Claremont Review of Books reviews The Culture Transplant by economist Garett Jones. Jones is a liberal who looked at the data, found answers he didn't like, and had the courage to report them anyway. For all the reasons he didn't like them, you will probably find them agreeable.
Economists interested in discovering the causes of successful economic development initially looked to factors such as free trade, exchange rate manipulation, distance from a coastline, or education levels.
But these approaches never panned out, so Jones relies on newer research that points to culture as determinative of economic growth—and culture is unmalleable. Immigrants and their descendants do not absorb the cultures into which they migrate. They instead retain the tendencies—at least those related to economic growth—of their homelands.
Jones concludes, “[I]f the only thing you knew about each nation on the planet was the fraction of that nation with ancestors of European descent, and you did the best job you could trying to predict average modern income per person using just that fact, you’d be able to predict two thirds of all global income differences.”
People of certain cultural lineages just make better societies.
There are probably places where you could be arrested for making factual claims such as these. Jones will likely be cancelled in spite of his protestations that he isn't happy with his findings. It will be said he should have quashed them.
It has been clear for decades that not all cultures are created equal. Some produce more economic wealth than others and I don't find Jones' "better societies" a bridge too far. It is a good argument for closing our open borders and admitting only those likely to prosper here, as many recent immigrants now do.
