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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

Certainly if I wanted to be more scientific about this, there is a lot I would do differently...

That said, if you go through history, there has seldom been a time when one location or one state remained the dominant force in the world for more than 3 or 4 generations (especially looking at more recent world history). So, another way of posing the hypothesis might be: Is there a "migrant" sub-population within the human species that is both willing to travel to wherever opportunities are to be found and, at the same time, increase the prosperity of those locations when they arrive?

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If that's the case, it could be that a "substantial move" indicative of this migrant opportunity-seeking mentality doesn't require immigration or the crossing of nation-state boundaries at all. I wonder if there's another way to phrase this to include someone uprooting themselves from the American east coast and moving to California, for example.

Similarly there are parts of the world where crossing a border to live is nearly as easy (e.g. within the EU). What's the barrier you're trying to measure? Leaving familiar people/surroundings?

[Edit - added EU example and question]

It's a reasonable hypothesis, I'm just doubtful that the poll, worded as it is, counts as evidence of this.

Another hypothesis is that people know more about their parents and grand-parents than they do about their more distant ancestors, and that people are more likely to answer polls that are easy to answer than polls that are hard to answer. This hypothesis would also explain the results we're seeing in the poll.

Given that it is fairly easy to identify those "dominant forces" you should check whether there were any significant amounts of immigration to those places before they achieved top-dog status.

By my estimate I can see only one country that has had mass immigration and then which achieved dominant world power status fairly soon afterwards: the United States. Are these connected, probably, are they connected because the immigrants were made up of a tribe of wandering genetic entrepreneurs moving onto their next conquest, I suspect not.

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