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Or compare the Ming Treasure Voyages cancellation with the European Age of Exploration. China was on top of the world, but their institutional infighting manifested as stasis while Europe's often-more-literal infighting manifested as a mad scramble for power, and the difference in incentives set China back centuries.
Compare East Germany with West Germany, or South Korea with North Korea. The economic effects of better vs worse governance on nearly-the-same-genes can literally be big enough to see from space.
I think a more interesting wrench in the gears is the question of better vs worse culture, though. South Korea has a lot more lights than North Korea in all the satellite photos, but at 0.72 and still falling TFR they might as well start turning lights off now before the last person "leaves". Their genes haven't significantly changed, and their government changes over the past 60 years (since the TFR started falling from 6) seem unrelated, but the cultural changes have been massive and baffling. Nerds started getting a mathematical handle on voting system foibles and game theory back around the time of Condorcet (though we've now got much better alternatives to FPTP than IRV-misnamed-as-Ranked-Voting, so the lesser-nerds' focus on the latter at this point in history is weird...), and likewise for economics and at least the most obvious Communism-level economic mistakes. But does anybody have any sort of mathematical analysis of WTF happened in South Korean culture, to cause the gender war to get so bad and the fertility rate to plummet eight-fold in 2 or 3 generations? It's like the stereotype of the pushed-into-overachievement kid burning out and becoming suicidal, but on a 50-million-person scale!
South Korea made childhood hellacious so nobody wants to subject people to it. It’s not a mystery.
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It’s not because of the gender war, it’s because they have a broken culture that is ultra-hyper-competitive for no good reason and encourages all parents to pour all their resources into a single child who lives a miserable life in the hope of being 98th percentile in a hundred exams in a row and getting a job at Samsung (that pays as well as an average white collar job in the US). Many people increasingly check out of that system.
Less, I expect. I knew programmers at Samsung in Korea back when programming was an ordinary white-collar job, and they made a lot less than American programmers did.
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