Bryan Caplan's Open Borders Argument is Fallacious
Bryan Caplan's Open Borders Argument is Fallacious
Contra his takes on a recent podcast
This post is in response to Caplan’s arguments on this podcast:
Bryan Caplan argues his typical open borders take.
1. He asks how much of the 1st-3rd world IQ gap is environmental. He says trans-national twin studies show about 40%. This makes sense when US blacks are 85 IQ and Africans are 70 IQ. However, he is lacking a concept of broad sense geneticness. Africans are 70 IQ because they make a crap environment when they are left alone. So in that way the European-African gap is 100% genetic, and the US Black-White gap is 200% genetic.
He justifies importing 70 IQ populations by saying we increase the average phenotypic IQ in the world. This is like putting sewage in wine and saying that because the alcohol kills some of the sewage bacteria, the world is better off if we mix sewage and wine because it decreases the amount of sewage in the world. Caplan fails to think like an economist here -- the marginal profit of adding one natural 70 IQ person, raised to 85 IQ by welfare, is negative for a 100 IQ society. They just bring crime and are a net tax burden.
2. Caplan handwaves away the increase in crime by saying that immigrants have lower average crime than the US crime rate, higher than the European crime rate, but this doesn't matter because people don't value crime reduction that much. First, Caplan is dishonest when he claims US immigrants have lower crime rates than Americans. Only the huge black crime rate makes this true. Our failure to properly deal with them does not mean we should import more brown people. Next, Caplan says that even if crime rate is increased by immigration, as in Europe, this doesn't matter because preference studies show that the value placed on crime reduction by people is rather low. He compares not wanting violent brown immigrants to not wanting white men to be born, because men are more violent than women. He again fails to think like an economist; the average marginal social utility to birthing a white male is positive because we are the people who have created everything around you. Our contribution outweighs the harms (and furthermore the eugenics I promote can be seen as a plan to increase the average marginal social utility of white male, and other, births).
His position here is summed up: "the whole point of economic development is to reduce diversity [i.e. increase "diversity"/global racial homogeneity]. You're losing a little bit, it's true, but compared to what you're gaining I don't see that it's remote worthwhile to preserve most culture as they traditionally existed. The traditional European culture of 1800 is just totally gone forever." But what do 99% of white people gain from importing brown people? Caplan acts like I get some cash payment every time a brown person comes into my country, when in reality I don't, I get poorer, more of my money goes to pay for them to exist, and they vote to make this worse and increase discrimination against me. This is so true for any white person who isn't in the Patriciate that it should be true for Caplan even though he's Jewish. His productive, intelligent children will simply face more crime, higher taxes, and even worse discrimination (this might be less because of their Jewishness) with every new brown person that comes in. You don't gain anything fiscally. The people who gain are those who would pay a lot of money to see white people destroyed, and the Patriciate who employ all of these brown people for cheap and don't pay their income supplements.
What could motivate such fallacious argumentation? Caplan fronts as if it’s raw altruism for nonwhite people, but this is naive from an economic perspective.