When I did my Ph.D. in engineering over 40 years ago I would estimate that the grad students in my program were at least 75% foreign born. I had and have no problem with that. Let them stay. Too few Americans are willing to work that hard. I did tell my kids that unless they had a definitive calling, they were better going into industry with their masters than doing their Ph.D.'s - the opportunity cost is too high unless you are looking for a research position, when the Ph.D. becomes all but mandatory.
I did observe that the Honors / IB programs that my kids took in high school were ~ 75% the children of highly educated East and South Asian parents. I told my kids - get used to it, they will be your peers and competitors for the rest of your life. You are playing on a world stage and have to step up to the bar.
And therein lies the problem. Why do recent immigrants and the children of recent immigrants run rings around the children of families who have been here for generations? Why, despite barriers of language, customs, and yes, race do they succeed at such rates in the hard sciences? Where do the smart white kids go instead? Every time I read about the next great thing in technology, the CEO of the company seems to be Asian, either Indian or Chinese. Why is that?
Actually, I think I have the answer. They go into law or finance. They're hoping to join a big white-shoe law firm or a big brokerage and make boatloads of money.
Don't get me wrong. Law and finance are both necessary, but in moderation. When they conspire to create impenetrable financial structures, crafted by clever lawyers and clever financiers to gull the public, they are no longer an asset to society. When those structures collapse, nobody goes to jail -- because prosecutors can't explain to jurors how it happened. All that talent and a lot of other people's money down the drain.
C'mon, Whitey, up your game. Go into the sciences. Learn about Arrhenius's law instead of the butterfly spread. Contribute to society's growth instead of helping the rich to get richer.
But helping the rich get richer pays more and has higher social status. When I was in college more than half a century ago the hot competition was not so much the foreign kids but the Jewish kids.
So many people are trying to get into the high end law and finance area now that engineering is a very reasonable route. You won't get rich, but you can do well. But you have to be smart, hard working, and somewhat alert to the structure of the economy and how it is changing so that you can try and be prepared for the changes.
I can make a lot of national strategic interest arguments in favor of high skills immigration but I gotta admit that on a personal level I like it because I know I can compete. I’ve been in the software industry for thirty years now and while I’ve had plenty of talented foreign-born colleagues, none of them has been orders of magnitude better than me. As I’ve gotten more experienced I've taken some of the younger Indian developers under my wing as a mentor. Just paying it forward.
I’ve also so far worked at two start ups with founders from either India or Pakistan. Judging from the upper management at those places there may have been a bit of a South Asian good ol’ boys network going on. Not in a discriminatory way: just in the sense that people tend to hire out of their social circles. Again, it’s not a problem when you know you can hang. You welcome global competition. It’s just further proof of your own competence.
Besides which, an educated Pakistani in the US isn’t exactly a foreigner. I mean, they’re from another country and if we spend a lot of time together we’ll discover some cultural differences, but they’re ipso facto cosmopolitan and maybe culturally Muslim but not a fundie about it. Like me they’re Anywhere people in David Goodhart’s formulation, and we probably share an admiration for Ramanjuan and Feynman. Despite being an American lying at the core of my identity (because where else is an atheist, liberal, individualist supposed to live?) immigrant South Asian professionals and I generally see eye to eye. Birds of a feather.
In the techno optimist manifesto by Andreessen, I think this section is very telling
“We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.
We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.
We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.
We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.”
🎶One of these is not like the others🎶
We did not have “a problem of isolation” before the internet, the internet created one. I think there is good reason to believe smartphones, the internet and social media are the main drivers behind the strong decline in mental health and life safisfaction; rising conspiracism, wokeness, MAGA and authoritarianism more generally; and a receding birth rate.
There is a good case to make this cluster of technologies has made us worse off overall. AI is around the corner and most people are very negative about that too.
Unsurprisingly, its from tech, not medicine, construction or energy, that this “techno optimism” comes from. Here’s how I see it. Under Biden, there was increasing pressure on the tech sector, with various famous documentaries and discourse more generally describing the tech sector as a threat to mental health, democracy and society. Feeling aggrieved, big ego tech billionaires turned to online accelerationists and other rightists. In their stories, they were not profiteers selling young people digital crack, but Nietzschean vitalist space explorer heroes.
The reason it aligns so well with MAGA, is because of the core MAGA value: shamelessness. Right wing populism is the coalition of the shameless, those upset at being criticized, moralized, held accountable. Hence the presence of supplement salesmen, crypto bros, various other conmen, racists, all the botox, tax evasion, etc. Hence the “long house”, the soyjak memes with text walls. The flaunting of wealth, the constant search for external validation.
Its a movement of puerillism, the ultimate “mass man” as described by Ortegy y Gasset. Modern man needs to learn shame and guilt again, boundaries, respect for authority, humility, gravitas and moral seriousness.
do you think industrialized agriculture and vaccines have no downsides? Or electric lighting? Have you ever heard about disrupting circadian rythm from artificial blue lighting? Those things are all like the others.
You could also wonder why should one respect anti-authority if any-authority does not deserve respect. And if people like Musk, Andreessen, RFK and Trump himself are the anti-authority, well sorry they are proving to deserve less respect than any PhD lib
This is a difficult discussion - there are of course many instances of failing authorities and of individuals being rational in defying them. Woke, decarbon agenda and COVID overreach being strongest recent examples. Yet, I think that on the margin, more people would do well by being more humble in the face of authority. Many people acknowledge, on reflection, that when they are talking politics they are dramatically overconfident, basically larping. That is the cost of democracy, I guess, but it turns increasingly damaging once technical topics (e.g., vaccines, trade policy) get more politicized. It is up for political leaders and other elites to set boundaries around discourse
Yes, but who is an expert? There are a lot of self-appointed "experts" out there, and a lot of useful idiots ready to uncritically amplify the "expert" opinions. And opinions they are, sometimes based on facts as they are known, sometimes opinions unmoored from reality.
COVID provided multiple examples. In the beginning, it was an authentically frightening pandemic. Almost nothing was known about it, it killed a substantial percentage of those it infected, and it spread like wildfire. It took weeks to establish its etiology (the virus that caused it) and find a course of treatment that enabled more of its victims to survive.
Meanwhile, the proper expert thing to do would have been to say, "This is a new and unique disease. Right now, the only thing we know about it is that it is obviously a respiratory disease somewhat like the flu, but much more vicious. Let's treat it like the flu. First, don't panic. Second, stay away from people who have it, and you who have it stay away from everyone. Masks help to keep the flu from spreading and may help keep this from spreading. Wipe down surfaces that come in contact with food with bleach. Stay tuned, and we will be sorting out the things that help from the things that don't."
Instead, we were barraged with absolute ironclad rules based on "the science" when there was no science to back them up. We were told everything from "go out and play, there's no real danger." to "Go home, lock the door, fog the house with Lysol, stay in a closet and talk to no one." Worse, when some of these precautions were proven wrong (like surface disinfection) the experts simply walked away from them. They didn't admit they were wrong, they just wouldn't talk about it. We never had a clear idea what we should be doing.
This created a fertile field for quack remedies. Like ivermectin. Ivermectin is a anthelmintic, a dewormer. There were reports early in the epidemic that it improved the survival rate of COVID patients. And so it did -- in areas where intestinal parasites were common. It killed the patient's tapeworms so he wasn't fighting two battles at once. If you didn't have tapeworm, it wouldn't help. How was that misconception fought? By screaming, "Horse medicine won't help" instead of explaining why it wouldn't help.
Worse was the hate the mainstream media had for Trump. His musing, "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?" immediately morphed into "Trump says inject bleach. What a moron." Consequently, when Trump started Operation Warp Speed to create a vaccine, the scoffers were many, both on the scientific and political side. The "scientists" said, "It'll never work, or it'll be so late it won't help" while the politicians said, "Anything that Trump creates is evil, and you shouldn't take it."
Joe Biden contributed mightily to that attitude when he said "When we finally do, god willing, get a vaccine, who’s going to take the shot? Who’s going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up? They now say it’s OK. I’m not being facetious." (Sept. 3, 2020, Kenosha WI) Of course, once he was elected, he swapped ends. A year and six days later, he mandated the vaccine for all Federal employees, Federal contractors, health care workers and employers of more than 100 workers.
And that's why "political leaders and other elites" shouldn't set boundaries around discourse. The boundaries they set won't exclude unscientific opinion. They will exclude scientific opinion the elites disagree with. Not the same thing at all.
While many high-skilled immigrants come here and benefit the country, a few of them come here and demonstrate their incompatibility with American values. I heard about this one guy, he was a refugee from a failed communist regime, his dad worked as an electrical engineer at MIT, he went to MIT and two Ivy League colleges, yet he spends all his time spreading vulgarity and fantasizing about overthrowing the US government.
That extrapolation is highly reasonable. Also, we can see things on the tech horizon like fusion energy and disease cures that are certain benefits. No guarantees, but the future looks better on the whole than the past or present from my perspective.
Matt Ridley makes the case in his "Rational Optimist." Ridley’s central thesis is that optimism is not naïve—it’s rational, based on evidence of human resilience and ingenuity.
I think Matt Ridley's book has a number of gaps for example relating to environmental limits. When I read it, I was wondering whether it is not an example of motivated reasoning (dont forget that he is a fossil fuel entrepreneur and English aristocrat).
To clarify, Ridley's role as a fossil fuel entrepreneur is not what makes his arguments unreasonable (I only mentioned this in parentheses because it could explain the biases that went into his book).
Before we go into details about Ridley's argument (and I dont know whether there is space here for this), I'd like to know whether Matt Ridley is the best foundation for the claim that the extrapolation from history is reasonable?
If you (or Richard or somebody else here) know scholarship that makes a stronger argument for the extrapolation from history than Ridley, we should start from there.
"So if their maximum goals were accomplished, blacks and Hispanics would be around 25%-30% of scientists, leaving maybe 75% of slots to be determined by merit." And this is not even how it happens in the real world because nobody completely ignores the relative density of human capital to make this happen when the rubber hits the road. DEI amounts to just making a big show of competing for the relatively smaller black talent pool and publicly wringing your hands and promising to "do better" when you are left standing at the end of the DEU musical chairs.
The problem is not so much the DEI quota itself. The key problem is that after the DEI quota, everyone is engaging in arguing that those admitted due to DEI quota are just as productive (or more) than everyone else. It is this post-quota justification that destroys the merit system.
Then get rid of the H1B and let these people come in on a Green card. Don’t use them for cheaper labor and the threat of firing and eventual deportation.
Have people working with Green Card taxed at max rate (ie top 0.1% income), deny all benefits, and have the companies pay them 50% more than a citizen for the same work slot. Only then, it would be fair.
It wouldn't be THAT difficult. Productivity pro worker varies considerably - in some places, top 20% are responsible for 80% of the revenue.
"of the 44 members of Meta’s recently recruited superintelligence team, who can earn packages of up to $100 million a year, half are from China"
There's only 2 team members from India despite them making up such a huge proportion of "high skilled" immigrants, not surprising given the IQ differences between India and China.
As for the government picking geniuses, how many geniuses have average test scores? Not Elon Musk or the chemical engineer from Taiwan I bet. Your positive examples of immigration are again from the races that are being crowded out by an immigration system based on self-presentation and nepotism, not ability.
104 IQ POC with a chip on their shoulder will make great gay race communists though, and almost as smart as people picked out of an East Asian phone book.
Hearing about IQ comparisons as a fundamental measure of capability from people who are stereotyped as dog-eaters and against the backdrop of the liveleak videos is really rich. It's always funny seeing people who are unfairly characterized as lesser trying to punch in the direction they think is down. "Pick me, Pick me!" The area where I'm at in Canada holds the bones of expendable Chinese quasi-slaves who were used to construct much of the railroads. How quickly you forget. Newflash, just because the nationalists hate Browns, doesn't mean they would be ok with lots of Chinese coming, either. In many cases the family culture of the 104 IQ "POCs" (btw, you aren't "White" no matter how much you cope, Zhang) does a lot more good for the country than an army of super-genius autismos. Stay in your own lane nigga.
Western countries have outdone East Asia for the last few hundred years, so IQ isn't everything(www.unz.com/akarlin/salon-demographics explains this and why assuming I'm Chinese may be surprisingly unlikely). That's why the first half of my comment was about actual achievements of different races, and those aren't cherry-picked examples since they're the ones Hanania himself used.
Perhaps the most reasonable measure of the merit of a group is what they actually achieve on a collective level. East Asia has been doing a lot better than South Asia. The large IQ gap between the two is an explanation that Hanania is likely to accept, but even if one is agnostic as to the cause one has to accept that East Asians seem to have a more positive effect on development. Sure, East Asia was more susceptible to communism but given their lack of assertiveness East Asians don't gain much political power in the west. Sure, South Asians are better at climbing the corporate ladder and taking over western companies, but that may be a zero-sum or negative-sum game.
The point of my argument isn't East Asians good, South Asians bad. It's that if H1B proportions don't match what we know about human capital, whether it's IQ or whether it's which races create high-functioning countries, then is the immigration system actually selecting for merit effectively? Are we actually EHC-maxing? Maybe Hanania thinks the immigration system is about as good as we can hope under current political conditions.
Unpopular opinion: Jensen Huang has created more wealth for America during his tenure at Nvidia than the entire black population in the US since they first arrived in 1619 as slaves. It's $4T+ and counting.
The closest thing to big wealth creation by blacks is the NBA and to a lesser extent the NFL. And individuals like Oprah. But those are billion dollar enterprises. Nothing compares to Nvidia.
Great article. however, i didn't see you addressing the basic problem of "high-skill immigration", the use of immigration slots to bring low-wage workers, even babysitters and hookers, into the country under some guise as "high-skilled".
Also, long, long ago at TI, I wanted to get a VISA-related job for a young engineer from somewhere in South America who was doing good work in Hall effect semiconductor devices. The HR people worked me through a tortious path of "must dos" before we could get TI to sponsor him. One of the steps in the path was running an ad in a couple of tech magazines for a guy with comparable skills at two-thirds the wage we would pay a US new graduate. I was shocked when foreigners applied, willing to come to the US at such a low wage.
The proof that a foreigner is a high-skilled immigrant is that American companies will pay MORE than they would pay a so-called lower-skilled American worker. We've seen this year that Microsoft (for example) wants to lay off American coders and replace them with "high-skilled" foreigner coders at much lower wages. Right now, the definition of a "high-skilled immigrant" is someone who will increase bottom line profits by reducing payrolls.
If the US required higher wages to import some "high-skilled" foreign worker, you will see far far fewer companies to bring in these so-called "high-skill" immigrants.
You could cut that out if government demands (A) top tax (like on 0.1% top income, federal AND state AND local) for everyone using Green Card and their dependents, (B) no social benefits (except public education and pension), (C) restriction to job slots where company must pay 50% higher gross pay to the GC holders compared to citizens, and less than 25% of slots available to non-citizens.
While I support the notion that we should recruit the best and brightest without regards to nationality, the example of higher education is a difficult one because many nationals will return to their home country with valuable education secured, providing little to no benefit to the country where they received their education. Furthermore their education is partially subsidized by the US government (since virtually 100% of colleges/universities rely on federal grants).
In short, yes to recruiting foreign expertise, no to expanding efforts to educate foreign students.
This should be a testable hypothesis. We banned affirmative action a year ago. We know that had some effects on the ethnic composition of Harvard's last recruiting class. Did it affect the national composition?
In Canada the public-facing White Nationalist community appears to be made up of people who don't have any notable career, research, artistic, or athletic achievements. Many of these people aren't even on good terms with their families and one figurehead is actually a documented wife-beater who left his children and another was denounced by the arm of the family who run a succesful construction business. This theme is repeated in many fractal ways. If these people were to get their way we would actually face a real dystopia, not the imaginary one they've made up in their minds because an ESL Indian is serving them bad coffee.
Just today I talked to a Quebecer complaining about all the N-words and asked him to maybe consider that, objectively, things aren't as bad as he is saying. Things are good, even. This is a guy on government welfare who resides in a province that takes a disproportionate amount of transfer payments from my western province, telling me that immigrants are ruining his life. There's all manner of non-contributing nationalists talking about deporting people on the basis of skin colour, and they admit they don't care about the economy. It's easy to say that when self-identifying as down-trodden.
There is a big difference between high skill immigration in principal and the H1B program as it actually exists. The Visas are awarded by random lottery. This means that at the big tech companies paying 200K+ H1B workers are generally legitimately high skilled, but not so much at average companies paying 100K. I hate the dishonesty of claiming that you can't find an American worker to do a typical tech job. This is both how defenders of the H1B program frame it and what is required by law. Companies who hire H1B workers have to conduct fake job searches to "prove" no American workers are qualified, propping up make-work jobs in law, HR, and the government to check the paperwork. Surely this is the real "parasitism?" Surely awarding the H1B applications by salary is more defensible than by random lottery? The argument that there is no reliable way to tell if higher paid workers are the ones who are more high skilled is strange coming from someone who thinks markets work. If your average company with a software engineering department that was 90% Indians on H1Bs admitted that they were motivated by nepotism, and cheaper and more dependent labor (it is much harder to change jobs on an H1B) that would be one thing, but the lies that it is about finding more capable foreigners because there's no Americans to do these jobs are infuriating.
This is a rather interesting perspective. In your opinion, how would you define high-skill? What would be your preferred SAT cutoff, and would you prioritize specialists (e.g. semiconductor workers, robotics engineers)? How would you spot falsified qualifications?
SAT is not a skill. The issue is workplace productivity. It is fairly well assessible. I would say, having 2x higher productivity compared to the mean (not median) would be a good criterium.
When I did my Ph.D. in engineering over 40 years ago I would estimate that the grad students in my program were at least 75% foreign born. I had and have no problem with that. Let them stay. Too few Americans are willing to work that hard. I did tell my kids that unless they had a definitive calling, they were better going into industry with their masters than doing their Ph.D.'s - the opportunity cost is too high unless you are looking for a research position, when the Ph.D. becomes all but mandatory.
I did observe that the Honors / IB programs that my kids took in high school were ~ 75% the children of highly educated East and South Asian parents. I told my kids - get used to it, they will be your peers and competitors for the rest of your life. You are playing on a world stage and have to step up to the bar.
And therein lies the problem. Why do recent immigrants and the children of recent immigrants run rings around the children of families who have been here for generations? Why, despite barriers of language, customs, and yes, race do they succeed at such rates in the hard sciences? Where do the smart white kids go instead? Every time I read about the next great thing in technology, the CEO of the company seems to be Asian, either Indian or Chinese. Why is that?
Actually, I think I have the answer. They go into law or finance. They're hoping to join a big white-shoe law firm or a big brokerage and make boatloads of money.
Don't get me wrong. Law and finance are both necessary, but in moderation. When they conspire to create impenetrable financial structures, crafted by clever lawyers and clever financiers to gull the public, they are no longer an asset to society. When those structures collapse, nobody goes to jail -- because prosecutors can't explain to jurors how it happened. All that talent and a lot of other people's money down the drain.
C'mon, Whitey, up your game. Go into the sciences. Learn about Arrhenius's law instead of the butterfly spread. Contribute to society's growth instead of helping the rich to get richer.
But helping the rich get richer pays more and has higher social status. When I was in college more than half a century ago the hot competition was not so much the foreign kids but the Jewish kids.
So many people are trying to get into the high end law and finance area now that engineering is a very reasonable route. You won't get rich, but you can do well. But you have to be smart, hard working, and somewhat alert to the structure of the economy and how it is changing so that you can try and be prepared for the changes.
I can make a lot of national strategic interest arguments in favor of high skills immigration but I gotta admit that on a personal level I like it because I know I can compete. I’ve been in the software industry for thirty years now and while I’ve had plenty of talented foreign-born colleagues, none of them has been orders of magnitude better than me. As I’ve gotten more experienced I've taken some of the younger Indian developers under my wing as a mentor. Just paying it forward.
I’ve also so far worked at two start ups with founders from either India or Pakistan. Judging from the upper management at those places there may have been a bit of a South Asian good ol’ boys network going on. Not in a discriminatory way: just in the sense that people tend to hire out of their social circles. Again, it’s not a problem when you know you can hang. You welcome global competition. It’s just further proof of your own competence.
Besides which, an educated Pakistani in the US isn’t exactly a foreigner. I mean, they’re from another country and if we spend a lot of time together we’ll discover some cultural differences, but they’re ipso facto cosmopolitan and maybe culturally Muslim but not a fundie about it. Like me they’re Anywhere people in David Goodhart’s formulation, and we probably share an admiration for Ramanjuan and Feynman. Despite being an American lying at the core of my identity (because where else is an atheist, liberal, individualist supposed to live?) immigrant South Asian professionals and I generally see eye to eye. Birds of a feather.
In the techno optimist manifesto by Andreessen, I think this section is very telling
“We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.
We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.
We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.
We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.”
🎶One of these is not like the others🎶
We did not have “a problem of isolation” before the internet, the internet created one. I think there is good reason to believe smartphones, the internet and social media are the main drivers behind the strong decline in mental health and life safisfaction; rising conspiracism, wokeness, MAGA and authoritarianism more generally; and a receding birth rate.
There is a good case to make this cluster of technologies has made us worse off overall. AI is around the corner and most people are very negative about that too.
Unsurprisingly, its from tech, not medicine, construction or energy, that this “techno optimism” comes from. Here’s how I see it. Under Biden, there was increasing pressure on the tech sector, with various famous documentaries and discourse more generally describing the tech sector as a threat to mental health, democracy and society. Feeling aggrieved, big ego tech billionaires turned to online accelerationists and other rightists. In their stories, they were not profiteers selling young people digital crack, but Nietzschean vitalist space explorer heroes.
The reason it aligns so well with MAGA, is because of the core MAGA value: shamelessness. Right wing populism is the coalition of the shameless, those upset at being criticized, moralized, held accountable. Hence the presence of supplement salesmen, crypto bros, various other conmen, racists, all the botox, tax evasion, etc. Hence the “long house”, the soyjak memes with text walls. The flaunting of wealth, the constant search for external validation.
Its a movement of puerillism, the ultimate “mass man” as described by Ortegy y Gasset. Modern man needs to learn shame and guilt again, boundaries, respect for authority, humility, gravitas and moral seriousness.
do you think industrialized agriculture and vaccines have no downsides? Or electric lighting? Have you ever heard about disrupting circadian rythm from artificial blue lighting? Those things are all like the others.
Why should I respect authority when authority does not deserve respect?
You could also wonder why should one respect anti-authority if any-authority does not deserve respect. And if people like Musk, Andreessen, RFK and Trump himself are the anti-authority, well sorry they are proving to deserve less respect than any PhD lib
This is a difficult discussion - there are of course many instances of failing authorities and of individuals being rational in defying them. Woke, decarbon agenda and COVID overreach being strongest recent examples. Yet, I think that on the margin, more people would do well by being more humble in the face of authority. Many people acknowledge, on reflection, that when they are talking politics they are dramatically overconfident, basically larping. That is the cost of democracy, I guess, but it turns increasingly damaging once technical topics (e.g., vaccines, trade policy) get more politicized. It is up for political leaders and other elites to set boundaries around discourse
Yes, but who is an expert? There are a lot of self-appointed "experts" out there, and a lot of useful idiots ready to uncritically amplify the "expert" opinions. And opinions they are, sometimes based on facts as they are known, sometimes opinions unmoored from reality.
COVID provided multiple examples. In the beginning, it was an authentically frightening pandemic. Almost nothing was known about it, it killed a substantial percentage of those it infected, and it spread like wildfire. It took weeks to establish its etiology (the virus that caused it) and find a course of treatment that enabled more of its victims to survive.
Meanwhile, the proper expert thing to do would have been to say, "This is a new and unique disease. Right now, the only thing we know about it is that it is obviously a respiratory disease somewhat like the flu, but much more vicious. Let's treat it like the flu. First, don't panic. Second, stay away from people who have it, and you who have it stay away from everyone. Masks help to keep the flu from spreading and may help keep this from spreading. Wipe down surfaces that come in contact with food with bleach. Stay tuned, and we will be sorting out the things that help from the things that don't."
Instead, we were barraged with absolute ironclad rules based on "the science" when there was no science to back them up. We were told everything from "go out and play, there's no real danger." to "Go home, lock the door, fog the house with Lysol, stay in a closet and talk to no one." Worse, when some of these precautions were proven wrong (like surface disinfection) the experts simply walked away from them. They didn't admit they were wrong, they just wouldn't talk about it. We never had a clear idea what we should be doing.
This created a fertile field for quack remedies. Like ivermectin. Ivermectin is a anthelmintic, a dewormer. There were reports early in the epidemic that it improved the survival rate of COVID patients. And so it did -- in areas where intestinal parasites were common. It killed the patient's tapeworms so he wasn't fighting two battles at once. If you didn't have tapeworm, it wouldn't help. How was that misconception fought? By screaming, "Horse medicine won't help" instead of explaining why it wouldn't help.
Worse was the hate the mainstream media had for Trump. His musing, "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?" immediately morphed into "Trump says inject bleach. What a moron." Consequently, when Trump started Operation Warp Speed to create a vaccine, the scoffers were many, both on the scientific and political side. The "scientists" said, "It'll never work, or it'll be so late it won't help" while the politicians said, "Anything that Trump creates is evil, and you shouldn't take it."
Joe Biden contributed mightily to that attitude when he said "When we finally do, god willing, get a vaccine, who’s going to take the shot? Who’s going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up? They now say it’s OK. I’m not being facetious." (Sept. 3, 2020, Kenosha WI) Of course, once he was elected, he swapped ends. A year and six days later, he mandated the vaccine for all Federal employees, Federal contractors, health care workers and employers of more than 100 workers.
And that's why "political leaders and other elites" shouldn't set boundaries around discourse. The boundaries they set won't exclude unscientific opinion. They will exclude scientific opinion the elites disagree with. Not the same thing at all.
Lotsa words, but some sense, I hope.
While many high-skilled immigrants come here and benefit the country, a few of them come here and demonstrate their incompatibility with American values. I heard about this one guy, he was a refugee from a failed communist regime, his dad worked as an electrical engineer at MIT, he went to MIT and two Ivy League colleges, yet he spends all his time spreading vulgarity and fantasizing about overthrowing the US government.
His name is Costin Alamariu.
What's your point?
Based on the immigrant doctors I have encountered, I say get a lot more of them.
"The tech right is of course correct not to fear the future and to see technology as the key to human progress, not a threat to it."
Are you extrapolating past successes into the future? Or do you have any special insights that justify this attitude?
That extrapolation is highly reasonable. Also, we can see things on the tech horizon like fusion energy and disease cures that are certain benefits. No guarantees, but the future looks better on the whole than the past or present from my perspective.
"That extrapolation is highly reasonable." Why?
Matt Ridley makes the case in his "Rational Optimist." Ridley’s central thesis is that optimism is not naïve—it’s rational, based on evidence of human resilience and ingenuity.
I think Matt Ridley's book has a number of gaps for example relating to environmental limits. When I read it, I was wondering whether it is not an example of motivated reasoning (dont forget that he is a fossil fuel entrepreneur and English aristocrat).
How it makes his arguments unreasonabe ?
To clarify, Ridley's role as a fossil fuel entrepreneur is not what makes his arguments unreasonable (I only mentioned this in parentheses because it could explain the biases that went into his book).
Before we go into details about Ridley's argument (and I dont know whether there is space here for this), I'd like to know whether Matt Ridley is the best foundation for the claim that the extrapolation from history is reasonable?
If you (or Richard or somebody else here) know scholarship that makes a stronger argument for the extrapolation from history than Ridley, we should start from there.
"So if their maximum goals were accomplished, blacks and Hispanics would be around 25%-30% of scientists, leaving maybe 75% of slots to be determined by merit." And this is not even how it happens in the real world because nobody completely ignores the relative density of human capital to make this happen when the rubber hits the road. DEI amounts to just making a big show of competing for the relatively smaller black talent pool and publicly wringing your hands and promising to "do better" when you are left standing at the end of the DEU musical chairs.
The problem is not so much the DEI quota itself. The key problem is that after the DEI quota, everyone is engaging in arguing that those admitted due to DEI quota are just as productive (or more) than everyone else. It is this post-quota justification that destroys the merit system.
Then get rid of the H1B and let these people come in on a Green card. Don’t use them for cheaper labor and the threat of firing and eventual deportation.
Have people working with Green Card taxed at max rate (ie top 0.1% income), deny all benefits, and have the companies pay them 50% more than a citizen for the same work slot. Only then, it would be fair.
It wouldn't be THAT difficult. Productivity pro worker varies considerably - in some places, top 20% are responsible for 80% of the revenue.
"of the 44 members of Meta’s recently recruited superintelligence team, who can earn packages of up to $100 million a year, half are from China"
There's only 2 team members from India despite them making up such a huge proportion of "high skilled" immigrants, not surprising given the IQ differences between India and China.
As for the government picking geniuses, how many geniuses have average test scores? Not Elon Musk or the chemical engineer from Taiwan I bet. Your positive examples of immigration are again from the races that are being crowded out by an immigration system based on self-presentation and nepotism, not ability.
Looking at South Asian children in the US their average IQ is only slightly above whites, implying most of their parents could have effectively been ruled out as geniuses: https://www.unz.com/isteve/new-racial-admixture-and-cognitive-performance-study
104 IQ POC with a chip on their shoulder will make great gay race communists though, and almost as smart as people picked out of an East Asian phone book.
Testing immigrants has more difficulties than I considered in my comment: https://sectionalismnotes.substack.com/p/raw-human-capital-is-not-a-productive
Hearing about IQ comparisons as a fundamental measure of capability from people who are stereotyped as dog-eaters and against the backdrop of the liveleak videos is really rich. It's always funny seeing people who are unfairly characterized as lesser trying to punch in the direction they think is down. "Pick me, Pick me!" The area where I'm at in Canada holds the bones of expendable Chinese quasi-slaves who were used to construct much of the railroads. How quickly you forget. Newflash, just because the nationalists hate Browns, doesn't mean they would be ok with lots of Chinese coming, either. In many cases the family culture of the 104 IQ "POCs" (btw, you aren't "White" no matter how much you cope, Zhang) does a lot more good for the country than an army of super-genius autismos. Stay in your own lane nigga.
Western countries have outdone East Asia for the last few hundred years, so IQ isn't everything(www.unz.com/akarlin/salon-demographics explains this and why assuming I'm Chinese may be surprisingly unlikely). That's why the first half of my comment was about actual achievements of different races, and those aren't cherry-picked examples since they're the ones Hanania himself used.
Perhaps the most reasonable measure of the merit of a group is what they actually achieve on a collective level. East Asia has been doing a lot better than South Asia. The large IQ gap between the two is an explanation that Hanania is likely to accept, but even if one is agnostic as to the cause one has to accept that East Asians seem to have a more positive effect on development. Sure, East Asia was more susceptible to communism but given their lack of assertiveness East Asians don't gain much political power in the west. Sure, South Asians are better at climbing the corporate ladder and taking over western companies, but that may be a zero-sum or negative-sum game.
The point of my argument isn't East Asians good, South Asians bad. It's that if H1B proportions don't match what we know about human capital, whether it's IQ or whether it's which races create high-functioning countries, then is the immigration system actually selecting for merit effectively? Are we actually EHC-maxing? Maybe Hanania thinks the immigration system is about as good as we can hope under current political conditions.
Unpopular opinion: Jensen Huang has created more wealth for America during his tenure at Nvidia than the entire black population in the US since they first arrived in 1619 as slaves. It's $4T+ and counting.
The closest thing to big wealth creation by blacks is the NBA and to a lesser extent the NFL. And individuals like Oprah. But those are billion dollar enterprises. Nothing compares to Nvidia.
Great article. however, i didn't see you addressing the basic problem of "high-skill immigration", the use of immigration slots to bring low-wage workers, even babysitters and hookers, into the country under some guise as "high-skilled".
Also, long, long ago at TI, I wanted to get a VISA-related job for a young engineer from somewhere in South America who was doing good work in Hall effect semiconductor devices. The HR people worked me through a tortious path of "must dos" before we could get TI to sponsor him. One of the steps in the path was running an ad in a couple of tech magazines for a guy with comparable skills at two-thirds the wage we would pay a US new graduate. I was shocked when foreigners applied, willing to come to the US at such a low wage.
The proof that a foreigner is a high-skilled immigrant is that American companies will pay MORE than they would pay a so-called lower-skilled American worker. We've seen this year that Microsoft (for example) wants to lay off American coders and replace them with "high-skilled" foreigner coders at much lower wages. Right now, the definition of a "high-skilled immigrant" is someone who will increase bottom line profits by reducing payrolls.
If the US required higher wages to import some "high-skilled" foreign worker, you will see far far fewer companies to bring in these so-called "high-skill" immigrants.
You could cut that out if government demands (A) top tax (like on 0.1% top income, federal AND state AND local) for everyone using Green Card and their dependents, (B) no social benefits (except public education and pension), (C) restriction to job slots where company must pay 50% higher gross pay to the GC holders compared to citizens, and less than 25% of slots available to non-citizens.
While I support the notion that we should recruit the best and brightest without regards to nationality, the example of higher education is a difficult one because many nationals will return to their home country with valuable education secured, providing little to no benefit to the country where they received their education. Furthermore their education is partially subsidized by the US government (since virtually 100% of colleges/universities rely on federal grants).
In short, yes to recruiting foreign expertise, no to expanding efforts to educate foreign students.
". Furthermore their education is partially subsidized by the US government"
....isn't that why we charge them higher tuition?
Heck, that's part of why competition among colleges is so fierce to recruit foreign talent. Because they get to charge them more than the locals.
Charge them, I'm pretty sure, a rate that would be profitable even without government subsidies.
The ones on scholarship are of course an exception to this reasoning. But then, they may be particularly likely to stick around.
Some of the fierce competition is due to DEI. A lot of foreign born can be registered as POC.
This should be a testable hypothesis. We banned affirmative action a year ago. We know that had some effects on the ethnic composition of Harvard's last recruiting class. Did it affect the national composition?
The effects on racial composition at Harvard have been minimal. They chose to defy and sit it out. Most Ivies are like Harvard.
In Canada the public-facing White Nationalist community appears to be made up of people who don't have any notable career, research, artistic, or athletic achievements. Many of these people aren't even on good terms with their families and one figurehead is actually a documented wife-beater who left his children and another was denounced by the arm of the family who run a succesful construction business. This theme is repeated in many fractal ways. If these people were to get their way we would actually face a real dystopia, not the imaginary one they've made up in their minds because an ESL Indian is serving them bad coffee.
Just today I talked to a Quebecer complaining about all the N-words and asked him to maybe consider that, objectively, things aren't as bad as he is saying. Things are good, even. This is a guy on government welfare who resides in a province that takes a disproportionate amount of transfer payments from my western province, telling me that immigrants are ruining his life. There's all manner of non-contributing nationalists talking about deporting people on the basis of skin colour, and they admit they don't care about the economy. It's easy to say that when self-identifying as down-trodden.
There is a big difference between high skill immigration in principal and the H1B program as it actually exists. The Visas are awarded by random lottery. This means that at the big tech companies paying 200K+ H1B workers are generally legitimately high skilled, but not so much at average companies paying 100K. I hate the dishonesty of claiming that you can't find an American worker to do a typical tech job. This is both how defenders of the H1B program frame it and what is required by law. Companies who hire H1B workers have to conduct fake job searches to "prove" no American workers are qualified, propping up make-work jobs in law, HR, and the government to check the paperwork. Surely this is the real "parasitism?" Surely awarding the H1B applications by salary is more defensible than by random lottery? The argument that there is no reliable way to tell if higher paid workers are the ones who are more high skilled is strange coming from someone who thinks markets work. If your average company with a software engineering department that was 90% Indians on H1Bs admitted that they were motivated by nepotism, and cheaper and more dependent labor (it is much harder to change jobs on an H1B) that would be one thing, but the lies that it is about finding more capable foreigners because there's no Americans to do these jobs are infuriating.
This is a rather interesting perspective. In your opinion, how would you define high-skill? What would be your preferred SAT cutoff, and would you prioritize specialists (e.g. semiconductor workers, robotics engineers)? How would you spot falsified qualifications?
SAT is not a skill. The issue is workplace productivity. It is fairly well assessible. I would say, having 2x higher productivity compared to the mean (not median) would be a good criterium.
It’s a good post Richard, but how do we get MAGA to act?
The right is in completely paralysis here, and we’re hurting the future with less students, funding and visa.
You have a prominent voice … so when are people going to actually step up?
We need people like you speaking out, sure, but we need policy. How?