It is impossible for the U.S.'s success to be due to "foreign talent"

Reversing cause and effect is always poor form

I was about to start my Substack with a post reviewing the Cambridge History of Latin America, but, due to personal problems combined with insufficient will on my part, I have instead decided to begin by addressing a little bit of left-wing political mythmaking. I will tend to keep such posts free, but cannot guarantee anything at the moment, and encourage you to

for the low, low price of $42 per year for a series of planned reviews of the following books:

The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volumes 1 and 2

Saburo Ienaga’s The Pacific War: 1931-1945

Richard von Glahn’s The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

…and more to come.

Prominent Substack and Twitter pundit Matthew Yglesias has recently gone on a crusade against the country of Hungary, stating the right should not attempt to emulate the country’s leadership’s socially conservative policies because some of its social outcomes are not as advanced as those of the U.S.:

Note my favorite comments on his post were this and this; read these before you read my post. Now that you’re done, go ahead and continue reading.

Many have criticized Yglesias’s blatant illogic by (appropriately) defending Hungary’s living standards or by (correctly) pointing out that a nation’s “living standards” are nothing compared to its defense against corrosive social habits, but only a few have bothered to point out the single most devastating criticism of this attempted meme: that it is logically impossible that the U.S.’s success is due to “foreign talent”. It is a brazen reversal of cause and effect. Foreigners only move to a country where there is opportunity for them. Now, it is possible that the present-day benefits and opportunities that a country offers may be the result not of the character of its previously existing people or institutions, but of migration. For instance, the United Arab Emirates being the Muslim country with the highest average IQ is not at all due to the character of its people prior to the twentieth century and hardly at all due to the character of its institutions, and is primarily due to the abundance of fossil fuels that it exports. However, this is clearly not true for the United States, the abundance of opportunities in which for migrants from, e.g., Germany, Italy, Hungary, Mexico, etc. was clearly an already existing result of its people and institutions, rather than unique access to natural resources. A country that can attract migrants from Hungary and Germany is already has more opportunity than Hungary and Germany, and the migration cannot be the cause of this difference in attractions. Migration of “foreign talent” may increase inequality in living standards among the nations, but it is never the original cause of it. For a demonstration of this, consider Argentina. Though it is just as open to immigration as it was a century before, and had an even higher foreign-born percentage than the U.S. at its peak, it is no longer a major destination for high-skilled immigrants because it economically fell behind the U.S. and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, despite becoming increasingly more socially liberal on every front over the course of that century. And, indeed, Yglesias does not even bother to defend the idea high migration causes a high level of prosperity, simply claiming they are linked on an “aesthetic level”. Well, so are exclusionary zoning and status as an elite destination, but I have yet to see Yglesias claim implementing exclusionary zoning in more places will make more Americans elites. Much the same goes for Yglesias’s attempt to claim

One reason the non-diverse, non-cosmopolitan, highly traditionalist parts of the United States are much wealthier than rural Hungary is that they are connected to and subsidized by the much richer and more successful parts of the United States where you can find drag queen happy hour at the public library and the headquarters of big multinational corporations.

Though it is certainly true that richer countries tend to be more open to homesexualism and transsexualism, the causation, if there is any, must be primarily from wealth to leftism, not leftism to wealth. The U.S. had a world-beating tech sector prior to adopting the primary precepts of modern-day social leftism, and that tech sector would have continued to exist were these precepts never adopted. Were the pattern of causation the reverse, the Philippines would have higher living standards than South Korea, and famously pro-transsexual Argentina would have higher living standards than the United States.

It is never a good idea to reverse cause and consequence while making an argument. The obese do not have a large net calorie intake because they are obese, but they are obese because they have a large net calorie intake. Crime is not caused by poverty, but poverty is caused by crime. High life expectancy does not make a country rich, but a country becoming rich does raise its life expectancy. And, much likewise, the U.S. is not rich because it attracts lots of migrants and is socially leftwing, but it attracts lots of migrants and is socially leftwing because it is rich. And, given this, there is nothing wrong with Americans possessing admiration for the Hungarian ruling class.