I approve publication of this manuscript.

1. Upon reading the heated debate, I felt that there exist some profound differences as to what consist of sound justifications of scientific statements among forum participants. Unfortunately, I do not have knowledge enough to persuade any of them, and in my opinion, there is no such consensus even among philosophers of science.

2. Having said that, I think it permissible to present the historical statistics so that it hints the possible causality from psychological differences to social phenomena. This is not only because the authors made so much compromise to include many kinds of provisos, but also I believe that it is permissible to present this sort of suggestions.


3. This is somewhat related to the statement above, but even though it is not statistically proven, it does not mean that it should be prohibited to present in the text. In some ways, I believe in the Bayesian world view as Emil does. To find another black crow does not prove that “all crows are black”, but certainly it lends some more subjective support to the statement.

4. At the same time, I understand that as MH points out repeatedly, the magnitude of the influence (defined by the variance decomposition, etc.) is very small, probably well less than 10%. However, the migration of middle-easterners to Denmark began in 80’s or so (right?), so the cumulative effect in the future is going to be exponentially eminent and important. Up to now, maybe the effect is not discernible, as almost everybody in this forum agrees.

5. Lastly, I happened to be a Libertarian, who strongly believes in ABCT as MH does. One of my favorites is de Soto’s “Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles” (1998). However, when I got my Ph.D education in 90’s, and still now as I see, the Austrian school is a heresy from the mainstream academic economists. Interestingly, the Austrian economics has been as heretical as Lynn & Vanhanen have been. I would like to yell at MH so that he is going to make a good scholar, who persuades other Economists to believe, or at least read some of ABCT books.

3. This is somewhat related to the statement above, but even though it is not statistically proven, it does not mean that it should be prohibited to present in the text. In some ways, I believe in the Bayesian world view as Emil does. To find another black crow does not prove that “all crows are black”, but certainly it lends some more subjective support to the statement.

The problem is that there is absolutely no proof that the statistics presented in Section 9 adds anything to the likelihood of the proposed hypothesis. As I showed, the forces driving income inequalities are qualitatively different from what would be expected given the proposed theory. Up to now, the proposed theory does not reject the null hypothesis. Partial out just the top incomes and/or capital gains, and the trend is flat. Yet, the author(s) still reason that if the predicted effect doesn't show up, it must be due to confounding. As if they have already found which confoundings there are. It's a case of wishful thinking. Alas, such affirmation is not justified by any empirical modeling of the income data. The paper is so speculative, given total lack of evidence, that the absence of any mention about the need for empirical testing (by modeling the income data) in either the abstract and conclusion sections makes this affirmation entirely unjustified. As if the author(s) believe there is already empirical proof of their model, when in fact, just the opposite is true.

Not even there is proof of the theory given the observed data, but there is not even any proof that there are confoundings that are acting to "hide" the effect of low-IQ immigration.

In other words, they didn't find any black crows. Not even a single one.

4. However, the migration of middle-easterners to Denmark began in 80’s or so (right?), so the cumulative effect in the future is going to be exponentially eminent and important. Up to now, maybe the effect is not discernible, as almost everybody in this forum agrees.

The problem is that if the children of immigrants, particularly in the very egalitarian countries, e.g., "Nordic", do better than their parents in achievement (and perhaps even IQ, at least in the language component), given the theory proposed in the article, we will expect decreasing SES gaps over time as observed in the data. And although the trend in % foreigner is probably biased upward, the % of foreigner has increased by a large amount. If even such large shift is not making income differences perceivable, I have every reasons to be skeptical about the effect of low-IQ immigration in income. How many more low-IQ immigrants the proposed theory needs for the effect to appear statistically ?

I would like to yell at MH so that he is going to make a good scholar, who persuades other Economists to believe, or at least read some of ABCT books.

This is a case of misreading [EDIT: I think after reading it once more, that I have misunderstood the underlying message of this comment in 5).]. The reason why I talked about that, as I said several times in my comments, is only because I wanted to show how poor fit the proposed theory has, in explaining the trend in income inequalities. A comparison provides a good illustration for such understanding, e.g., that the forces driving income inequalities are qualitatively different than predicted by the proposed theory. Which fails to predict why income inequalities increases and decreases, sometimes so suddenly, at some particular times, associated with important events unrelated to immigration.

Whether economists believe the scenario of the ABCT is not relevant. All economists agree that the trend in income inequalities are usually associated with particular, important events, which cause a series of continuous "breaks". But according to the proposed theory, it's as if there is no such "breaks". That's why it fails to fit the data so far.

EDIT n°2 (February 21th) : By the way, although I don't have anything more to say about the article, I would be VERY curious to see how economists, especially those experts in the study of inequalities, would react in reading the present article here. Something tells me that they will use the same argument as the one I used and that, consequently, they will be hostile to the hypothesis advanced in the present article. I will wait until the article is published, and then, I will email the people I have in mind.