Well, enjoyment of marshmallows has large diseconomies of scale (eating too many marshmallows makes you feel sick). And you can't trust those people running psychology or social science experiments.
So I have a lot of sympathy for those who just eat the single marshmallow.
Brilliant application of Goodhart's law, which states the fastest way to get information from the internet is not to ask a question but to confidently proclaim a wrong answer. Richard's incorrect attempt to explain why racism is the cause of disparate outcomes is meant to invite us, the commentariat, to supply the correct one. So far, seventeen comments in, no-one has. I guess it falls to me.
Kendi's groundbreaking work on stereotype within the US is too nuanced to be simply ported over one-to-one in Asia. Yes, East Asians here are subject to stereotype, and yes stereotypes exist also in Asia. However, in their home environment East Asians share something in common: light skin. All define themselves in contradistinction to 'dumb', 'lazy', brown and indigenous people of color. East Asians are the white people of Asia, and similarly benefit from racism and stereotype there. They, like the white people of Europe, were fortunate enough to gain political and technological power that they use to subjugate and exploit BIPOC they encounter. All of the non-white, non-East-Asian countries we can compare with are full of innocent beautiful brown bodies who are held down by racism. We don't have a control-group world in which these other peoples were allowed to thrive wtih which to compare the world we have.
"Brilliant application of Goodhart's law, which states the fastest way to get information from the internet is not to ask a question but to confidently proclaim a wrong answer."
The East Asian countries in question all have a history of strong (compared to their central and southeast Asian neighbors) central government. They also have a history of literacy. And they aren't independent: the origins of both the Japanese and Korean legal traditions lie in the Chinese classics.
The common cultural aspect of East Asian is family-based, not institutional-based and thus, was inherited in a very similar manner to genetic. You'd be surprised if you ask any of those from E.Asian and Vietnam, if they know about Guan Yu or Romance of Three Kingdom - a fantasy-historical novel about ancient China that deeply how people think, from proverbs forward or how the three-follows were expected of woman in the family. This is how E. Asian have strikingly similar behaviors regardless of where they are, especially in listed categories.
However, this is not true for separated families. In twin studies of Korean babies, the Korean kids share the similar genetic from biological parents that influence their intelligence and height, but their belief and subsequently their behaviors are mostly of the adopted parents. Follow-up, their social outcomes are closer to of white families they are with, from drug-uses onward.
Yeah, culture does matter, and it’s what’s keeping me from believing in generic racial theories. I know a few Asian people that grew up as adoptees from white families, and their life paths did not mirror that of most Asian Americans. It is clear culture matters, just based on the example of transracial adoption.
I'll second that Asian adoptees seem to behave "very white", more so than black adoptees, and their performance in school tends to align more with the white median than Asian. I've known quite a few such adoptees. Even knew a Korean adoptee who grew up to sometimes fly a Confederate flag on his pickup truck, with an accent to match (which my brain could never quite resolve when talking to him).
Though I think genetics are also important, and I'll speculate that at least part of what may be happening is that Asian adoptees tend to be from a lower IQ underclass and when adopted into the higher-IQ American middle or upper-middle classes (which also value things like work, education, and abiding by the law), the genetic difference is a wash.
Culture comes from a group of people deciding on the social norms that define a group, then passing on these norms and traditions to future generations. The social norms chosen usually are ones that ensure group survival.
Values and norms. The older people in the group raise the children and teach them the group’s values and norms.
That’s why when you take someone out of that group (e.g. an Asian kid adopted at birth and raised by White parents), that kid doesn’t magically display traits stereotypically associated with Asians, but rather absorbs the culture of the adoptive family.
It depends on what you mean by traits. The kid might eat macaroni and cheese but the kid's intelligence will be far more indicative of that of his biological parents than his adoptive parents.
This doesn't answer Richard's argument: why do East Asian countries all have "values and norms" which result in high education/income, low crime, low fertility, etc.?
I agree that culture obviously has a big role. Maybe there are similarities in East Asian cultures that Richard missed?
East Asian nations have one very strong cultural trait that can explain much of their success - honor of parents and ancestors. This translates to discipline of children and high scores on the marshmallow test.
>Im finding it difficult to distinguish this from the hatred of intellectual independence. Can you help? And, are there cultures, excepting the US to some extent, which dont honor parents and ancestors? After all, virtually all cultures in history are traditional.
While all cultures were originally traditional, there is surely a scale of obedience to parents even among those. Some have argued that East Asian worship of parents creates a society good at following orders but not so good at intellectual creativity. I'm not sure that is a valid construct, but it seems worthy of further study.
He only mentions Confucianism in passing, and that seems like the elephant in the room. I've lived in both South Korea and China, and the respect for hierarchy and harmony and emphasis on self-improvement through hard work and education permeate both cultures. Also, elite Koreans used Chinese script to communicate (Korea didn't have its own written language until the Middle Ages), and Japanese readers can understand a lot of written Chinese in ways that English readers can't understand German. Elites in all cultures were heavily influenced by Confucianism and China throughout history, and these trickled down over time to the masses. If it is genetics, we have ample Korean adoptees to study, and nothing has yet turned up.
> If having a similar culture doesn’t mean being similar in terms of language, religion, moral psychology, political institutions and history, pop culture, or sexual attitudes, what could it mean?
Language does not seem to have a big influence on culture. Basque is not related to any language in the world, and yet Basque culture is much more similar to Spanish culture than other linguistically related countries such as Romania. Not to mention that during most of history, they did have a shared language: Classical Chinese was the lingua franca! Classical Chinese was not only used for communication between countries, it was also the language of official and intellectual works. Much of literature was also written in Classical Chinese. This only stopped relatively recently. How is this any different than when Latin was the lingua franca in Hungary?
Political institutions come and go, and often result from accidents of history that do not reflect the culture of the country. In a few decades, (part of) Germany went from being a monarchy, to a democracy, then fascist, then socialist, to a democracy again. Is that because of German culture? Did North Korea become socialist and South Korea democratic because the North and South were culturally different? You're right that the political events of the last 150 years have resulted in cultural differences, but that doesn't undo a millennium of being part of the Sinosphere.
Modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pop culture influence each other quite a lot! Anime-style art is ubiquitous in China and Korea. Local versions of Kpop-style bands are really popular in China. Not to mention the influences of Japanese colonization in places like Taiwan.
>Pop culture. Japan and South Korea have produced pop cultural products that have large fan bases abroad. China has not, remaining unattractive to outsiders, or as Peter Thiel calls it, “weirdly autistic.”
If you limit yourself to last few decades, perhaps you're right (with the possible exception of Hong Kong cinema). But there was a time when Chinese culture was hugely popular in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinoiserie Even today, many aspects of Chinese culture are pretty popular abroad (food, martial arts, etc... ).
Sexual attitudes also come and go, and are often a result of political institutions. In 1975, Spain was still a semi-fascist ultraconservative country. By 2005, it legalized gay marriage.
The article has a lot of interesting points, but you are underestimating the shared cultural heritage of East Asia. We have historical records of what Japan was like before cultural contact with China. It was very different. I have zero idea what Japan would look like today without cultural exchange with China. You cannot say the same for the Netherlands.
Americans are so good at stereotype threat that they know southeast Asians should be stereotyped to do about as well as whites while East Asians should be stereotyped to do the best.
Stereotype threat is also so strong that in Malaysia, a country with a Malay majority, it makes the Chinese population outperform to such a great degree that there has to be explicit and aggressive affirmative action in favor of the majority population.
Thailand, meanwhile, has skillfully evaded stereotype threat by having the wealthy and powerful Chinese minority take Thai names. Now nobody can tell the difference and they live in perfect harmony.
I don’t think this article really does enough to dispute the “Confucian values” theory, especially since Confucianism tends to promote precisely the same values that seem to correspond with what makes East Asian societies unique: education, social harmony, and family values. The cultures of these countries can be quite different overall while still sharing similarities in these particular areas due to all of them being historically influenced by an ideology that heavily promotes them.
Cultural values come from a group determining what can best ensure its survival. Groups that grow up in arid climates have different cultures than groups that grow up in wet/monsoon climates. Groups that grow up in high-threat areas have different cultures than groups in low-threat areas.
Two groups with similar genetic profiles can still develop culture differently. For example, ancient Athenians and Spartans had similar genetic profiles but vastly different cultures.
Confucian values likely grew out of a need for harmony because rice was the dominant agricultural crop, and growing rice requires a lot of social harmony to be successful.
Another example is how similar stereotypes of working class White and Black Americans are. See Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals for more info.
How can China be a unitary state when Beijingers and the Shainghaiese speak different varieties, grow different crops, live under different climates and threats, and thus diverge culturally?
What is the difference between Spartan and Athenian cultures today?
Why has Confucianism taken root in non-rice-growing areas, such as Harbin and Dalian?
Why do crackers, despite their penchant for liquor and guns, continue to have such massively better educational and life outcomes than blacks in the same regions of the country?
I'm impressed, you found a counterargument for everything.
As for my responses:
1) China was only a unitary state for the past 400 years or so, when the Qing Dynasty unified much of the groups we now know as Chinese, via conquest. For 5000 years before that, the lands now known as China were a bunch of warring kingdoms.
2) There aren't any big differences between today's Athenians and Spartans. But that does not disprove that they were very different back then.
3) Via conquest, then imposing the ideology on everyone.
4) Do they? Take a look at some Appalachian towns. Heroin, fentanyl, opioids, single motherhood, food stamps, etc. everywhere, with an "honor culture" that basically has men kill each other over the slightest insult. I don't think they're doing well.
1) Fair point, but this applies just as well to almost anywhere else in the world you can think of. Greece was warring city-states, as you note, and became a unitary state even later than China, yet is far more linguistically and indeed genetically* close than China.
*Notwithstanding the hidden Slavic populations in the far north.
2) It needn't disprove it at all. The US Civil War was prosecuted almost entirely by a leadership of British descent. The bulk of the men who fought in it were the same. We make too much of the difference between Brits: aside from the Cornish and some Anglians, if you're from most of England you're genetically very similar to someone from the furthest away county.
3) There's something else that happened during conquest: genetic spread from the invading males.
4) The comparison I made isn't between white and white but between white and black. The poorest, most backwards Appalachian white county is significantly safer than the richest black areas of the country in California and Maryland. People also talk about this honor culture as if it's endemic and causes widespread murder, but it really doesn't. You'd expect that to be borne out in murder statistics, but the white murder rate in most Appalachian states is close to the national white median. Leaving aside the massive outlier that is DC (very small white population), the white murder rate is twice as bad in the Western states as it is in the appalachian ones. (It is, admittedly, significantly higher than the old Yankee states and the Germanic Midwest.)
My suspicion is that people like the honor culture explanation because it's memorable and because it also allows them to blame whitey for the existence of actual honor-killing cultures in the US, notably among blacks, for whom 'respect' is an existential issue and for which killings take place on a regular basis.
Point taken about the life expectancy decline, much of which is explained by opioids.
>China was only a unitary state for the past 400 years or so.
The opening line of The Romance of Three Kingdoms goes "Kingdoms under heaven long divided must unite, and long united must divide." Which is true. You see the same pattern over and over again with a new dynasty overthrowing the previous one, then starting a long decay during which political power changes hands and splinters off into multiple nations until a new dynasty takes over again to start the cycle anew.
The extent of that varies even within a time period. The early Indo-Europeans appear to have almost completely replaced the populations of northern Europe... but more densely populated southern Europe was less impacted. The Anglo-Saxons who conquered formerly Roman England had a real but small genetic impact. Hungarians evidence little genetic evidence of the population who gave them their non-Indo-European language. I would say that the rise of agriculture & states changed the calculus so that it made more sense to tax conquered peoples rather than just wipe them out.
The first and last part are interesting, but some of the parts in the section on culture are pretty unconvincing.
On religion, Confucianism deserves far more than a brief mention, as other commenters have pointed out. It was the state ideology of Korea for centuries, and it was highly influential in Japan, in addition to being at the core of Chinese political thought. It may not be the same as, say the Catholic Church in Western Europe, but it probably explains a degree of cultural similarity that is on par with, say, the influence of ancient Greek thought on various Western cultures. As for shintoism and other folk religions, my understanding is that they do share quite a few characteristics. Etymologically, "shinto" is the same as "shendao," a term used to refer to some concepts from Chinese folk religion.
On linguistics, while it's true that the lack of relationship between their languages means the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese ethnicities diverged a long time ago (and are therefore probably not super closely related genetically either), this obscures the numerous linguistic loans that the three cultures have made later. The writing system, of course, is the most visible one. Before modern hangul, Korea used Chinese characters, just like Japan and Vietnam also did. This of course means that they were able to share texts between them far more easily than otherwise.
All in all, it's true that China, Korea and Japan didn't split from a common parent culture the way Italy, France, and Spain did, and it's true that they have diverged quite a bit in recent times (I think that's due primarily to political choices, like becoming communist), but otherwise they became similar enough in terms of culture during their history that I'm not sure we need to look for other explanations.
There are two problems with what you posit. First, you liberally mix up small c (values) and big C culture (K Pop).
But second, you ignore the deep rooted historical connections between China, Korea, and Japan and to some extent Vietnam. Yes, they are distinct almost in every respect except they all had extended period of independent adoption of Sinitic big c culture and much of its administrative state (all at one point or another used Chinese characters - Japan still does).
So, what I'd say they share is sources of elite narrative reproduction (which explains the educational outcomes) and administrative state (with strong familial dimensions) which explains the economic success. North Korea and Vietnam are outliers for different historically contingent reasons.
In fact, from the perspective of elite narrative reproduction and administrative state tradition, we could simplify the world into four overlapping and mutually interconnected cultural spheres:
1. Helenic - anywhere Alexander the Great and Cesar and their descendants set their genocidal designs on
2. Indic - South and South East Asia
3. Sinitic - East Asia
4. Other - fragmented parts of the world with various traditions interrupted by the global spread of the Helenic tradition (parts of Africa, many parts of the Americas) - they still contribute to elite narrative reproduction but only within the overall schema of one of the other traditions.
These don't map neatly onto economic development over the last 100 years or so but explain a lot of the variation we're seeing. They certainly explain cultural affinities within.
These traditions are not independent of each other from the very start - Indic tradition spread Buddhism to the East, Helenic tradition develop in contact with the Indic. They each got huge injections from the Others at different parts of their development (e.g. Mongols, Turks, etc) but the other by and large did not leave behind independent traditions.
Perhaps the most impactful of the Others is the Farsic (Persian) cultural tradition which sits between Indic and Helenic and fed strongly into both of them, yet was never fully absorbed. What sets it apart is the significant interruptions to its administrative state tradition that is likely to never resume in the way that Indic and Sinit traditions have.
Fair point. He did not have time to turn Cesar-style genocidal or really establish a clear vision of what he wanted other than conquer a bunch of places and name cities after himself. But hard to describe his approach as anything but brutal and what he left in his wake was a lot of misery.
You totally forgot Islam. Understandable as their civilization's not doing so great right now, but it was ahead of the West for a few hundred years. Sunrise, sunset.
I did not forget it. I actually see Islam firmly in the Helenic tradition (including their conquest of Persia). Just look at how it drew on Greek philosophy (rescuing it for the Rennaisance) Byzantine administrative tradition. The Helenic tradition does split into two branches post fall of Rome - Western Rome and Byzantium but both are available to both groups the new West (Rome, Spain, post-Frankish lands) and the old-West (Egypt, Levant, Greece, Asia Minor). As late as 1914 you had three empires claim to be inheritors of Rome: Austro-Hungary/Germany - Kaiser=Cesar, Russia - Tsar = Cesar, and Ottomans (which also claimed to inherit the tradition of Islam through Sultan = Kalif - which started as a sort of reform Christianity). True, there are few people in the West who see a continuity with the Abbasids but much of it is embedded in the culture.
Also, that's not to say that there are no very local traditions of narrative elite reproduction that have much more recent roots. But I think if you want to understand some of the broader cultural affinities that seem to persist over very long time frames, these are a good place to start.
There's no such thing as Islamic Civilization nor any Religion based Civilization. And the Culture/Civilization of the Middle East is largely based on the indigenous Pre-Islamic cultures of the region.
Also, the notion that Muslim scholars, philosophers and scientists merely copied and translated the works of Ancient Greeks is an Orientalist myth. They were actually far more influenced by indigenous Middle Eastern traditions (Egyptian, Punic, Mesopotamian and especially Iranian) and even those of India than they were by the Greeks, and they exhibited far more originality than Western writers claim they did. Ibn Rushed (Averroes) wasn't just some Arab copy of Aristotle.
I wonder if China's failure to produce any pop culture isn't just because the state still exerts so much control over culture there. The Soviet Union similarly failed at pop culture, despite the fact that Russia on the eve of Soviet take over was a major producer of internationally popular literature and music. There's something to be said for having a marketplace of ideas, it forces artists to produce things that at least someone will want to consume voluntarily.
It seems to me that the so-called lack of Chinese pop culture is entirely due to a lack of exposure on Richard's part. Chinese dramas are finding quite an audience among teenage girls and 20-somethings.
I've chosen to completely ignore Richard's writings and thus I'm going to bunch Japan, China, and SK into one bucket.
Japan: If you're a nerd or nerd-adjacent you don't even need to read this. Japan rules. Anime first and foremost, but also their music, their aesthetic, their food*, even their walkability. All absolutely fetishized among certain types of westerners.
South Korea: K-Pop and cinema, but consumer electronics can't be discounted either. Samsung is a dominant phone manufacturer now; there's no way no Koreanness hasn't snuck in with the hardware.
China: I'd be very surprised if your median American's view of China has changed much since the 90s. It's still fortune cookies and Chairman Mao. (My last visit to China, a few years ago, I was pleased to note did not coincide with a dearth of Maoist merch. Still very much available.)
*I have often wondered, while at table with an unblinking companion with whom I share interests and friendship if not a neurology, whether the love of sushi among the American nerdariat is related to the disproportionate autism of that demographic. Hear me out. Japanese food is renowned for its purity of taste. Ingredients taste like themselves. With the exception of salt, seasonings tend to be mild. Yes, there are obvious exceptions like wasabi. But wasabi is either used very sparingly, or applied by the diner. With sushi, this is true even of soy sauce. Even Japanese curry is bland: these are the people who took British food and decided it was too spicy for them. If you want a sensory deprivation tank for the mouth, you can't really go wrong with a bento box of pasteurized ingredients. I think - pornography aside - Japanese culture has slotted Tetris-like into western tastes because it is so bland and so inoffensive.
I don't know about the autism thing. I think geeks like anime and manga because it's like (prewoke) American nerd culture but with more involved plotlines and better character development and often better production values (MCU aside) so everything else from Japan gets a halo effect. You have a whole ritual with the chopsticks (which aren't used anywhere else) that makes it a separate food thing. That said, you don't see geeks into cherry blossom viewing, baths, or kimonos.
Also, I don't know if 'bland and inoffensive' is really the reason, apart from sushi. (And the geeks often like Indian food too, which is very strongly spicy.) Anime is often *weird*, partly because it's from another culture, of course, but there is a greater tolerance of surrealistic and fantastic elements in art over there. (Remember the cartoon with the battling soda cans that turn into girls?) It's also very un-woke, because Japan is so conservative, but that's a huge appeal to a nerdy guy. Instead of having to play second fiddle to some Action Girl, a male protagonist can go on adventures and get the girl (more than one in some anime) in the same hero's journey we had before the wokies moved in.
You could also argue it has something to do with neutering and undermining the previous culture (i.e. the Cultural Revolution).
Another country that's a conspicuous failure at latter-day cultural export is Germany, though this is seldom talked about. This contrasts with pre-WW2 Germany, which had an influential film industry, and of course before that opera, classical music, etc. Not to mention philosophy and various intellectual developments. But WW2 and the cultural self-flagellation that followed it have neutered Germany's capacity for cultural export. It has exported a few things, but it's dwarfed by both Japan (which is rather less repentant about its pre-1945 culture) and France (which remains more or less fully proud of its culture).
pretty easy to explain the success of east Asians, like Europeans they typically have very good genetics which gives them an edge in education, learning, work rate and having the impulse control to stay out of the kinds of trouble that could hinder their future success. Some call this racist but those who are willing to accept reality call this a fact.
And get cancelled? Instead he has us arguing and making his argument for him. But a lot of us are using pseudonyms, so we can say what he can't. But he's still boosted his signal.
I know Richard is pointing to genetics as the shared causal factor here, but it can't be the only one. Two (sort of) counter examples below.
I am not a geneticist, but I believe that if one wants to cluster all "East Asians" into a genetic profile, Mongols and Turkic people (inhabiting the Central Asian -stans today, including the Uighurs), not to mention Tibetans (many of whom are in India today), ought to lie within that cluster too. And these people, as far as I know, don't fit the profile Richard is trying to explain, either within their homelands or as migrants. So what explains this?
Indian immigrants do at least as well as the highest achieving East Asian populations in the US. Indians are genetically much closer to Europeans than either are to East Asians. What explains this?
If there are genetic differences, they can be due to recent selection. Population density and means of subsistence can alter the quantity and quality of such selection. It's completely expected that low-density semi-pastoralist peoples will have different characteristics than high-density rice farmers. On top of that, most central-asians have double digit percentages of west-eurasian ancestry.
Indian immigration is highly selective and draws from an anomalously genetically stratified population. Also Indians, while arguably looking closer to whites than to the Chinese, are more than 50% east-eurasian for what I've read in Razib's stuff.
I've read almost all of Razib's stuff. The east-eurasian part of the "Indian genome" is highly divergent from whatever it is that East Asians commonly possess. Also, the "higher" up the caste ladder one goes, the percentage reduces to very low proportions; upper castes have majority West Eurasian affiliation (mostly from Indus Valley/Iranian Farmer, and some from Indo-Europeans, or steppe people). That said, the East Eurasian affiliation still exists. You are right about Indian immigration being highly selective, but that selection is primarily for a certain kind of drive and ambition and plain openness; the Indian diaspora has very little representation from the most underprivileged Dalit caste but otherwise is fairly diverse. Yet it possesses the cultural package that Amy Chua describes as key to prosperity.
Central Asians possessing substantial West Eurasian ancestry may have something to do with it. But can we completely discount the difference in environment; also the difference between nomadic and settled populations? BTW......when it comes to Tibetans vs Indians in India.......one does see the effect that Richard discusses (at least as per my observations as an Indian.)
By "highly selective" I meant mostly selective in terms of intelligence. The US doesn't care about your background within the subcontinent as long as you have brains. The stratification seems important because the descendants of modern-day immigrants would have an expected intelligence centered around their parents' mean with a correction term accounting for regression to the mean, that mean wouldn't be the country-wide mean but that of their extended family and the two can be largely different in a country as stratified as India. There can be selection for other less researched mental traits like "openness" as you claim (I have no way to know).
I value the stuff that Amy Chua says. I actually saw many aspects of the Asian-american immigrants' grit and determination in my (white) immigrant grandparents, but it would be silly not to expect genetic differences as well. Middle class Americans adopted a lot of Koreans and Chinese babies in the 90's. Those grew up without Amy Chua's cultural package and still reached or outperformed the white average. In contrast, American adoptees of American background tend to perform very badly in life and generally don't catch up to their nice middle-class parents academically.
I've never been to India, but the blogger "bald and bankrupt" has a video visiting the Tibetan quarter in Delhi and it surprised me how orderly and clean it seemed.
India wasn’t genetically stratified, at least to a significant degree. Genetic differences between castes had more to do with the Islamic conquests and resulting elite intermarriage rather tha strict subcontinent-wide genetic stratification which in many ways would’ve been impossible to consistently implement in a pre-industrial socdty
Commenters here chastising Richard for ignoring genetics is truly beautiful.
The Straussianism is about as thin as Saran wrap, but it's enough for many people I guess. Probably a good thing for Richard.
Should have saved this for Apr 1st
I wonder if trying to agree with Kendi as much as possible, while pushing genetics is the way to go :D
It's hilarious
It’s sophomoric.
Don't forget the marshmallow experiment.
Well, enjoyment of marshmallows has large diseconomies of scale (eating too many marshmallows makes you feel sick). And you can't trust those people running psychology or social science experiments.
So I have a lot of sympathy for those who just eat the single marshmallow.
The Australian Aborigines package will be slim.
Brilliant application of Goodhart's law, which states the fastest way to get information from the internet is not to ask a question but to confidently proclaim a wrong answer. Richard's incorrect attempt to explain why racism is the cause of disparate outcomes is meant to invite us, the commentariat, to supply the correct one. So far, seventeen comments in, no-one has. I guess it falls to me.
Kendi's groundbreaking work on stereotype within the US is too nuanced to be simply ported over one-to-one in Asia. Yes, East Asians here are subject to stereotype, and yes stereotypes exist also in Asia. However, in their home environment East Asians share something in common: light skin. All define themselves in contradistinction to 'dumb', 'lazy', brown and indigenous people of color. East Asians are the white people of Asia, and similarly benefit from racism and stereotype there. They, like the white people of Europe, were fortunate enough to gain political and technological power that they use to subjugate and exploit BIPOC they encounter. All of the non-white, non-East-Asian countries we can compare with are full of innocent beautiful brown bodies who are held down by racism. We don't have a control-group world in which these other peoples were allowed to thrive wtih which to compare the world we have.
"Brilliant application of Goodhart's law, which states the fastest way to get information from the internet is not to ask a question but to confidently proclaim a wrong answer."
speaking of brilliant .... *claps quietly*
It really is a thing of beauty. I was limbering up my fingers to respond before it hit me!
The East Asian countries in question all have a history of strong (compared to their central and southeast Asian neighbors) central government. They also have a history of literacy. And they aren't independent: the origins of both the Japanese and Korean legal traditions lie in the Chinese classics.
Yes, that claim of cultural independence is the sort of thing that someone with the "thick" historical knowledge of Razib Khan would never write.
The common cultural aspect of East Asian is family-based, not institutional-based and thus, was inherited in a very similar manner to genetic. You'd be surprised if you ask any of those from E.Asian and Vietnam, if they know about Guan Yu or Romance of Three Kingdom - a fantasy-historical novel about ancient China that deeply how people think, from proverbs forward or how the three-follows were expected of woman in the family. This is how E. Asian have strikingly similar behaviors regardless of where they are, especially in listed categories.
However, this is not true for separated families. In twin studies of Korean babies, the Korean kids share the similar genetic from biological parents that influence their intelligence and height, but their belief and subsequently their behaviors are mostly of the adopted parents. Follow-up, their social outcomes are closer to of white families they are with, from drug-uses onward.
Yeah, culture does matter, and it’s what’s keeping me from believing in generic racial theories. I know a few Asian people that grew up as adoptees from white families, and their life paths did not mirror that of most Asian Americans. It is clear culture matters, just based on the example of transracial adoption.
I'll second that Asian adoptees seem to behave "very white", more so than black adoptees, and their performance in school tends to align more with the white median than Asian. I've known quite a few such adoptees. Even knew a Korean adoptee who grew up to sometimes fly a Confederate flag on his pickup truck, with an accent to match (which my brain could never quite resolve when talking to him).
Though I think genetics are also important, and I'll speculate that at least part of what may be happening is that Asian adoptees tend to be from a lower IQ underclass and when adopted into the higher-IQ American middle or upper-middle classes (which also value things like work, education, and abiding by the law), the genetic difference is a wash.
Anecdotally, black children adopted into white families also take on a great deal of their family's culture, values, abilities and behavior.
Where does culture come from?
Culture comes from a group of people deciding on the social norms that define a group, then passing on these norms and traditions to future generations. The social norms chosen usually are ones that ensure group survival.
And group survival is indicative of the transfer of... what?
Values and norms. The older people in the group raise the children and teach them the group’s values and norms.
That’s why when you take someone out of that group (e.g. an Asian kid adopted at birth and raised by White parents), that kid doesn’t magically display traits stereotypically associated with Asians, but rather absorbs the culture of the adoptive family.
It depends on what you mean by traits. The kid might eat macaroni and cheese but the kid's intelligence will be far more indicative of that of his biological parents than his adoptive parents.
This doesn't answer Richard's argument: why do East Asian countries all have "values and norms" which result in high education/income, low crime, low fertility, etc.?
I agree that culture obviously has a big role. Maybe there are similarities in East Asian cultures that Richard missed?
East Asian nations have one very strong cultural trait that can explain much of their success - honor of parents and ancestors. This translates to discipline of children and high scores on the marshmallow test.
>Im finding it difficult to distinguish this from the hatred of intellectual independence. Can you help? And, are there cultures, excepting the US to some extent, which dont honor parents and ancestors? After all, virtually all cultures in history are traditional.
While all cultures were originally traditional, there is surely a scale of obedience to parents even among those. Some have argued that East Asian worship of parents creates a society good at following orders but not so good at intellectual creativity. I'm not sure that is a valid construct, but it seems worthy of further study.
He only mentions Confucianism in passing, and that seems like the elephant in the room. I've lived in both South Korea and China, and the respect for hierarchy and harmony and emphasis on self-improvement through hard work and education permeate both cultures. Also, elite Koreans used Chinese script to communicate (Korea didn't have its own written language until the Middle Ages), and Japanese readers can understand a lot of written Chinese in ways that English readers can't understand German. Elites in all cultures were heavily influenced by Confucianism and China throughout history, and these trickled down over time to the masses. If it is genetics, we have ample Korean adoptees to study, and nothing has yet turned up.
> If having a similar culture doesn’t mean being similar in terms of language, religion, moral psychology, political institutions and history, pop culture, or sexual attitudes, what could it mean?
Language does not seem to have a big influence on culture. Basque is not related to any language in the world, and yet Basque culture is much more similar to Spanish culture than other linguistically related countries such as Romania. Not to mention that during most of history, they did have a shared language: Classical Chinese was the lingua franca! Classical Chinese was not only used for communication between countries, it was also the language of official and intellectual works. Much of literature was also written in Classical Chinese. This only stopped relatively recently. How is this any different than when Latin was the lingua franca in Hungary?
Political institutions come and go, and often result from accidents of history that do not reflect the culture of the country. In a few decades, (part of) Germany went from being a monarchy, to a democracy, then fascist, then socialist, to a democracy again. Is that because of German culture? Did North Korea become socialist and South Korea democratic because the North and South were culturally different? You're right that the political events of the last 150 years have resulted in cultural differences, but that doesn't undo a millennium of being part of the Sinosphere.
Modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pop culture influence each other quite a lot! Anime-style art is ubiquitous in China and Korea. Local versions of Kpop-style bands are really popular in China. Not to mention the influences of Japanese colonization in places like Taiwan.
>Pop culture. Japan and South Korea have produced pop cultural products that have large fan bases abroad. China has not, remaining unattractive to outsiders, or as Peter Thiel calls it, “weirdly autistic.”
If you limit yourself to last few decades, perhaps you're right (with the possible exception of Hong Kong cinema). But there was a time when Chinese culture was hugely popular in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinoiserie Even today, many aspects of Chinese culture are pretty popular abroad (food, martial arts, etc... ).
Sexual attitudes also come and go, and are often a result of political institutions. In 1975, Spain was still a semi-fascist ultraconservative country. By 2005, it legalized gay marriage.
The article has a lot of interesting points, but you are underestimating the shared cultural heritage of East Asia. We have historical records of what Japan was like before cultural contact with China. It was very different. I have zero idea what Japan would look like today without cultural exchange with China. You cannot say the same for the Netherlands.
Don't forget a key part of the package: East Asians love wearing masks!
Lol!
Americans are so good at stereotype threat that they know southeast Asians should be stereotyped to do about as well as whites while East Asians should be stereotyped to do the best.
Stereotype threat is also so strong that in Malaysia, a country with a Malay majority, it makes the Chinese population outperform to such a great degree that there has to be explicit and aggressive affirmative action in favor of the majority population.
Thailand, meanwhile, has skillfully evaded stereotype threat by having the wealthy and powerful Chinese minority take Thai names. Now nobody can tell the difference and they live in perfect harmony.
Me thinks that what Richard’s tryun to saay is that the blank slate has got some writin on it…
I don’t think this article really does enough to dispute the “Confucian values” theory, especially since Confucianism tends to promote precisely the same values that seem to correspond with what makes East Asian societies unique: education, social harmony, and family values. The cultures of these countries can be quite different overall while still sharing similarities in these particular areas due to all of them being historically influenced by an ideology that heavily promotes them.
You still need to drill down to where Confucian values come from and why they can take root in certain cultures and not others.
Cultural values come from a group determining what can best ensure its survival. Groups that grow up in arid climates have different cultures than groups that grow up in wet/monsoon climates. Groups that grow up in high-threat areas have different cultures than groups in low-threat areas.
Two groups with similar genetic profiles can still develop culture differently. For example, ancient Athenians and Spartans had similar genetic profiles but vastly different cultures.
Confucian values likely grew out of a need for harmony because rice was the dominant agricultural crop, and growing rice requires a lot of social harmony to be successful.
Another example is how similar stereotypes of working class White and Black Americans are. See Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals for more info.
How can China be a unitary state when Beijingers and the Shainghaiese speak different varieties, grow different crops, live under different climates and threats, and thus diverge culturally?
What is the difference between Spartan and Athenian cultures today?
Why has Confucianism taken root in non-rice-growing areas, such as Harbin and Dalian?
Why do crackers, despite their penchant for liquor and guns, continue to have such massively better educational and life outcomes than blacks in the same regions of the country?
I'm impressed, you found a counterargument for everything.
As for my responses:
1) China was only a unitary state for the past 400 years or so, when the Qing Dynasty unified much of the groups we now know as Chinese, via conquest. For 5000 years before that, the lands now known as China were a bunch of warring kingdoms.
2) There aren't any big differences between today's Athenians and Spartans. But that does not disprove that they were very different back then.
3) Via conquest, then imposing the ideology on everyone.
4) Do they? Take a look at some Appalachian towns. Heroin, fentanyl, opioids, single motherhood, food stamps, etc. everywhere, with an "honor culture" that basically has men kill each other over the slightest insult. I don't think they're doing well.
1) Fair point, but this applies just as well to almost anywhere else in the world you can think of. Greece was warring city-states, as you note, and became a unitary state even later than China, yet is far more linguistically and indeed genetically* close than China.
*Notwithstanding the hidden Slavic populations in the far north.
2) It needn't disprove it at all. The US Civil War was prosecuted almost entirely by a leadership of British descent. The bulk of the men who fought in it were the same. We make too much of the difference between Brits: aside from the Cornish and some Anglians, if you're from most of England you're genetically very similar to someone from the furthest away county.
3) There's something else that happened during conquest: genetic spread from the invading males.
4) The comparison I made isn't between white and white but between white and black. The poorest, most backwards Appalachian white county is significantly safer than the richest black areas of the country in California and Maryland. People also talk about this honor culture as if it's endemic and causes widespread murder, but it really doesn't. You'd expect that to be borne out in murder statistics, but the white murder rate in most Appalachian states is close to the national white median. Leaving aside the massive outlier that is DC (very small white population), the white murder rate is twice as bad in the Western states as it is in the appalachian ones. (It is, admittedly, significantly higher than the old Yankee states and the Germanic Midwest.)
My suspicion is that people like the honor culture explanation because it's memorable and because it also allows them to blame whitey for the existence of actual honor-killing cultures in the US, notably among blacks, for whom 'respect' is an existential issue and for which killings take place on a regular basis.
Point taken about the life expectancy decline, much of which is explained by opioids.
>China was only a unitary state for the past 400 years or so.
The opening line of The Romance of Three Kingdoms goes "Kingdoms under heaven long divided must unite, and long united must divide." Which is true. You see the same pattern over and over again with a new dynasty overthrowing the previous one, then starting a long decay during which political power changes hands and splinters off into multiple nations until a new dynasty takes over again to start the cycle anew.
The homicide rate is not all that high in West Virginia, though it may be higher than it is among whites close to the Canadian border.
Conquest frequently helps spread a culture, as well as (obviously) a state.
Until very recently conquest was also a way to spread genetics.
The extent of that varies even within a time period. The early Indo-Europeans appear to have almost completely replaced the populations of northern Europe... but more densely populated southern Europe was less impacted. The Anglo-Saxons who conquered formerly Roman England had a real but small genetic impact. Hungarians evidence little genetic evidence of the population who gave them their non-Indo-European language. I would say that the rise of agriculture & states changed the calculus so that it made more sense to tax conquered peoples rather than just wipe them out.
The first and last part are interesting, but some of the parts in the section on culture are pretty unconvincing.
On religion, Confucianism deserves far more than a brief mention, as other commenters have pointed out. It was the state ideology of Korea for centuries, and it was highly influential in Japan, in addition to being at the core of Chinese political thought. It may not be the same as, say the Catholic Church in Western Europe, but it probably explains a degree of cultural similarity that is on par with, say, the influence of ancient Greek thought on various Western cultures. As for shintoism and other folk religions, my understanding is that they do share quite a few characteristics. Etymologically, "shinto" is the same as "shendao," a term used to refer to some concepts from Chinese folk religion.
On linguistics, while it's true that the lack of relationship between their languages means the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese ethnicities diverged a long time ago (and are therefore probably not super closely related genetically either), this obscures the numerous linguistic loans that the three cultures have made later. The writing system, of course, is the most visible one. Before modern hangul, Korea used Chinese characters, just like Japan and Vietnam also did. This of course means that they were able to share texts between them far more easily than otherwise.
All in all, it's true that China, Korea and Japan didn't split from a common parent culture the way Italy, France, and Spain did, and it's true that they have diverged quite a bit in recent times (I think that's due primarily to political choices, like becoming communist), but otherwise they became similar enough in terms of culture during their history that I'm not sure we need to look for other explanations.
There are two problems with what you posit. First, you liberally mix up small c (values) and big C culture (K Pop).
But second, you ignore the deep rooted historical connections between China, Korea, and Japan and to some extent Vietnam. Yes, they are distinct almost in every respect except they all had extended period of independent adoption of Sinitic big c culture and much of its administrative state (all at one point or another used Chinese characters - Japan still does).
So, what I'd say they share is sources of elite narrative reproduction (which explains the educational outcomes) and administrative state (with strong familial dimensions) which explains the economic success. North Korea and Vietnam are outliers for different historically contingent reasons.
In fact, from the perspective of elite narrative reproduction and administrative state tradition, we could simplify the world into four overlapping and mutually interconnected cultural spheres:
1. Helenic - anywhere Alexander the Great and Cesar and their descendants set their genocidal designs on
2. Indic - South and South East Asia
3. Sinitic - East Asia
4. Other - fragmented parts of the world with various traditions interrupted by the global spread of the Helenic tradition (parts of Africa, many parts of the Americas) - they still contribute to elite narrative reproduction but only within the overall schema of one of the other traditions.
These don't map neatly onto economic development over the last 100 years or so but explain a lot of the variation we're seeing. They certainly explain cultural affinities within.
These traditions are not independent of each other from the very start - Indic tradition spread Buddhism to the East, Helenic tradition develop in contact with the Indic. They each got huge injections from the Others at different parts of their development (e.g. Mongols, Turks, etc) but the other by and large did not leave behind independent traditions.
Perhaps the most impactful of the Others is the Farsic (Persian) cultural tradition which sits between Indic and Helenic and fed strongly into both of them, yet was never fully absorbed. What sets it apart is the significant interruptions to its administrative state tradition that is likely to never resume in the way that Indic and Sinit traditions have.
Alexander wasn't genocidal, he wanted to rule conquered people rather than wipe them out.
Fair point. He did not have time to turn Cesar-style genocidal or really establish a clear vision of what he wanted other than conquer a bunch of places and name cities after himself. But hard to describe his approach as anything but brutal and what he left in his wake was a lot of misery.
You totally forgot Islam. Understandable as their civilization's not doing so great right now, but it was ahead of the West for a few hundred years. Sunrise, sunset.
I did not forget it. I actually see Islam firmly in the Helenic tradition (including their conquest of Persia). Just look at how it drew on Greek philosophy (rescuing it for the Rennaisance) Byzantine administrative tradition. The Helenic tradition does split into two branches post fall of Rome - Western Rome and Byzantium but both are available to both groups the new West (Rome, Spain, post-Frankish lands) and the old-West (Egypt, Levant, Greece, Asia Minor). As late as 1914 you had three empires claim to be inheritors of Rome: Austro-Hungary/Germany - Kaiser=Cesar, Russia - Tsar = Cesar, and Ottomans (which also claimed to inherit the tradition of Islam through Sultan = Kalif - which started as a sort of reform Christianity). True, there are few people in the West who see a continuity with the Abbasids but much of it is embedded in the culture.
Also, that's not to say that there are no very local traditions of narrative elite reproduction that have much more recent roots. But I think if you want to understand some of the broader cultural affinities that seem to persist over very long time frames, these are a good place to start.
There's no such thing as Islamic Civilization nor any Religion based Civilization. And the Culture/Civilization of the Middle East is largely based on the indigenous Pre-Islamic cultures of the region.
Also, the notion that Muslim scholars, philosophers and scientists merely copied and translated the works of Ancient Greeks is an Orientalist myth. They were actually far more influenced by indigenous Middle Eastern traditions (Egyptian, Punic, Mesopotamian and especially Iranian) and even those of India than they were by the Greeks, and they exhibited far more originality than Western writers claim they did. Ibn Rushed (Averroes) wasn't just some Arab copy of Aristotle.
I wonder if China's failure to produce any pop culture isn't just because the state still exerts so much control over culture there. The Soviet Union similarly failed at pop culture, despite the fact that Russia on the eve of Soviet take over was a major producer of internationally popular literature and music. There's something to be said for having a marketplace of ideas, it forces artists to produce things that at least someone will want to consume voluntarily.
It seems to me that the so-called lack of Chinese pop culture is entirely due to a lack of exposure on Richard's part. Chinese dramas are finding quite an audience among teenage girls and 20-somethings.
I've chosen to completely ignore Richard's writings and thus I'm going to bunch Japan, China, and SK into one bucket.
Japan: If you're a nerd or nerd-adjacent you don't even need to read this. Japan rules. Anime first and foremost, but also their music, their aesthetic, their food*, even their walkability. All absolutely fetishized among certain types of westerners.
South Korea: K-Pop and cinema, but consumer electronics can't be discounted either. Samsung is a dominant phone manufacturer now; there's no way no Koreanness hasn't snuck in with the hardware.
China: I'd be very surprised if your median American's view of China has changed much since the 90s. It's still fortune cookies and Chairman Mao. (My last visit to China, a few years ago, I was pleased to note did not coincide with a dearth of Maoist merch. Still very much available.)
*I have often wondered, while at table with an unblinking companion with whom I share interests and friendship if not a neurology, whether the love of sushi among the American nerdariat is related to the disproportionate autism of that demographic. Hear me out. Japanese food is renowned for its purity of taste. Ingredients taste like themselves. With the exception of salt, seasonings tend to be mild. Yes, there are obvious exceptions like wasabi. But wasabi is either used very sparingly, or applied by the diner. With sushi, this is true even of soy sauce. Even Japanese curry is bland: these are the people who took British food and decided it was too spicy for them. If you want a sensory deprivation tank for the mouth, you can't really go wrong with a bento box of pasteurized ingredients. I think - pornography aside - Japanese culture has slotted Tetris-like into western tastes because it is so bland and so inoffensive.
I don't know about the autism thing. I think geeks like anime and manga because it's like (prewoke) American nerd culture but with more involved plotlines and better character development and often better production values (MCU aside) so everything else from Japan gets a halo effect. You have a whole ritual with the chopsticks (which aren't used anywhere else) that makes it a separate food thing. That said, you don't see geeks into cherry blossom viewing, baths, or kimonos.
Also, I don't know if 'bland and inoffensive' is really the reason, apart from sushi. (And the geeks often like Indian food too, which is very strongly spicy.) Anime is often *weird*, partly because it's from another culture, of course, but there is a greater tolerance of surrealistic and fantastic elements in art over there. (Remember the cartoon with the battling soda cans that turn into girls?) It's also very un-woke, because Japan is so conservative, but that's a huge appeal to a nerdy guy. Instead of having to play second fiddle to some Action Girl, a male protagonist can go on adventures and get the girl (more than one in some anime) in the same hero's journey we had before the wokies moved in.
Anime is full of action girls tho'?
But never at the expense of male heroes
You could also argue it has something to do with neutering and undermining the previous culture (i.e. the Cultural Revolution).
Another country that's a conspicuous failure at latter-day cultural export is Germany, though this is seldom talked about. This contrasts with pre-WW2 Germany, which had an influential film industry, and of course before that opera, classical music, etc. Not to mention philosophy and various intellectual developments. But WW2 and the cultural self-flagellation that followed it have neutered Germany's capacity for cultural export. It has exported a few things, but it's dwarfed by both Japan (which is rather less repentant about its pre-1945 culture) and France (which remains more or less fully proud of its culture).
Couldn’t the differences between China and “Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan” be called US military occupation.
pretty easy to explain the success of east Asians, like Europeans they typically have very good genetics which gives them an edge in education, learning, work rate and having the impulse control to stay out of the kinds of trouble that could hinder their future success. Some call this racist but those who are willing to accept reality call this a fact.
Probably not. If he had thought it were genetics, he surely would have said it outright.
And get cancelled? Instead he has us arguing and making his argument for him. But a lot of us are using pseudonyms, so we can say what he can't. But he's still boosted his signal.
Well done. I salute you, Hanania-sama!
Masterful if troll
He has already left academia now .
Just a strategy for audience capture, otherwise few won't give him the ears
Plausible deniability preserved!
I know Richard is pointing to genetics as the shared causal factor here, but it can't be the only one. Two (sort of) counter examples below.
I am not a geneticist, but I believe that if one wants to cluster all "East Asians" into a genetic profile, Mongols and Turkic people (inhabiting the Central Asian -stans today, including the Uighurs), not to mention Tibetans (many of whom are in India today), ought to lie within that cluster too. And these people, as far as I know, don't fit the profile Richard is trying to explain, either within their homelands or as migrants. So what explains this?
Indian immigrants do at least as well as the highest achieving East Asian populations in the US. Indians are genetically much closer to Europeans than either are to East Asians. What explains this?
If there are genetic differences, they can be due to recent selection. Population density and means of subsistence can alter the quantity and quality of such selection. It's completely expected that low-density semi-pastoralist peoples will have different characteristics than high-density rice farmers. On top of that, most central-asians have double digit percentages of west-eurasian ancestry.
Indian immigration is highly selective and draws from an anomalously genetically stratified population. Also Indians, while arguably looking closer to whites than to the Chinese, are more than 50% east-eurasian for what I've read in Razib's stuff.
I've read almost all of Razib's stuff. The east-eurasian part of the "Indian genome" is highly divergent from whatever it is that East Asians commonly possess. Also, the "higher" up the caste ladder one goes, the percentage reduces to very low proportions; upper castes have majority West Eurasian affiliation (mostly from Indus Valley/Iranian Farmer, and some from Indo-Europeans, or steppe people). That said, the East Eurasian affiliation still exists. You are right about Indian immigration being highly selective, but that selection is primarily for a certain kind of drive and ambition and plain openness; the Indian diaspora has very little representation from the most underprivileged Dalit caste but otherwise is fairly diverse. Yet it possesses the cultural package that Amy Chua describes as key to prosperity.
Central Asians possessing substantial West Eurasian ancestry may have something to do with it. But can we completely discount the difference in environment; also the difference between nomadic and settled populations? BTW......when it comes to Tibetans vs Indians in India.......one does see the effect that Richard discusses (at least as per my observations as an Indian.)
By "highly selective" I meant mostly selective in terms of intelligence. The US doesn't care about your background within the subcontinent as long as you have brains. The stratification seems important because the descendants of modern-day immigrants would have an expected intelligence centered around their parents' mean with a correction term accounting for regression to the mean, that mean wouldn't be the country-wide mean but that of their extended family and the two can be largely different in a country as stratified as India. There can be selection for other less researched mental traits like "openness" as you claim (I have no way to know).
I value the stuff that Amy Chua says. I actually saw many aspects of the Asian-american immigrants' grit and determination in my (white) immigrant grandparents, but it would be silly not to expect genetic differences as well. Middle class Americans adopted a lot of Koreans and Chinese babies in the 90's. Those grew up without Amy Chua's cultural package and still reached or outperformed the white average. In contrast, American adoptees of American background tend to perform very badly in life and generally don't catch up to their nice middle-class parents academically.
I've never been to India, but the blogger "bald and bankrupt" has a video visiting the Tibetan quarter in Delhi and it surprised me how orderly and clean it seemed.
India wasn’t genetically stratified, at least to a significant degree. Genetic differences between castes had more to do with the Islamic conquests and resulting elite intermarriage rather tha strict subcontinent-wide genetic stratification which in many ways would’ve been impossible to consistently implement in a pre-industrial socdty
They send their best people over here to college. Some Indians have some Australoid admixture, some don’t. But I agree they do as well as East Asians.