Jones’ thesis, in a nutshell, is “immigration, to a large degree, creates a culture transplant, making the places that migrants go to a lot like the places they left.” In other words, assimilation is overstated and cultural transmission works in both directions.
This short book is filled with data, charts, and citations of various academic research. As Jones is quick to point out, not all cultural attributes are equally important for a country’s economic success. One that matters is the degree of trust within a community. He cites a study that found, “current trust attitudes back in the ancestral homeland did a very good job predicting trust attitudes of Americans…. Forty-six percent of the home-country attitude toward trust survived…. Looking only at those fourth-generation immigrants, people whose great-great-grandparents were the most recent ancestors to live their full lives overseas… [the authors found] the same 46 percent persistence.” Trust attitudes are sticky and culturally determinant. “Some attitudes from the ancestral country get transplanted to the second generation, and some don’t. But among the attitudes that substantially survive migration, many matter for the wealth of nations: savings rates, views on trust, and views toward government regulation and personal responsibility.”
Another focus of Jones’ book is Deep Roots research, the idea that culture is so sticky that you can tell a lot from a peoples, on average, by looking at their distant ancestors. This is a theory that claims that lineage, and not geography, matters most. “For both State History and for Agricultural History, migration-adjusted scores are twice as good as migration-unadjusted scores for predicting a nation’s prosperity in 2000…. If you’re trying to guess a nation’s income per person in 2002, the migration-adjusted tech measure handily beats the migration-unadjusted measure. The relationship is always at least twice as strong, and the year 1500 migration-adjusted tech measure explains well over half of all cross-country income differences today.” So, the traits that matter most for predicting contemporary economic success are how far back legible state formation occurred, when agriculture started, and, foremost, the degree of technological proficiency and innovation within a community by the year 1500. Jones is quick to add, “The key trait we’re interested in is always the comparison between the migration-adjusted scores and the migration-unadjusted scores…. Cultural transplant theory predicts stronger migration-adjusted relationships.”
After many more cross-country comparisons, Jones digs deeper with a case-study of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. “Outside China, every country with a majority that’s of Chinese descent is strongly capitalist, strongly market oriented, and prosperous: Taiwan, Singapore, tiny Macau, and Hong Kong…. China is, by far, the world’s poorest majority-Chinese country…. Taiwan, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong—those four Chinese-majority countries appear to be grafting China’s Deep Roots of prosperity, China’s high SAT [State-formation, Agriculture, Tech] scores from 1500, China’s legacy of good governance and competent bureaucracy, and China’s legacy of Confucian culture onto multiple lands…. All are among the top 10 percent of richest countries per person; all have higher average incomes per person than Australia or Canada or France. And none have natural resources to thank for their prosperity. Their best geographic feature is excellent access to the ocean.” Furthermore, Jones brings in the rest of the Chinese diaspora, “Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines—people from China moved to all these nations, usually thinking they’d move back. But they often ended up staying, though typically keeping up some degree of Chinese cultural practices and retaining the Chinese language…. And on average, first-, second-, and third-generation Chinese immigrants wound up much richer, more prosperous, and better educated than the indigenous populations in the countries they moved to…. Across Southeast Asia, there’s a strong relationship between the Chinese share of the population and current prosperity.”
Finally, Jones admits to what the research has yet to figure out. “We know pretty clearly that culture persists and that culture substantially survives migration, but we really don’t know exactly why it persists.” Nonetheless, he concludes, “My most important claim—that culture persists and, to a substantial degree, survives the process of migration—is backed up by the types of evidence that have a lot in common with good experiments. Since 1500 people have moved around the world, and they’ve tended to carry much, often most, of their economic heritage with them from their old countries…. Looking at shorter time horizons, the second-, third-, and even fourth-generation descendants of immigrants around the world today hold political and social attitudes a lot like those in the countries their ancestors came from long, long ago…. On average, migrants make the places they move to a lot like the places they left…. If a country wants prosperity and peace over the next century, it’s prudent to choose an immigration policy that raises its Tech History score; that imports cultural attitudes that are friendly to competent governance, markets, and individualism; and that gives some attention—but nowhere close to overwhelming attention—to the risks that often accompany greater cultural and ethnic diversity.”
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