Razib, do you know if the Uighurs ever participated in the imperial exam system?

When Shanghai was first settled, the mercantile and skilled laborer classes were primarily from the southeastern coast, especially Guangdong and Zhejiang. The slums were populated by poor laborers from north of the Yangtze. In the city's status hierachy, it can be said that northerners were at the bottom. However, even with the stark economic disparities, I believe there was a general sense of cultural unity and common identity among Chinese from all provinces. Based on historical precedent, it seems unlikely that southerners will leverage their enormous economic clout to do so.  
 
Besides, a market dominant minority has no incentive to split from the host country.

I think he was inferring that southeastern China's remarkable historical success at the imperial examinations and commerce implied higher levels of g. In my view, it's very unlikely that the southeasterners would seriously conceive seceding from the current Chinese polity. To begin with, their mercantile and financial networks seem to stretch across the country, making secession economically unpalatable. It's also important to consider that having access to large amounts of low cost labor in the north and interior gives their manufacturing and import/export enterprises a competitive advantage on the international arena. There may be some level of friction between the bueracrats in the urban north and the southeast, but I'm skeptical that it could rise to a level where southeasterners become militant. Really if anything, there seems to be a pretty cozy relationship between the rent seeking bueracrats and entrapranuers, so why rebel?  
 
If China experiences political instability, I imagine it could come from the impoverished rural interior and the urban slums. With urbanites having a per capita income nearly 6 times higher than their rural countrymen, China's wealth structure is starting to look Brazilian. Economic reforms have done wonders for urban elite, especially those with connections to the Communist party, and the mercantile southeasterners, but a large proportion of Chinese workers and peasants have seen their incomes stagnate or even fall. With the population steadily aging due to the 1 child policy, the social safety net may be further weakened. In addition, the sex ratio imbalance could lead to tremendous amount of frustration among young men unable to find brides, especially if wealthy urban males attempt to buy up the scarce bride pool in the poorer regions.

When Flynn analyzed the IQ data for 2nd generation Japanese-American and Chinese-American kids brought up in the 1960s, he found no IQ advantage. However, he did find that they academically were doing quite a bit better than the caucasian population. Most likely this can be attributed to their spending significant more time per night studying and doing homework. 
 
IQ matters, but work ethic can prove decisive too.

it seems though there are a particular overrepresentation during this period from fujian and guandong. 
 
Indeed. There was a practice of limiting the number of exam takers and degree winners per province. Even with that limitation, southeastern Chinese (Fujianese and Cantonese) continued to noticeably outperform the rest of the country. The government finally resorted to a fixed quota per province to create a more proportional balance, but that lead to a decline in the quality of China's intellectual elite. I believe this system was relaxed later on, with southerners strongly reasserting their dominance until the end of the Qing dynasty. This is especially surprising when you consider that the gentry was highly concentrated in the urban north, especially around Beijing.

Many of the early advanced civilizations were established in warm weather regions like the Indus Valley, Egypt, the fertile crescent, Persia, the and the Meditteranean sea region.

The coast of southern China has long been a center of business and trade. It wouldn't surprise me if the complexities of an advanced economy selected for high cognitive ability or at least created an appreciation for the benefits of learning. There are northern cities, such as the political center Beijing, that been home to much of the gentry and have a history of strong intellectual accomplishment also.  
 
Mongolia and Kazakhstan are populated by North Asians, but tend to be quite economically stagnant. In China, the southerners share genetic affinity with other SE Asia populations, but seem to economically dominate both the mainland and SE Asia. The heterogenity of Asian populations is significant enough that I wouldn't want to generalize about IQ or attribute divergence to climate.

During the Qing dynasty, almost 90% of the top exam takers came from the southern region of China.

"They found that the Harlem Children?s Zone schools produced ?enormous? gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile. 
 
Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas ? reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start ? produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That?s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students" 
 
 
"Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school." 
 
Exactly. You discipline kids, push them hard, and force them to work hard and you get results. In America, we call that groundbreaking research. In East Asia and India, they call that common sense.  
 
One downside to all this is that most American kids of any race, except Asians and Indians, don't study all that much or get pushed all that hard. So applying this model to every school would produce great improvements for everyone and maybe even take us into the East Asian academic stratosphere, but the black-white gap would probably remain. However, at least we'd be maximizing utilization of our cognitive capital.

Ok. I suppose you might benefit from going to MIT or Cal Tech, but you do not benefit from dropping out of school and working early. At a minimum, the credentials you obtain through 4 years of college outweigh any cost of schooling.  
 
As I said earlier, I feel that everyone would benefit from 2-4 years of technical and business/finance education. Our current system is not utilizing human capital well enough. There are too many people that would rather get a blue collar job or go on welfare rather than study. For a country that wants to maintain an advanced, highly technological economy, it's appalling how many kids don't want to study. Looking at the academic rigor in South Korea or India, it's a pretty safe bet that we're falling behind and need to do something.  
 
More spending? No. More discipline in the schools, rote memorization, fact drilling, longer and more school days, and emphasis on math/science? Yes. It works in East Asia, it works in India, and it'll work here.

School is very useful. Even if your IQ is 150, you can stand to learn a lot from your professors and equally bright peers. There are quite a few concepts that need to be elaborated on, outside of book instruction, to be truly grasped. If you've got an IQ that high and aren't going to school, there's something seriously wrong with you. 
 
I didn't say giving low IQ people office jobs was the optimal outcome for society. However, if I was giving advice to a low IQ kid that wanted a good life, I'd tell him to go the college route and get a cushy, high-paying office job. Even with a low IQ, the presence of a college degree can get you into mid level management somewhere. Sure you'll probably be a relatively bad manager and might have to change jobs a few times, but you're better off making 50K/yr than 20K/yr. No way is anyone better off without a college degree.  
 
I would be willing to bet that plenty of those AA kids didn't study. Low IQ can be compensated for through sheer work ethic, but low IQ and no work ethic is a lethal combination. There has to be a mechanism in place to weed out kids that don't want to learn. Maybe keeping attendance and assigning regular HW would do that.....

A kid with a 90 IQ that makes it through 2-year or 4-year college shows an employer that he has discipline, persistence, and work ethic. He also would pick up some amount of valuable knowledge while at school that'd enhance his overall productivity.  
 
These days an employer is reluctant to hire a non-degree worker for a lucrative job and is even more reluctant to promote. If you want to get a job where you can learn skills and form the connections neccessary to climb up, having the degree credential is pretty important. From my experience, employers are reluctant to take on even experience people if they don't see the degree. If I were a 90 IQ kid with a strong work ethic, I'd do my best to get some type of degree at a relatively non-elite university rather than head out into the labor force early. I think back a few decades ago, climbing into the middle or upper class was easy for the less educated. Today that's not the case. Anybody that wants a successful career should not pass up college. 
 
If you don't have a degree and you have a low IQ, there's a decent chance you'll end up stuck in the manual laborer class and make around minimum wage for the rest of your life. Given that a lot of employers are willing to hire and retain dumb people as long as they see that degree, getting through college could be a life saver for an otherwise dull kid.  
 
If the East Asian educational system represents the point of saturation, we have a long way to go before the bubble bursts.

I would support sending more kids to college if we could persuade them to major in technical and business-related fields. We do need more engineers, programmers, entrpranuers, and accountants. There's still quite a few smart kids out there that don't go the 4-year college route and we'd benefit if they did.  
 
Less bright kids may not be able to complete an EE or finance degree at State U, but a 2-year degree is realistic for the overwhelming bulk of the population. Given the immense need for workers with technical and financial knowledge, getting kids to do more schooling is not a bad idea at all. I think as a society we'd be better off if the low IQ were pushed harder to learn the basics they need to operate in an advanced first world economy. I'm thinking understanding how to use Excel, the meaning of NPV, how to read a balance sheet, and some elementary level programming is within the grasp of the bulk of the populace. However, I think an emphasis on Asian-style rote memorization might be more useful for the low-IQ crowd than the current system.  
 
I'm actually very happy to see more kids taking AP and would like to see the program broadened. In East Asia and India, the trend of competitive middle-class parents pushing academic rigor on their children has paid pretty good economic dividends. If more American kids are educationally ambitious, that's a good thing. A more educated worker is generally a more productive worker.

The Indian laborers in the UK were disproportionately Sikhs from the rural Punjab. Many came from the Sikh carpenter caste.

Gregory Clark: 
 
"When I set out in my PhD thesis to try and explain differences in income internationally in 1910 I found that asking simple questions like "Why could Indian textile mills not make much profit even though they were in a free trade association with England which had wages five times as high?" led to completely unexpected conclusions. You could show that the standard institutional explanation made no sense when you assembled detailed evidence from trade journals, factory reports, and the accounts of observers. Instead it was the puzzling behavior of the workers inside the factories that was the key." 
 
You know, I think that historical and cultural variables play a larger role than Gregory Clark believes. Remember, the Indian mill workers were not as productive as the English mill workers when they lived in India. When the Indian mill workers immigrated to the UK in the 1950s though, they were able to raise their productivity to the same level as the white Englishmen and attain a similar level of economic success. Their descendants have gone on to achieve slightly more economic success, and significantly more academic success, than the native English population. 
 
What changed for the Indian mill workers? I think asking this question would give us a chance to identify critical non-genetic factors that can promote or retard the utilization of human capital.

Engineers don't come across as particularly socially dysfunctional from my experience. Maybe a little bit boring, but otherwise normal enough people.  
 
Plenty of American CEOs are quite smart. I believe former GE CEO Jack Welch has a phd in chemical engineering. Jerry Yang of Yahoo is a computer science guy. Vikram Pandit has a master's degree in electrical engineering. Being a nerd may not be a prerequisite to becoming a CEO, but nerds make good leaders because they know what they're doing. I think politicians that smooth talk their way into lucrative jobs are less effective.

Yesterday's nerd is today's physician/lawyer/CEO/entrapranuer/investment banker. If you've been born a nerd, you've been given a lucky break.  
 
Remember, our political and economic system are run by nerds. Do you think anybody really cares if Vikram Pandit (CEO of Citigroup) is cool or not?  
 
nisbett in *geography of thought* reports east asian societies exhibit more of an emphasis on the idea that academic outcomes are purely a function of effort, and not innate endowments, than most western cultures. 
 
I've read this too. In East Asian and Indian academic systems, much more material tends to be covered. So being able to study hard and absorb more information gives one a relative advantage and can compensate for lower IQ. I wonder if, even after controlling for IQ, Indians and Asians are higher on studiousness than other populations.....

Peer groups seem to be the critical factor. To the extent that parents can influence their children to join an appropriate peer group, they can influence their behavior.

Well then I guess the "hooking up" epidemic is probably something that hit its peak at least a couple of decades ago, but has since subsided. Based on the data, the mothers of present day teenagers/early 20 somethings probably did more hooking up than their kids. So perhaps that explains why so many parents are ready to believe the media hysteria.  
 
On a related note, most of the studies I've seen put the median lifetime # of sexual partners in the 2-4 range (more like ~2) and the mode at 1. So apparently even in the post-1960s sexual revolution era, monogamy is still alive and well (though traditional Western Christian norms on marriage and family have lost much of their influence).

Agnostic. A little off topic here, but do you think the evidence indicates that the mean number of sexual partners (per American) has been on a down swing over the past decade and a half? It seems like a lot of the evidence you've brought in previous posts (decling STDs, less teen pregnancy, etc.) would point in that direction for the present day youth cohort.