As distinct from happiness, of course:
1. If a kid does badly in school, does the parent genuinely get mad at the kid and withhold affection?
2. Can people wait in an orderly line?
3. Can people stay in their designated lane when driving a car?
I wonder how these variables, if measured, would fare in cross-country growth regressions. I covered these points and others in my talk in Buenos Aires. Going way back, here is my sushi test for minimal levels of social trust.
Don’t Asian-Americans fail (1)?
Don’t Asian-Americans fail (1)?
What do you count as “failure”? Withholding, or not withholding? I don’t know what Asians do, so I can’t use that knowledge to try to interpret what you’re saying.
I don’t know about that. My experience in Beijing indicates that #3 is unlikely at best, #2 is out of the question and #1 (as a teacher) seems to be up for quite a bit of debate, yet, would China be considered a complete failure culturally?
What, outside of these parameters, defines “cultural success?”
They do have sushi, for what it’s worth.
Re: the “sushi test” from your 2004 post. I offer Russia as a counterexample.
Sushi restaurant chains are springing up all over Moscow, and seem to be doing well, usually quite full. It is far from clear that this means people in Russia trust one another, or that Russia is a great place for foreigners to invest.
I hope this is tongue-in-cheek. 2 and 3 are ridiculously anglo-saxon measures of cultural success. (1 seems more culturally invariant.)
Sweden seems to be the reverse of India. Possibly no on the first one and emphatically yes to the other two.
The variables are probably endogenous anyway. For example point 1: a child’s education gains importance after a society overcomes subsistance agriculture.
I thought that was the point. The parents wouldn’t be angry and withhold affection for poor academic performance if a country’s economy was based on subsistence agriculture, because education wouldn’t matter much.
The variables are probably endogenous anyway. For example point 1: a child’s education gains importance after a society overcomes subsistance agriculture.
I thought that was the point. The parents wouldn’t be angry and withhold affection for poor academic performance if a country’s economy was based on subsistence agriculture, because education wouldn’t matter much.
“2 and 3 are ridiculously anglo-saxon measures of cultural success.” and “Why not just add darkness of skin and be done with it?”
So are you saying that objectively beneficial behaviors are inappropriate measures of success when they are associated more with “anglo-saxons” than other cultures/races, or are you claiming that having orderly lines and drivers who stay in their lanes is not an objective benefit?
I agree with Doug – for each of these criteria, meeting the criterion is objectively better than not meeting them. I’d be interested in how highly modernized non-Western cultures perform on this. How’s Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore? How’s the first-world parts of South Africa? And just for general interest, how’s Russia?
I have to disagree that #3 is objectively better. There’s probably some degree of “not staying in your lane, but paying attention to your surroundings” that could well make traffic more efficient. There were places in China where it seemed to me that squeezing lanes made better use of the roads.
Or take a look at videos of this genre: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vietnam%20crossing%20the%20street&search_type=&aq=f
Have not seen all Asian families, only a large extended Chinese one (4 generations, more than 350 members in US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, China and Malaysia).
Withholding affection is one way of trying to enforce parental will/wishes/hopes/dreams, but there are other Chinese parents who love unconditionally. However, ALL are ambitious for their children. See Joy Luck Club, the movie, for good generalizations of how Chinese families can differ.
Funny, people in Hong Kong often call main-landers “mei wen hua” (literally “uncultured”) often for (2) and (3)
It seems to me that (3) says a lot more about whether or not enough roads have been built to handle the traffic than about the culture. People in Los Angeles aren’t that culturally different from the rest of the US, but they’ve developed some quite aggressive behavior on the freeways (such as forcing your way in front of the driver in the next lane with no warning, even though he’s tailgating to try to prevent exactly that) to deal with the severe shortage of freeway capacity in the region.
If the “green” belief system succeeds in keeping freeway-building stopped over most of the country, expect the LA behavior and other forms of “road rage” to greatly increase as a result — and don’t let the nanny-statists tell you that it’s drivers’ fault. People can tell when they’re being treated unfairly, and they have no obligation to be nice about it.
Regarding the supposed “Anglo-Saxon bias” of #3, is it also culturally biased to be interested in how many people needlessly die on the roads every year because of drivers who don’t follow the rules?
A quick search turned up this report. Admittedly it is from the 1980s but from my recollection in seeing similar sources from more recent years, the patterns haven’t changed substantially. Here are deaths per 10,000 registered vehicles in different cities:
Bangkok – 10
Delhi – 26
Bombay – 31
Hong Kong – 10
Seoul – 43
Now here are the numbers for some developed country cities:
New York – 2.2
Tokyo – 1.4
London – 2.2
Of course, this is only one of many variables we would be interested in measuring “cultural success” so, naturally, there isn’t a perfect correlation with GDP per capita nor would we ever expect one. But it does point to the idea that some cultures are more willing to follow certain norms even when there aren’t police on every street corner in order to benefit society as a whole.
Source
Tyler’s #3 point refers to my 2007 article “Fragmented Future” on Robert D. Putnam’s work on social cooperation, in which I wrote:
“As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.”
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_01_15/cover.html
My question for Tyler is whether the freeways in Buenos Aires have become more orderly over the last 30 years.
“I have long thought that a culture was too uncivilized when its people can’t spontaneously organize themselves into a line (or queue if you are European) when waiting for something. At the other extreme, a culture is overcivilized when its people will wait at a stoplight in a remote area when it is obvious that there are neither other cars to hit or police assets there to ticket them”
http://ideasinprogress.blogspot.com/2005/06/how-much-civilization-is-too-much.html
“At the other extreme, a culture is overcivilized when its people will wait at a stoplight in a remote area when it is obvious that there are neither other cars to hit or police assets there to ticket them”
Yeah, I thought that too, until I turned at a red light late at night when it seemed like no one was around for miles, and a cop came around the bend behind me, just in time to see me do it and pull me over.
By this standard New York is at the nadir of cultural success, which seems right to me.
We can give you the best cabal money and best service.
Everything is decided by the market instead of any single human being’s personal feeling.
But opportunity and efforts are same important on the way to yr goal.
Like the aion gold performance in the market.
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