The Culture Transplant

The Culture Transplant is about the fact that on average, immigrants never fully assimilate. Europeans who violently migrated to North America usually didn’t assimilate to Native American culture and levels of technology. Chinese migrants who migrated peacefully across Southeast Asia didn’t fully assimilate; instead, on average, they became “market dominant minorities.” Recent statistical work by my fellow macroeconomists shows that these aren’t outliers or exceptions. Instead, they illustrate a general rule: cultural and economic behaviors migrate and persist across the generations.

That’s looking across centuries after 1500 when humans ran a series of massive and often evil migration experiments, and economists have learned from those experiments. I should emphasize that isn’t a story about the benefits of geography: the richest parts of the Americas used to be closer to the equator (especially the Inca, but also the Aztec and Maya), but now they’re far from the equator.

That’s true both to the North (US, Canada) and the South (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay). Prosperity, by and large, went where the Europeans went in the Americas, and it lasted for centuries.

And it’s not like being close to the equator is an economic curse today: the richest country in Southeast Asia is almost on the equator itself: Singapore, with a majority population that’s of Chinese descent. So geography-based stories of prosperity are missing a lot, and they keep us from seeing the transformative power of migration to change the wealth of nations.

If you want to know how rich a nation is today, you’ll do a lot better job if you know the history of where a nation’s ancestors came from, rather than knowing the history of the land itself. Prosperity has deep roots, and those deep roots get transplanted when people migrate.