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Notes -
A couple of points-
East Asians have an IQ advantage. We should bear this in mind before praising certain trends or practices in Asia- Japan has half a standard deviation on the US in IQ, of course they produce more geniuses per capita. Asian Americans who have something closer to normie blue tribe approaches to education and work-life balance do better than they did in the old country.
As far as anyone can tell, Asian societies are still much poorer than America, even with the IQ advantage and working 80 hour weeks. Yes, their societies are nice places to live which have solved many problems América finds intractable. But they live in tiny dwellings and can’t afford cars. Their model clearly doesn’t work that well when developed east Asia is poorer than Western Europe, never mind the Anglosphere.
India is a third world country and working insane hours is normal for very poor countries, because low productivity means you need a lot of hours to make ends meet. We shouldn’t try to copy their work ethic because we don’t have to do this.
Working or studying ridiculous hours comes at a cost. People need to socialize, they need to sleep, they need to engage in healthy recreation. Korean or Japanese or Chinese society has a level of hyper competitiveness which absolutely grinds out these human needs because it mandates spending insane amounts in zero sum competition where everyone just kinda winds up where they would have anyways. It’s pure wasted value.
Agree with all of these.
I've always had a difficult time squaring points #1 and #2 together though. Why do societies that produce so many more geniuses per capita have such difficult times pushing the innovation frontier relative to the West? Is it just their conservative/conformist culture that squelches much of their talent? Are the measured IQ differences illusory from the tests, as Asians are more likely to study harder?
Asian societies are as innovative or moreso than much wealthier white majority societies. They simply don’t have as much wealth to show for it. By all appearances the IQ advantage is 1) real and 2) economically squandered so hard they wind up poorer than dumber, younger, more fertile, less innovative countries in the west.
That doesn’t mean Japan doesn’t do anything right. But they are legitimately poorer than even southern Europe, let alone the USA.
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As far as your second point, I think just going off the salaries to determine who is better off is probably not all that good. Having your entire society be a nice, high trust place to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and you have good, safe, and efficient public transportation would seem to make up for a smaller apartment and no car. Having more money but tripping over homeless people and seeing trash everywhere doesn’t seem a good trade to me.
And yet by revealed preference, people want to live in San Francisco. Anyway, entire societies that are nice, high trust places to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and have good, safe, efficient public transportation but are poor... well, they're the stuff of fantasy, I suspect.
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