I think you're correct on the impact on inequality and the returns to IQ. My biggest concerns are the side effects of that inequality, because people care quite a bit about their status relative to their peers. This also kind of gets into hedonic adaptation and the Easterlin Paradox. I'm actually curious about your take on these two things and what they mean for economic growth as good thing or goal. Another concern I have is the impact on housing prices and infrastructure due to our abysmal zoning, land use, etc laws. Could this lead to homelessness? Overall I still lean pretty strongly towards open borders.
My intuition is that it would both flatten the curve (while shifting the mean toward the higher value) AND it also would give us a fatter tails. That means that while the inner quartiles of the distribution might be more equal, I would expect to have even more cases of extreme wealth, underclasses (though with higher baseline in a wealthier country, easier to be bum on UBI). The great GDP means even more opportunity for outsized gains from entrepreneurship and scale, so you get more deca-millionaires and billionaires. How does that compare even if you get a broader (and richer) middle class?
It would be more useful if you would just write your own model and show how it differs from Jones'. I know you're not a huge fan of math, but at least Jones' approach shows clearly what factors are involved and gives a starting point to quantify their importance.
This is most evident in point 4. You write "Would IQ have a big effect on personal economic success under open borders?". Well, in Jones' model, the break even point for individual IQ premium at which current US citizens would no longer lose from open borders is 9%. So it's possible to agree with you that this factor is underestimated, and still ultimately come down on his side.
Similarly, two of your other arguments are a) Open borders would increase mean global IQ and b) Open borders would increase the individual IQ premium. I think a) is obviously correct, but I don't have any idea how important it is, because you don't give any numerical estimates. Maybe this is already enough to refute Jones' argument, maybe not.
b) is more questionable. For example, let's suppose society has ten people with IQ of 100 and one person with an IQ of 150. Jones' model implies that the smart person earns a 50% wage premium. Now suppose everyone else's IQ drops to 50. Under Jones' model, the smart person now earns double what everyone else earns (although everyone else earns less than before). You suggest he will earn more than double. But to me, it seems equally plausible that this cuts the wage premium. Maybe in the smart society, he was a leader or inventor, while in the dumb society he's forced to do subsistence farming, just like everyone else.
More generally, smart people typically don't try to move to countries or locations with a lot of dumb people. They try to be around other smart people. This implies heavily that, as Jones argues, high-IQ people have positive externalities on other high-IQ people which outweigh their negative impact on the individual IQ wage premium. But again, this is complicated enough that it's hard to know what to think, and the best thing to do is probably to try to model it somehow.
Something Bryan Caplan doesn't consider here that could have a crucial impact on per-capita GDP: how would a substantial reduction in the median IQ of eligible voters eventually resulting from a massive influx of low-IQ migrants affect domestic political policy? I daresay it would shift leftward, toward more pervasive government intervention in economic affairs to bring about more egalitarian distribution of wealth, with inevitable consequent loss of productivity.
Anyway, it's hard to see a rosy future when reproduction and innate intelligence are inversely correlated both here and in the world at large, no matter what sort of immigration policy prevails.
The only people harmed in your model here are the low-IQ natives, who don't benefit from the increased demand for the proportionately scarcer high IQ workers, and who also are probably harmed by the welfare state getting spread thinner over more low productivity citizens. (although maybe amortizing nonrival public goods like the military over a larger population makes up the difference)
I have no idea who one would prove this, but my hunch is that average iq matters mostly because of the high iq individuals making things better, not because of the average itself.
For example, a group of 99 people with 95 iq and 1 person with 180 iq seems more capable to me of achieving some breakthrough than a group of 100 people with 110 iq.
I think you're correct on the impact on inequality and the returns to IQ. My biggest concerns are the side effects of that inequality, because people care quite a bit about their status relative to their peers. This also kind of gets into hedonic adaptation and the Easterlin Paradox. I'm actually curious about your take on these two things and what they mean for economic growth as good thing or goal. Another concern I have is the impact on housing prices and infrastructure due to our abysmal zoning, land use, etc laws. Could this lead to homelessness? Overall I still lean pretty strongly towards open borders.
My intuition is that it would both flatten the curve (while shifting the mean toward the higher value) AND it also would give us a fatter tails. That means that while the inner quartiles of the distribution might be more equal, I would expect to have even more cases of extreme wealth, underclasses (though with higher baseline in a wealthier country, easier to be bum on UBI). The great GDP means even more opportunity for outsized gains from entrepreneurship and scale, so you get more deca-millionaires and billionaires. How does that compare even if you get a broader (and richer) middle class?
It would be more useful if you would just write your own model and show how it differs from Jones'. I know you're not a huge fan of math, but at least Jones' approach shows clearly what factors are involved and gives a starting point to quantify their importance.
This is most evident in point 4. You write "Would IQ have a big effect on personal economic success under open borders?". Well, in Jones' model, the break even point for individual IQ premium at which current US citizens would no longer lose from open borders is 9%. So it's possible to agree with you that this factor is underestimated, and still ultimately come down on his side.
Similarly, two of your other arguments are a) Open borders would increase mean global IQ and b) Open borders would increase the individual IQ premium. I think a) is obviously correct, but I don't have any idea how important it is, because you don't give any numerical estimates. Maybe this is already enough to refute Jones' argument, maybe not.
b) is more questionable. For example, let's suppose society has ten people with IQ of 100 and one person with an IQ of 150. Jones' model implies that the smart person earns a 50% wage premium. Now suppose everyone else's IQ drops to 50. Under Jones' model, the smart person now earns double what everyone else earns (although everyone else earns less than before). You suggest he will earn more than double. But to me, it seems equally plausible that this cuts the wage premium. Maybe in the smart society, he was a leader or inventor, while in the dumb society he's forced to do subsistence farming, just like everyone else.
More generally, smart people typically don't try to move to countries or locations with a lot of dumb people. They try to be around other smart people. This implies heavily that, as Jones argues, high-IQ people have positive externalities on other high-IQ people which outweigh their negative impact on the individual IQ wage premium. But again, this is complicated enough that it's hard to know what to think, and the best thing to do is probably to try to model it somehow.
My take: https://onpersons.substack.com/p/naively-modelling-open-borders
Something Bryan Caplan doesn't consider here that could have a crucial impact on per-capita GDP: how would a substantial reduction in the median IQ of eligible voters eventually resulting from a massive influx of low-IQ migrants affect domestic political policy? I daresay it would shift leftward, toward more pervasive government intervention in economic affairs to bring about more egalitarian distribution of wealth, with inevitable consequent loss of productivity.
Anyway, it's hard to see a rosy future when reproduction and innate intelligence are inversely correlated both here and in the world at large, no matter what sort of immigration policy prevails.
The only people harmed in your model here are the low-IQ natives, who don't benefit from the increased demand for the proportionately scarcer high IQ workers, and who also are probably harmed by the welfare state getting spread thinner over more low productivity citizens. (although maybe amortizing nonrival public goods like the military over a larger population makes up the difference)
I have no idea who one would prove this, but my hunch is that average iq matters mostly because of the high iq individuals making things better, not because of the average itself.
For example, a group of 99 people with 95 iq and 1 person with 180 iq seems more capable to me of achieving some breakthrough than a group of 100 people with 110 iq.
"breaking the countries that work"
WHAT could THAT mean?