Recently I was listening to a radio interview with an Asian American professor. At one point she had to expound about the “model minority myth,” which refers to the fact that the public has a misimpression about the state of Asian Americans (after prompting from the white host).
The idea is that while the public believes that Asian Americans are successful, often well-off, and disproportionately professionals, this is actually misleading and perpetuates the myth that they are a model minority.
The problem is that it is not a myth. The public’s eyes are not lying. The term “model minority” is loaded, and comes out of a specific time, the 1960s, and was used in contrast with black Americans. But, descriptively it points to the fact that Asian Americans on average are more educated, more well-off, and live longer, than the average American, including the average white American.
I’ve heard the well-actually-the-model-minority-is-a-myth responses in various forms since the 1990s. It has been perfected by Asian American activists, who use as a template the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and so must flatten and negate the unique characteristics of Asian Americans which make the template ill-fitting for their purposes.
First, “remember the Hmong. Not all Asian Americans are Indian, Chinese, or Japanese….” Aside from the fact that the Hmong have made massive strides in the last 30 years, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of Asian Americans are Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. The “traditional” Asian American groups. This is not to negate Bhutanese refugees, but they are a very small community, and their experience is not typical. Sometimes the average does tell you a lot.
Second, there is the idea that Asian American success is predicated on selective migration. Yes, but so what? That doesn’t negate the descriptive reality that Indian American doctors are quite well-off, and their children do quite well. And importantly, the idea of Asian Americans as a “model minority” came to the fore in the 1960s, when most Asian Americans were native-born Chinese and Japanese. And, these groups were not selected for professionals and those with social and financial capital. The Japanese who arrived tended to be the poorer families from the southern part of Japan, often the landless, while the Chinese were Taishenese and Cantonese laborers.
The ultimate aim is to emphasize the determinative impact of white racism and supremacy in American life. The existence of Asian American success, including dark-skinned South Indian doctors who did not arrive in the United States until they were 30, is threatening to that model.
A few minutes of Google and surveying public data could illustrate the fact that the empirical examples refuting the myth are implausible. There are not many Hmong or Bangladeshis (poorer Asian communities). Those communities are actually advancing too. The model minority idea emerged at a time when very few Asian Americans were products of the post-1965 selective immigration system. The vast majority of Asian Americans are actually “successful” groups.
Of course, it is a fact that there are plenty of ways you can suggest that Asian Americans do suffer the impacts of bias and racism. But the details matter. For example, in PNAS this winter: Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States.
But that’s not the discussion we’re having. Academics and “thought leaders” are lying to the public. Some of the academics and most of the “thought leaders” probably actually believe that the model minority is a myth because they can’t be bothered to take a few minutes and avail themselves of free Census data. But, many Asian American scholars surely understand that the myth is a lie they are promoting for ideological reasons on some level (I have no doubt they have sophisticated rationales for why the myth isn’t a myth, but the data and your eyes tell you the truth).
Where does this leave us? I’m not super interested in the obfuscation of Asian American scholars, and the perpetuation of a lie by our intellectual overclass. Rather, I wonder, how many lies are presented to us as the truth by our intellectual overclass? I suspect more than we like to believe. If you have domain expertise in an area there might be lies and falsehoods and obfuscations that your field promotes to the public because they’re convenient lies. And you think to yourself, “well, my field is special, my colleagues are particularly craven and we study a very sensitive topic.”
But perhaps you’re not special. Perhaps being craven is typical, and sensitivity is the order of the day.
Pyrrho is not looking so bad.
Hi Razib,
If you have not already read it, please check out this article by Rav Arora from the New York Post.
“The fallacy of white privelege-and how it’s corroding society”
https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/the-fallacy-of-white-privilege-and-how-its-corroding-society/
Very insightful with some great points and relates well with this post.
Second, there is the idea that Asian American success is predicated on selective migration. Yes, but so what? That doesn’t negate the descriptive reality that Indian American doctors are quite well-off, and their children do quite well. And importantly, the idea of Asian Americans as a “model minority” came to the fore in the 1960s, when most Asian Americans were native-born Chinese and Japanese. And, these groups were not selected for professionals and those with social and financial capital. The Japanese who arrived tended to be the poorer families from the southern part of Japan, often the landless, while the Chinese were Taishenese and Cantonese laborers.
I do not disagree with you on the main thrust of the argument in this post, but I do think that the second half of the above statement can be misleading. First of all, the idea of a “model minority” was not simply economic in nature, it had to do with the perceived (accurately) docility of the Japanese and Chinese peasants and laborers as well. Whether they were successful or not economically, they didn’t commit crimes and engage in other anti-social behaviors as the black minority did.
Second, the median incomes of various Asian groups in the U.S. appear to track very well with the English proficiency and educational selectivity of those immigrants that are sometimes very different from the norms of their origin countries, as I am sure you are very well-aware (so a groups from a prosperous country such as Koreans has a relatively high rates of poverty and a low median income, contrary to popular perception while another from a less developed country such as the Filipinos has a high median income).
Indian immigrant doctors ARE doing much better than the descendants of Japanese and Chinese peasant immigrants of yore.
By the way, you can see the data here for the educational attainments of the various Asian groups in America by birth (foreign-born vs. U.S.-born): https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/asian-americans/
so a groups from a prosperous country such as Koreans has a relatively high rates of poverty and a low median income
the koreans are temporary. 1.5 & 2nd gen have no issues with English. (similar pattern i think among Vietnamese, though not as extreme)
This makes a lot of sense to me, but I think the factors for Asian success go beyond “work ethic.” In a sense, a lot of Hispanic Americans ancestors arrived much in the same was as early West Coast Asians, and Souther Europeans, to provide manual labour or smaller services to those who did.
The difference was that restrictive immigration prevented a critical mass of Asians being able to form their own self-sustaining political world (as with Hispanics, while racism prevented their assimilation (as with Italian Americans).
The result was that they were forced into a kind of Perioikoi niche, which meant that the only way to survive was through entering certain professions and moving up through education. This required a kind of focused work-ethic that allowed them to rise up in th 1960s.
The reality is that much of America’s economic life isn’t too different from the Louisiana River pilot cartels. Certain jobs require membership in certain communities, so downward mobility is not much of an option. I do not think that many Asian Americans would even have the chance of being hired for certain manual jobs, and if they were, their coworkers wouldn’t make it easy for them. That forces them upwards, and has probably played a big part in their success.
#DefundAcademia
Aditya, Asian migrants to US really wanted their kids to be working class manual laborers, but due to color line in those jobs were forced to settle for urban professional jobs as only option other than not “surviving”?
Matt, every pre-1965 migrant group that came here to fill the manual laborer role had hopes for their kids. That said, in many of these communities, the second or third generation can still occupy that niche.
With Asians, there was no option beyond that first generation to take over that space. Simply put, 2nd generation Asians would not have been employed in many fields, and therefore there was no manual labour position for the slacker Asian.
There was a great documentary on the first Indian immigrants to the West Coast from 1890-1910. They were Sikhs who started out as farm labour. However, those roles were quickly closing as there was a concerted effort to replace them with Mexican or white workers. Because most of them married Mexican women, who were allowed to own land, their mixed race children merged into the Hispanic population, but it was clear that full-blooded Indians would have had no opportunities to stay on as agricultural labour.
It’s an open secret in the Korean-American community that the low median incomes of Koreans are a result of the fact that many 1st generation Koreans have tended to own small businesses, and cheat on their taxes (as most immigrant small businesses do). 2nd generation Korean-Americans have tended not to continue working in those businesses, but instead go into the professions, where they do outstandingly well for what is after all quite a small community.
Also, Japanese-Americans in the 1960s were pound-for-pound perhaps the single most successful ethnic community in American history. This was a population of a few hundred thousand or thereabouts but they had quite a few famous names in a wide variety of fields. The founder/Prime Minister or Singapore was even using their success at the time as a sign of Japanese prowess and coming Asian success.
There has been a huge amount of regression to the mean with Japanese-Americans, and they are probably the most assimilated “community of color” in the USA, but they still do reasonably well.
Bangladeshis in the USA are an interesting group. They are mostly concentrated in the NY metro, and draw overwhelmingly from uneducated and non-English-speaking immigrants. The 1st generation is basically a lost cause. They get jobs at the absolute lowest rungs of the service economy, and success means getting a job as a parked car ticketing cop or some other low level local government post. But what is interesting is that the 2nd generation, which is still quite small and young, is doing surprisingly well in terms of education. I read they comprise about 10% of the student body at elite public high schools in NYC, with Bangladeshis making up something like 2% of the city population.
Also, I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but here in NYC I get the sense that Bangladeshi religiosity peaked and is starting to decline. I used to see some head covering among the women, now I see less. Also there is a certain religious look among Muslim Bangladeshi men (dyed red hair and a specific beard and Muslim white clothing), but I see less of that too. I know the sound of Bangladeshi Bengali, and the only reason I can even guess they are Bangladeshi (vs Indian) is from the language.
@Aditya, was being a bit extra-sarcastic there I admit; I don’t think there’s absolutely nothing to what you propose. I do think there’s some degree to which native groups probably tend to find out what the lucrative blue-collar niches are and share the information / contacts / openings to family and friends, and that leads to a bit of relative difference in education investment. And there’s an extra pressure as well from being not wanting to be the only person who is introduced into a culturally different environment.
But it’s not like, y’know, there aren’t Asian American migrants groups who don’t achieve that high educational success relative to White natives. I’m pretty sure they aren’t all unemployed and don’t have really low incomes. I know at least in Britain where I’m from it’s like that for some South Asian groups who weren’t very selected; they’re not either unemployed or marginally employed or else in a professional job. Lots of them still work in the same general niches as parents, if the niche has not gone. It’s not like “There’s no Plan B, so better invest in education!”. And I’d be surprised if the US’s more open and migration friendly society wasn’t like that in practice.
It just seems like a factor, but likely less of an important factor than selection (for aspirations and parental skills+education), and community expectations. I’m no expert of course. Maybe it was more important in 1890-1910, like in your example (though I’m not very aware if that example did actually lead to a surge of highly educated Sikhs in the early 20th century?).
Hi Razib! Been reading this blog for some months now, thanks for spending your time on it.
I was wondering if “model minority” doesn’t make a stronger claim than the one you refute. You write:
> But, descriptively it points to the fact that Asian Americans on average are more educated, more well-off, and live longer, than the average American, including the average white American.
In other words, Asian-Americans are successful. But being “model” minorities suggests, to me at least, that they are examples that other minorities can follow. That they are role models, so to say. If we take it to include that quality, it is relevant whether or not there is a selection effect (because another minority can’t go back and selectively re-immigrate).
bangladeshis put a lot of eggs into stuy https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/05/233354/stuyvesant-asian-student-interview
I always wonder why do East Asians have great developed countries to return to (if they wanted) like South Korea and Japan but southeast and south asians don’t… why are only east asians sucessful both in their native countries and abroad?
The kids from Stuy and other competitive NYC public schools don’t do *that* well. I went to the Ivy League and never met anyone from those schools at university or work. I remember hearing somewhere that they tended to become things like pharmacists. And the girl in the article Razib linked to is right. Going to Stuy probably hurt her chances of getting into an Ivy. Very selective universities seem like they don’t like to take too many students from the same high school. So if your high school is too good academically, it makes it much harder to stand out. Better to be the valedictorian or top 5 student at an average school than number 60 or 100 at Stuy.
@alex: South Korea is overrated by a lot of people who have never been there. The majority of the building stock is shabby and borderline 3rd world, the salaries are half of American levels (if that), and people work like crazy. Koreans in the USA have been very entrepreneurial, but S Korea is super corporate oriented, and your career/income path up to retirement is to a depressing extent already determined by your university entrance at age 18. And it’s not like the country is even growing fast anymore. It’s been growing slower than the USA, Canada, Australia, and a big chunk of Europe for a little while now. So the catchup phase is over.
Japan is better off than S Korea, but the salaries for professional-level work would shock educated Americans for being so low. Japan isn’t shabby but it’s architecturally pretty ugly. Concrete everywhere, even in the countryside and seaside. And the culture has just lost all of its energy. Even compared to 15 years ago, forget about the high growth postwar period.
Infrastructure in both Japan and S Korea is excellent though. And there is very little social disfunction by American standards.
@Bulbul
Can you elaborate on the “shabby building stock” exactly, what do you mean and how does it actually impact S. Koreans quality of life? Ditto for the university entrance bit as well.
White collar/professional salaries in general are higher in the US than what you would find for those same jobs/industries in other countries. But even in the US salaries vary from one major metropolitan region to another, and sometimes pretty strongly within the same region. High salaries are also often washed out anyway between high cost of housing, student loans, health insurance, etc. How does the cost of living in S. Korea (or countries like Japan, Taiwan) compare?
If you want to see what a poorly functioning society with a large segment of model minority Asians looks like, come visit me in Hawaii!
Granted, that’s more of a function of several decades worth of brain drain to the mainland, and an economy that’s focused on service sector jobs for the military and low end mass tourism.
That’s how you end up with guys like me with college degrees working as security guards or hotel front desks.
On the plus side, mainland Asians like living here because the expectations on them aren’t as stressful.
East Asian countries have high average IQs and immigrants reflect that, but Indian, Filipino, etc are function of selection.
India likely has very different IQs among subgroups, with a lot of the population being very mediocre but some being like Jews.
The bottom line is that Asians are just another data point on why IQ is the metric to rule them all on socioeconomic outcomes.
People point out that Asians don’t just make more money but “behave” better as well. Sure, but after controlling for IQ not convinced that is a *big* issue.
Main problem besides low earnings is that mediocre IQ individuals (say 9X, usually from Central/South America) who come to America seem to degrade on social behavior after first generation. There is a certain “peasant morality” to first generation Hispanics that fades in second+ generation, even as earnings increase due to English proficiency. America, the entire west really, just turns these people from Helots to Dalits (to borrow a Moldbug term). This even happens to whites in similar IQ range (see Coming Apart). Possibly welfare state (Puerto Ricans have no peasant virtues in first generation, and are only ones already part of US welfare infrastructure due to historical happenstance), but likely multi-casual.
McNamarra’s Morons probably can’t be made human, but if we can’t make people with 9X IQs well behaved we are probably doomed.
@mick: most of the buildings currently standing in S Korea were built during their high growth phase, something like 1975-2005. S Korea was not a developed country at the time, those buildings weren’t built very well, and have not aged well. They have electricity, indoor plumbing, and now high speed internet connections, so I guess from an autistic point of view there is no change to quality of life vs nice buildings.
Cost of living in Seoul is quite high these days. I’m not sure how it compares to for example metro NY. I would imagine that Manhattan is more expensive than any similar geography in Seoul, but that places like suburban NJ are actually cheaper on a square foot basis than the commie-block “suburbs” of Seoul. Keep in mind that almost half of S Korea’s population lives in greater Seoul.
Salaries are across the board much lower in S Korea than in the USA. Something like half, or perhaps a bit less. I think they recently raised their minimum wage though so the bottom end will no longer be half of America (unless the USA goes to $15-20/hour soon).
This was all fine and dandy when S Korea was growing at 7% a year or 5% a year, became the expectation was that that kind of growth would result in a wholesale reconstruction of the country with nice buildings, and that people would soon earn much higher salaries. But actually growth has stalled out at something like 2% a year more recently. S Korea is growing slower than the USA, not faster (I’m discounting the Covid19 period).
Japanese salaries used to actually be just about the highest on earth, at current exchange rates, as recently as 1995 or so. Your average Japanese would make 50% more than your average American, at a straight currency conversion. Sure Japan was overpriced, but PPP adjustments are a poor man’s argument. When they went overseas, Japanese were flush. Like 40% of luxury goods sold on 5th Ave NY used to go to Japanese tourists.
Then a never ending decline set in. It was gradual, slow. But now Japanese will make 30-40% less than Americans, instead of 50% more. Tokyo is much more affordable, dare I say cheap to a visitor from NY for example. I think at PPP, Japanese are roughly at the same level relative to Americans than they were in 1995. But if they leave the country, or want to buy foreign goods in Japan, they are a lot poorer than before.
@Alex, I think it’s fair question; probably ultimately a question of recent development economic history though.
For the East Asians, you’ve got Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Japan forged its own path of economic modernisation, oriented around exports and with specific institutions focused on catching up, and then South Korea and Taiwan copied it quite a bit, or had reforms imposed by colonial Japan, while Singapore and Hong Kong have followed some unique development strategy capitalising on being ex-British bastions of law and order for international flows, in their respective regions (Insular SE Asia and China).
Then you’ve also got China that has somewhat copied the “typical” East Asian development model, but some uniqueness owing to both its huge size (can dominate markets through scale) and its Communist bureaucracy.
The South Asian sphere does not seem to have followed the same models (in the case of Singapore/Hong Kong, there just isn’t any British/ex-British city state that could!), and it seems they were a bit tardier to have been tardier at some improvements to health and so demographic fertility transition, and mass education, with delays movements to cities and development of industry and taking advantage of globalisation and exports and so on.
But, India is supposedly only 10 years behind China on GDP per capita* trajectory. So there are reasons to think this is a temporary issue of later shift towards convergence, not a permanent issue. Though that may not be a perfect measure of development (another proxy might be energy use, though China’s a wierd outlier on energy intensity – https://tinyurl.com/y9f8f6de – with very high amounts of energy consumed per unit of GDP).
*Well, at least the Maddison Project shows same trajectory from 1985 on, after a divergence in 1975-1985 that saw rising Chinese GDP per capita and declining Indian GDP per capita (so different starting points) – https://tinyurl.com/yb8ugkcf
Other GDP per capita estimates don’t include this 1975-1985 phase of decline, so tend to come to lower estimates of rate of subsequent Indian growth. So narrative of “Soaring Dragon, Earthbound Elephant”. But if you follow Maddison Project and look at relative change since 1985, India comes out as slightly China’s superior in growth in the period 1985-2016 – https://tinyurl.com/y9lqjtbt.
Re; living standards, comparing living standards between developed countries always seems difficult to me because qualitative and subjective issues start to loom large once you remove a lot of the “low hanging fruit” of poverty and large differences between generally poor and generally rich economies.
That said, the East Asian ‘tiger’ economies that caught up to (and exceeded) Western Europe do tend to look slightly less impressive when instead of a perspective of GDP/capita, looked at through a perspective of “PPP Consumption per hour worked” (how much value of goods and services are consumed per hour of labour), because hours relatively long and private and public consumption / wages often slightly low as composition of GDP (relative to corporate investment and so on). (PPP does seem relevant because inevitably most consumption will occur within country, even for people who *really* place a high preference on foreign travel, let alone those that never go overseas.)
There is no way in hell India is only 10 years behind China. China in 2010 already had world class infrastructure and was the factory of the world.
I remember watching something on like MSNBC is 1999 where some Indian professor/consultant dude was saying they (India) would skip the industrial revolution, go straight to the internet revolution, and become a first world country by 2020. There’s still a bit of that attitude in India. The education is focused on elite level institutions, which are arguably world class – hence the Indian “thought leaders’” focus on IT, Silicon Valley, whatever. But the general level of education is absolutely abysmal. I also think it doesn’t help that all decent education takes place in English, in which at best 5-10% of Indians are fluent. How can you learn if you don’t even understand the language of instruction?
It is also almost impossible for even medium-sized factories to ever fire anyone. By law (unless the law changed in the last few years since the last time I checked). So they don’t like to hire, and are very capital intensive for a country at India’s level of development. What manufacturing growth that is taking place is happening because of Indian tariffs and local content laws. So if you want to sell in India, it might make sense to build in India. Maybe that’s fine, but it won’t result in the sort of export-oriented growth that fueled East Asia. Infrastructure of any kind is also difficult to build because eminent domain gets tied up in courts forever. Every little farmer will sue you and also protest you if you try to build a highway through or a factory on their land.
I haven’t taken an interest very recently but I got the sense that GDP growth actually slowed down under Modi after the first few years.
@ Bulbul
Regarding the S. Korea salary thing again – how much do you think low salaries might have to do with the SK economy being dominated by a handful of major companies – Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, etc., creating a monopsony – finite number of positions at the big companies, surplus of college graduates, and not enough competitors to help keep the major players honest and pay people what they’re worth? I remember reading a long while back an article, I think on Bloomberg or Wall St Journal or something, about Samsung in particular having a distorting effect on South Korea’s economy as a whole, not just because it dominates the telecommunications/electronics industry in the country, but as a conglomerate it also dominates whole other sectors like shipbuilding, construction, etc., which at the time I had no idea about.
@matt: I don’t think any of the tiger economies of East Asia have exceeded the leading economies of Europe. The closest would be Japan, which might be more or less on par with France in terms of salaries. For me though this is not a big achievement, because in 1995 the salaries in Japan were much much higher than in France.
Singapore has a high GDP per capita, but talking to friends who lived there, the salaries are relatively low. It’s some kind of weird artifact of Singapore being a big HQ and trade city. S Korea and Taiwan are more on par with Spain maybe.
What happens in Asia is that it’s just too competitive. Korea and Taiwan knee-capped Japan Inc in the 90s and 00s, and have in turn been knee-capped by the Chinese in the 10s. It’s like a bucket of crabs when one manages to almost escape the others pull him down.
Germany is just lucky that it’s bordered by Poland and France instead of by S Korea, Taiwan and China lol.
There is something missing in the analysis – religion.
The successful minorities of South Asia are mostly Hindus, Jains and Sikhs. Muslim South Asians don’t belong to the model minority. This is even more visible in the United Kingdom where Muslims, who are predominantly South Asian, are even poorer than the average Black British. British Muslims make up 12% of British prison inmates while representing 4% of the population. British Hindus don’t even make up 0.3% of all inmates while representing 1.5% of british population.
The same can be said about South Asians in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In France, where most Hindus are Tamil refugees who came in very poor conditions quite recently, the second generation is already much more affluent and educated than their barely literate refugee parents. In the Netherlands, most South Asians are from Suriname and again, those who are Hindus have blended in the mainstream population.
Religion does play a role. I can notice it here in France. Pakistanis tend to mingle with Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and Malians but these groups tend to be less successful in academics despite being here for nearly three generations. The smaller Hindu community doesn’t blend that much with the outside world and when it does, it usually opens up to the religiously unaffiliated whites.
The Asian Model minority concept also exists in France but only since the 1990s and was aimed at French Vietnamese who came as boat peoples in dire conditions. Now, the term is used to designate all East Asians, specifically those from China with Chinese children doing exceedingly well in French schools. South Asians, irrespective of religion, are not yet considered part of that model.
There are also sub-groups in these models. In France, blacks who come from French speaking countries like the Congo and the Ivory Coast, and who tend to be Christian usually outperform other blacks at school even those from the Outer Territories who are French since the times of slavery. These french speaking blacks come from the local bourgeoisie and tend to give higher value to academic education. The contrast is quite great with poor and under educated Muslim Malians and Comorians who tend to under-perform even amongst the second generation.
@ Varoon
1. Where do Senegalese in France fit? Are their outcomes closer to Malians and Comorians or the Congolese/Ivory Coast folk? Also, how do Cameroonians, Rwandans fair?
2. Is there much difference between Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians or are their lived experiences/outcomes broadly similar? I believe pretty much all the domestic terrorist attacks within France over the past few years were carried out by people of Moroccan or Algerian backgrounds, not so many Tunisians.
I had a French friend in my building who’s family background was Hindu from Pondicherry India. He was very successful academically and economically in France, his sister married a white French guy and he dated mostly white French girls (when he could get dates). Excepting the accent, he came across as quite Indian American, right down to the angry short Tamil guy thing I noticed among American born South Indians.
The only point that was different was his strong sense of camaraderie with other French minorities, especially Muslim French. I guess France in general is a smaller world than the USA, with less minorities overall and as a percentage of the population. Plus race relations there seem terrible, worse than here. So maybe French born minorities stick together more than in the USA?
Model minority does not mean that the minorities are of relatively high SES. It means that they are of low SES the first generation, higher the second, yet higher the third, and so on until they settle into a distribution not unlike, often more well off, than white Americans.
In other words, it refers to the upward velocity from a low start, something that has not happened with black Americans. Quite the opposite, black Americans who start high, for instance the progeny of entertainers and sports stars, tend to crash and burn over a generation or two.
In other words, there is the implication that there is something speical about and wrong with black Americans — of slave descent (since Caribbean and recent African immigrants are, wait for it, model minorities). Possible causes that have been proffered include a destructive culture, and a lower average IQ.
One thing I forgot to mention earlier: while Filipinos have higher median household income than Koreans, the former also have higher number of people in the household on average than the latter. In per capita terms, Korean-Americans have slightly higher median income (which tracks neatly with the educational attainment levels of their respective foreign-born cohorts).
the koreans are temporary. 1.5 & 2nd gen have no issues with English. (similar pattern i think among Vietnamese, though not as extreme)
I wasn’t suggesting that American-born Koreans have trouble with English.
Here are the English proficiency, educational attainment numbers, and poverty percentages by foreign/American birth for the major Asian groups:
1. Chinese
Foreign-born English proficiency (ages 5 and up): 42%
American-born English proficiency: 92%
Foreign-born bachelor’s and postgrad degrees: 50% and 27%
American-born bachelor’s and postgrad degree: 66% and 25%
Foreign-born % living in poverty: 16.7%
American-born % living in poverty: 10.5%
2. Filipinos
Foreign-born English proficiency: 70%
American-born English proficiency: 97%
Foreign-born bachelor’s and postgrad degrees: 49% and 9%
American-born bachelor’s and postgrad degree: 41% and 11%
Foreign-born % living in poverty: 6.3%
American-born % living in poverty: 8.8%
3. Vietnamese
Foreign-born English proficiency: 34%
American-born English proficiency: 88%
Foreign-born bachelor’s and postgrad degrees: 25% and 7%
American-born bachelor’s and postgrad degree: 51% and 14%
Foreign-born % living in poverty: 14.3%
American-born % living in poverty: 14.2%
4. Indians
Foreign-born English proficiency: 74%
American-born English proficiency: 95%
Foreign-born bachelor’s and postgrad degrees: 72% and 40%
American-born bachelor’s and postgrad degree: 74% and 41%
Foreign-born % living in poverty: 7.3%
American-born % living in poverty: 8.1%
5. Koreans
Foreign-born English proficiency: 47%
American-born English proficiency: 94%
Foreign-born bachelor’s and postgrad degrees: 52% and 20%
American-born bachelor’s and postgrad degree: 60% and 23%
Foreign-born % living in poverty: 14.2%
American-born % living in poverty: 10.5%
6. Japanese
Foreign-born English proficiency: 51%
American-born English proficiency: 97%
Foreign-born bachelor’s and postgrad degrees: 49% and 17%
American-born bachelor’s and postgrad degree: 49% and 16%
Foreign-born % living in poverty: 10.3%
American-born % living in poverty: 7.7%
It’s an open secret in the Korean-American community that the low median incomes of Koreans are a result of the fact that many 1st generation Koreans have tended to own small businesses, and cheat on their taxes (as most immigrant small businesses do).
I don’t doubt tax cheating by cash-basis merchants does occur, but I have not ever seen any data even remotely suggestive of the idea that this is why Korean median household income lags compared to other Asian groups such as the Indians, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese.
Now, I can’t even begin to think of proxies that can measure respective tax cheating, but I can attempt to falsify your assertion by looking at business ownership numbers as well as total and per business revenues.
First, according to the numbers in Mr. Khan’s post, these are the percentages of the various Asians groups compared to the total Asian population in the U.S. and their respective shares of Asian-owned businesses: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/07/asian-owned-businesses-nearing-two-million.html
Chinese pop share: 23% business share: 27.6%
Indian 19%; 19.7%
Filipinos 18%; 10.1%
Vietnamese 9%; 16.2%
Koreans 9%; 11.7%
Japanese 7%; 6.2%
As you can see, the Korean share of business ownership is only mildly higher than its population share among Asians. For the cash business cheat hypothesis to work well, their share of the business ownership should be higher. If their population is no more entrepreneurial than the average and the non-entrepreneurial portion of the population that derives income from presumably more tracked sources is no lower, than the hypothesis is more difficult to sustain.
Moving on to the volume of the businesses and their receipts:
Asian Indians owned 377,486 firms (19.7 percent of all Asian-owned firms) and had receipts of $227.1 billion (32.5 percent of all Asian-owned firm receipts). Chinese owned 528,702 firms (27.6 percent) and had receipts of $210.1 billion (30.0 percent). Filipinos owned 193,336 firms (10.1 percent), with receipts of $25.8 billion (3.7 percent). Japanese owned 119,163 firms (6.2 percent), with receipts of $44.2 billion (6.3 percent). Koreans owned 224,891 firms (11.7 percent), with receipts of $107.8 billion (15.4 percent). Vietnamese owned 310,864 firms (16.2 percent), with receipts of $34.6 billion (5.0 percent).
As you can see, Indian-owned businesses tend to command much higher revenues than the raw number of business warrants. We can perhaps assume that Indian-owned businesses tend to be bigger. Both Chinese- and Korean-owned businesses also tend to be bigger in revenues than their numbers warrant (though obviously not as big as Indians). It is only the Filipinos and Vietnamese who seem to run smaller businesses with low revenues. So, one can lend some strength to the idea that the latter two groups are more likely to run smaller, cash-basis businesses and have greater opportunities for tax-cheating. Yet, they have very divergent poverty rates and household median income numbers – so this is strongly suggestive of the idea that the cash business tax cheat theory doesn’t explain the disparity well.
By the way, I think this fits with my intuition and experience of the latter groups being more likely to run mom-and-pop businesses such as hair and nail salons, small groceries, restaurants, etc. Korean-run businesses these days seem to be larger chains (H-Mart, Lotte, etc.) whereas Indians dominate IT and contracting work.
South Korea is overrated by a lot of people who have never been there.
On what basis do you make that assertion? My experience is that South Korea is underrated by “a lot of people who have never been there” and tend to be rated highly by visitors and expatriates. Maybe it has to do with the selection effect associated with my particular social circle, but for one disgruntled teacher of English I’ve run into, I probably can count more than 10 who rave about their experiences (a bit too much like fanboys and girls for my taste).
The majority of the building stock is shabby and borderline 3rd world
This is an inaccurate hyperbole, which makes me think that you have not spent much time in the Third World. Although it is true that mass-built apartments and other large-scale buildings in Korea that date from the early 70’s to early 90’s tend to have that Brutalist architecture reminiscent of the Soviet bloc, many of those have been demolished and redeveloped with Contemporary buildings.
One quirk of real estate development in South Korea is that the housing authority does not grant permission for redevelopment unless the buildings appear rundown, so there is a disincentive to maintain the residential buildings well. Then once the permission is given, the residents high-five each other as developers will come calling to trade their old units with the new ones once the old building is replaced. Moreover, there is a strange cultural tendency in South Korea (as is the case in Japan) to NOT want a “used” home. So both Japanese and South Koreans tend to build to be replaced in, say, 30 years, rather than to last 50 or 100. There are no (highly desired) “pre-war” apartments in Korea! 😉
the salaries are half of American levels (if that), and people work like crazy.
Koreans work hard and play hard. Although salaries are lower than in the U.S., that provides a very poor living standard and quality comparison. Medical care is largely free, transportation is almost comically low cost and omnipresent (and extremely convenient), and (strangely to Westerners) eating out is often less expensive than grocery-shopping as is domestic alcohol (Soju, a milder Vodka of sorts, is roughly $1-2 a bottle). The government takes great pains to make sure certain agricultural products are affordable. Delivery is everywhere to everywhere.
After-service for goods and services are free or low cost and are of very high quality (as is also the case in Japan). I once saw a gleaming, tall Samsung building and asked whether that was a regional headquarters – no, it was a Samsung after-service center. In much of the West, if your TV were to break, good luck with the call center “help” for the next hour trying to get warranty service of some sort. In South Korea, you not only get prompt and excellent warranty, even out-of-warranty service is comprehensive, fast, and very low cost. Clearly, the Korean economy isn’t designed with the “maximum shareholder value” in mind, but some sort of a strange notion called “customer satisfaction.”
As an American supremacist, there are some things I find strange or negative about South Korea, but there are also many quality of life quirks there that are quite convenient and much better developed than in the West.
Koreans in the USA have been very entrepreneurial, but S Korea is super corporate oriented, and your career/income path up to retirement is to a depressing extent already determined by your university entrance at age 18.
This is rather old news, and doesn’t jive with younger workers who increasingly avoid the staid Chaebols.
Infrastructure in both Japan and S Korea is excellent though. And there is very little social disfunction by American standards.
My wife and children visited South Korea last year. When they came back to the U.S., they grumbled that our airports and other transportation infrastructure seemed Third World-like in comparison. Yes, I threatened to send them to the real Third World airports next time. 😉
In Seoul, she kept making sure no one left anything at coffee shop tables and such unattended. It boggled her mind that no one would steal anything and people routinely left phones, iPads, laptops, etc. and went away and came back later without a worry. She also couldn’t believe that a city of over 10 million people had no violent ghettos.
Her take on South Korea was to quote Seinfeld – “Why would you emigrate from a pony country to a non-pony country?”
@bulbul: Germany is just lucky that it’s bordered by Poland and France instead of by S Korea, Taiwan and China lol.
Eh, I’d tend to think Germany would be a bunch richer if it were bordered by a bunch of more Germanys (or, rather if more so than it already is by other Germany like regions within the Blue Banana).
I don’t think Japan, or Germany, would be richer if you teleported them to Central Africa, for’ex.
Generally “Poorer neighbours then richer country, all things being equal”, doesn’t seem quite right. Gains from trade, cheaper imports of labour, capital, goods, opportunities for investment, probably outweigh competition with neighbours?
Maybe it’s very different in the East Asia sphere as a specific case due to national economic strategies, of course. (All the low hanging fruit of opportunity from neighbours industrialisation and development is left on the ground?). But that’s a choice of course.
It seems unlikely to me that we should expect Asian countries to be richer. They are crowded, lacking in resources, and have only had half a century or so to get rich. They do pretty well considering these things.
Most importantly for their peoples quality of life they provide high quality necessary services cheap. Americans can afford more cars, but we need a car to get places because out public transport sucks.
America has been rich since the founding. It was far richer than England per capita before the revolution, only England greater population made its economy bigger. It’s true that ideas are very important to wealth, but ideas + land + resources is better still.
@Twinkie: I’ve heard the under-reporting sales thing as a reason for low average income from two different Korean-Americans, and it seemed plausible to me because 1) when I was growing up in metro NY, Koreans did seem to run a ton of small businesses, even compared to other Asian groups, and 2) Koreans in LA have and had a rep for being more successful than Filipinos and Vietnamese. But if the numbers make that argument implausible, touche.
Regarding your points about Korea, you’re not so much disputing anything I wrote as you are explaining or excusing it. I suspect you’re Korean-American, so maybe you’ve heard the term “pari pari”. Koreans threw up almost their entire existing building stock in a hurry during a relatively short period of time. They could do this because the economy was growing at 10%, 7%, 5% annually. Now that the economy is growing at 2%, now that the workforce has started to decline, and the total population will soon enter a period of rapid and increasing decline as has already started in Japan, there is not the same economic capacity to replace those shabby (and yes, quasi-3rd world) buildings en mass. What is there now is mostly what will stay there. Just like most of the buildings thrown up in Sao Paulo during their own boom are still there 40 years later.
As an aside, 3rd world doesn’t have to mean Cambodia or Nigeria. The 3rd world is very broad, ranging from Sao Paolo, Almaty, and Kuala Lumpur (which are really not too bad) right down to the poorest village in Africa or South Asia.
Regarding the low incomes, if I am an overworked college educated white collar professional in Seoul and I make the same as a Bangladeshi immigrant restaurant busser in NYC, the fact that I can get my Samsung refrigerator serviced for free or that the metro is affordable or that ramyeon is cheap doesn’t make up for it.
Impressions come down to the difference between expectations and reality. If you expect Korea to be some random Asian developing country (as most people off-handedly did until quite recently), you will come away very impressed by Korea. But if you expect Korea to be the “Next Japan” circa 1990, meaning a hyper-successful, hyper-wealthy, polished, almost sci-fi style country, you will come away disappointed. Even Japan is not the next Japan. There is no next Japan in Asia.
Most of the comments above are insightful and very knowledgeable. Then there are a few racist and stupid comments about (implied) genetically derived, differing median intelligence levels between ethnic groups. Oh well.
I might add to the stupidity here, hopefully not to racism – I have a poorly-thought out, probably stolen, concept that some-but-not-too much rejection and isolation of a minority by the dominant culture can increase internal resilience, coherence, and mutual support within the minority. After a while that results in socioeconomic progress as a group, of course at the expense of some people who do more poorly because of discrimination. Too much discrimination by contrast will overcome what the minority can do to help its members.
Part of this concept is whether the dominant culture codes the outgroup as mostly-different or mostly-underclass.
This all could help explain why model minorities happen. American Jews in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century fit best into this concept. Blurred lines of course – many white Americans thought East European Jews of the early 20th Century were genetically inferior, but not as strongly as racist attacks as made against other groups.
One interesting story I read supports the coding issue – in the Jim Crow era, a group of African visitors were touring the American South. They were shunted into white facilities, not Black ones, because the racist society couldn’t quite code them as the N word. I think the interaction of modern African immigrants can provoke a similarly different interaction from the dominant society, as soon as they talk and one hears an accent. That can have an effect on socioeconomic outcomes.
The attempt to split up the “Asian” community into finer and finer distinctions is one that is only ever done in a one-sided and politically convenient fashion. No one says, when comparing “white wealth” to “black wealth”, that “Well, actually, if you compare Irish or Scots-Irish Americans to black Americans, or Italian Americans to German or Jewish Americans, the disparities are not so simple.”
@Bulbul
I lived in Korea for about half a year (almost 5 years ago now), and agree with you. Many of the apartment complexes that now house a huge portion of the population, the countryside having been virtually emptied out over the past 40 years, are thrown together by the chaebols, cramped, and by American or European standards almost unlivable; a friend I’d made (27, worked for a chaebol) showed me a picture of his apartment, and it was no larger or personal than a freshman college dorm. Driving past rows upon rows of these complexes, with a giant Samsung, Hyundai, or LG logo on the side, is like walking into Judge Dredd and staring at city-blocks. The housing stock in Japan is older and the floor space is smaller than in Korea, but the restrictions on height in Japan tend to make the buildings themselves more personal and neighborhood-like. Agreed though that the architecture in Japan is ugly, in large part due to incredibly lax zoning laws and an absence of city planning. Aging will hit South Korea even harder than it hit Japan, it’s already underway; the country doesn’t have the kind of reserves that Japan had built up both before WWII and afterward to manage a demographic cliff that came even faster and harder than Japan’s own.
Urban public transportation infrastructure in both countries is obviously superior to America or Canada, but as far as rural or outlying areas go, I’d rather be in America: small towns in Japan and Korea tend to rely either on privately operated buses and/or railways that charge exorbitant prices for uncomfortable service and infrequent timetables, while the roads and even highways are substandard (and sometimes even unsafe) compared to North American roads. I’ve found distances that in the US would take about 20-30 minutes by car, in Japan take an hour by car, and not because of traffic: low speed limits, winding roads, poor sightlines, absence of state or interstate highways. Not to mention that the most popular kinds of car, the kei car and kei van, have a very low maximum speed and low HP. I was too terrified by Korean driving habits to try renting a car, even in rural areas, in Korea.
Has anyone systematically analysed whether there’s a meaningful selection effect among East Asian immigrants to the US? Candidly, I’m quite skeptical about that, both because of my anecdotal understanding of the dynamics of who came to the US when and stayed (at least for Japanese and Koreans), and because as far as I am aware, the numbers on stuff like IQ tests and PISA scores don’t suggest that the immigrants are meaningfully “better” than the people who stayed home.
re: Twinkie and Bulbul–
I agree with Twinkie about a lot of what makes Korea great, e.g. public safety, public transit, etc. Health care isn’t free (the copays are high compared to the US) but the list prices those copays are calculated against are way lower than the US. It’s almost comical comparing how long it took workmen in the US to do a simple bathroom renovation (6 months with multiple elementary screwups along the way) with how long it would take in Korea (maybe a week or two). Cheaper, faster, and better in Korea. Those massive brutalist apartment blocks are still omnipresent, though. There’s newer nicer complexes going up, but the old ones are everywhere you look.
All that said, as Bulbul notes, Korea is approaching the demographic cliff at breakneck speed, much faster than Japan is doing. And as far as young people rejecting the chaebol, I think that’s partly just sour grapes because stable corporate jobs are hard to come by, compared to a generation ago before the Asian Financial Crisis. People weren’t complaining about “hell Joseon” a few years ago because things are great. I recall there was a survey that found over 50% of Koreans would leave Korea if they could. There’s a real morale problem in Korea.
“First of all, the idea of a “model minority” was not simply economic in nature, it had to do with the perceived (accurately) docility of the Japanese and Chinese peasants and laborers as well. ”
Very good point by @Twinkie. Asian American activists (which is a group I don’t really consider myself to be part of, even though I broadly support their ideas) HATE this stereotype- not just because it undermines their efforts at building cross-racial political coalitions, but also because it undermines their political agency. It implies that Asians don’t care about politics or social issues.
“Has anyone systematically analysed whether there’s a meaningful selection effect among East Asian immigrants to the US? ”
@Taeyoung there definitely is for Mainland Chinese immigrants. Many are highly educated professionals who originally came here for graduate studies. Aside from “Chinatown” and family reunification immigrants, there’s a heavy educational attainment filter.
[Re South Korea] the culture has just lost all of its energy… [But] there is very little social disfunction by American standards.
I wonder how much of that can be traced to an old population.
@Taeyoung: everything I read and heard (I don’t have any articles and studies at hand though) says that immigrants from Japan and Korea to the USA were skewed below average in their home countries. Poor farmers from Kyushu or Okinawa, predominately working class immigrants from S Korea. That’s not to say that elite-level Koreans didn’t come over as well, but I think the skew was worse than the Korean national average, rather than better.
There is something amazing about the USA, where it is fabulously wealthy compared to most of the world, but when you get here, most of the locals seem lazy and unambitious. How is that possible? So if you’re a lower middle class Korean, immigrating to the USA is like a ticket into the American upper middle class for your kids. Maybe not for you, but for your kids almost for sure. Why struggle against immense competition to get into SKY (the Korean Ivy League), and then maybe anyway end up with an income and material lifestyle lower than a middle class American person in Houston or Atlanta?
Take an average 3000 sq ft or better yet 4000 sq ft McMansion in suburban Atlanta, on a large plot of land. If you landscape it well and add a pool, buy a bunch of faux European furniture, and get yourself a Mercedes or Tesla, it will seem fabulously wealthy to just about anyone from Korea. Like Chaebol owner level. But this is eminently attainable in the USA. I mean you’d definitely be upper middle class, but a good 10-20% of the American population can have that lifestyle.
@Taeyoung, should be pretty selected overall – https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED489960.pdf – “Compared to other ethnic groups, Asian-American group has significantly higher level of parental education. As seen in Figure 1 below, over 52% of Asian-American parents being interviewed have post secondary degrees, as compared to 35% in European-American, 13.5% in Hispanic, and 13% in African-American groups.”
Since the countries of origin do not tend to have higher levels of post secondary than US, seems like that unavoidably implies a lot of selection?
There could be room for some subsets of Asian-Americans to be hyposelected, but anecdotally seems unlikely for it to be Chinese since everything reports that they perform well above the Asian-American average, which itself seems unavoidably fairly selected already. (Japanese and Koreans not sure.)
Re; PISA, on the latest PISA 2018, on Reading score anyway, the only facet they give for Native vs Migrant kids differences, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong didn’t actually outperform native Western European and USA white kids (Japan 504, Korea 514; “Chinese Taipei”: 504, Hong Kong: 529, vs in the same ballpark natives UK: 511, Poland: 514, France 502, US Whites 531). But Singapore did and then US Asians outperformed them (Singapore: 546, US Asians: 556).
But that was a general average of all Asian groups and included migrants and natives, so you’d assume that some subsets of that US Asian group would perform even higher still. Which would mean substantial differences from country of origin.
On PISA Maths, though native-migrant gap not given, assuming its the same size as for Reading (fairly reasonable since these scores are highly correlated at a national level), then Japan-Korea that implies that Japan-Korea don’t really separate from Germany-Netherlands-Sweden. Japan: 527, Korea: 526, “Chinese Taipei”: 531, which is good against Netherlands: 519, Germany: 500, Sweden: 502, but those countries have a Reading advantage of natives>migrants of +13, +21, +19, so assuming that translates to Maths…
However Singapore and Hong Kong seem well beyond US Asians on PISA Maths and well beyond Korea, Japan and “Chinese Taipei”(US Asians: 539, Singapore: 566, Hong Kong: 551).
So there is possibly a confound there of some Asian countries being very effective at PISA maths.
Re:Bulbul:
Elite Koreans certainly came over for study and work, but my impression (and this is mere anecdote) is that elite Koreans mostly didn’t immigrate — they were just in the US for work or study, and always intended to Korea eventually. Out of 5 close relatives in my mother’s generation who spent years in the US, four returned to Korea (my mother being the exception). If that pattern is representative, that would be consistent with the Korean immigrant population being skewed towards lower socioeconomic status.
I do think that’s changing though. Almost none of my cousins are in Korea anymore, although they’re not all in the US. And they come from privileged backgrounds.
Re: khuzifenq
Thanks — that would make sense for the Chinese, at least for the most recent wave of immigration.
It was a lot easier to immigrate to the USA under Reagan and before, which is when most Korean immigrants arrived. I think the main wave was 1970s-80s, admittedly continuing into the 90s.
Even now there are ways that don’t require much selection. Most Bangladeshis originally came under the diversity visa (visa lottery), and then sponsored and brought wives and relatives. Bangladeshis graduated out of the visa lottery (there are too many of them in the USA to qualify anymore), but they are still coming in large and probably growing numbers through family reunification. I think the visa lottery has moved on as a favored means for Nepalis, Central Asians,.. There are some qualifications (I think a university degree for example?) but it’s not strict at all. Asian immigrants aren’t all or mostly brainy STEM H1-b people.
@Taeyoung: I have a good friend from university who’s father came over (along with his family) as a Korean executive to help manage the first Samsung factory in the USA, back in the 80s. They stayed forever, and the father ended up starting his own import-export business. I had another Korean-American friend in high school who’s father was a doctor. Just anecdotal but I didn’t see a complete lack of elite-level people from Korea.
There’s a bit of a motte and bailey at play with the model minority myth myth. Activists use the term constantly in hopes that listeners will take the term at face value and assume there’s no such thing as a model minority. But when cornered they will say, “Of course some minorities are rule-abiding and prosperous, I never said otherwise. But those minorities are no less Othered by society. You have no right to ask minorities to conform to a fake set of standards. The model minority myth is the myth is that society recognizes such a thing a a model minority except as a basis to stigmatize different minorities.”
This version of the argument is harder to prove or disprove.
@mekal: I’ve found distances that in the US would take about 20-30 minutes by car, in Japan take an hour by car, and not because of traffic: low speed limits, winding roads, poor sightlines, absence of state or interstate highways.
It is clear that you have never driven east-west in northern New England.
Regarding your points about Korea, you’re not so much disputing anything I wrote as you are explaining or excusing it.
“Excusing” it? You clearly didn’t understand what I wrote.
I suspect you’re Korean-American, so maybe you’ve heard the term “pari pari”.
The term is perhaps better transliterated “ppal-i, ppal-i,” which means “Quickly, quickly” in Korean, which I think you bring up to evoke the hurry culture of South Korea.
I grew up in Seoul, Tokyo, Orange County, and New York City. I also worked and lived in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America (with extended sojourns in East Africa, Southeast Asia, and a few other places I’d rather not mention, for work). I have a pretty well-rounded view of what life is like around the globe, so I tend to look askance at unlimited and generalized assertions such as “So and so country/region/city is overrated,” which doesn’t say much about the putative topic, but does reveal something about the person making the statement.
Now that the economy is growing at 2%, now that the workforce has started to decline, and the total population will soon enter a period of rapid and increasing decline as has already started in Japan, there is not the same economic capacity to replace those shabby (and yes, quasi-3rd world) buildings en mass.
On the contrary, there is greater maturation in the real estate market in South Korea and tastes have become more, not less, luxurious. Yes, South Korea faces a serious demographic decline, but there is yet little evidence that its increasing technical sophistication and economic development will reverse anytime soon, given the increasing amount of spending on advanced research as well as its dramatically improved cultural exports, among other things. As you can see, I don’t subscribe to wild hypotheses, neither “Japan (or Korea) is taking over!” nor “Japan (or Korea) is withering away!”
What is there now is mostly what will stay there. Just like most of the buildings thrown up in Sao Paulo during their own boom are still there 40 years later.
Have you been in those Brazilian buildings? Do things work 99% of the time as they do in the Brutalist developments of South Korea?
As an aside, 3rd world doesn’t have to mean Cambodia or Nigeria. The 3rd world is very broad, ranging from Sao Paolo, Almaty, and Kuala Lumpur (which are really not too bad) right down to the poorest village in Africa or South Asia.
“Similar” appearances do not mean similar functionality. The problems with mass-built housing in the Third World aren’t simply an aesthetic issue – there are serious functional issues (disruptions of basic services, deterioration of safety equipment, lack of public safety and sanitation, etc.) that significantly damage the quality of life. Comparing them to lower and middle class mass-housing in South Korea, because of architectural resemblance is unintelligent and uninformed at best.
We in America also have Brutalist buildings – they are often housing projects for poor blacks. If you haven’t been in one of those projects, I urge you to read Venkatesh’s “Gang Leader for a Day.” I can give you a preview – it’s not like Seoul.
Regarding the low incomes, if I am an overworked college educated white collar professional in Seoul and I make the same as a Bangladeshi immigrant restaurant busser in NYC, the fact that I can get my Samsung refrigerator serviced for free or that the metro is affordable or that ramyeon is cheap doesn’t make up for it.
It’s clear that you are more interested in winning a rhetorical argument than elucidating reality or arguing honestly. Are you comparing the middle class quality of life in South Korea with “a Bangladeshi immigrant restaurant busser in NYC” with a straight face? (Are such menial labor workers in NYC under-worked in comparison to “over-worked” Koreans?)
You, again, clearly did not understand why I brought the quality of service issue in South Korea. Its society and economic structure have a different optimization mix than we do in the West. Western-style disposable consumer culture with poor after-service has trouble existing in South Korea, because there is an expectation of high quality service even at low price levels there. That has a very large impact on the quality of life, society-wide. Try standing in the line at the DMV in NYC and then compare that with dealing with the civil service in South Korea, as another example.
a hyper-successful, hyper-wealthy, polished, almost sci-fi style country, you will come away disappointed. Even Japan is not the next Japan. There is no next Japan in Asia.
I am sorry, I don’t draw my imaginations about other countries through comic books or sci-fi movies.
and by American or European standards almost unlivable; a friend I’d made (27, worked for a chaebol) showed me a picture of his apartment, and it was no larger or personal than a freshman college dorm.
Well, if we are playing anecdote games, I’ll just have you look at these:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=apartments+in+seoul
There are apartments on the first page of that list ranging from $450 a month to $3000 a month in South Korea. Perhaps you can do something similar for me of apartments in the same price range in NYC or London, and show me just how much more livable those places are.
Being a 6’2″ American with a corresponding swagger and personal space requirements, I prefer living in my suburban McMansion with my large family and multiple dogs and also occasionally hanging out in my rural farmhouse in the hills with considerable private land, on which to hunt, rather than spend my life in cramped apartments in East Asian (or European, for that matter) cities, but some of these assertions are really quite silly.
@Twinkie: “I’m so international, I lived in Korea, and the three places on earth with the largest number of ethnic Koreans living abroad lol” If I need some advice about the best Ktown spots I will hit you up. The problem with bragging anonymously on the internet is that no one knows what’s true. I can say that I have been to dozens of countries, including on every continent except Antarctica, was myself born in the 3rd-world, and am a big strapping 6’3″. But what’s the point, if someone will just say, “I think you’re lying!” Also the height is a lie lol.
Just some thoughts on your post: the fact that Korean incomes are half of American incomes does not indicate a different cultural preference or mix of priorities. It indicates a poorer economy. Koreans did not choose to make half the salary of Americans in return for better aftercare on home appliances, and cheaper soju (you brought soju up!). Koreans also are not now consciously making the choice to live and work in ugly shabby concrete boxes (often with plate glass on the newer buildings that true). Take a drive in Jeju (the Korean Hawaii!), and tell me how the buildings are compared to Coastal California or Amalfi.
Regarding the Bangladeshi busser in NY, I’ll play devil’s advocate (I’m from an ethnicity that loves to do that). How exactly is the Bangladeshi worse off than the white collar Korean? He makes the same income, perhaps even with fewer hours worked. His children are likely to move into the American middle or even upper-middle class, and make more not less than the Korean’s children. His neighborhood is dirty, but after 10 years he will probably find a way to buy his own apartment or even a stand-alone house, renting out extra rooms in the house to help pay the mortgage. Even so he will have living space not too different than our denizen of a Seoul satellite city. Our Korean can buy cheap Korean food and soju, but our Bangladeshi can get pretty cheap Bangladeshi food in Jackson Heights and other Bangladeshi neighborhoods in NY. I doubt the NY prices are higher actually. And he saves his liver by not being obligated to drink with his boss and coworkers for 4 hours after work 3-4 days a week. One area where the Bangladeshi is at a clear disadvantage is medical care, where the USA has a truly abysmal system, you’ll get no argument otherwise from me. Still, there is a good chance he managed to swing Medicaid somehow, or otherwise accesses free clinics and hospitals, which exist in NY.
My original comment about Korea was triggered by my noticing that certain types of people tend to overrate it. I’d include alt-right types who like to use Korea and Japan as examples of all the good things that happen when the population is homogeneous, left-wing people who praise S Korea as a kind of affirmative action 1st-world country, and of course Korean-Americans who in my experience are surprisingly and consistently nationalistic for the home country, these days even more so than real Koreans.
I think this will be my last post on this thread. Arguing anonymously on a days old blog post is the definition of a waste of time, for both you and me!