One interesting observation - despite Malayalees and Tamilians being "lingustic brothers in arms", they have an order of magnitude delta in the allele (0.296 vs. 0.036).  
 
Any guesses how this comes about?

The "prescriptiveness" test often works well when chatting w/ with Opinion folks without requiring a capital T Truth.

It's trivial to postulate a different theory of gravity and trivial to prove that the idea that things fall down is more prescriptive than other theories (generally... in non-relativistic environments here in one local area on earth).

Once you start with the kernel that certain things are objectively Better than other things (if not necessarily True).... you can ratchet up to more and more abstract truths....

What a rant! Love it!

Although as a huge fan of End of History, a few clarifications on that book

- Fukuyama is arguing that we've reached the end of a philosophical / dialectical historical debate about the type of governance that's best. (In a broad sense) At least as far as Fukuyama was concerned, there were no alternative paradigms with serious universal aspirations across populations (Islamicism, for ex., has universal aspirations but only within it's population; the height of communist ideology, by contrast truly did have a potential to take over our collective IQ's). He's not saying *reality* has shifted to liberal democracy; he's saying that our arguments have shifted so we now assume liberal democracy as the ends and instead debate the means and how to deal with fits & starts of the recalcitrants.

(now, I do think that Transnational Progressivism has emerged as a rebirth of many socialist ideals with obvious, intellectual universalist aspirations... Fukuyama was wrong and didn't forsee this development)

- the chinese example is actually consistent with End of History - Fukuyama's tenet is that political and economic evolution are intertwined but isn't hardcore about which should come first. Per End of History, a Chinese middle class that's accustomed to choosing jobs, where to live, what to buy, etc. will eventually, and in a very natural way, wish to extend these "rights" into the political sphere. Politics may come well after but is inevitable once some level of economic prosperity has been achieved.

The media heads in Stockholm will soon be chattering about the "embarassment" of the Euro vote and how "backward" the stalwart nation has become.

sigh.

I'd tend to concur that the dominant covariance is brown + tech resulting in brown + libertarian. My parents (and many of my parents friends) tend to be Democrats b/c they fear a latent racism in Republican politics.

In the younger crowd, "educated" and "activist" turn into "liberal" which also tends to flow Democrat rather than Libertarian. Tech is the one counter flow

Razib -- I can compare a few of my stories from my many trips to Scandinavia. It's an, uh, interesting place to visit if you're a young indian dude....

In any case, w.r.t. Arranged marriages, the 2 underlying axiomatic beliefs I've always used to describe it are:

1) do you believe marriages succeed because of exogenous or internal reasons? The Arranged Marriage (AM) proponets see mostly exogenous factors -- extended family support structures, income, eliminating lifestyle questions around religion, etc. Parents, of course, very clearly see the exogenous factors. Opponents tend to see marriage as more of a private affair between the couple.

2) expectations from marriage. In the Olde country, the Bohemian Bourgeois isn't quite a part of the scene, and self-actualization ("but what about *my* needs") isn't part of the deal. Expectations are much more classically bourgeois and are about building long term stable platforms for raising kids.... The various Andrew Sullivan quoters re-inforce this one.... And, if actualization isn't part of the deal, it makes factor #1 even more important.

Personally, I'm a split-the-middle on this one... Brownness is bonus points (the value of which varies from day to day) but not a veto. And I can pretty much gaurantee that a gal from the parent's village ain't gonna work out for a Ludicris-loving, fine-dining guy like me.

On the flip side, I think a lot of non-brown folk don't fully recognize the degree to which they implicitly integrate exogenous factors into mate selection (for ex., meeting mates in Grad school implicitly selects education and some cultural traits; a few of my friends back in TX meet mates from church).

For a lot of brown folks in the US, a bit of the AM can be justified on grounds of exercising those factors explicitly because they're a minority rather than relying on chance....

Out here in Silicon Valley, "Indian mafia" has an entirely different connotation. Vinod Khosla @ Kleiner is our Don Corleone and you can't start any sort of venture without paying a tax to the family (e.g. hiring in quite a few of the brown folk). ;-)

It's pretty interesting to watch the reverse-minority game when youngish, white VC associates angle for invites to Indian entrepreneur events.

Where I grew up, Houston, TX, the 2 dominant (post-Oil collapse) industries are (electrical / software / aerospace) engineering & medicine. You can imagine the rest....