I put “may” in the title because this theory is still tentative.

It started off with a question: which country will have more innovation – a country with 10 million white people and 10 million black people, OR a country with just 10 million white people and zero black people?

Before reading, this post assumes a lot of things about race, IQ and colonialism that the reader may not agree with, and will be making “objections” at the implicit assumptions. If you don’t agree with the implicit assumptions, take it up on the relevant posts where we argue for those priors explicitly. OR – alternatively, you can observe some arguments being made based on priors you don’t necessarily agree with just to see where it leads.

Patents for South Africa vs. Parent and Analogous Countries

The first apples-to-apples comparison that came to my mind was South Africa vs. Australia and New Zealand. Okay, so how do we measure “innovation”? Sadly it’s a bit of a nebulous concept, and unlike “intelligence”, there isn’t some valid and reliable way to measure it. But we can look at the number of international patents filed in various countries. Obviously this treats all patents as equally important, and so if there is some major variation in the importance of the average patent each country files, then this method would be flawed.

But with all these caveats, I compared South Africa to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and Holland (Boers being dutch ancestry), looking at the size of their white populations and the number of patents filed.

Number of Patents Per 1k Whites in South Africa, Parent Ethnicity Countries of South Africa and other UK Offshoots

White populations are inferred from looking at each country’s demographics page in wikipedia.

And so we can see that the number of patents filed by the country South Africa is roughly, if not slightly lower than, what you would expect from a white country with 4.6 million people and nobody else. You might say, “well the UK has Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and Afro-Caribbean populations, and they will invent things, so it’s unfair to assign what they might be inventing to the white British”.

Fair enough, so I just multiplied the patents per 1k whites by the white population. For the UK, that meant multiplying 0.275 by 0.848 (the percent of the UK that is white), and so if non-whites in the UK filed proportionately as many patents as whites in the UK (which is probably pretty close to true based on the IQ data), we would expect the UK whites to be filing 0.233 patents per 1k of the white population.

This same process was done with the other countries. It’s hard to say what’s happening. What I think is happening is that blacks in South Africa are innovating slightly, but they suppress white innovation as well, and these balance out to result in about as much innovation per white person as white Australians, and also close to white Canadians.

Patents for Latin America and Iberia

Another set of countries to do this with would be Latin America and Iberia (Spain and Portugal). Because the European ancestry of Latin American countries comes from Iberia, we can see if the presence of Amerindian and African genetic admixture is associated with more or less innovation PER WHITE CAPITA. I.e. – is it better to have 20 million whites and 20 million amerindians, or to have 20 million whites and zero blacks?

The reason I am using these countries is because I wanted to just compare the 5 most populous latin american countries, but Chile is also included because I found a paper on genetic admixture estimates of Brazil, Mexico Columbia, Peru and Chile:

Patents Per 1k Whites (as Proportion of Genetic Admixture of the Total Population) in Latin American and Parent Ethnicity Countries of Iberia

And then I looked at them to see the relation between the number of patents per 1k whites and the percentage white a country is:

I also did the same thing excluding Iberia, and found a weak positive correlation between the percent white a latin american country is and the number of patents per 1k whites:

Obviously there’s still a lot more work to do on this before we start getting conclusive, but let me put it this way: it’s not immediately obvious that the presence of amerindians, counted either as full persons or genetic admixture within a mixed population, has any benefit on innovation.

And let me re-iterate what this means: this means that a country of 10 million whites and 10 million amerindians is not going to be any more innovative than a country of just 10 million whites. Or at least that’s what this very limited analysis points to. But we certainly can’t just leap to the conclusion that adding in amerindians to a white population will simply add in their innovation with no other cost.

Because lets say 1 million whites issue 100 patents, and 1 million amerindians issue 10 patents. A country of just those 1 million whites would have 100 patents, or 0.1 patent per 1k whites. But, if there were also 1 million amerindians, there would still be only 1 million whites, but 110 patents. Thus the number of patents per 1k whites would be 0.11, thus there would be more innovation! But it seems like this is not happening. That there is a suppressive effect of amerindian admixture on the white population, which roughly cancels out any additional innovation you get from having that amerindian population (expressed either as purebred individuals and/or genetic admixture within a heavily mixed population).

(I didn’t do a multi-country analysis with African countries because African demographic data is 1. Really spotty and 2. the white populations in other african countries get so small that it yields ridiculous results.

For example, Nigeria supposedly has about 50k whites and issued 50 patents in 2013. The total population of Nigeria was 173.6 million in 2013. And so the patents per 1k whites in Nigeria would be 1, higher than any country looked at here. But that’s silly, because say you have a country with a billion blacks, and 1 white guy, and this country had only one patent. This would be 1,000 patents per 1k whites. And so when you have very small numbers of whites in a country, it stops being meaningful in terms of figuring out if the presence of non-whites are overall helpful of harmful in terms of innovation, because at that point you’re mostly looking at non-white innovation and dividing it by the tiny number of whites. )

Now obviously I have not been looking at East Asians or high-Caste Indians really, except to the extent they make up part of the non-white population in the UK.

Diversity and School Performance

Data from the NAEP shows that white students and black students in black schools do worse on standardized tests than when they are in majority white schools. It’s hard to say why, but it seems that the presence of large numbers of blacks in a school depresses everyone’s cognitive performance, including the blacks.

The saturation of a school with a low-IQ population, in this case blacks, appears to cause lower cognitive ability as measured by standardized tests. This makes intuitive sense, as it seems like being around smart people would train you to think smart-like; but it could just be that smarter people avoid putting their kids in schools that have a lot of blacks.

This effect also probably exists to a lesser degree with hispanics.

Affirmative Action

There are several possible mechanisms by which racial diversity can depress innovation. One of which is institutional racism against whites in schools. Based on their number of academic competition winners and SAT scores, whites should be 72% of the student body at elite universities. Based on their population of 18-year olds, they should be 55% (just based on simple numbers).

In practice, whites are about 44.35% of the students admitted to these universities. Similarly, Asians, who should be 24.06% of the students at the top 20 Universities, are only 18.09%.

Moreover, for any given SAT score, whites actually do slightly better – so it’s not like blacks and hispanics catch up and overcome whatever environmental disadvantage you imagine them to have had. The gap actually widens; so a white with a given SAT score going in will probably do better. (This may be related to later physical development in whites that also applies to cognitive development; i.e. white brain development may continue longer than black brain development, resulting in a widening gap after age 18.)

The result is that less intelligent blacks are being pushed into elite institutions at the expense of more intelligent whites.

And so if you want a job doing groundbreaking research, that becomes more difficult to do if you are white; the presence of blacks and hispanics in the applicant pool makes it about 38% less likely that you will even get into the elite institutions. Now almost certainly some affirmative action blacks and hispanics, against the odds, do end up doing groundbreaking research that’s not actually the work of a white guy fraudulently assigned to them.

But affirmative action provides a very plausible mechanism by which the presence of blacks and hispanics can reduce the total amount of innovation in a country.

Direct Wasted Resources

The direct wasted resources involve things that can be well-quantified, and things that are more difficult to quantify.

From a fiscal standpoint, we can see that hispanics on net take $5,160 more from the US government at all levels than they pay per person, blacks take $7,700 more than they pay, and whites on net contribute $1,260 more than they take in government services. And this is when you apply all military spending to whites.

If you evenly distribute military spending to the whole US population, the net cost of hispanics rises to $7,298, the net cost of blacks is $10,016, and whites on net contribute $2,795. This is summarized in the table here:

And so on net, blacks and hispanics cost the US $682.81 billion if you assign all military spending to whites, or $801.66 billion if you evenly distribute military spending. This is a direct hammer blow to the US economy that blacks and hispanics deliver every year.

And poorer economies tend to produce fewer inventions, even when they are of the same race and have the same average IQ of wealthier countries. For example, North Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary) having fewer patents per capita than western Europe, despite having the same average IQ. Intuitively, it seems like this would be because they are more concerned with making ends meet, and the country has less money to fund research. So if you have a population that is making a country around $750 billion poorer every year, that has to reduce research spending.

Another direct form of wasted resources would be firm productivity. Richard et. al. in 2007 took a measure of productivity of various firms over a period of 6 years, and contrasted their performance to their racial diversity. The study was done in the United States, and so isn’t likely to be muddled by the faux “ethnic diversity” in Europe where a Dane and a Swede working together is considered diverse. Richard found a strong negative relationship between firm diversity and productivity:

Firm Productivity and Racial Diversity (Richard 2007)

Another study done in Germany in 2012 by Parrotta et. al. found a similar, though less pronounced, negative relation between firm diversity and productivity:

The effect size is smaller, since they treat a Dutch person working in a German firm as being just as foreign as a Somali immigrant to Germany. In fact, even more absurd, is that a second-generation Somali living in Germany, who speaks German, is considered “ethnically German”, while the Dutch immigrant is “foreign”. Even with this ridiculous methodology that I can only surmise is designed to mask the true effect of racial diversity in firms, there is still a significant negative effect.

Other forms of wasted resources are more difficult to quantify, or are things I don’t have ready numbers for. Examples would be the need for businesses to have “diversity” consultants. The cost of “racism” legal battles; such legal battles would be impossible if the country was 100% of one race.

Another cost would be the geographic dislocation caused by the criminalization of racial discrimination. An anecdote I have of this is a Denny’s I used to go to. I noticed that over time, the Denny’s became a black and hispanic hang-out, it became loud, and the white people started to leave. And then I stopped going. Then one day I saw the Denny’s went out of business. The cause is obvious: they lost their white customers, driven away by the blacks and hispanics which the Denny’s could not exclude. And were left with low-paying and low-tipping blacks and hispanics.

So what is the result? The result is that the whites now have to go to a new restaurant, in some neighborhood that the blacks and hispanics don’t frequent. Some place less convenient, with a large building that the Denny’s was in now useless.

This has happened to entire cities, which I’ll go into in the next section. The blacking of Detroit, East St. Louis, Baltimore, has resulted in whites moving into the suburbs, and in whites spreading out over larger distances, having to commute to work and school, and all of the attendant costs of that. If you spend 2 hours commuting, you have less time to do anything else, are less productive at work, etc. But those whites are saying, by their actions, that a 2 hour commute is better than being around blacks.

Indirect Wasted Resources

The indirect wasted resources of racial diversity are more difficult to conceptualize. This would be the result of policy and the effectiveness of government. In countries with large black populations, and thus the government if full of blacks, those countries tend to be considered “corrupt”. Similarly, big city government that have lots of blacks, and sometimes those with hispanics, tend to be considered more “corrupt”.

One way to quantify the impact of this is to look at the median household income of racial groups in the United States, and then look at the incomes of the largest cities with a given black, white and hispanic population.

Median Household Income by Race in the United States in 2014

We can compare this to the median household income in large black cities in the US:

And we can do the same with hispanics:

And we can do the same with whites:

City data comes from city-data.com.

Now in the cases of blacks and hispanics, the blacks and hispanics are worse off, even within the United States, when they make up a larger proportion of a city. Detroit, overall, which includes the whites in Detroit, is poorer than the black US average, meaning that the Detroit black is going to be much worse off than even the number for Detroit.

We can also compare the per capita GDPs of country groups to their per capita GDP in the United States

GDP numbers are from here, using the World Bank 2015. Population numbers are from here. Per capita numbers are inferred with simple division.

If you want to talk about colonialism, please read this article and this article before commenting about that.

And so we can see that European countries, warts and all (including former USSR, Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia countries), and including Ukraine, have a GDP purchasing power parity of $33,542 per capita. Latin American countries, warts and all, average to $15,417 per capita, and black African countries average to $3,617 per capita. Black Africa excludes Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

I personally think it’s relevant to look at the variation within European countries by cluster as well, as Ukranian immigrants to the United States are going to integrate with the white population and eventually be behaviorally and economically indistinguishable from the rest of the European-American population:

So that “white” number includes countries that have political pathologies that don’t transfer when they migrate to other white countries. For example, there are Serbian and Croat immigrants to Australia, but they aren’t having turf wars in Australia like they do in the Balkans. Similarly, Russian immigrants to Canada aren’t trying to impose a dictatorship like what exists in Russia. When whites in the pathological countries of Eastern Europe leave those places, they become Western Europeans. Ireland used to be poorer than the UK, now it’s wealthier, and Irish-Americans aren’t some lower class, they’re fully enmeshed with the singular European-American population.

And so the overall $33,542 number for Europe “warts and all” probably underestimates the benefit of European immigration.

Now to somebody with a lot of environmentalist priors, who imagines that Africa is poor because “Europe had a head start” or “Guns, Germs and Steel” connect-the-dots arguments, or imagines that “colonialism” made Africa poor, they’ll just write all of this off as entirely circumstantial, and then write off the relative outcomes within countries as totally circumstantial.

But for the rest of us, this is evidence that the kind of environment that blacks and hispanics creates reduces the upside of development of those countries. When all the races are placed within the same country, there is a gap, but the gaps between the countries not only captures the differences in cognitive ability, but also the compounding effect of having populations of a certain race making all the laws. And so the gap between Africa and Europe is much larger than the gap between African-Americans and European-Americans, and this is evidence of “political externalities”, the indirect effects of having certain racial groups in your country.

The result being that the presence of mesoamerican admixture, and much more so of blacks, causes countries to be drastically poorer beyond the simple addition of lower IQ people to the labor force of a European country. No, there are compounding policy effects that lowers the available surplus resources, which lowers the amount of innovation.

Therefore, it is not clear whether or not the innovation carried out by blacks and hispanics offsets the suppressive effect they have on the societies they are in. I’m leaning toward hispanics being “break even” – that their suppression is roughly offset by their own innovation, while blacks are a net negative.

If True, So What?

If this is true, then maximizing global innovation would involve generalized racial segregation. For the small number of people who do real, useful scientific research, I wouldn’t want to put any limits on what they can do or who they can work with. However, when they bring in their abuela and 20 other family members who proceed to vote the United States down to the level of latin america and thus reduce their ability to do scientific research, that’s bad.

So lets not have that. Africans, in African countries, will do some innovative things. And what they do can be added to what white people will do in all-white countries, which is as much or more than what those same white people would do if there was a large black population within the same country. With the internet the communication argument is bogus, and for the super-scientists who need to work in the same physical laboratory, we make exceptions for the 10,000 or so people worldwide for whom this circumstance applies.

But the general rule is probably that global racial segregation with regards to whites, blacks and amerindians will increase overall innovation by preserving the kind of economic environments created by white (and asian) populations necessary to fund that research.

IF this is true.