The following two tweets caught my eye:

On one level, these are both sort of “gotcha” tweets, implicitly arguing that JD Vance has accidentally made the case for more immigration.   But I’m more interested in something else—what motivated Vance to make this claim?  

Political statements can be evaluated in many different ways.  One might view them as expressing the opinion of the politician.  But it’s also worth thinking about why the statement was made.  Politicians have many different views—but what determines which views get expressed in a political campaign?   

It seems plausible that successful politicians tend to express views that they believe will be persuasive to voters.  Note that I am not commenting on the sincerity of the politician.  Regardless of whether they believe “X is true”, or do not believe X is true, they would not be inclined to campaign on “X is true” unless they thought the message was effective.

In this particular case, I’m not particularly interested in what Vance believes.  But I am very interested in what Vance believes that the public believes.  The fact that Vance is advancing this argument in a campaign suggests that he believes the public does not see America as being among the world’s richest countries.  

It would be interesting for a pollster to ask the public whether the US or China is the richer country.  I suspect that a significant share of respondents would say “China” (albeit not a majority.)  Of course, the US is many times richer.

Here’s another good question.  “Does the US adhere to international trade laws while other countries cheat?”  Again, I’d expect many wrong answers.  (Yes, we often cheat.)

It seems to me that when the public is optimistic about the state of the country, the ideology of nationalism has less appeal.  If you go back to a period when the US was clearly number one, say 1965, the mood of the public was pretty supportive of global institutions.  When the public believes that other countries are getting ahead of the US, especially if they believe other countries are cheating to get ahead, then the public is likely to become much more nationalistic.

A few months ago, I did a post pointing to the odd fact that the US was the country that had accepted the most immigrants and was also the richest country.  Taken literally, Vance’s statement could be viewed as essentially identical to my post.   Despite using the term “if”, however, it is the clear implication of his statement that the US is not the richest country.  But at least Vance and I agree on one thing—one fact implies the other.  We agree that the correlation between America’s high rate of immigration and America’s position on the world’s richest country list is probably causal. 

Now we just need to figure out if America is indeed a very rich country, or not.