Are vegetarians dumber? Or are they vegetarians because they're dumber? The Kolkata Libertarian points me to this UPI article by one Jim Bennett on India and its relation to the Anglosphere. This part caught my attention:

If what we know about the correspondence between those factors is true, India, provided its course of reforms continues, should sooner or later outstrip China in economic, political, and military significance. Such a development would have profound consequences for the world's political and strategic balance. To consider India and China, however, we must ask why India not already surpassed China, or more broadly, why has India not done better than it has over the past half-century since its independence.

OK, this is the old Hindu-rate-of-growth problem. The standard explanation-echoed in the above piece-is that the "Permit Raj" prevented India from developing its true potential. The economic success of South Asians in the United States, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom (particularly non-Muslim South Asians) and Africa-pointed to an ability to succeed given a conducive framework. I think a more historically aware approach would look at the contrasts between India and China. While China spent the majority of its life as a civilization under a putatively centralized government, India usually existed as a complex of polities, ranging from tribal chiefdoms to literate kingdoms. The occasional mega-state, the Mauryas or Guptas for instance, resembled paramountcies rather than a true empire in the mold of Han China or Imperial Rome, their brevity preventing the formation of a horizontal ruling class that could permanently lay the substrate for later trans-subcontinental polities. The result of the Chinese bureaucratic state was a 2,000 year old tradition of civil service and social mobility. As a means to this end-the Chinese had a preoccupation with learning that percolated down to the lowest classes of the Han folk. On the other hand, one of the ironies of India history is that its chronology is dependent on foreigners! In particular, Chinese Buddhist pilgrims. This is due to two reasons. The more prosaic is the habit of writing on wood tablets-a rather perishable form of record. But a second reason is that Indian culture's preoccupation with the mystical and metaphysical tended to neglect the march of history. Producing Buddhism for export and Hinduism for domestic consumption, as well as pioneering areas of human knowledge such as grammar and mathematics, Indian civilization deserves a place with the Chinese and the Western. All three major civilizations had commonalities-in particular their ability to absorb "barbarians," whether it be Arabs, Franks or Tibetans, and ensure the character of their civilization remain dominant. But as I said, China had a civil service bureaucracy, while the West developed varieties of military feudalism (Europe had a form we are familiar with, while the Islamic world was awash in a proliferation of slave armies and barbarian converts in the service of Muslim potentates). India of course produced caste. As someone of Muslim heritage (though my paternal grandmother's family were Bengali Brahmin converts to Islam), I would be lying if I did not feel an ancient revulsion to this institution. The reality of class differences-and the brutal facts of poverty and destitution are clear to all. But it has always struck me as degrading to enshrine these "natural" divisions into a metaphysical system-the varna. That being said-India's culture has been remarkably resilient. While Islam seems brittle to the touch of Western influence, India seems to acclimating somewhat better-producing engineer's and Ms. Universes in turn. On the other hand, India is far behind China as an economic power-and even southeast Asian excluding the Communist states of Indo-China. Going back to India's political structure, and the social system that undergirds it, I believe we might glean one of the root causes of its relative weakness in comparison to China: its stratified but impermeable social system. While Turks, Moguls, Afghans, Marathas and British washed over India, the basic village structures continued with relatively little disruption. These elites that "ruled" the subcontinent siphoned off the tax revenue to maintain their empires and make them profitable. But the social structures that crystallized during the Gupta Age continued to form the everyday basis of Indian civilization. And for an agrarian economy guided by tradition this was sufficient. But the technological age requires different responses. The Indians that immigrate to the developed West are predominantly twice-born, the three higher castes in Hinduism, and Sikhs. Those that settled the plantation colonies in Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana and Trinidad were more likely to be peasants. Though none of these nations have Indian populations as destitute as those in India-and in fact in Fiji, Guyana and Trinidad the Indians are generally considered the dominant factors in the private sector economies-neither are they "Tiger" economies. My general point? It seems plausible that social capital in the Indian subcontinent has been monopolized by certain castes-and due to their endogamous nature it does not permeate the society as a whole. In the Republic of India 10% of the people are "tribal" and another 15% Dalit-that's 25% of your population that is deprived of social capital and prevented by cultural norms from acquiring it because of hereditary status. Another 10% are Muslim-almost all from the lower social orders and held back by a religion that frankly distrusts modernization as the vehicle of its rival-Westernization. I had seen numbers that estimate that the twice-born form about 40% of India's population (the Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaisyas). The Sudras-and especially the southern Sudras that take the spots of Kshatriyas and Vaisyas in regions that don't have these castes-occupy a middle place, not twice-born, but not unclean like the Dalits. Though women can marry up-hypergamy-men generally can not go up in the caste system. This sort of artificial or culturally based system of endogamy fractures the Indian genetic and cultural pool. Sweepers are sweepers, farmers are farmers, and so forth. Of course people break out of these preordained roles sometimes-but surely it is more difficult when your religion and your familial traditions dictate that continue to follow a certain profession. But one last thing. And this goes back to the title of my post. Indians have a rather low IQ, 81 to be exact. Chinese have higher one, around 100. Steve Sailer has proposed that there are chicken-and-egg problems in this case. To some extent, he is probably correct. But I think it likely that certain castes have higher IQs that 81, while others may have lower ones. Throughout history Indian high culture has existed atop the masses-and it maybe that the software revolution will spread horizontally, but not penetrate vertically. I wonder if perhaps Indian vegetarianism prevents them from developing their full intellectual potential? Then again, high-caste and southern Indians are the most likely to be vegetarian, and these are the bright ones! We will know in about 20 years. India has a stable democracy and some adherence to law and order. Though illiteracy is appalling-it also has many college graduates. The ingredients are there, if the recipe doesn't produce a good dish, we will have to rethink whether it is just the environment that is the problem. Equivocations: I am willing to be corrected on the rough percentages of the four varna. I took the highest number I've seen for twice-born I remember-I've seen statistics that show Brahmins are only 2% of India's population, so I am honestly skeptical that 38% of India's population could be termed "middle-castes." Also-I don't mean to imply that the caste system has been deleterious in the past. The sheer number of Indians-from antiquity onward (the Greeks believed that India-the Indus river system-was the most populous country in the world)-points toward its success. But there are many models for a pre-modern civilization, and fewer ones once many people get powerful weapons in their hands and information in their heads.