Why everyone want to live in a country with a high average IQ. By Heretical Insights.
Warning: Insightful but a little long (you should see the full article!).
For most of modern economic history, … workers moved from low-productivity regions to high-productivity ones, reallocating labor toward areas where it was most valued. … People left stagnant regions because opportunity lay elsewhere.
In recent decades, however, this mechanism has weakened, and in some countries, reversed outright … Across much of the Western world, people are moving away from economic centers. Instead of moving to where their skills are at a premium, citizens of these countries flee them in droves.
At first glance, this is baffling, like watching water flow up a hill. But a look at the list of anomalous countries suggests an explanation: Third World immigration.
Third World immigrants move to the productive areas, then natives move out due to wage suppression and housing overcrowding:
Immigrants do not disperse randomly across space. They concentrate in areas of economic opportunity, especially so if preexisting ethnic networks are already present to help facilitate the settlement, which usually means major metropolitan centers. As immigrants disproportionately settle in high-employment areas, they absorb a substantial share of local labor demand. This reduces the expected returns for natives who might otherwise move into these regions …
When immigrants arrive, they do not simply add to local labor supply. Some native competitors exit, reducing supply contemporaneously, while others never arrive in the first place, reducing future supply in a way that is harder to observe. Wage suppression is therefore partially masked by native displacement…
Then there is culture:
More natives are leaving productive areas than would be predicted by housing pressure or congestion alone. Something else is at work. That something is immigrant behavior. …
Large inflows of culturally distant, low-trust populations often degrade local living conditions in ways that are not well captured by standard economic models.
Crime is the most obvious channel, but far from the only one.
Political conflict, incompatible norms, misuse of public space, noise, litter, and simple dissatisfaction with becoming a minority in one’s own neighborhood all contribute to native exit. In the United States this process is often mislabeled as “white flight”, but it is neither exclusively white nor uniquely American.
Nor does it require high crime. Even affluent, low-crime immigrant groups can induce native outmigration by transforming institutions. West Coast Asians, for example, have dramatically intensified educational competition, raising the grind associated with schooling and driving native flight from public school districts. …
Early 20th-century Ellis Island immigration did not produce anything resembling white flight. Native-born Americans did not abandon New York, Boston, or Chicago en masse despite dramatic demographic change. By contrast, contemporary California, London, and New York City have seen absolute declines in native populations. The greater the cultural, behavioral, and normative distance between newcomers and locals, the stronger the incentive for natives to leave.
Experience increases dislike:
The standard optimist’s reply to this is simple: “give it time”. Any tension we see now is just a “phase”. As people intermingle, they’ll get used to each other, fear will fade, and prejudice will melt away through everyday contact. This idea sits at the heart of a large chunk of the social sciences, but the empirical support itself is far more lacking. ,,,
Leeuwan et al. (2023) conducted four studies examining whether exposure to immigrants attenuates the relationship between disgust sensitivity and opposition to immigration. It does not. Exposure had no meaningful mediating effect.
Another study found that in Europe, “direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies” (Hangartner et al., 2018)….
History offers little solace. During the Second Great Migration of American blacks from 1940 to 1970, Boustan (2017), examining 70 U.S. metropolitan areas, found that for every black family moving into a central city, roughly two white families moved out. And the long-run attitudinal effects persist to this day. As Vuletich et al. (2023) show, counties that received larger black inflows historically exhibit higher implicit racial bias among white residents today. …
The most optimistic evidence comes from a recent meta-analysis of forty-one preregistered experiments. Lowe (2025) finds that intergroup contact does, on average, reduce prejudice. But the magnitude is vanishingly small (about one tenth of a standard deviation). More importantly, the effect operates predominantly at the interpersonal level. Contact changes how people behave toward the specific individuals they have interacted with, less so how they perceive the outgroup as a whole.
Winners and losers:
In nearly every wealthy country, locals are more skilled than immigrants. When skilled natives are driven out of high-productivity regions by overcrowding and poor behaviors of unskilled (and often economically inactive) immigrants, the national economy suffers. Labor is misallocated away from places where it generates the most value, and aggregate productivity falls below the counterfactual. …
Internal migration has historically been one of the primary engines of upward mobility. The canonical story of “ambitious country kid moves to the big city to better himself” has largely disappeared in high-immigration Western countries. That pathway has been appropriated by immigrants themselves. The beneficiaries of urban productivity are no longer natives seeking opportunity, but newcomers displacing them. ….
Because immigrants cluster in high-productivity areas, and because their presence drives natives out, immigrant incomes are artificially inflated relative to natives.
In Britain, ethnic minorities are overrepresented in London by roughly a factor of three. London’s productivity is about 50% higher than the rest of the country. Were it not for immigration-induced native displacement, white British incomes would be higher and minority incomes lower than observed. Fiscal and income comparisons therefore substantially understate the true cost of immigration relative to natives.
More bulls**t from the globalists:
The pattern of internal migration is also evidence against one of the more sophisticated arguments for mass immigration, which goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers, and strain the welfare system, they provide large economic benefits through indirect channels. Specifically, they free up skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor. …
While this argument is possible in theory, the actual behavior of natives suggests that this is not the case in practice. If it were, domestic migration should flow towards concentrations of immigrants, not away….
Revealed preferences — everyone wants to move to countries with high national IQ:
You’d also expect to see a very different trend in international migration, if the argument was true. Skilled workers from the First World would move to the Third World to take advantage of the allocative benefits of low-skill labor and because “higher IQ would be in greater demand”. Someone who might be a cashier in the U.S. could move to Brazil and enter the upper-middle class. Westerners would take advantage of the relatively greater IQ premium by moving to South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa en masse. But instead, the unambiguous pattern we see is that of Third World elites moving to the First World.
The reason for this is because more intelligent populations generate large, compounding externalities that operate well beyond individual earnings.
Higher cognitive ability improves competence in complex roles, facilitates innovation, enables large-scale cooperation, and raises economic literacy, all of which scale socially rather than merely individually. The result is that the effect of national IQ on national income is several times larger than the effect of individual IQ on individual income (each IQ point is associated with a 2–3% increase in individual income versus a 6–8% increase in GDP per capita).
In other words, high intelligence has large positive externalities and low intelligence large negative externalities.
National IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of GDP per capita, and conditional on GDP per capita, future economic growth. It is also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development.
In societies created by individuals with high IQs, everyone benefits. This is why immigrants who move from low-income, low-productivity countries to wealthy, Western countries see gains in their wages (Hendricks & Schoellman, 2017). This wage gain at migration represents the economic benefit migrants get from moving to a high-IQ society, which is able to make better use of their human capital.
Insofar as low-skilled immigrants lower the national IQ of the host society, they generate negative externalities for natives. Any indirect benefits they may provide is offset by these negative externalities. If moving to a high-IQ country raises one’s living standards independently of one’s own ability, the reverse should also be true — that the same person living in a country with a lower IQ should have lower living standards.
With that in mind, immigration lowers national IQ in every Western country except Australia.
Simple version:
Watch what people do. If immigration were broadly beneficial to natives, we would expect them to move toward it — to follow the opportunity it allegedly creates. If it is harmful, we would expect the opposite. And what we observe is not subtle.
Revealed preference indicates that Westerners dislike actually-existing immigration so much that they are willing to pay a heavy price to escape it.
In immigration-heavy countries, people move away from economic opportunity. They leave the very places where their skills would be most valuable and their incomes highest. That is not how a healthy system behaves. It is how a system behaves when something has gone wrong at a more fundamental level. … People do not walk away from opportunity without a reason, and certainly not on this scale.
But remember, in left-speak the “oppressive” groups are the ones with higher average IQs. Which explains an awful lot about how lefties see the world.