Sebastian Jensen

Jun 11, 2023

Hanania has been posting good takes lately: facing the truth about interracial crime, the case against reading books, and answering the obesity question. This is a welcome upgrade over what he was posting earlier: contrarian nonsense that fans flames on the internet. He has not given up on defending immigration though, as he has posted a recent article titled ‘Diversity Really is Our Strength’, arguing in favor of high levels of immigration from an (implicitly) hereditarian position.

He skips over the weak arguments against immigration (e.g. that they lower wages, bring bad cultures, cause budget deficits) and instead tackles the strongest argument for restricting it, which is that national IQ is associated with GDP per capita. National IQ is clearly the causal variable behind this association, though Hanania seems to take this as a given.

Instead, he makes the case that this is not a slight against immigration, as this doesn’t take into consideration benefits within individuals:

To see what I mean, imagine you have two countries. Country A has a GDP per capita of $40K, while Country B has a GDP per capita of $10K. An engineer making $15K a year moves from Country B to Country A. What happens? The average GDP in both countries goes down. Someone might look at that and say that the engineer should stay in Country B. But you haven’t actually shown that anyone in either country is worse off by him moving.

The problem with this argument is that a low national IQ can have effects on the general population independent of the within-individual effects. For example, national IQs are correlated with a variety of measures of social development:

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