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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I've been thinking about Indians today.

I guess someone has to.

What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.

Filtering. Filtering. Almost there.. No, you've still got coffee grounds left over. Keep at it champ.

The average Indian who arrives in the US is not representative of a random sampling of the native population. I'd know, I am one (Indian that is, I haven't been in the States since the NY skyline was a tad bit different).

The number of would be immigrants is far larger than the number that get through. You're filtering for IQ, conscientiousness and a million other things, leaving aside differences in drive that can motivate someone to cross a couple oceans and establish themselves far from home. That's before even getting into sociocultural aspects.

Leadership is certainly a part of it, at least if you're imagining just taking the same group of people and transplanting them under new management. Indian managers, in India, suck ass. They're mostly stick and little carrot, when they're not sodomizing you with it. Our societal norms and governmental system, while not outright dysfunctional, are still glaringly suboptimal in many regards. Being an entrepreneur is god knows how many times easier in the States, and so is relying on talent and work ethic to pay dividends.

The worst part of India, as most Indians who've escaped would tell you, is all the other Indians. The systemic failings are so coup-complete that the best recourse for a talented Indian is to take his talent elsewhere.

This strict system of skimming off the top is how a country that has, the last time I checked reliable figures, an average IQ in the upper 70s or low 80s, manages to contribute the single most successful ethnic group in terms of average income in the US.

There are plenty of other HBD-related factors, IQ here is not distributed as it would be in a homogenous population. I have good reason to believe that the upper caste/Brahmins are smarter on average, and I'm not one myself, just a cut above what would count as so underprivileged that I'd get AA in India. Millennia of strict endogamy and self-selecting for intellectual pursuits does funny things, just look at the Jews (though they were forced into their role more than willing adopters). And these upper caste people are disproportionately likely to be immigrants to the US. Sadly the matter isn't remotely as well researched as HBD in the US, not that I'm not convinced by available evidence.

Presumably this also answers @sickamore 's question, so I'm not going to duplicate it.

The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.

We have many examples of countries where you have a large population at one level and a minority that performs much better. And whether it’s in compounds or in open cities, they typically live in much more advanced, first-world level communities than the rest of the population.

I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this. Rich Brazilians too, don’t accept living in squalor, nor do the wealthier South Africans. Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia likewise build clean, functioning, safe and high quality neighborhoods. Even the British themselves did this in India, and the neighborhoods they built are still some of the most desirable in the country, with gardens and parks and tree lined streets.

But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.

I struggle to understand why all these smart people are content with this, and I think it’s because emigration is an option. If you’re a smart Indian and want to live in a clean and developed country, it’s much easier to move to one (as you are doing) than to carve out a space like that in India. But that’s also pretty sad for India. This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization. It should look like it.

Latin America, South African elites, Russia, east Asia, etc. are all partially hajnalized in a way India isn’t. Carving out a nice, clean community where the unwashed masses come in to clean houses and then leave once their job is done is much, much easier when you can say no to your extended family at least sometimes. I don’t think Kinshasa and pre-war Gaza had these nice gated communities either.

The extended family of most UMC Indians are also UMC Indians, or at least middle class and respectable.

India certainly has perfectly acceptable gated communities, it's not Africa where your cousins and their goats have to be hosted in your spare bedroom.

hajnalized

What does this mean?

It's a reference to the Hajnal line. HBDChick and Jayman talk about it more than most in the hbdosphere. From the summary:

so, to sum up — INSIDE (or to the west of) the hajnal line we find:

– late marriage and 10-20% of adults never marrying

– small families, either nuclear or stem

– higher average iqs than outside the line

– the highest concentrations of human accomplishment in europe

– more democracy

– greater civic-mindedness or orientation towards the commonweal

– generally low perceived corruption

– high individualism

– and low homicide rates in the 19th century

Those would be the characteristics @hydroacetylene probably meant by haljanized.

I prompted ChatGPT 3.5 with:

Here is a reddit comment I came across:

"Latin America, South African elites, Russia, east Asia, etc. are all partially hajnalized in a way India isn’t. Carving out a nice, clean community where the unwashed masses come in to clean houses and then leave once their job is done is much, much easier when you can say no to your extended family at least sometimes. I don’t think Kinshasa and pre-war Gaza had these nice gated communities either."

What does "hajnalized" mean in this context?

And ChatGPT responded with:

In the context of the Reddit comment you provided, the term "hajnalized" appears to be used in a way that refers to the concept of the "Hajnal line." The Hajnal line is a hypothetical boundary that has been proposed by scholars to describe a historical and cultural divide in Europe. It is named after the historian John Hajnal, who first identified this pattern.

The Hajnal line is often associated with certain social and demographic characteristics, including:

  • A higher prevalence of nuclear families: The idea is that areas to the west of the Hajnal line historically had a higher tendency toward nuclear families, where married couples and their children lived separately from their extended families.

  • A later age at marriage: People in areas west of the Hajnal line tended to marry later in life compared to those in areas to the east.

  • A higher age at first birth: Women in areas west of the Hajnal line typically had their first child at a later age than those in eastern areas.

  • Lower rates of cousin marriage: Marrying cousins was less common in regions west of the Hajnal line.

The comment you provided seems to be using the term "hajnalized" to describe regions or populations that have adopted or exhibit some of these social characteristics associated with the Hajnal line. It suggests that Latin America, South African elites, Russia, East Asia, and other places mentioned in the comment have certain social structures that resemble those to the west of the Hajnal line in Europe, in contrast to India, Kinshasa, and pre-war Gaza, which are implied to have different social structures and dynamics. The term is being used to draw a cultural and social comparison between different regions.

Or in other words: IQ isn't enough. You also need WEIRD psychology to replicate American + Western European prosperity.

Sometimes I feel the need to toss most Motte comments into ChatGPT, for all the niche jargon used that everyone seems to follow except me. I am still coming to terms with assabiyah.

I honestly want to see a bunch of these.

I hate to say this.. but culture. Desi culture is just uniquely fond of rent-seeking and bureaucracy to an extent that even their brightest can't muster enough collective escape velocity. The intellectual foundation of the Desi elite isn't all that different from the Desi peasant, the Desi elite is just smarter and more leftist.

India is poorer than Guatamala, Brazil, South Africa, Malaysia, or Indonesia. Rich Indians in India of course DO live a lot better than poor Indians.

Mumbai has a 50% higher GDP capita than Guatemala City, though ($14k vs $22k). All large developing countries have extreme inequality between rurals and urbanites. The surprising thing isn’t that rural Indians are dirt poor (the same thing is true of rural Chinese and yet tier 1 cities in China are often quite clean and pleasant), it’s that Indians in the much higher HDI major cities don’t live better.

doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.

One possible reason would be leaving to a foreign nation lets the high IQ minority escape or greatly reduce the any clan ties that would sap their capital before it can accumulate enough to generate meaningful returns. If a bright ambitious person starts a business near their extended family and makes an extra $1,000 one month but then familial claims want $950 or worse $1050 of that $1,000, they're not going to accumulate any real capital. If they emigrate and plough that most or all of that $1,000 into their business and repeat for a decade they'll accumulate a vast surplus.

I don't really see clan/familial ties playing that big of a role here.

As I must stress, India is not Africa. You aren't expected to share all your wealth with your extended family even if it's considered laudable to at least contribute to those who are struggling.

My immediate family is significantly wealthier than at least my dad's side, and while he has made sizeable contributions (dowries, which if nominally illegal are often extracted through gifts or wedding fees, college tuition, bankrolling their businesses), at no point has he been expected to meaningfully devalue our quality of life or jeopardize his own business.*

The typical Indian with cash to spare hands out maybe 5-10% to their relations, not "$950 or worse $1050 of that $1,000". That would be considered laughable, at most people, or at least your family, would disapprove if the rich uncle didn't consider helping his impoverished nephew and niece through school, and maybe college (the fees are nowhere near as bad as in the US).

Is this a minor drag on accumulation of capital? Sure. Is it so bad that it motivates our best and brightest to flee so that they aren't milked dry? Hell no.

*And I don't resent it. It's his money, and if it wasn't for the assistance of his horde of siblings and cousins, who often faced financial privation so that they could scrounge up enough money to put a promising student through med school (a full-ride scholarship is still expensive when you have about zero money since your farm was stolen and your village genocided), to the extent some of them compromised their own higher education, then he would never have become a doctor. It's the least he could do that, when their bet on him paid off, he goes to the trouble of making sure their kids can enter whatever college or field they like.

Overall, Indians have an attitude towards entrepreneurship and redistribution of wealth that would be unremarkable in comparison to China, if not the West.

Valuable context, thanks. The attitude you describe wouldn’t be unknown in the west even if it isn’t exactly mainstream, at least once you adjust a few cultural details(eg there’s no dowries here).

You're welcome! Some people here are prone to make less than well informed proclamations about the proclivities of a nation of 1.3 billion people, including some particular ones that are hilarious to someone who knows better.

One of the reasons that Indians assimilate so easily in the West is because the fundamentals of our culture or general mindset isn't that different. It causes me severe pain when someone thinks the relevant comparison is something like Africa. Our dysfunctions are significantly different.

Of course, I don't ascribe malice, just ignorance, and that's a far more forgivable sin. I'm sure I've made sweeping claims that people better informed would disagree with.

What do you see as the main causes of India’s dysfunctions?

HBD, corruption, subversion of meritocracy and egalitarianism through affirmative action, religion, factionalism that encourages populist pandering.

Basically, the electorate is too dumb and uneducated to hold the government accountable, and while that's vaguely true everywhere, it's more true here.

This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization.

This is a bit of a stretch to say, isn't it? Also, other cradles of human civilization don't look better either.

Until the British bring democracy, railways and cricket to India, China is consistently more civilized. The only period where historical GDP per head estimates are higher for India is when China is recovering from being ravaged by Genghis Khan. The only areas where India has world-leading achievements are pure mathematics and classical music.

There are three civilizations - Persia, Rome and China. (Western Civilization is Rome under new management, which is why its hegemonic state is governed by a Senate which sits on Capitol Hill in a building decorated in the Corinthian order). From macro-demographic trends, we can tell that India is dramatically better off when governed by Persians (the Mughals), Romans (the Raj), or Romanized Indians (post-independence democratic India).

I don't think the cradle of Chinese civilization looks bad, although I agree that the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas now look better.

Persians (the Mughals),

Eh, the Mughals were descendents of the Mongols with a bit of Turkic influence added in (Babur, the first Mughal emperor was descended from both Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane, the latter of which was descended from both the Mongols and the Turks), I would say they are closer to China than Persia.

They used persian as their court language but that's not the same as being genetically persian.

I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this.

Thanks for this link. This is very informative in terms of city planning, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and application of advanced security master planning. I'm sure things are sugar coated and that there is a need for paying security and police to maintain that environment as an open city within a country like Guatemala, but it's an inspiring example of what can be done with public space. The security consultants would have had a heart attack.

Yeah, they don’t go into huge detail in the video but I suspect that a combination of narrow, winding streets, heavy pedestrianization and only a few access roads because it’s on top of a hill mean that it’s hard for criminals to get in and out easily.

I don't know much about criminology, so I have little idea how narrow, winding streets aid urban crime prevention.

They help prevent the kind of smash-and-grab organized crime raids commonplace in wealthier parts of very unequal Latin American countries.

Ok. Point taken. I'd think that ambushing unsuspecting people is easier on a narrow, winding street than on a wide, non-winding one, but thankfully that's not something I have experience with.

There are often other subtle considerations such as deliberate lack of public transport to the area that can make things like remote suburbs attractive to certain residents.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things is in an arms race with elites for the battle over public spaces.

The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.

There are plenty of gated communities and upscale neighborhoods. They might not be as pretty as their European counterparts, but they're safe, clean and quiet. And some cities are certainly far nicer to live in, Varanasi is notorious even to Indians as being a hive of scum and villainy.

But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.

We've been used to that kind of bullshit, pun intended, well before the floodgates on emigration opened up. It might act as a relief valve for the perfect combination of talented and discontent, but there are millions of us who could make it in the West yet are mostly content to remain, even if they grumble about conditions. I know plenty of doctors more talented than me who decide to remain. It's the default decision.

Humans can adjust to a great deal indeed. It's not that they don't care at all about cleanliness, it's that they don't care enough for that to be their raison d'être. Hell, that's true enough for me, I certainly appreciate Western cities, but them being cleaner is not in my top 5 reasons for emigrating. The other concerns are far more prosaic.

The coordination problem is insurmountable, it's a country of 1.3 billion people, I assure you that some have tried.

When it comes to projects like cleaning up the Ganges, the government doesn't bother because the electorate doesn't care. Not enough to swing an election, which is all that matters. The Ganga is sacred and pure even when the coliform count makes the rectum of the last patient I saw with faecal impaction seem like a sterile field.

There are plenty of gated communities and upscale neighborhoods.

What are the best examples?

Uh.. I don't want to doxx my precise geographical neighborhood by naming only the ones I've been in.

I'm sure a quick Google search for "high end gated communities" in a bunch of random cities would suffice. I am at least certain of the fact that they exist, even if I can't point out which ones are the "best".

Also that living in a rich community in a poor country gives you access to cheap servants without needing to learn Spanish or Tagalog and commit a felony.

"Ugly rich" Brits are happy to admit that this is the best aspect of living an expat lifestyle, and I assume it works even better if you are a upper-caste local.

Sure, but that doesn’t stop the Brazilian or South African elite from building gated communities that are difficult to get to- servants just have to take motorbikes in or whatever.

Agreed - I was answering the question about "Why do Indian elites stay in a literal shithole rather than moving to a country which has discovered the lost art of street-sweeping?"

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