Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread – 07/15/2020

I got a review copy of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. I’m curious about this because I’ve become much more open to flooding the country with immigrants since I of the opinion our elites have gone insane.

I also got a copy of Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. Obscure fact: Postrel’s husband read this weblog in its early years.

Don’t know what I’m going to read next after One Billion Americans. A lot of books that are in my “to-read” list. Don’t want to read anything about Islam for a while, and perhaps I should avoid cultural evolution. But I think I’m going to get to Hugo Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe.

I know people say blogs are dead, but my Brown Pundits blog now gets a few hundred comments within two days on every “open thread” (400+ comments now in four days). Part of it is I’m lax on quality control, but once you get a certain amount of engagement then a feedback loop occurs.

Speaking of Indians, I contributed a chapter to Which of Us are Aryans? It’s been out for a while, but I just got my payment so I remembered it again.

I’m toying with the idea of a weekly “Patron livechat” for my Patreon supporters. The main reason for the Patreon is to compensate for the Brown Pundits podcast, which costs me some money to host and edit.

Genetic basis of offspring number and body weight variation in Drosophila melanogaster.

Early Medieval Genetic Data from Ural Region Evaluated in the Light of Archaeological Evidence of Ancient Hungarians. Magyars are who we thought they were.

How robust are cross-population signatures of polygenic adaptation in humans? Not very robust.

What Journalists Say When No One is Watching. Journalists are class. Not objective observers.

Why does the journalistic drama resemble Middle School? That is, the tween-years of 11-13? My hypothesis is that tweens aren’t having sex yet, or serious relationships, or preparing for career/college. But, they now have hormones. That is why social infighting is so intense during this period. A lot of the arguments among journalists seem to be incredibly vicious back-biting over a shrinking pie. It’s not future-oriented, but present-fixated. Unfortunately, this is a case with capitalism is driving us away from virtue. Journalism with monopoly rents was more mature.

What the Post-Trump Right Will Look Like. Tyler Cowen.

I haven’t been saying much about COVID-19 because it seems like we’re going to just keep going until herd, vaccination, or a really good therapeutic. Depressing.

Reduced phenotypic plasticity evolves in less predictable environments.

Quit Chrome. Safari and Edge Are Just Better Browsers for You and Your Computer.

Oil economy in Texas is collapsing.

The World That Twitter Made. Tanner Greer.

The Left Case against Open Borders.

Three hallmarks of malaria-induced selection in human genomes.

Shillings, gods and runes: Clues in language suggest a Semitic superpower in ancient northern Europe.

Purifying selection acts on germline methylation to modify the CpG mutation rate at promoters.

25 thoughts on “Open Thread – 07/15/2020

  1. I’m curious about this because I’ve become much more open to flooding the country with immigrants since I of the opinion our elites have gone insane.

    Completely agree with the last statement, but wouldn’t this just increase the “elite overproduction” since some proportion of the immigrants will be elites. Assuming that the number of elite positions will not change wouldn’t this make things much worse?

    Isn’t the better approach to lower our own production of useless elites?

    weekly “Patron livechat”

    totally onboard with this!

  2. Magyars are who we thought they were

    Ever since Lake Uyelgi mounds were excavated 10 years ago, these chieftain graves occupied an outsize position in the Hungarian new folk mythology (without any medieval DNA … some matches in the uniparental markers of the contemporary Bashkirs in the area already sufficed). Hungarian tourism in the area has become its economic lifeline, too.

    When the scientific observation fit so neatly into the popular Internet-age myths, I am tempted to be skeptical about the data…

  3. I’m curious about this because I’ve become much more open to flooding the country with immigrants since I of the opinion our elites have gone insane.

    I am confused by this statement. Would you elaborate?

  4. I’m curious about this because I’ve become much more open to flooding the country with immigrants since I of the opinion our elites have gone insane.

    Can you explain this statement? I’m interested in this perspective especially from the center-right.

  5. I am confused by this statement. Would you elaborate?

    I can’t speak for Razib, but presuming you think our elites have gone nuts on “both sides of the aisle” the argument would be that immigrants tend to be much more pragmatic and realist, and much less ideologically driven. Plus if it really turns into a flood American culture could change irrevocably…and that’s probably a good thing, considering where we are going as a culture.

    I’d also personally say that the continued global decline in fertility rates means that (absent novel life-extension techniques or heavy automation) basically every country that wants to matter in around 50 years has to be willing to accept a continual stream of immigrants.

  6. Further to “The triumph of idealism over materialism in the long run”
    https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/07/11/the-triumph-of-idealism-over-materialism-in-the-long-run/

    There is a very good article about Hagia Sophia on Quillette today

    “The Hagia Sophia Should Remain a Beacon to All” by Lars Bronworth [sic should be Brownworth]
    https://quillette.com/2020/07/15/the-hagia-sophia-should-remain-a-beacon-to-all/

    If you want to know more about Byzantine History you should listen to Brownworth’s excellent podcast “12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of The Byzantine Empire” which can be downloaded free ($0.00) from:
    https://12byzantinerulers.com/

    Repeating myself from the previous thread:

    A comment on Turkey. I have been anti-Erdogan for some time. I think he is a bad dude. I think Turkey’s membership in NATO is indefensible. I am certain they would not come to our aid if were were attacked by Russia and I doubt that the American people would be willing to spend much money or many lives to defend the Erdogan regime.

    I think we now have enough clarity on the Erdogan regime and Turkey to take specific actions. We should expel Turkey from NATO. We should close, evacuate, and destroy the Incirlik airbase. We should tell the Russians that Turkey is now their problem.

    Putin has established himself as the protector of the Orthodox Church. He might be motivated to do something to protect its property in Turkey. At any rate, he has a lot more leverage and a lot less scruples to deal with Erdogan.

  7. “I’m curious about this because I’ve become much more open to flooding the country with immigrants since I of the opinion our elites have gone insane.”

    I too am having a hard time understanding this comment. I think that bringing in more immigrants would dilute America’s political culture and strengthen the grip of elites by allowing them to more easily play divide et impera.

  8. Yes, this is my thought about what truly massive waves of immigration would bring. We’d have a one-two knockout combo of the Singapore and CCP-style arguments that the diversity of the population and the massive size of the population makes traditional democratic governance unwieldy, and instead need one-party control, de jure as in China or de facto as in Singapore, to promote social harmony and stability. We’d just end up consolidating rule by insane elites.

  9. Speaking of Elites:

    “‘Hamilton’ Loses Its Snob Appeal: Political correctness is a barrier to keep the working class from becoming upwardly mobile.” By Rob Henderson | July 14, 2020
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamilton-loses-its-snob-appeal-11594746441?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h

    “When I was a new student at Yale in 2015, everyone on campus was talking about the Broadway sensation “Hamilton.” “It’s amazing,” a classmate told me. … I searched the internet for tickets: $400—way beyond my budget as a veteran enlisted man attending college on the GI Bill.

    “So I was pleased this month when “Hamilton” became available to watch on the streaming service Disney+. But now the show is being criticized for its portrayal of the American Founding by many of the same people who once gushed about it. Is it a coincidence that affluent people loved “Hamilton” when tickets were prohibitively expensive, but they disparage it now that ordinary people can see it?

    * * *

    “Once something becomes fashionable among the upper class, aspiring elites know they must go along to have any hope of joining the higher ranks. But once it becomes fashionable among the hoi polloi, the elites update their tastes.

    ***

    “Ideological purity tests now exist to indicate social class and block upward social mobility. Your opinion about social issues is the new powdered wig. In universities and in professional jobs, political correctness is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out those who didn’t marinate in elite mores.

    “These are luxury beliefs—or ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while taking a toll on lower class.

    ***

    “The winds will have shifted by the time the proletariat catches up, and that’s the point. Affluent people keep their positions secure by allowing only those who go to the right colleges, listen to the right podcasts, and read the right books to join their inner circle. But just as today’s fashionable art will soon be out-of-date, so will today’s fashionable moral opinions.”

  10. Further to: “Life is a great test” Razib’s post on Brown Pundits.
    https://www.brownpundits.com/2020/07/14/life-is-a-great-test/

    Here is the least surprising development on the testing front, you could imagine:

    National Association of Basketball Coaches wants SAT and ACT eliminated as an eligibility requirement for college players | July 16, 2020
    https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/29474153/national-association-basketball-coaches-wants-sat-act-eliminated-eligibility-requirement-college-players

    “Calling them “longstanding forces of institutional racism,” the National Association of Basketball Coaches on Thursday proposed permanently eliminating SAT and ACT requirements as part of the NCAA’s initial eligibility process.

    “The proposal originated from the NABC’s Committee on Racial Reconciliation … The committee, co-chaired by Harvard’s Tommy Amaker and South Carolina’s Frank Martin …

    “The NABC Committee on Racial Reconciliation believes that the SAT and ACT are longstanding forces of institutional racism and no longer have a place in intercollegiate athletics or higher education at large,” Amaker and Martin said in a joint statement. “This is an important step towards combating educational inequality in our country.”

    “In April, the NCAA Eligibility Center waived the standardized test score requirement for incoming freshman student-athletes in both Division I and Division II for the 2020-21 academic year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

    * * *

    “I am proud of the continued efforts of the Committee on Racial Reconciliation, and look forward to engaging further with the NCAA on this crucial topic,” said NABC executive director Craig Robinson*, former head coach at Oregon State. “We feel it is prudent for college athletics to address a standardized test structure that has long had disproportionately-negative impacts on low-income and minority students.”

    “Last month, the NABC also recommended that all high school and college students be required to complete a course on Black history.”

    *Michelle Obama’s brother.

  11. This “giga-america” concept is a brief for vast population-majority replacement, and it won’t just be for elites but also for proles. In fact, mainly for proles. The new elite will be Latin American oligarchs, Jews from Europe, and Northeast Asians all of whom will merge seamlessly with the old elite.

    The concept will end with the white legacy population of America – the “posterity” of the Constitution – relegated to the least-habitable parts of the continent, like American Indian reservations. And they know it, and oh yes are armed.

    Speaking as one quasiBritish-Empire foreigner to another: I do not see this ending without violence, violence aimed at the both of us.

  12. Hmm… I guess, metaphorically, if you are one of the last pagans during Christianization, then summoning a vast pagan army to crush the cult seems relatively attractive, even if they aren’t exactly going to obey the proper forms of the old paganism. Some sympathy for that, though I don’t really think it would necessarily work out like that.

    Re; population aging, a possibly relevant paper earlier this year https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7690“Population aging, migration, and productivity in Europe”, explicitly including education and productivity measurements – punch quotes: When the model also covers the effect of education on productivity and not only on labor-force participation––an innovation introduced here––the projected increase in burden under the baseline scenario is only a low 10% by 2060. This means that much of the fears of population aging seem exaggerated. As this increase is modest, either moderate migration levels, if migrants are well-educated and integrated, or an increase in labor-force participation among the general population can fully compensate for it.

    Note their model also finds that the increase in dependency ratio under the Japan scenario (Japan policy applied to EU) is about the same as their baseline scenario (current projected EU trends)!

    Now all models are just models, and models with more assumptions have more room to go wrong than models with fewer, but food for thought.

    There might be some scenarios where going for a huge lump of increase in working age population right now, without much selection, could leave the dependency ratio worse off in future (e.g. importing, with a slight delay, East Asia’s greater demographic problems than relative to more slowly transforming Western countries, without its high human capital!).

    A moderate lump of quite selected population a la Canada might work better but in the case of the US, consider would probably contribute to increased income inequality, already quite high in the US…

  13. Interesting 2 year old WEIRD paper, still in the preprint process; https://asp.mercatus.org/publications/experimental-study-kin-and-ethnic-favoritism – trying to actually test differences in kin favouritism behaviour between sets of participants with a game design.

    Main Findings: All national/ethnic groups (urban in Iran and Canada, rural villagers in Ecuador) seemed to show indistinguishable and universal kin-favouritism in low cost condition of 3 player bribery game involving kin and a stranger. Iranians showed more favouritism to co-ethnics and friends in 3-player game, Canadians favoured friends about as much, but ceased to favour friends under high cost condition, did not favour co-ethnics at all. Ecuadorian villagers from village with cousin marriage tradition weakly more favourable to kin under high cost conditions, but not strong.

    Weak evidence but may suggest that kin-favouritism is high and universal among humans, and is just a very deeply evolved drive. (That is people who really treat family impartially or “like strangers” barely exist, even among the WEIRDest of populations). While treatment of non-kin, friends vs strangers and dealing with large evolutionary novel group sizes and types (Dunbar’s questionable Number and all that) may have more room to vary.

  14. Maybe I’m too square, but my priors weigh pretty strongly against “Carthaginian domination of northern Germany and southern Scandinavia”, as awesome as that would be — I’m gonna need more proof than sheqel ~ shilling and panim ~ penny.

  15. “Early Medieval Genetic Data from Ural Region…”“The five Uyelgi samples with an average of 22,540 SNPs show … closest ancient proxies in the current published databases are the Iron Age Central Sakas and early medieval Kimak from present-day North Kazakhstan. The Central Sakas (Inner Asian Scythians) were modelled as a two-way mixture of Late Bronze Age pastoralists (56%) and southern Siberian hunter-gatherers (44%) by Damgaard et al., which scenario is plausible for the Uyelgi population as well.

    Pretty similar to the Iron Age putatively Indo-European Saka from a little east in Central Kazakhstan, though they’re a little “North” of them genetically in the paper’s PCA and much later in history. Pretty similar to Kyrgyzstan Huns of a similar time period tho.

    Interestingly for these samples at Uyelgi Cementary, on the y samples are mostly N1a1, but have a G2a2 and a J2b1. No R1. (I don’t think there was a *lot* of R1 found by this era in Damgaard’s big paper which covered Kazakhstan. IRC one of the R1s that was there was a Lithuanian like outlier, DA29, while others were more typical for genetic structure – DA224 -R1b1b, DA89 – R1, R224 – R1).

  16. Right. American culture is senescent and sclerotic, our politics and elite are wholly dysfunctional…it is time for us to have a new American society. I have as well shifted positions to supporting large-scale immigration into America for its own sake.

    @zimriel: The plan is not violence and reservations. The plan is synthesis and ascension.

  17. About the “carthaginian superpower”: I believe that Carthage is an underrated and misunderstood civilisation, but to call it, as that site does, “superpower” is ridiculous.

    Superpower was Darius’ Persia, or Trajan’s Rome. They were monsters far superior in power and wealth to any other power around them. Carthage was a medium Mediterranean power, as could be the Epirus of King Pyrrhus, or Macedonia before Philipos, or the Athens of Pericles.

    Does anyone consider Syracuse a superpower? Because Syracuse had a war with the Athens of Pericles. And she won it. And she had a war with Carthage that soon afterward confronted Rome. And she won it.

    The rest of the article is a sum of obviousities squeezed to the point of absurdity to give them a new scope.

    Are there terms of possible Semitic origin in that area related to currency and agriculture? Not a big thing. The coins and tools of the Mediterranean world arrived in Northern Europe. There is a thing called trade.

    If Pytheas, a Greek from Marseilles, arrived in Scotland, it is reasonable to think that the Phoenicians from Cadiz could have done so because they were as good navigators as he was. The Britons invaded by Claudius minted coins that were a crude copy of Greek coins. More than a thousand years before that, works of religious art have been found in northern Europe that show Egyptian influence. I use several Japanese loanwords related to culture and technology probably derived from the time when the Japanese ruled Europe. Ah, no, they didn’t.

  18. “‘The Life and Death of Ancient Cities’ Review: Eternal Cities: It was not foreordained that the Romans would rule through cities, but that is how the empire came to work. ” By Kyle Harper | July 17, 2020
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-life-and-death-of-ancient-cities-review-eternal-cities-11594997623

    “The Life and Death of Ancient Cities” By Greg Woolf, OUP

    “And it is also true that cities flourished in what we usually think of as the golden ages of classical antiquity, first in Greece, and then in Rome. Yet to imagine these cities as somehow inevitable is to do injustice to the sheer diversity of urban models and trajectories. It also fosters an unwarranted teleology, in which the ancient city is the ancestor or forerunner of its modern counterparts. As Mr. Woolf puts it, “Their urban experience was utterly unlike our own.”

    “Mr. Woolf offers a magisterial survey of ancient cities running from the first experiments in the Ancient Near East to the twilight of classical urbanism in the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Even though demographic growth and technological progress were prerequisites of urbanism everywhere, actual cities developed under different stimuli—religious, ecological, economic and political.

    * * *

    “The Life and Death of Ancient Cities” is a big history that leaves aside some of those big comparative questions, preferring to draw out the contingent and the particular in its vivid portraits. Mr. Woolf makes for an authoritative, readable and thought-provoking guide through a few thousand years of our life as urban animals.”

  19. I take for granted that Pytheas did no more than take a Carthaginian ship on a regular trading voyage, as a passenger, perhaps boarding at Huelva in Spain (I believe the Carthaginians had barred the pillars of Hercules to ships from Greek colonies by that time). Carthaginian coins absolutely litter the very inlets in England that Mediterranean ships would be most likely to use to shelter from Atlantic tides. Greek coins do not.

    But those same coins, accepted as trade goods, are not themselves traded inland intact, but were either melted down or dropped, for us to find; and no evidence exists for Carthaginian settlement. When the Britons eventually first struck their own coins, a little before the Romans came, those coins were modelled on old knock-offs of Macedonian staters transmitted across Europe, not anything Carthaginian.

    Trading in ships beyond the edge of the world does not a superpower make, or the Vikings and Polynesians would be superpowers. This language stuff is ley-line crankery, finding patterns in noise.

  20. For some reason that came off sounding like a contradiction of Ginasius’ comment, rather than a supporting one.

  21. In the ‘non-myth of the Asian model minority’ thread, someone asked this:

    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?

    In my view, caste, religion and social cleavages have a lot to do with it. East Asia invested heavily in basic and primary education early on whereas South Asia mostly did not. Indian educational policy was notoriously biased towards the elite (IITs, IIMs etc). This was only very recently slightly rectified. Even today, basic education in India is terrible because of a huge shortage of resources. Too many groups fight over precious funds.

    In the diaspora, the non-desi majority force internal cohesion and these conflicts become far less salient. If you look at instances where South Asian immigrants have emigrated, including those from poor backgrounds, they have tended to rise quite quickly by 2nd gen. There are some religious differences here. Hindus tend to do better in this regard. There’s also intra-moslem distinctions, i.e. Bangladeshis tend to do somewhat better than Pakistanis.

    I don’t buy the IQ argument. It is true that IQ in India is lower than in East Asia, but that is also in large part due to environmental factors (malnutrition, stunting, viral load etc). If you look at Singapore, most of the early Indian diaspora was poor and indentured servants. Now they have done well for themselves there. It’s true that since the 1990s, there has been an increase in selective migration. But median Indian salaries were already very close by 1990 to ethnic Chinese ones.

    And that community was hardly very elite.

  22. @principa, Bishnupriya Gupta has argued that this large educational inequality in India, with successful tertiary education and relatively little primary and secondary education, is partially a legacy of British era underinvestment in (non-commercial / commodity) agricultural improvements, and in primary education, while over investing in some of the more conspiciously “civilising” aspects of development – like tertiary education, civil service, railroads. Leading to a dualistic structure with a subset of people who were well prepared for post-industrial service sector outsourcing, but not really the labour base for lots of industrialisation.

    I’m not sure if I totally buy into that explanation – it seems like it’s putting a lot of emphasis on the British for trends that are not substantially reversed even a couple generations after independence, relative to the factors you talk about. But it seems like that could be a part of the story and it seems like fairly intelligence economic historians find it plausible.

    Agree Singapore is an interesting “data point” for the questions of South Asian diaspora. It is a shame for our curiousity that they do not seem to publish too much data (as far as I can tell) on performance of different sub-populations, in English at least, but I suppose this is in keeping with the Singaporean approach to managing a diverse society.

    PISA data would be interesting to see for instance – the only published international test data with minority breakdowns I think was some data from the TIMSS, where I believe Singapore Malays had a very reduced performance gap relative Singaporean Chinese, compared to Malaysian Malays, though can’t remember in Singaporean Malays outperformed Western Europe or not – in any case some of the less nuanced “International Tests = IQ” commentators were a bit evasive about this ;).

    Apparently though Singaporean Malays outperformed the OECD average on PISA maths on the last batch of tests – https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/minister-masagos-points-to-historic-first-that-puts-a-shine-on-progress-of-muslim. I don’t think that’s published anywhere, just announced. OECD average on Maths was 489, so if outperform by nothing, still about Russia, Slovakia, Hungary or Lithuania’s average, who hit OECD average (comparisons to Western Europe slightly more complicated by migrants likely depressing scores, only to fairly small degrees in the grand scheme of things, but enough to be a relatively significant share of gap with developed East Asia). Malaysia itself performed at 440 in Maths, so the effect of being in Singapore on performance for the “same” ethnic group seems about at least (at minimum) +49 (which is pretty large; about the scale of the difference between French and Turkish/Greek natives).

    Indians within Singapore would I think be expected to outperform Malays, based what is likely from the other information about occupations and so on.

    Side note that also implies a larger PISA Maths gap between Singapore’s Han Chinese and Japan/Korea, greater than the overall Singapore->Japan+Korea gap, which is about +25 points, a bit more of a gap than by which Japan+Korea themselves outperform most of Western Europe, when excluding the likely disadvantage effect from migration.

  23. I’m not sure if I totally buy into that explanation – it seems like it’s putting a lot of emphasis on the British for trends that are not substantially reversed even a couple generations after independence

    You got that right. A big factor to refute historical determinism is that many of these decisions were made in the 1950s. The fact that some of the British trends were continued doesn’t necessarily imply that Indians are slaves to history. It just means that its elites were comfortable, and in fact insisted, on directing scarce resources to their progeny. In that sense, the old elite may have been Indian but it was still a very extractive elite which was less concerned about the poor than was the case in much of East Asia. Garibi Hatao and similar slogans were for electioneering. Actual policies was another matter.

    Agree Singapore is an interesting “data point” for the questions of South Asian diaspora. It is a shame for our curiousity that they do not seem to publish too much data (as far as I can tell) on performance of different sub-populations, in English at least

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Household_income

    the only published international test data with minority breakdowns I think was some data from the TIMSS, where I believe Singapore Malays had a very reduced performance gap relative Singaporean Chinese, compared to Malaysian Malays, though can’t remember in Singaporean Malays outperformed Western Europe or not – in any case some of the less nuanced “International Tests = IQ” commentators were a bit evasive about this ;).

    TIMSS is known to be much less g-loaded than PISA, so it wouldn’t necessarily prove that much. A simplification would be that PISA tests more for g-loaded cognitive skills wereas TIMSS is a better measure of the educational system itself. E.g. Russia does fantastic in TIMSS (#1 in the last one) but in PISA is does below OECD average and far from the East Asians.

    Though obviously PISA is not a one-to-one correlation with IQ, but it has been fairly strong (0.8 if I recall correctly), however even hereditarians acknowledge that environmental factors play a role in IQ. AFAIK, nobody serious claims a 100% hereditary position in relation to IQ. So, PISA is more strongly related to hard cognitive skills but even there you have plenty of room for environmental improvement.

    Apparently though Singaporean Malays outperformed the OECD average on PISA maths on the last batch of tests

    That’s interesting, but without publishing it, they sort of undermine the announcement. You need independent verification of the methodology to see that the data is solid. But I can believe it, given that Singapore is a pressure-cooker environment and is enormously rich, so resources thrown at the educational system isn’t a problem and the peer environment is helpful for motivation.

    All that said, as Nassim likes to point out, what matters is real world performance, not test. Israel doesn’t do great on PISA but has a nominal GDP per capita on par with France. Russia does about as well, but is 4.5X poorer. Poland does very well for the non-East Asian OECD world, but has a GDP per capita on par with Chile, which does considerably worse.

    There are many more skills to life than taking a test, though I am someone who will defend standardised testing. But because it is a fairly objective tool, however narrow, some people take it and run way too far into too many domains and in the process of doing so ignores many other factors.

    As Razib mentioned in his opening post, East Asians in the US are much less likely to be promoted than Indian-Americans (who are more likely than whites of similar qualifications). Obviously there are non-scholastic skills/factors at play here.

    This goes back to the original question that I tried to answer, given the success of the Indian diaspora, including those who came from modest backgrounds like in Singapore, how come India is significantly poorer than East Asia. I don’t think IQ (which is severely constrained in India due to malnutrition/stunting/viral load) can explain it. Sociological explanations have to be found which are credible and in keeping with how Indian polity has evolved, social cleavages etc. My answer is that at least partly caste has a lot to do with it, but there are likely many other factors.

    Another issue I’ve raised on Brown Pundits is how come Indian educational outcomes in India get so little attention in public policy. The basic school system is atrocious. You can’t explain it by claiming Indian parents don’t care (all social science research shows an enormous emphasis on education, even among the poorest). Yet there seems to be no accountability. Once again, caste, lingustic and religious factors must be a factor in explaining this discrepancy.

  24. Yeah, PISA is often over-scrutinized as explaining GDP per capita. Looking at similar levels of GDP per capita PPP (which is probably more relevant as a signal of living standards and development), Malaysia, Portugal, Poland and Greece have roughly similar GDP/cap PPP, but quite different performance on PISA. I mention it only as another possible test in the context of Singapore about how unselected South Asian groups could perform. (Whether GDP/capita is really a good measure of real world performance in development or not).

  25. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200723115855.htm – Cosmo, a bull CRISPRd to produce 75% male offspring. 50% who inherit his y chromosome, and another 25% who are XX but inherit his SRY gene inserted on chromosome 17 (attempts to make effectively a new Y chromosome from the X failed).

    Be interesting to see if the XX males produced are fitter or less fit, and how they differ from his XY offspring… Even if any of the “double SRY” with SRY on the chromosome 17 and y differ at all from the rest.

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