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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Consider the common case of a Latin American man who leaves to become a construction worker in the US.
He's a basically sensible person who's willing to work hard, but due to corruption, lack of infrastructure, and probably prejudice in Latin America, he's extremely poor.
He risks his life to go to America, where he's still subject to corruption (employers can get away with cheating him of his wages, and there may be payments for his work into Social Security that he will almost certainly never be able to collect) and prejudice, but he's still better off because he's hooked into much better infrastructure, probably less corruption, and possibly less prejudice.
Why are these problems so much worse in Latin America? Probably a lot of it has to do with the character of the people there. Thus when he's in the country he's likely to do things that incrementally increase the problems he left Latin America to get away from.
If you get irritated by malicious comments like "U.S. people are self-centered, greedy, manipulative, meddlesome, trigger-happy devourers of the world's resources, entitled policemen of the world's affairs, and deluded by their overinflated self-importance", then that should give you a hint of how your odious generalization about Latin Americans is likely to be received.
Many Western societies have seen pretty dramatic productivity-enhancing institutional changes in the last few hundred years that aren't explicable in terms of changes in genetic makeup. In light of this, your view seems to rely on believing that most currently remaining institutional variation is genetic, whereas this wasn't the case ~300 years ago. Do you think this is the case?
Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea seem to make a pretty strong case for a huge independent effect of institutions.
Who said anything about genetics?
Korea is. China (I assume this is what you mean by Hong Kong and Singapore) is evidence against.
Oops, shouldn't have assumed you're talking about genetics :)
Still, if you're talking about character in a causally neutral sense, it seems that you need to posit character traits that hardly change within a person's lifetime. Here I admit that the evidence for rapid institutional effects is weaker than the evidence for institutional effects in general.
(Re: Hong Kong, Singapore, no, I do mean those cities specifically. Their economic outcomes differ strikingly from culturally and genetically similar neighbors because of their unique histories.
You seem to assume that everybody in Latin America has the same character, in which case how comes certain people emigrate and other don't?
You're leaving out that he left Latin America to get away from those problems, and also that a lot of immigrants want to become real Americans (or whichever country they're moving to).
But do they understand what caused them.
I'd be more comfortable with an immigration policy that explicitly screened for something like this.