Why is Spain so much richer now than almost any country in Spanish America? Before you answer with great confidence, ponder this: According to Angus Maddison’s data on per-capita GDP in 1950, Spain was poorer than Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and roughly equal to Colombia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama. This is 11 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and Spain of course stayed out of World War II.
Suppose that we think of Spain as always having had higher average human capital than countries in Latin America, but that many Latin American companies were more resource-rich than Spain. What we have observed is consistent with the share of world wealth accounted for by human capital going up and the share accounted for by natural resources going down.
Franco’s Spain experienced the sort of temporary politically-caused poverty that happens from time to time, and is now happening in Venezuela. It was performing well under its potential. Over the centuries, Spain has generally been richer and more powerful; that’s why it makes sense to talk about Spanish America but not Aztec Iberia.
Someone posted in the same thread that this was sort of a low point for Spain compared to before and after. Also, the civil war was really devastating.
That old sorcerer has vanished
And for once has gone away!
Spirits called by him, now banished,
My commands shall soon obey.
-Goethe
“What we have observed is consistent with the share of world wealth accounted for by human capital going up and the share accounted for by natural resources going down.”
Let’s be careful not to confuse human capital with tertiary educational attainment, or, for tertiary educational spending. There is no correlation between the latter and national prosperity, and although the former appears to be correlated with gdp per capita, causality remains a remains and if there is a relationship, whether it is wealth that causes increased schooling or if increased schooling causes wealth, or possibly a little in both directions.
Playing with the World Bank’s gdp by country graphing web tool, as recently as 1990 Spain was not nearly so far ahead as it is now of the Spanish American countries. Spain has constistently had much higher tertiary educational achievement levels than the Spanish American countries but that gap is and the rate of change has remained relatively constant. It really does not appear to be a free lunch, unlike US colleges and universities, a country can’t just print diplomas and get rich.
Chile has lower levels of tertiary education achievement than Colombia but is nevertheless a richer country. Indeed, Chile has greater wealth per capita than the Russian federation despite the latter having the highest tertiary achievement levels on the planet.
South America’s problems with debt, governance, governance stability, the popularity of socialism, earlier industrialization and trade policies, as well as investors willingness to invest capital in the Spanish American countries, all may have much more explanatory relevance than the number of diplomas per capita.
It is mainly academic economists who are wedded to the notion that increased university funding automatically causes economic dynamism, for obvious reasons.
And people who are interested in finding the optimal level of university subsidizaton are not necessarily troglodytes.
Peter Thiel discussed what the optimal level of university subsidizaton might be:
“I think the question we have to always ask is: how many people should we be training? My intuition is you want the gates to be very tight. One of my friends is a professor in the Stanford Economics department. The way he describes it to me is that they have about 30 graduate students starting PhDs in economics at Stanford every year. It’s 6-8 years to get a PhD. At the end of the first year, the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students, where they sort of agree who the top 3-4 are. The ranking never changes. The top 3-4 are able to get a good position in academia. The others not so much. We’re pretending to be kind to people when we’re actually being cruel.
…It’s the supply and demand of labor – if there are going to be good positions in academia where you can have a reasonable life, it’s not a monastic vow of poverty that you’re taking to be an academic… if you’re going to have that, you don’t want this sort of Malthusian struggle. You have 10 graduate students in a chemistry lab, where you have to have a fist fight for a Bunsen burner or a beaker, and if somebody says one politically incorrect thing, you can happily throw them off of the overcrowded bus. The bus is still overcrowded with 9 people on it. That’s what’s unhealthy.”
(h/t Steve Sailer)
Simply putting more of the people of Spanish America through more years of school, I for one, am confident, is not all that it will take to attain Spain’s level of wealth.
Also, note that Spain has been bubbly ever since the adoption of the Euro. A unified currency means unified interest rates, which will generally be too low for some parts of the continent and too high for others.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128514195
I know what he is driving at but two additional reasons:
1) Many of these nations had nasty Civil Wars while Spain waa coming out of their Civil War.
2) Spain birth rate Dropped a lot in 1970swhile Latin Amercica remained.
I sure Bryan would love the second one.
Maybe Franco’s right wing economic policies were more conducive to economic growth than the left wing policies adopted by many of the South American countries in the post 1950 era? A good test would be to compare Chile post and pre 1970 when they switched to right wing economic policies.
Kling’s hypothesis sounds more plausible.
Caplan’s hypothesis is immigration is the cause for Spain’s recent success. It reads like heavy propaganda. His argument is more rhetorical than logical.
Caplan’s a great guy, but in my judgment he’s consistently unreliable on the issue of immigration. He’s a relentless advocate for the cause of open borders, which is fine, but whenever that topic comes up in his writing, one needs to start reaching for the grains of salt.
To be clear, I’m not questioning his integrity or honor at all and I am confident that he speaks with perfect sincerity. But sometimes advocates drink their own kool-aid and start seeing everything in the world through a filter of incorrigible confirmation bias.
So, I can say many wonderful things about Caplan: he’s smart, clever, funny, witty, creative. And I mean that. He’s a celebrity pundit. Just like Kling and Cowen.
My criticism is that Caplan is writing propaganda. He’s deeply thought about the issue of immigration, he reached his conclusion, and he’s switched into advocacy and activist mode. His writing on the issue is intended to persuade and advocate a specific conclusion.
You said Caplan is a great guy and a man of integrity, honor, and sincerity. These are answers to the wrong questions to ask about pundits. At some level, everyone is sincere in what they believe.
Caplan’s not a great guy. He’s an ingrate who wants to transform the American majority (white gentiles) into a minority because they “scare” him.
http://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/they_scare_me.html
His open borders fanaticism is just an expression of his self-absorption.
@chedolf,
Ideally, in these comments, we consider arguments, and ideas. We discuss which are right or wrong, which are valid or invalid, and which are interesting.
I believe Caplan is wrong. Especially in the post you linked. I find Eric Kaufmann’s arguments on the subject of identity more convincing. But I wouldn’t name call Caplan an “ingrate” and I suggest you do the same. We should aspire to a more philosophical method of arguing points and beliefs.
Niko, imagine an American couple moving to Japan, where they have children who announce a desire to dispossess the native Japanese majority of that status. Most Japanese would be appalled. I’m sure most of us would be, too. It would be hard to object on the merits when (not if) critics began describing these people as “ugly Americans.”
There’s something immensely strange about choosing to live in a country while trying to harm the people who built it and their descendants. (And transforming an electoral supermajority into a minority is an unambiguous harm in a representative democracy.) “Ingrate” is almost charitable in that circumstance.
Regarding your encouragement to argue more philosophically: I don’t reject Caplan’s position merely because, taken at face value, it’s bad policy. The underlying paranoia is itself destructive. People who think and talk like Caplan are provoking exactly the kind of lowest-common-denominator, tribal politics they deplore. Someone on Twitter asked Charles Murray if he and other buckleyite never-Trumpers “will concede that if had not been for their indifference towards people’s concern over large ethno-cultural changes, then none of the nationalism that they so disapprove of would be able to manifest.” Murray: “I do concede it.” As the questioner says, Murray is just indifferent to the demographic shift. Caplan actively tries to facilitate it, and offers an absurdly provocative motive for doing so. I think it’s important to object to this and not just to the policy itself.
@chedolf,
I find it puzzling you are trying to explain this to me by analogy with Japan. Nothing you are writing is new to me. I mostly agree with you. Of course Caplan’s position is wildly offensive and provacative.
I don’t think most “never-Trump” style Republicans were “indifferent” to white identity concerns, they were hostile; they actively frustrated and suppressed them. John McCain made the campaign pledge to “Complete the Danged Fence” because he knew that his voters wanted less immigration, then when in office, he did the opposite, and supported much larger levels of immigration. That is awful to campaign one way, know what your voters want, promise them that, and then work to confuse and distract them and deliver the opposite result. George W Bush was the same and fully supported dececiving and tricking his voters and doing the opposite of what they wanted. McCain went further and called his own voters “crazies” who attended Trump rallies or supported Trump.
Trump is also suggesting higher levels of immigration, but I think Trump is genuinely trying to establish some compromise, and cater to some white identity concerns while also being welcoming to some, even slightly increased levels of immigration. Trump faces much more coordinated pro-immigration anti-white-identity forces that are determined to frustrate and undermine him.
What do you think of Eric Kaufmann’s position in the book Whiteshift? Even if you haven’t read the full book, you can read the author’s twitter feed to see his general position. He argues that white identity is a valid concern, just like any other identity group. And that people should be to argue for that openly, and make compromises, rather than having to sublimate their identity concerns into exaggerated concerns over rapists and losing jobs.
Niko, most of what I know about Kaufmann is secondhand. No strong opinion of him. Am about to read his conversation with Tyler Cowen.
You’re just being deliberately dishonest (assuming you actually read the link you pasted). Caplan didn’t say white people scared him. He said homogeneous majorities scared him (and specifically included a long list of groups including even libertarians) that ‘scare him.’
So no, fear of ‘white gentiles’ simply has nothing to do with his position.
It reads like a post where Caplan expounds on his preposterous idea that “social trust” scares him. He has this theory that living in a fractured low trust society would lead to libertarianism because nobody could cooperate with each other (and therefore be unable to form a strong government or have social norms).
I find this idea really flawed, and the empirical evidence of what those societies look like is really bad. You don’t end up with no government, you end up with corrupt government. You don’t end up with libertarian culture (a contradiction?), you end up with a bunch of people who can’t interact effectively because they don’t know the rules and don’t trust anyone.
It kind of feels like to come up with it you’ve got to have a screw loose, and I don’t just mean in a philosophical sense. I think he really gets off on this kind of thing at a personal level. It reminds me about his essay which railed on the restrictions of his Catholic upbringing (especially on how its insistence on sexual standards made it hard for him to get laid!). At some point doesn’t “what are you rebelling against Johnny?”, “what do you got?” get a little silly doesn’t it.
Lastly, “I want to destroy social trust and turn everyone into a powerless serf for semi-coordinated high IQ people like myself” could come straight out of Mein Kampf, so I don’t think he’s doing himself any favors there (Bryan was raised Catholic but is ethnically Jewish).
I went through a phase with somewhat similar opinions when I was much younger. And maybe if I had become a paid academic I would have sat around all day trying to come up with complex abstractions to justify donor positions. When you start with some bad base assumptions, it’s pretty easy extrapolate those to more bad ideas.
I think the most charitable thing that can be said is he’s probably a little autistic and might not fully understand what he’s saying.
Is Bryan a terrible person? I think we are all pretty terrible, including myself.
Caplan didn’t say white people scared him. He said homogeneous majorities scared him (and specifically included a long list of groups including even libertarians) that ‘scare him.’ So no, fear of ‘white gentiles’ simply has nothing to do with his position.
Caplan isn’t targeting the only group remotely like a homogeneous majority in the actual society he inhabits. He’s just promoting anomie as a social good. Seems implausible.
@asdf, your arguments sound too “Ad hominem” centric. I’d suggest you learn traditional philosophical argument. (I’m learning it)
Caplan reveals he grew up in Los Angeles. How has de facto open borders changed California in general and Los Angeles specifically? His lived experience is certainly at odds with his views.
“Won’t these migrants vote to ruin Spain? I don’t see the slightest hint of this. Migrants come to work, not to change Spain. And it’s far from clear that natives’ political views are better than migrants’.”
Again… California, Bryan?
Condorcet’s paradox. If an immigrant has to choose between an anti-capitalist pro-immigration party and a pro-capitalist a to-immigration party, he’s going to it’s in his interest to pick the former. It makes no sense to say, ‘see, the people we don’t want here have illustrated why we don’t them here by voting against us because we don’t want them here.’ Perhaps one will argue that they voted for bad policies first, and only afterward did the party start favoring less immigration, which seems dubious, but is also a moot point: almost everyone who’s alive today in the west has grown up in (or immigrated to) a world where the more pro-capitalist major parties have tended to be more anti-immigration. The argument – that immigrants vote badly – thus seems unavoidably recursive.
This is silly. For one, these people already supported more leftist policies before they immigrated. That’s how they voted in the home country. It’s how they poll on the issues. It’s how they vote on referendums. There is little evidence they support socialism because the GOP is anti-immigrant (pretty hilarious considering until recently they were cucks who brought you Reagen’s amnesty).
Beyond that, if we believe voters behavior reflects their interest in any way, it’s obvious that low IQ groups are going to vote for socialism. They are likely to receive and not likely to pay, on net. Basic logic dictates how they will vote.
When the Superintendent of New York City Schools says that “merit is a concept of white supremacy” he is simply stating a fact. Whites have higher IQ = better ability to produce goods and services people want = more merit. In any society organized to reward merit, whites will be above the low IQ groups that will be on the bottom. If you lack merit, why would you want a society organized around merit? Doesn’t make sense.
Yes yes, nobody wants Venezuela to happen. Even the poor. But it’s not like it ever gets presented in that fashion. It’s always “vote for this good thing, now this good thing, now this good thing” until it all adds up to socialist collapse.
Consider domestic migration.
Lots of folks fleeing California, looking for a better lifestyle elsewhere in the U.S., essentially economic ‘refugees’.
They are leaving in part because of the negative consequences of state politics, and going to states that are attractive to them because of the absence of those conditions (often fairly attributable to different local politics), but then changing the balance of local politics by demographic force of sheer numbers, and then voting for exactly the same kind of ruinous policies which contributed to their exodus in the first place.
It would be absurd to say that those formerly progressive Californians somehow wiped their ideological slate clean in the process of moving, and only seem to continue their former progressive voting patterns, because they were “born-again progressive” in reaction to local politics, even if it was a fact that local political parties had pro or anti-Californian positions in their platform, which of course it isn’t.
<i?Migrants come to work, not to change Spain.
True, but migrants have kids, and those kids may or may not identify with the local culture. Generally, it’s pretty safe if migrants come from a huge variety of cultures; they’ll be fragmented enough that the kids will have to assimilate. If there are enough from a single (or similar) culture to form a self-sustaining minority culture, problems can arise.
A while back, Rome imported a bunch of foreigners (Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, etc) to help out with its armies. You may remember how that went.
400 years ago the Wampanoag experienced seemingly non-threatening Pilgrim immigration and helped them survive their first winter as relations started out friendly. The Pilgrims had kids too, lots and lots of them, and there were more like them where they came from who would be coming in too.
Quote from wikipedia, “The tribe largely disappeared from historical records after the late 18th century…” Which is why, despite playing an important role in the nation’s founding story, when you mention the name of the tribe today to the typical American, the response is, “The who?”
Economists could, IMHO, benefit greatly from the study of history. Short-term decisions have long-term consequences, and economics doesn’t teach the long term AFAIK.