Category: Podcast

Garett Jones is Associate Professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. His book, Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters so Much More than Your Own is the subject of this episode.

The book deals with an empirical puzzle: IQ is a weak predictor for earnings. We all know high-IQ people who live paycheque to paycheque, and lower IQ people who succeed brilliantly. And yet, when we look at the relationship between nations’ average IQ scores and their incomes, the relationship is strong. Nations with the highest average IQ scores are eight times wealthier than nations with the lowest IQ scores. How can we resolve this apparent contradiction?

Garett documents five main channels for the spillover effects of IQ:

1. Smarter people are more patient, they save more and build up more capital.

When economists test people’s patience, high-IQ people tend to be more willing to wait for a larger amount of money in the future rather than taking a smaller sum now. This is important at the national level because savings tend to stay within a country* and fund investments within that country. That means living in a higher IQ nation generally means having more capital available to compliment your labour.

2. Smarter groups are more cooperative.

Economists use the iterated prisoner’s dilemma as an idealized scenario where cooperation is at odds with people’s individual, short-term incentives. Jones looked at the many times economists have studied this in experiments and correlated the cooperation rate in these experiments with the SAT scores of the schools the study participants were drawn from. He found that higher SAT schools produced more cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.

In later research, Al-Ubaydli, Jones, and Weel (2014) found that higher IQ groups were more cooperative, but higher IQ individuals were not. A high-IQ person in a low-IQ group would not foolishly cooperate when everyone else was defecting, but high-IQ groups could coordinate on a cooperative solution despite not knowing that they were in a high-IQ group.

3. Smarter people are more informed voters and are more likely to support market-oriented policies.

Caplan and Miller (2010) document the tendency for high-IQ people to think like economists.

4. Smarter groups make more productive team members.

Jones uses “O-ring” technologies (drawing on an idea from Kremer (1993)), in reference to the fatal part that cause the Challenger disaster, to show how high-IQ workers can be indispensable in many sectors of a modern economy. While many economic models assume substitutability between high- and low-skilled labour (e.g. three low-skilled workers can do the work of one high-skilled worker), O-ring sectors don’t have this feature. When one mistake can completely destroy a project, low-skilled workers can have effectively negative marginal products.

5. Peer effects cause those with high-IQ peers take on the behaviours of high-IQ people, implying that low-IQ people in high-IQ countries will be more patient, cooperative, informed, and productive than low-IQ people in low-IQ countries.

It’s well documented in the social science literature that people take on the behaviours of their peers. This effectively multiplies the positive effects of the first four channels by making low-IQ people behave like high-IQ people.

Jones sees a virtuous cycle between IQ and development. Higher IQs lead to better economic outcomes, and better economic outcomes lead to better health outcomes and higher IQs. But despite the great importance of this subject, people have been extremely reluctant to research differences in IQ between groups for fear of finding an unpalatable result. One of Jones’ aims in writing this book is to make it more acceptable for people to do research in this area.

We also discuss Jones’ recent debate with Bryan Caplan on the subject of open borders. Jones’ work on IQ spillover effects give us reason to use caution in supporting open borders.

 

*This is actually another economic “paradox” that economists don’t fully understand. One would expect savings to be invested where they face the highest returns, regardless of national boundaries, but that seems not to be the case.

REFRENCES

Al-Ubaydli, O., Jones, G., & Weel, J. (2014). Average player traits as predictors of cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma.

Caplan, B., & Miller, S. C. (2010). Intelligence makes people think like economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey. Intelligence, 38(6), 636-647.

Jones, G. (2008). Are smarter groups more cooperative? Evidence from prisoner’s dilemma experiments, 1959–2003. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 68(3), 489-497.

Kremer, M. (1993). The O-ring theory of economic development. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 551-575.

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The post Hive Mind, IQ, and the Wealth of Nations with Garett Jones appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Ash Navabi returns to the podcast to discuss his essay, “Will Iceland’s Sovereign Money Proposal End Economic Crises?”

In April of 2015, Frosti Sigurjonsson, Member of the Parliament of Iceland and Chairman of the Committee for Economic Affairs and Trade, made a bold proposal to end fractional reserve banking and replace it with a system he calls “sovereign money.”

Fractional reserve banking is the system under which banks create money by lending out a portion of depositors’ money, keeping only a fraction to pay out on demand. One problem with fractional reserve banking is that the mismatch between banks’ assets and liabilities leaves them exposed to bank runs and financial panics. To solve this problem, the central banks of the world function as “lenders of last resort” to save insolvent banks from going under. However, the more insidious problem with fractional reserves is that the injection of new money directly into credit markets artificially lowers interest rates and incentivizes entrepreneurs to take on longer term projects than the real savings available in the economy can sustain. Having central banks intervene to keep the cheap credit flowing does nothing to address this problem, and in fact makes it worse.

Under the Icelandic proposal, while there would be a 100% reserve requirement for private banks, the central bank would still be able to create money at will. Ash critiques this on the basis of the “Cantillon effect.” The Cantillon effect is the phenomenon whereby the creation of new money transfers wealth to the early holders of that money. If a new dollar is created, the first holder of the dollar can use it to buy goods before prices have adjusted upwards. However, as people exchange the new dollar and use it to bid on various goods, the sellers of those goods will adjust their prices upwards to account for their consumers’ greater willingness to pay. If you are the last to get hold of the new dollar, then you’ve been bidding against the holders of new money for a long time before seeing an increase in your income, thus making you poorer in real terms.

By centralizing money creation in the central bank, Sigurjonsson’s proposal would enrich those to whom the central bank lends. In particular, the proposal would allow the central bank to grant money directly to the government to pay for government spending. Thus, the Cantillon effect would enrich those who are paid directly by the government at expense of those who aren’t. Ash argues that this would invite cronyism, since those with the right connections will be able to benefit from these Cantillon effects.

In the end, it’s not clear whether the sovereign money proposal would have been a net good or a net bad. It could have reduced credit expansion, but the cronyism inherent in the proposal could easily outweigh the positive effects.

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