Doing better in the promised land

View of Tel Aviv. Israel shows good intellectual achievement, but not the top intellectual achievement of Jews in the U.S. How come?

Why do Ashkenazi Jews do worse in Israel than in the United States? This question is raised by Heiner Rindermann in his new book Cognitive Capitalism. Israel is an advanced country and shows promise in certain areas, like nuclear power and certain high-tech goods. Yet it underperforms when compared with Jewish communities in the West. "There is clear evidence for good intellectual achievement; however, not for top intellectual achievement as from Western Ashkenazi Jews" (Rindermann 2018, p. 149).

Israel is 42% Ashkenazi, a proportion that works out to more than three and a half million. By comparison, American Jews number between 5.5 and 8 million, and their intellectual creativity—in whatever field you choose—has been many times greater. So what gives?

One reason is that the above figure of 42% includes the recent wave of Russian immigrants to Israel, and they are on average only half-Jewish (Wikipedia 2018). It is also possible that offspring of Ashkenazi-Sephardic or Ashkenazi-Mizrahi marriages tend to self-identify as Ashkenazi. 

A second reason is ideological. The Zionist movement sought to create a "new Jew," who would be less intellectual and more interested in other pursuits. Furthermore, Israel is home to over a million Haridim (strictly Orthodox Jews), who confine their intellectual pursuits to Torah study.

A third reason is that Israel is not a high-trust culture, at least not to the same extent as Western countries:

Statistics from Transparency International on corruption corroborate these political observations: while Scandinavian nations are leading in non-corruption, closely followed by (present and past) British and European countries, Israel comes at rank 37, after Botswana, [United Arab] Emirates and Chile. (Rindermann 2018, p. 150).

This is consistent with mainstream thinking. When Jews immigrated to the United States, they found a land of opportunity where they could use their abilities to the fullest. This narrative, however, is usually framed in terms of freedom from discrimination: America offered a haven from antisemitism. Just as importantly, however, it also offered a high-trust culture. Americans could generally be counted on to do what they said they would do and charge only what they said they would charge. When two Soviet journalists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, visited the U.S. in 1935, they were struck by the integrity of the average American:

The American sits in his office with his coat off and works. He works quietly, unobtrusively, without making any fuss. He is never late anywhere. He never hurries anywhere. He has only one telephone. No one waits for him in his reception room, because an appointment is usually made with absolute accuracy, and not a single extra minute is wasted during the interview.

[...] Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, "I'll do that," it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word—this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people. (Ilf and Petrov 1937)

Migration and productivity

The same could be said for other immigrant groups. People do better when they move from a low-trust culture to a high-trust one. They can fully realize their potential. We see this with PISA math scores. Asian American students do better than students in Asia, White American students do better than students in Europe, Hispanic American students do better than students in Latin America, and African American students do better than students in sub-Saharan Africa (Sailer 2013).

This benefit of migration is affirmed by mainstream economists, although they usually attribute migrant success to abstractions like "good government" and "good institutions"—as if these entities are not composed of flesh-and-blood people who think and act like other people of the same culture:

There are many reasons why this is so. Among them are that the lower earners usually live in societies with predatory governments that arbitrarily confiscate wealth, are rent asunder by civil war and other armed conflicts, and lack the social, political, and economic institutions that are the foundations for economic growth, as well as numerous other factors. By contrast, residents of developed countries face fewer political and social barriers to economic growth, thus incentivizing the long-term accumulation of the machines, knowledge, and human capital that propel the economy. (Nowrasteh 2016)

As a result, migrants are more productive in First World societies like the United States than they were in their home societies:

[...] the median worker from the developing world can expect a fourfold increase in wages by coming to the United States. Across the board, wage growth can range from a twofold increase for Dominicans to a 15-fold increase for Yemenis. Thus, just by moving to the United States, these workers will experience increases in income that few in the developed world can imagine. These gains do not come at the cost of Americans' losses, but from the increased productivity of the immigrant workers themselves. (Nowrasteh 2016)

Their productivity will increase because they are now interacting with a high-trust culture. They receive their supplies on time, and these supplies don't have to be checked and double-checked. The product of their labor is then distributed or further processed by people who do what they say they will do. More work gets done, and less time gets wasted.

This is the main argument for labor mobility. Workers from a Third World country can do better if moved to a First World country. This is not because they have become better workers. It's because they are now immersed in a culture that functions better.

So why not let people migrate from the Third World to the First World? Their productivity will rise, employers will get cheaper labor, and the global economy as a whole will benefit. It's a win-win, isn't it?

Well, no. If you fill a high-trust culture with people from low-trust societies, you'll eventually get .... another low-trust culture. You'll kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Parting thoughts

When I raise these points with other people, I soon run into disagreement, even when among people with open minds.

Disagreement often comes from a belief that immigrants will "assimilate." The habits of a low-trust culture will be shed and replaced with those of a high-trust one. To some extent, this does happen when immigrants are relatively few in number. As they become more numerous, however, the pressure to assimilate slackens and may even go into reverse. The pressure to assimilate is also weakened by new technologies, particularly the Internet, which are making it easier for migrants to live in their native culture anywhere on the planet.

There is also disagreement over what creates a high-trust culture. At one time this question used to interest social scientists, but now that interest has refocused on "whiteness studies." It seems that societies like Iceland function admirably because of their "white privilege."

Sarcasm aside, trust does matter. It has been key to the rise of Western societies to global dominance. But how is it created? I've argued that Western societies have extended the high-trust environment of the family to a much larger social context, specifically through a more individualistic mindset that is governed by universal moral rules, rather than by a dual morality that favors close kin over everyone else.

This high-trust mindset has four main components:

Independent social orientation - independence of the self from others, including stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness. 

Universal rule adherence - capacity to obey universal and absolute moral rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and expelled from the entire moral community, as opposed to being ostracized by close kin.

Guilt proneness - capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule adherence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.

Affective empathy - capacity to experience the emotional states of other people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. This help is conditional on the other person being judged morally worthy, i.e., a rule follower. In most human populations, affective empathy is largely confined to relations between a mother and her offspring. In northwest Europeans, it has become generalized to all community members (Frost 2017).

In addition, there is a fifth and historically more recent component: pacification of social relations. This is an outcome of the first component. Once violent individuals had become branded as immoral, they were removed from society with fanatical zealousness (Frost and Harpending 2015). Finally, there is increased cognitive ability, which I mention last partly because it receives too much attention in this sort of discussion and partly because it too may be relatively recent. Rindermann (2018, pp. 86-87) has argued that mean IQ rose in Western Europe during late medieval and post-medieval times as a result of the greater reproductive success of the nascent middle class.

All of the above components have medium to high heritability. If we wish to impose this mindset, we will be constrained by the underlying genotype. Guilt and empathy cannot be elicited from people who are not guilt-prone and empathic. Nor can such people be made to feel calm if they have exceeded their anger threshold. There remain only "carrot and stick" methods to make them act in ways they normally would not. As for cognitive ability, the room for improvement is slim. Any gains made during adolescence will largely "wash out" during adulthood.

That may not be the message you want to hear. And perhaps it is too pessimistic. Again, it depends on the numbers. It would also help if Christians were still interested in enforcing proper behavior. Nowadays, most aren't.

Finally, I should point out that there may be more than one way to build a high-trust culture. East Asian societies, for instance, rely more on rule adherence and less on affective empathy and guilt proneness (Frost 2015).

References

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost, P. (2015). Two Paths. The Unz Review, January 24

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/two-paths/

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology 13: 230-243.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.abstract

Ilf, I. and E. Petrov. (1937). Little Golden America

https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=little+golden+america&btnG= 

Nowrasteh, A. (2016). The Case for More Immigration. Democracy. A Journal of Ideas. Fall. No. 42

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/42/the-case-for-more-immigration/

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.

Sailer, S. (2013). PISA racial results for Americans on Math. December 3, Steve Sailer. iSteve.

https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-racial-results-for-americans-on.html

Wikipedia (2018). 1990s Post-Soviet aliyah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah