An Interview with Garett Jones

Contributed by Luis E. Cardenas

Garett Jones is the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University. He has written a number of books analyzing the intersection of economics and government policy, particularly analyzing the effects of immigration on the economy. He has also worked as an economist in Congress. He received his BA from Brigham Young University and his PhD from the University of California, San Diego.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SALIENT: Your work spans macroeconomics, public policy, and the effects of culture in these fields. In fact, your research suggests that immigration shapes institutions in ways that last for generations, including in matters of national prosperity. What led you to study this question, and how would you say your approach differs from mainstream academic thought on economics and immigration?

JONES: This comes from the fact that Adam Smith's book was entitled The Wealth of Nations. The grandest project of economics is to try to explain the wealth of nations: why some nations are so much more productive than others. It's a great puzzle, right? It's a puzzle that is intellectually interesting, and it's socially and morally important. That's really what got me into it.

By the standards of economics, I take a multidisciplinary approach to addressing my questions. What that really means is not that I go outside of economics. I mostly use the many tools within economics to address this question. So, for instance, I ran some early statistical analyses that found that a nation's average IQ seemed to have a much stronger relationship with a nation's prosperity than a person's IQ had with that own person's prosperity. It looked like a six-to-one multiplier, some kind of social multiplier to IQ. That made me wonder, “where is this coming from?” And so I began thinking about game theory, experimental economics, and the differences in what drives cooperation.

Ultimately, I found evidence, some created by others, that smarter groups are more cooperative. And since cooperation is so central, from Adam Smith onward, to shaping highly productive team efforts, I realized I was onto a path where I could start explaining this. So I had to go from macroeconomics, the big picture, to experimental game theory, the very small picture, to start getting these answers. I think what makes me different is that I pull together evidence from all the parts of economics to address these questions. I don't just stick to some statistical analysis and then move on.

SALIENT: Today, the Republican Party seems to be split between those who favor reducing immigration outright and those advocating for more selective, ‘high-skilled’ and merit-based immigration. Think of the recent H-1B visa debates. Is this an accurate way to portray the debate? How would you suggest we balance economic benefits with concerns over cultural and institutional change driven by immigration?

JONES: Well, you know, American culture has already been destroyed a couple of times. And that worked out ok, I'd say. I don't think that every cultural change is for the better. The way that German-American culture, Scandinavian-American culture materially shifted what America was is noteworthy. This is not a nation that would be recognizable to the Founders. Even late 1800s America would not have been recognizable to the Founders.

When one asks what is valuable about a nation's culture, I come back to this issue that I talked about in the panel earlier. The core–what makes America special compared to other countries–is its excellence and its sense of adventure. The fact that it's a nation that is of world-historical importance from its beginnings. It's worth cultural tumult and cultural displacement if those cultural displacements are part of helping make America greater.

Getting America to be at scale–to have enough people to do grand things–was part of the project in the 19th century with German, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants and others, including my own Irish ancestors. That is a reminder that cultural change per se and obsession over the folkways of America is, I think, a low-status thing, and we should place less weight on that. Who cares what people eat at dinner? It's important to somebody on some level, but it's not worth sacrificing America's future greatness for.

SALIENT: In your 2022 book, The Culture Transplant, you explore the historical trace of prosperity and the wealth of nations with an immigration lens. You compile academic economics research and pull from international case studies, including the I-7 grouping. What is this grouping? What can it tell us about our domestic approach to immigration, and possibly even about the greater international migratory movements?

JONES: The I-7 is my way to address American greatness in a way that I think appeals to academics and the NPR crowd. The I-7 are the seven nations that invent most of the world's great ideas by multiple measures. I picked three measures, and one could pick others, but I looked at research and development spending per capita, patents per capita, and Nobel Prizes per capita. By multiple measures, there are seven places that have a mixture of average excellence and large scale. They create most of the great ideas in technology, science, and engineering that end up shaping the world. There are three in Asia, three in Europe, and then the US. The entire world depends on the inventions made in these nations. Anybody who's arguing for an immigration policy that favors low-skilled immigration should be worried if institutions worsen even slightly in one of the I-7 nations.

If institutions worsen even slightly in one of the I-7 nations, there's a well-documented link between a nation's government quality and a nation's level of innovation. It seems obvious. You need good institutions to get a lot of R&D, venture capital spending–all those kinds of things. If poorly chosen immigration policies hurt institutions in these important nations–even slightly–that has costs on the whole planet. So anybody who's a utilitarian, even a soft utilitarian, would say, ‘wow, I don't want to kill the goose that lays the world's golden eggs. I don't even want to weaken the goose that lays the world's golden eggs.’ You definitely don't want a migration policy that puts American innovation at risk.

This is why I non-ironically say that for people who favor open borders, have open borders for Iceland, or pick a rich country and let a lot of people from poor countries move there to have a shot at prosperity. Focus this on a country that isn't one of the world's most innovative. Don't put global innovation at risk. If you're really sure that adding 100 or 200 or 300 million immigrants from countries where test scores are low and corruption is high will have no effect on that government's prosperity, on that government's competence, then let's run this experiment in Iceland. If it works out, great.

I use Iceland half-jokingly, but if Iceland had the same population density as Singapore, you'd have hundreds of millions of people there. From the point of view of open borders activists, this is a great opportunity where they could have their cake and eat it, too. Because you could have mass migration to a country, it would boost prosperity for hundreds of millions: people could send remittances back to their home country, make the world a better place, and still not place the I-7 at risk.

Basically, I'm arguing for a kind of conservatism toward institutional quality in the I-7. Beyond that, people who care about global well-being and global prosperity should actually be obsessed with trying to improve institutions in the I-7. I want those places to be better than they are. It's important.

SALIENT: In an earlier book of yours, 10% Less Democracy, you discuss populism, democracy, and what optimal government looks like. You jokingly approach William F. Buckley's phrase with a twist: “Rather than being governed by the masses of Boston or by the professors of Harvard, I’d far rather be governed by the engineering faculty of MIT.” Trump’s second administration has so far been described as a mix of ‘tech bro’ oligarchy, aggressive technocracy, and a triumph of meritocracy over DEI. How much of your phrase’s sentiment still holds true to your personal political philosophy today? And what is your general forecast on the second Trump administration?

JONES: That is one of the best questions I've been asked about my research in years. Thank you so much. This is a good one because it's a nice challenge, right? I think it is true that I'd rather be governed by the MIT engineering faculty than by the average person in Boston.

The DOGE approach–not just the headlines of DOGE, but once one dives a bit deeper–these are parts of what people call the “broligarchy”. They're technically extremely skilled engineers who are coming into government. Any particular version of it might turn out better than average or worse than average, right? We always roll the dice when it comes to policy, but I think there's little doubt that having ‘broligarchs,’ technically highly competent people with an engineering background, bringing the power of artificial intelligence into government, is something that– perhaps not this year, but over the next four to six years–will be obviously a very useful tool for improving government.

Any particular policy might work out badly. It is always too soon to tell. Give me 100 days to tell you, right? Finding ways to integrate usefully artificial intelligence into government spending priorities and routinizing and improving government decision-making are obvious paths to improvement.

It does help that anyone who goes on a university campus knows that the engineering faculty are not the heart of far-left thinking on campus. One way to get slightly less radical progressivism in the bowels of the American bureaucracy would be to bring in a bunch of regular engineering professors–or, more broadly, people from the engineering community. That's a place where you get centrist, moderate takes.

Again, in 100 days, we'll know a lot more. Over the next four to six years, we'll be able to look across countries and see how countries that are integrating the insights of tech and engineering from artificial intelligence into government decision-making will start making much better decisions, and it'll be too obvious to ignore.