skills. However, if the immigrants are above average then this causes a brain drain for the home country.
This would also stop smaller first world countries like the Japan or the UK becoming overcrowded. OTOH its also completely infeasible in the foreseeable future because people wouldn't agree to it.
The cost of annexing can be very high. War is hard on people, and we don't have methods of smoothly and sensibly rearranging national borders.
Also, at that point, country Y has inherited all of country X's problems.
As far as I can tell, you don't get everyone (or a very large proportion) of people wanting to leave a country unless there's a lot of violence or a natural disaster. If the problem is poverty, people would rather have some members of their families emigrate to work, and send money back.
I think "annexing country X" might show some problems with utilitarian thinking-- a tendency to abstract away important amounts of detail and the costs of getting from point A to point B. This doesn't mean utilitarian thinking is always wrong, but these are problems to watch out for.
That's my point. Having many people from country X emigrate to country Y causes country X to acquire country Y's problems.
Immigration doesn't lead to importing country X's government.
True, but it may very well lead to importing the reason country X has the government it does.
The scatterplot shown here appears to show a strong positive correlation between population and GDP per capita.
[EDITED to add: no, I'm an idiot and misread the plot, which shows a clear correlation between population and total GDP and suggests rather little between population and per capita GDP. Sorry about that. The Gapminder link posted by satt also suggests very little correlation between population and per capita GDP. So the context for my (unchanged) argument below is not "Increasing returns to scale are just one factor; here are a bunch more" but "Increased returns to scale are probably negligible; here are a bunch of things that aren't".]
In any case, "increasing returns to scale" were just one example (and I think not the best) of how someone might be more productive on moving from (smaller, poorer, more corrupt, less developed) country A to (larger, richer, less corrupt, more developed) country B. Here, let me list some other specific things that might make someone more productive if they move from (say) Somalia to (say) France.
And what caused these differences between these two countries? (Hint: it's not magical corruption ray located in Mogadishu.) And how will these traits change as more people move from Somalia to France?
It could be any number of things. Including the one I take it you're looking for, namely some genetic inferiority on the part of the people in country A. But even if that were the entire cause it could still easily be the case that when someone moves from A to B their productivity (especially if expressed in monetary terms) increases dramatically.
I'm actually not quite sure what point you're arguing now. A few comments back, though, your claim was that Nancy was (nearly) contradicting herself by expecting immigrants to (1) be productive in their new country even though (2) their old country is the kind of place where it's really hard to be productive, on the grounds that for #2 to be true the people in the old country must be unproductive people.
It seems to me that for this argument to work you'd need counters to the following points (which have been made and which you haven't, as it seems to me, given any good counterargument to so far):
There are lots of other ways in which the old country could make productivity harder than the new -- e.g., the ones I mention above.
The people who move from country A to country B may be atypical of the people of country A, in ways that make them more likely overall to be productive in country B.
Not necessarily, my argument goes through even if it's memetic.
How about some yourself. Note simply saying that something may happen is not a reason to ignore the prior that it won't. I responded to your only argument about the prior. Also, look at the way the immigrants are in fact behaving, I believe it involves lots of riots and creating neighborhoods that the police are afraid to go into.
That's exactly what the FRG did with the GDR.
That was a special case since there the difference was (originally) entirely due to the Soviet occupation. And even then it wasn't particularly effective, i.e., today the former GDR is doing much worse then the former FRG and (I think) comparably to the neighboring former Soviet satellites that weren't annexed.
That is a bit better, but even as a Bayesian argument it quietly rests on empirical priors which I find odd (as we're about to see).
In fact I do. gjm has listed a priori reasons to expect this. More empirically, I already know that epidemiologists talk about a "healthy immigrant effect", which suggests that immigrants are selected (or indeed self-select) to be healthier & wealthier than the average for their home country. I've also seen people bringing up the selectedness of immigrants in arguments about race & IQ, to rebut observations that Third World immigrants tend to do better in their new homes than the estimated mean IQs of their home countries would suggest.
It does, but it is a very weak suggestion. The correlation is not that great to start with, and doesn't account for other factors, like international differences in the working-age proportion of the population. Economists have tried to take a more systematic approach based on more involved regressions and/or fitting production functions, but the results here seem mixed, varying across industries and the level of aggregation.
(My own prior that increasing returns to scale occur in manufacturing — the class of industries, AFAIK, most important to a country's development — seems broadly consistent with the available evidence. I may as well add that my point 3 invokes "increasing returns to scale & specialization" simply as an example, and the basic conclusion that there's "[s]omething like a fallacy of composition" going on stands even if returns to scale are everywhere decreasing.)
I have little to add to what NancyLebovitz & skeptical_lurker have already said.