The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance, you can partly predict people’s savings behavior just by knowing which country their parents or grandparents came from. But even though it’s in the journals, and it’s well-replicated, my fellow economists have been squeamish about telling the public about this body of research. As with enriched uranium, they’re probably afraid it could fall into the wrong hands.The book also critiques the Open Borders worldview, the view that unlimited migration to the rich countries would be an obvious global good. I show that most scientific innovation worldwide happens in just seven countries—what I call the I-7. I also show that a nation’s rate of innovation is extremely sensitive to the quality and competence of a nation’s government. Since innovation spreads worldwide—as with the Covid vaccines—that means that poorly-chosen immigration policies in the I-7 could hurt not just those seven nations, but the entire planet.People everywhere on earth have a strong interest in making sure that nothing weakens the power of France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, the UK, and the US to keep on innovating. Imprudent immigration policies that ignore cultural transplant theory place that innovation at risk.Ultimately, I wrote this book because nobody else had. For the last twenty years I’ve been asking the Adam Smith question: Why are some nations so much more productive than others? I’d found some new answers in my own research, summed up in my earlier book Hive Mind. But at the same time, I kept reading findings by a separate group of researchers, especially three excellent professors at Brown University: David Weil, Louis Putterman, and Oded Galor. Their work on the “Deep Roots” of economic prosperity suggested that many of the important economic differences across countries began centuries, even millennia ago. Their work needed a plain-English explanation, so that got me working on The Culture Transplant.I should note that while I was working on my book, it turned out Galor was writing one as well, which I’m glad to say has now become the global bestseller The Journey of Humanity.