I believe the “Bell Curve” contains the answers to those mysteries.
I forgot to include slavery, and genocide by Margaret Sanger/Planned Parenthood as dimmacrat ideals.
The Russian people had the same response in the post Khrushchev era. The collective farms weren't meeting the production quotas to feed the country. And the biggest country on earth with a sparse population relative to both Europe and the United States was having to import wheat from these same places with denser population and less area devoted to growing wheat.
Once they allowed even a very limited amount of capitalism, namely private plots with less than an acre per family, these tiny plots which made up 5% fraction of the available arable land in Russia, was producing a majority of the domestically cultivated foodstuff.