Freedom is propsperity

From Razib Khan interviews Garrett Jones, The Culture Transplant - How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left.  My paragraphing.

GARRETT JONES: Yeah. And so it turns out that across Southeast Asia, one of the ways that you're trying to predict how rich a country is how market friendly it is, turns out, you're gonna have a tough time doing better than just checking to see the present Chinese, the percent of people whose ancestors came from China, maybe two, three, even more than four generations ago. And so, yeah, percent Chinese descent is a pretty strong predictor of prosperity. 

Of course, in economics and social sciences, you always got to ask is correlation causation. But, you know, there's this other literature that, that longer that looks back further than this, two or three Generation Trust literature I talked about, that's known as the deep roots literature. And my favorite part of that literature looks at basically, how the chess pieces were set across the world in the year 1500. before Europeans went everywhere, and started taking over things. And if you just look at how country how technologically advanced civilizations were in different parts of the world in 1500, and then you keep an eye on where those folks went or did not go. It turns out that, for example, across the western hemisphere, you can do a pretty good job predicting how rich your country is, by just looking at percent of European descent. 

Adding in, of course, adding in an Asian migration helps a bit too, of course, but and the question is, of course, is it correlation, or causation? And so I have to walk through that quite a bit to sort of help people think well, what would what would correlation without causation look like in this case, but in the case of China, it's really clear that you know, the 1500 was the year 1500, was pretty much the peak of the Ming Dynasty was a golden age. And as in the Qing Dynasty, as things started falling apart, a lot of people started leaving China and moving across Southeast Asia to other places. 

And the way I think of it is that those migrants who left China during the decaying decades of the Ming Dynasty, were basically carrying the seeds of success of the Ming glory decades, to these new national homes and planting seeds that have borne fruit in the 20th and 21st centuries. So for instance, Malaysia is a country that, as you mentioned, about 1/3, of Chinese descent, and the Chinese community is pretty much kept out of politics there. Yet, nevertheless, Malaysia has quite strong economic institutions, it doesn't appear that basically having Chinese people in the government is some kind of necessary condition in anyway, for good institutional quality, I don't want to, you know, want people to not fall for that line of thinking there. 

And more generally, across Southeast Asia percent Chinese a good predictor of just good institutional quality. And so I think that it's, like I said, planting the seeds of Ming prosperity, of the promise of the Ming Dynasty, throughout a much larger part of the world. 

It's worth remembering in this context that, you know, China is the world's poorest majority Chinese country by far in per capita terms, right? Hong Kong, rest in peace, Taiwan, Singapore, all majority Chinese and all far richer in per capita terms. China itself is the under the Chinese Communist Party's a lagger a real laggard. 

And so that means there's going to be pressure for out migration from communist China for a long time as people try to try to move to places. And I think if they're allowed to move to other places in the world, they're very likely to plant the roots of institutional success that can help make the new countries they move to far richer and more prosperous, and more market friendly. 

All good points.  

And if the Kuomintang had defeated the authoritarian communists in 1949 and had implemented a program of freedom and markets, it is highly likely that China would be far more prosperous and powerful today.  Everywhere else Chinese culture has spread, given any sort of accommodation for some freedom and markets, those countries have flourished.