The Garett Jones Curve: As Critiques Rise, Responses Fall
On the Absence of a Substantive Rebuttal
Garett Jones claimed in a speech that my coauthors and I miscited the academic literature on trust, misread several prominent papers on the topic, and that the referees of my peer-reviewed article on the topic must have missed these supposed errors. He has been making similar claims in private and in now-deleted tweets for years, so I was happy to finally be able to respond to his concrete critique. To recap, my points were:
Garett Jones has contributed no original empirical work to analyzing how immigrants affect the countries where they settle.
Garett Jones has contributed no original theoretical insights to analyzing how immigrants affect the countries where they settle.
Garett Jones missed much of the relevant literature on how immigrants affect the countries where they settle.
Garett Jones shows little familiarity with the vast peer-reviewed literature on how trust affects growth.
Garett Jones makes many unsupported accusations about the quality of my scholarly work, especially a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Kyklos.
Garett’s new piece again avoids my major claims and offers no rebuttal. Instead, Garett responded to a minor point I made about my Kyklos article. He originally claimed that paper was about interpersonal trust when it was explicitly about generalized social trust. In response, Garett cites older papers that used inconsistent terminology. None of that affects the point that my Kyklos article analyzed generalized social trust and that he misdescribed it.
Garett’s work on immigration has significant problems, as I’ve written here and here. His reaction to my critiques was to make unsupported statements about the quality of my academic work. I responded, and his subsequent response fails to address any of the substantive issues. This will be my last comment on this unless Garett raises new and interesting points.