April 9, 2011

India v. China, Again

From the WSJ:
BANGALORE, India—Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal. 
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants. 
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges. 
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India. 
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore. ... 
Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group. 
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group. 
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level. ... 
Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper. 
That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.

The Chinese strategy has been to create hundreds of millions of jobs for people to do with their hands, while the Indian strategy has been to create tens of millions of jobs for people to do while sitting on utility chairs tapping on computers and talking on headsets. The Chinese strategy of industrializing first with textiles, moving up to toys, then to industrial parts, and so forth, has worked before in multiple countries over the last 250 years. The Indian strategy of leaping over all that sweaty stuff right to post-industrial jobs appeals to post-industrial Americans, but it's less of a sure thing. 

It's worked fine so far for the right edge of India's bell curve, but nobody is very sure what the left 90% of India's bell curve looks like. Here in America, we aren't even supposed to think in terms of bell curves, so we are unequipped to even think about the question.

On the other hand, with China getting a dozen year head start on India at capitalism, would there have been all that much opportunity for India in industry?

239 comments:

1 – 200 of 239   Newer›   Newest»
IHTG said...

Shades of Booker vs Dubois?

Anonymous said...

The most important sentence in this piece is the one that admits to the US not being equipped to even ask certain questions about cognition in potential trade partners, allies and competitors.

I hope that PC is left outside the intelligence agencies' doors, but I doubt it.

Anon.

Anonymous said...

It's worked fine so far for the right edge of India's bell curve, but nobody is very sure what the left 90% of India's bell curve looks like.

I once saw a documentary on India which showed a clan of members of the left side of India's bell curve grabbing rats by their tails, smashing them against the ground, holding them over an open fire and eating them straightaway - all with savage glee. It was quite disturbing and eye-opening, since I mostly think of Indians as pleasant professional or mercantile types based on the Indian immigrants I have encountered.

Anonymous said...

I am a software engineer and work in Silicon Valley so I am very familiar with the topic. One thing that has always struck me about the Indian tech workers is how mediocre they are. In the last 15 years, I have worked with at least hundreds or maybe even thousands of these guys, and yet, I can’t recall a single one of them coming across as brilliant. This is amazing, considering that they make up close to 50% of all tech workers in Silicon Valley. The great majority of these guys know just enough to get the job done. Most of them work towards transitioning into other roles, like program manager, team lead, vendor management, etc, after coming here on an H1B visa, which is technically illegal. In my department, we just had two H1Bs, a DBA and a Database Architect, transition into program manager roles and now their vacant position is going to be filled with two new H1Bs again. This cycle never stops.

Anonymous said...

"Consider the mainland's 1.6 million young engineers. Their education is generally biased towards theory, and they get little practical experience in projects or teamwork. As a result, despite seeming so numerous, the mainland's pool of young engineers considered suitable for work in multinationals is just 160,000 – no larger than Britain's. Hence the paradox of shortages amid plenty.
"



China has a skill shortage too.

Anonymous said...

Right you are Steve.

Yes, we keep reading all the time about India's powess as an industrial superpower, but everyday when I am down at the shops I see very little ecidence of Indian products for sale.When I do see them, they are usually low priced handicratfs, for some reason - carved elephants and the like.
Of course China makes everything from socks to I-Pads, powerrangers to heavy trucks, underpants to televisions, grinding machines to claw hammers etc etc.
We keep hearing about Indian prowess in computers - but when have you ever seen the smallest, most basic computing component with a 'Made in India' stamp?
There could be a deeper reason for this - I don't know if indians have the aptitude, patience and sheer grit to do an 8-hour factory shift which might involve persistence and fine motor skills or just repititive drudgery - I think this is an important point.Contrary to what many claim, the ability to be an efficient factory worker depends a large part on personality traits, I'm sure many ethnicities can't 'buckle down' in a factory job, just in the same way they can't 'buckle down' in the classroom.

Anonymous said...

Tens of millions is an overestimate of the professional services sector.

"The entire software and technology-services sector, including call centers and outsourcing, directly employs just 2.5 million workers, a tiny fraction of the overall work force."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703313304576131792120382006.html

So definitely not tens of millions since 2.5 million includes call centers, the lowliest of office work. I don't see how that model could work.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure many ethnicities can't 'buckle down' in a factory job, just in the same way they can't 'buckle down' in the classroom.
--
Manufacturing cost is perhaps 15% based on labor. No Indian state has reliable electricity. There are outages everyday even in major cities. The roads are poor. Rail is expensive. All the other costs of manufacturing are high in India.

Anonymous said...

Most countries build the trappings of a developed nation, but they don't actually function properly. Besides the overeducated unemployable workforce one finds all over the globe, there are institutions such as China's non-functioning stock market. Why are the best managed, fastest growing companies selling themselves in NY, London and Hong Kong?

The race for credentials is no different in the U.S. Would hearing of a 25% increase in high school and college graduates make you think there has been any educational improvement?

As for economic development, China was literally starting from scratch. When you're that far behind, you have to be really stupid or dysfunctional as a society not to benefit from building roads, bridges, rail roads, telecom infrastructure, etc. Still, India and China rely on export markets because they do not have dynamic internal economies. How screwed up are their societies that their best and brightest look to sell/go overseas, instead of to the 1.3 billion fellow citizens?

Anonymous said...

Salary table

If you want see how absurd the skilled professionals shortage in India take a look at that chart of salaries for STARTING attorneys in India at top firms.

The richest firm pays $26k USD as a starting salary. This is in a country of about $1000 per capita.

Panagea3 which is the main legal outsourcing firm pays $11-16k USD.

Maybe India doesn't even have a top 10% of world matchers. Just a top 5%.

Bruce Charlton said...

Greg Clark - in A Farewell to Alms - estimated that the productivity of Indian cotton mill workers in the 19th century was about 12 (twelve) percent that of UK workers.

RandyB said...

Another key difference between India and China is the one described by Jeremy Siegel -- China has been emphasizing physical industrialization, while India has been creating an environment of economic freedom that's supposed to encourage innovation. The obvious downside to China is that they've been paying for economic advancement with the health and safety of their people. That might work for them, considering their society's traditional low value on human life, or it might blow up as citizens start demanding a better quality of life as part an improving economy.

India has such a large population and stratified society, that they might very well may have a sub-population reflective of US Caucausians -- 200 million people with an average IQ of 100. If that group marries and reproduces solely within itself and stops emigrating after college, they could create an economy as large as the US, the challenge being how much of it they have to throw off to the other billion. India's Gini Index is currently pretty low for the kind of country they are (with nuclear weapons and hundreds of millions of starvation peasants). Their upside could be a GDP the size of the USAs, with the Gini of Brazil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

They knocked on Tom Friedman's door to get his opinion, but he's at the far end of his house, so it'll take a few hours for him to get there.

It's interesting to think that the current crop of Indian call center staffers is considered to have "acceptable" English and computer skills. If those guys are the best of the best, they're in trouble - real trouble.

India has 1.2 billion people. Take the top 2% of Indians in terms of talent and you get 24 million people. Send 1/8th of those drawn at random to the US and you get the number of Indians we now have - 3 million. That subclass of Indians is now the second richest ethnic group in the United States, but what do the top 2% of non-Jewish white Americans look like? Probably not too shabby, either. Almost definitely richer than the Indians.

It'll be interesting to see if our Congress, via its immigration policies, has created a new group of "Jews" who will consider themselves a separate and superior group, and always work to look after the interests of the home country.

Anonymous said...

I don't knoe if there are any Malaysian readers of isteve out there, but it would be very interesting to hear the Malaysian perspective on all this.
Malaysia has had a big Chinese population coexist with a big Indian population for over a century.The ethnic Malays are caught in between.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure it's an advantage to hire people who don't speak English to talk to Americans, as long as the purpose of the call is to "meet the customer's needs" or "properly direct complaints". After the money has changed hands, the company is best off trying to get the caller to give up as fast as possible.

Franklin R said...

With a nod to your recent 'termites' article, there are some generalized personality differences between South Asians and NE Asians that might play a role here. South Asians are more Extroverted than NE Asians, whereas NE Asians are probably more Conscientious. That might mean that call center type jobs would work better in India than China, but manufacturing might work better in China. This of course, doesn't factor IQ differences between the groups in, just mentioning that general personality differences could be playing a role.

Henry Canaday said...

India appears to be following the Irish strategy of skipping all the miserable parts of the industrial revolution and moving straight to the talk-and-type post-industrial jobs. Or, rather, India makes stuff, but still the old-fashioned socialist way, through government-owned enterprises, which are pretty much invisible in export markets.

Just been through 'Dell Hell' after a PC crash. All the people were very nice, India is an extraordinarily polite country, but the technical competence seems to have declined over the past several years.

sykes.1 said...

So India right now is "all it can be." How sad.

I recently retired from the engineering faculty at a major university. Over half our graduate students are Chinese--all mainland, no Taiwanese, Hong Kong, et al.

When I was a graduate student in the 60s, we had a few Indians, but they have gradually disappeared from US campuses. The ones I personally knew were mediocre, and very arrogant. On the other hand, my former department is trying to hire an Australian-Pakistani who is brilliant and sociable, very confidant but nor arrogant.

All in all, it seems clear that India has lost the competition with China. We should give up our efforts to seduce India into an alliance (let the Russians keep them), and cozy up to the Chinese.

Anonymous said...

Off topic, but here's a new low in the minority voting rights gerrymandering:
http://www.kndo.com/Global/story.asp?S=14362370

Even though the city has the same number of whites and Latinos, "The white population votes at a larger percentage than Latinos thereby over ruling every time the Latino group disagrees with the white vote."

Chicago said...

If they can't find the talent in India they sure won't find it in the Philippines or Nicaragua. The Chinese took a more pragmatic approach by going into production at the lower end and cranking out products, gradually improving their capabilities until they worked their way up to the point where they have their own space program. That's a lot of toys and shoes to get where they've gotten. They're also better at providing quick infrastructure to expedite manufacturing, such as roads, power, shipping, etc.
India seems to have thought that they could get by with developing intellectual resources amongst the population, a top down approach, and that that would provide some sort of locomotive for growth, which it does to some extent but it isn't particularly impressive when competing with the first world. The Indians are also disorganized and bureaucratic. Might just be part of the cultural and racial differences between the Indians and Chinese.
Of course, the theme behind this is finding foreigners who can fit the bill but on the cheap. Don't want to develop American talents as one would have to pay them more money.

Anonymous said...

"The Chinese strategy has been to create hundreds of millions of jobs for people to do with their hands, while the Indian strategy..."

Indians have a strategy? Chinese society is state-managed (and good for them, I say), while Indian society is a free-for-all. The Chinese can be more positive about state management than Indians or Americans would be because China is far more homogeneous than India or America. If the US government didn't redistribute from whites to blacks, I'm sure more Euro-Americans would feel positive about the government managing the economy too.

In short, the Chinese have a strategy, but Indians don't. They mostly just watch what happens naturally.

My only experience with non-elite Indians has been with Caribbean Indians (Guyana, Trinidad). In some ways they're like SE Asians - hard-working, low-testosterone, family-oriented, not at all altruistic, with perhaps a similar mean IQ. But I don't know exactly how far down the Indian human capital ladder the ancestors of Caribbean Indians were. If all non-elite Indians were like that, then India of the future could be like Malaysia of today, with the elites playing the role of the Chinese.

Anonymous said...

OT.

Sidney Lumet RIP.

He made some clunkers but DOG DAY AFTERNOON and PRINCE OF THE CITY will be forever. His adaptation of LONG DAY'S JOURNEY was pretty good too.

Anonymous said...

"The great majority of these guys know just enough to get the job done. Most of them work towards transitioning into other roles, like program manager, team lead, vendor management, etc, after coming here on an H1B visa, which is technically illegal."

Being a manager lets one screw up royally in slow motion -- so by the time the Hindu's supervisors figure out he's a moron, he has probably collected a cool million in salary and benefits which he can then plow into a quickimart or cab company. Though chances are he won't be found out before the company goes chapter 11.

Gud bless Amelika!

Anonymous said...

Steve Sailer: It's worked fine so far for the right edge of India's bell curve, but nobody is very sure what the left 90% of India's bell curve looks like.

I feel like we Westerners can "grok" China [and, long term, it's not difficult to imagine possible futures in which China is our closest ally], but India is really, really weird.

Like waayyy beyond the the typical Westerner's "grokitudinal" capacity:


The Gandhi Nobody Knows
Richard Grenier
March 1983
commentarymagazine.com

...When Gandhi attended his first Indian National Congress he was most distressed at seeing the Hindus—not laborers but high-caste Hindus, civic leaders—defecating all over the place, as if to pay attention to where the feces fell was somehow unclean. (For, as V.S. Naipaul puts it, in a twisted Hindu way it is unclean to clean. It is unclean even to notice. “It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.”) Gandhi exhorted Indians endlessly on the subject, saying that sanitation was the first need of India, but he retained an obvious obsession with excreta, gleefully designing latrines and latrine drills for all hands at the ashram, and, all in all, what with giving and taking enemas, and his public bowel movements, and his deep concern with everyone else’s bowel movements (much correspondence), and endless dietary experiments as a function of bowel movements, he devoted a rather large share of his life to the matter. Despite his constant campaigning for sanitation, it is hard to believe that Gandhi was not permanently marked by what Arthur Koestler terms the Hindu “morbid infatuation with filth,” and what V.S. Naipaul goes as far as to call the Indian “deification of filth.” (Decades later, Krishna Menon, a Gandhian and one-time Indian Defense Minister, was still fortifying his sanctity by drinking a daily glass of urine.)...

none of the above said...

Anonymous (story about rats):

Don't confuse potential intelligence with culture/civilization. Plenty of the ancestors of the guys designing next-generation microprocessors, developing the next anti-cancer drug, working on getting another couple bits in the biggest quantum computer, etc., took great joy in eating the heart of the just-killed animal raw, or sticking the heads of their tribal enemies on pikes as trophies, or whatever. Go back more than a few generations, and we're all savages.

A much different question is, how much of the right end of the bell curve in India and China have they gotten into play so far, and how much more can they get into play quickly. This is more complicated in poor countries than in rich ones, because a lot of people in India who might have been pretty bright grew up malnourished and parasite-ridden in third-world poverty, and so won't be fine-tuning the search algorithms for Google anytime soon, even if they'd have blossomed into geniuses had they been born into a first-world standard of living. And of course, we only see the very brightest Indians in tech jobs in the US, where they're often very bright indeed.

If there's a large pool of very bright people who could be brought into the economy relatively simply in India, then they can continue to grow in terms of offering lower-cost access to very bright people. To the extent that those people either aren't there, or can't easily be reached (corrupt schools and poverty that persists for social/political reasons means you can't turn potential smarts into available smarts), India will hit limits to how much cheap smart people time can be sold.

I know a fair number of very bright Indian and Chinese scientists who have gone back home, or who are considering it, because there are a lot of opportunities for accomplished people at the top there that simply weren't around 10 years ago. (Obviously, it's much easier to convince an Indian mathematician from Bombay to move back to where she grew up, than to convince a white American to move to Bombay to take a job there, thousands of miles from his family, surrounded by unfamiliar culture and languages and diseases, etc.)

But that simply tells us that there's a pool of smart people who they used to export, and they can now keep home; it doesn't tell us how much available potential they still have.

Anonymous said...

It's not your main theme, but it looks like wasteful education spending (to signal an egalitarian caring?) may be a problem in India, too.

Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

Anonymous said...

The missing ingredient in the Indian off site call center strategy is management.

In 2001 I was managing a team of programmers and data base personnel at an Internet start up. My last couple employers had gone belly up so I was looking around for my next berth. I wanted to avoid being "on the sidewalk" again when my company inevitably went bankrupt.

That's how I came to interview for a job to supervise an Indian call center. The Indian entrepreneurs figured they could save so much money using their native people in the public contact seats that they could afford to fly in American managers. Yes, that's right. It was a job with a very, very long commute - half the planet. I was supposed to fly to India and back three times a month.

I made it to the final stage of interviews. There were just two candidates left before the young Indians went bust. It wasn't a total loss. I hired the other candidate but we both hit the bricks in a couple weeks when, as expected, my employer also went bust.

Albertosaurus

The Wobbly Guy said...

Here's one more data point - India education is overrated. Why are even Indian graduates unemployable?

http://forum.brightsparks.com.sg/showthread.php?p=49975

The relevant section:

"A local teacher from a top junior college who mentored a teacher from India was concerned that he was not used to the way lessons were run here.

'The teacher had a more traditional way of teaching - coming with a prepared speech and not expecting questions by students,' he said.

Mr Mukherjee, for example, said he has to get used to the rather more lively classroom culture here. He said: 'In Kolkata, students listen to you and the class is quiet. It's not the case here so it's a bit of a culture shock.'"

No questioning. No sense of curiosity, of inquiry. And we're surprised they suck?

What about China? I'm not sure, so I guess I need to find out a bit more about how much questioning and debate goes on in the classrooms over there. Hmmmm... who should I ask?

Michael Farris said...

Blogger just ate my longer comment but a lot can also be traced to language policy and education.

A clear majority in China speak roughly mutually intelligible versions of Mandarin. Written Chinese and spoken Mandarin have no rivals and are used in all spheres of life.
And the government is roughly committed to widespread access to education.

There's no single linguistic carrier of Indian identity. Hindi is not spoken by a majority even in the north. And English has the handicap of having its center elsewhere. India does not (and will not) set standards of usage and many Indians see it more as a ticket out of India rather than a way of being Indian.

After the states were re-organized along linguistic lines India (when it works ... kind of) is kind of like the EU a lot of locally governed language areas that live alongside and not with each other.

And India doesn't have any real commitment to broad education. It's traditionally been a resource hoarded by elites who restrict access to it.

If I had to bet on one country doing better my money would be on China.

Anonymous said...

In the last 15 years, I have worked with at least hundreds or maybe even thousands of these guys, and yet, I can’t recall a single one of them coming across as brilliant.... Most of them work towards transitioning into other roles, like program manager, team lead, vendor management, etc,

In other words, they want the "people jobs" for which they are suited.

There could be a deeper reason for this - I don't know if indians have the aptitude, patience and sheer grit to do an 8-hour factory shift which might involve persistence and fine motor skills or just repititive drudgery

No but like so many other NAMs they have great social skills, which count for everything in the world of educrats, HR types, and upper management.

John said...

In general, it is safe to say that India has worse government, worse infrastructures and lower educational attainment of her people when compared to China. The current model of India does not help to close that gap. All these smart people working for multinationals are not out there creating companies that will hire people on the other side of the bell curve. And without someway to lift the left side masses, infrastructures won't be built since they need scale. In the mean time, growth rate will slow since a big portion is dependent on the outsourcing market. They will run out of smart people that can do the job. Especially if the masses are not participating at all in the recent economic growth.

Anonymous said...

While China does have the strategy to create a more balanced economy and more manufacturing, she is also way ahead of India in the research and development front as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/28/china-us-publisher-scientific-papers

SomeBozo said...

@Anonymous software eng. in SV: Well how many brilliant non-Indians do you know? Maybe you're just not in a brilliance-requiring industry. Though having said that I was in a hedge fund that /did/ require brilliance, and I don't recall any Indians. Some Chinese, one Iranian (I think). But enh, too small a statistical sample. One brilliant guy at grad school (an nth-tier one, because American schools didn't trust his perfect-score GRE!), and a wicked-smart guy at another company. /my anecdotes.

Anonymous said...

The sound you hear is the sound of millions of Indians rallying their brothers to comment on this post in order to protect the honor of India.

Anonymous said...

"Yes, we keep reading all the time about India's powess as an industrial superpower, but everyday when I am down at the shops I see very little ecidence of Indian products for sale."

There is much truth to this. However, I think India has one advantage over the Chinese.
In the 18th and first half of the 19th century, France and England were called, respectively, the elephant and the whale. France was the predominant land power in Europe while England was the the premier sea-faring power.
In the Asian equation, China is the elephant and India is the whale. Though China depends on global trade, its economy has centered on building factories IN China. Though there is a dynamic over-seas Chinese community and the China has been investing heavily in places like Africa, Chinese have been less successful in breaking into the cultural modes of other nations. Chinese are hard workers and tough bargainers but not the best hagglers and schmoozers.
Otoh, Chinese in Hong Kong, Singapore, and some parts of Southeast Asia may have come under sufficently long white/western rule to know how the West works, and at least in that respect, have something in common with Indian elites who grew accustomed to British rule for 2 centuries.
Indians, having long had contact with the most powerful and progressive Western nation, know more about the world than the Chinese do. It also helped that Brits spawned US, an English-speaking superpower still politically, culturally, and economically close to the UK. Indian connection to UK opened the door to America as well. Also, Hindus, perhaps more than any other non-whites, followed the British everywhere--Middle East, AFrica, etc--to ply their trade during the era of British imperialism. Brits used Hindus as middlemen, Hindus use the British as the bridge. If Jews and Anglos are the masters of the global system, Hindus have something of their strength and qualities, having worked in the same system for so long.

Anyway, while Chinese power is very evident IN China, India power is really found BETWEEN India and the West. This might work fine for India if it were a smaller nation, but what works fine for its globalist class doesn't work well for the masses of the unwashed.

China vs India is also complicated by issues of race, geography, diversity, history, politics, culture, etc.
It can be seen as East Asian vs South Asian, Chinese homogeneity vs Indian diversity, temperate zone nation vs tropical zone nation, Chinese chauvinism/xenophobia vs Indian westernism/cosmopolitanism(at least among the elites), Confucianism vs Hinduism/Islam, authoritarianism vs democracy, heavy-tech vs high-tech, etc.

My prediction is Chinese will do better in China, Indians will do better in the realm between nations.

Anonymous said...

Interesting piece on the mini-dragon.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/24/vietnam-now/

David said...

Indians are far from ideal immigrants. Look at the links below.



MUST-READ Articles on Indians:


Richard Lynn, IQ & the Wealth of Nations: Average IQ of India is 81



India & Racial Admixture: India is the Brazil of Asia

http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/2633384/1/




Software Executive says Indians are Incompetent Programmers, Cheats and Frauds

http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102709.htm




The growing Indian lobby mirrors Israel lobby:

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1404/article_1241.shtml





Indians are the second largest group of illegal aliens in the United States:

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2011/02/20/h-1b-and-illegal-immigration/




English woman speaks frankly about having a mixed-race baby with man from India:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-467787/I-love-mixed-race-baby--does-feel-alien.html

Svigor said...

The sound you hear is the sound of millions of Indians rallying their brothers to comment on this post in order to protect the honor of India.

Attitude, they got in spades.

Ash said...

(1) I work in IT in the U.S. There are so many Indians where I work that there was an impromptu celebration when India recently won the World Series of Cricket.

(2) A lady from Britain once told me that America's Indian immigrants seem to be smarter on average than Britain's Indian immigrants.

(3) Are you sure India isn't also trying the textiles route? I seem to remember seeing "Made in India" on clothes recently...

alexis said...

Another fine quote from Ed Abbey:
"The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it."

Anonymous said...

No, not this crap again....

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ludBO7mOY

watch the interview, goddammit. It made me puke a little in my mouth. Indian elites are the worst anywhere.

Chris said...

Ash: "(2) A lady from Britain once told me that America's Indian immigrants seem to be smarter on average than Britain's Indian immigrants."

This is true. Having lived in the UK and USA, I have found that many of the Indians who came to the US were the cream of the crop (higher IQ), while many of the Indians who went to the UK were manual laborers. Indians in the UK are much more like American blacks. (Average IQ of India is only 81.) The situation in the US is changing, however. Chain migration is bringing over many lower IQ Indians. Indian ghettos in NJ are starting to resemble black ghettos. And now, Indians are the second largest group of illegal immigrants in the US:

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2011/02/20/h-1b-and-illegal-immigration/

Chris said...

Ash: "(2) A lady from Britain once told me that America's Indian immigrants seem to be smarter on average than Britain's Indian immigrants."

I meant to say: This is NOT true. See comment above.

Whiskey said...

India has a very large and active Marxist/Maoist rebellion. It has a thin elite, with fractured physical power (men with guns). This is not a recipe for success, rather human history suggests civil war. If 99.99% of the population won't even be working call centers, and wants nice things, the easiest way is to take up arms and take them from other people who have them but are not good at fighting.

Anonymous said...

I have asked this question in other venues and have only been dismissed for racism.

What is that smell - pungent, a mix of old sweat and bad curry - which wafts from the dwellings of 1st generation Indians? It is *not* hygiene, since the premises appear quite clean. It is not cooking, since I am used to Indian cooking.

This is even evident in some Indian-owned motels, where the scent is apparent throughout the buildings.

What is it?

A random Indian said...

The main problem with Indian English education is the way it is taught. In writing exercises, a certain rigid format, including specific punctuation is strictly enforced. Deviation from the format by as much as a single comma WILL result in your doom. The actual writing doesn't really matter in terms of marks. You can write utter bullshit and still receive marks.

So, students aren't encouraged to actually learn how to speak English fluently. Instead, they are made to write letters and reports, which are graded primarily on format, making the best bots get the best marks. This is not the way to make them fluent in the language, at all. There is no focus on pronounciation - and I believe doing that would be hard as teachers and state ministerial candidates alike have terrible pronounciation.

The only place to show off your writing and general skill with the language is in essays and story writing. However, as it happens, the education board is all for making everyone pass and to diminish the difference between the two ends of the bell curve each essay and story is given a rigid outline with several proto-sentences. The only difference from one paper to another is now a preposition or two, and other minor adjustments. No new points. In fact, adding them is a recipe for disaster as examiners take any deviation from the norm like a thorn in their butt.

In short, english education is an absolute joke. While the other subjects each have a good syllabus [ save for maths which is a mile wide and an inch deep ] , English needs a revamp. Add to this the fact that the exams of grade 10 and grade 12 are not very g-loaded [ outside of a few questions in maths, physics, and chemistry papers, it will be odd to see anything which was not fixable by more memorization ] and that the IIT-JEE is , in fact, g-loaded [ causing extra tuition to be almost mandatory for IIT-JEE as the students simply have not become used to using their brains enough ] and you have one fucked up education system. India will never progress till this is fixed.

Anonymous said...

Chris,
Sikhs in the UK are about on par with whites while Hindus are richer. Although the muslims as a whole are not faring too well, the worst among them have gang violence/other issues that mirror the problems associated with the white working class(without the divorce and single motherhood that characterizes them as well).

Anonymous said...

In a very direct (and perhaps mean) way, British colonialists divided up the peoples of India into 'martial' (ie good at fighting) and non-martial races.
Examples of martial races were the Sikhs and Gurkhas, the Bengalis were considered 'non-martial'.
Anyhow it is my contention that in general, sub-coninental Indians make poor soldiers and poor resistors of oppression - their whole history is just a litany of one conquest after another by small bands of tough foreign invaders, who were massively outnumbered.
By contrast east Asians have always shown to themselves to be tough, hard, determined little buggers in warfare, as any American who fought the Japanese will attest.China was humiliated in the 19th century because it was decadent and backward - a phase never to be repeated.
What has this got to do with comparing Indian economic growth to Chinese economic growth?, well, I contend that te same tough, determined, irrepressible fighting spirit that makes a nation good soldiers - willing to fight unflinchingly to the death rather than face dishonor or defeat - is exactly the same spirit that ensures that a nation wins the economic war of life.

i am the walrus said...

Wow. Nothing sets off the iSteve comment section like an "India vs China" post.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said... `“ China vs India is also complicated by issues of race, geography, diversity, history, politics, culture, etc.
It can be seen as East Asian vs South Asian, Chinese homogeneity vs Indian diversity, temperate zone nation vs tropical zone nation, Chinese chauvinism/xenophobia vs Indian westernism/cosmopolitanism(at least among the elites), Confucianism vs Hinduism/Islam, authoritarianism vs democracy, heavy-tech vs high-tech, etc”

-----------

“East Asian vs South Asian” --- you mean China/HK/Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, South Korea VS. India, Bangladesh, Mauritius, Srilanka and Pakistan?

“Chinese homogeneity vs Indian diversity” --- I know for a fact that "Diversity is a Strength". Ha Ha.

“temperate zone nation vs tropical zone nation” --- I wonder what Michael Hart would like to say about this.

“Chinese chauvinism/xenophobia vs Indian westernism/cosmopolitanism(at least among the elites)” --- the last time I checked, there are probably 1.2 billion “Chauvinistic and Xenophobic” Chinese VS. 2.5 million “Indian westernism/cosmopolitanism(at least among the elites)” , with call centre elites included.

“Confucianism vs Hinduism/Islam” --- in other words, you mean Confucius VS 10,000 Cobra, Monkey , Rat Gods , and Allah ?

“authoritarianism vs democracy” --- India is a Democracy… but really?

“heavy-tech vs high-tech” --- I am particularly interested in Indian high-tech. Care to name one, call centres aside? I would be delighted to learn about it.

Anonymous said...

India vs. Chinese armaments says it all. Norinco rules!

nsam said...

This is old news. At least 4 years old that is. Laws of supply and demand rule. But the point about unemployable "graduates" is correct.

From 2007

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1671982,00.html

Over the past decade or so, relatively high salaries in the call center sector have attracted thousands of applicants across the country. But now the boom is going bust because India's college graduates and young job seekers just don't want to be bothered with the business anymore.

nsam said...

I am not sure what conclusions can be reached from this WSJ piece. To put it in context call center ops are a small part of BPO. The FAQ at http://www.bpoindia.org/faq/ covers many aspects of this industry.

Anonymous said...

India still pays the poor not to have children. That seems like a nod to the bell curve.

Anonymous said...

"It'll be interesting to see if our Congress, via its immigration policies, has created a new group of "Jews" who will consider themselves a separate and superior group, and always work to look after the interests of the home country."


Interesting idea.

Do Indians identify with India or only with their own caste/religion/region/language group?

Jews consider all Jews to be Jews, right?

as said...

Michaels Farris: "It's traditionally been a resource hoarded by elites who restrict access to it."

This is not true.

It's difficult for Indian people to afford an education. It is not possible for the small fraction of Indians who are able to afford their own educations to simultaneously pay for the much larger faction which can't afford it.

And it goes beyond money.

You can think of a population as being able to "produce" a certain amount of teachers. A small fraction of Indians would have to be able to "produce" teachers as well for the much larger faction of the population which can't.

Anonymous said...

Why no one seems to clearly bring the issue, excuse me if someone did, that IQ gap between Indians in India and Chinese in China mimics that of Blacks – Whites ?

If Nigeria had the same size of the population of India and the west had an immigration policy in place to specifically attracts the crème of the crop of supposed 1.3 billion Nigerian elites, wouldn’t Nigerians have been the IT Gurus of the world instead of Indians, albeit slightly worse given that average IQ of Nigeria (Like India with 100’s of sub-tribes) being a shade less than that of India?

Seriously comparing India with China is actually in the same vein of logic of comparing American Blacks with American whites - almost the same IQ gap.


Last but not the least, It seems that Steve is mistaken in stating that China had several decades headstart than India in capitalism ( he probably has taken the bait of this Internet Indian hoax, for

i) China started capitalism in "SEC" – 4 special economic zones of 4 tiny coastal cities of less than 0.1% of Chinese population with almost visa-controlled environment at early 80’s ( the internet hoax capitalised on this fact stating that entire China had a headstart than India; the fact is NO ), yet more than 99.9 % of China’s population and cities didn't have a clue about Capitalism until early 90's. Shanghai didn’t have “capitalism” green light until early 1990’s ( Shanghai Stock Exchange didn’t exist before that), Beijing until 1998; and Tianjing until about 2000. I can not post graphics here to readers the best and most intuitive proof of this, but anyone who has some basic knowledge of Economics & Excel can do the following easy execise him/herself to get the point: go charting China vs India nominal GDP from 1940 till now, you will see both countries basically remained the exactly the same – almost flat trend lines, until 1991 when both countries “somehow” started to climb in an dramatic fashion as if being awakened all of a sudden. 1991, this was indeed when the most part (>90%) of both India and China started capitalism. The only difference is one trendline has been rather weak while the other soaring like a kite. A very interesting fact which resolutely refutes all that “China had 2 decades headstart” nonsense.


ii)On the contrary, India had the headstart if you want to think deeper, as both countries , China and India, started off at about the same time – India 1946; China 1949. China started as a Communist country ( and still is on paper) , while India as a Western Democracy. The question is why a democracy with all the inherited advantages (e.g. rule of laws, independent institutions, English as an official Language, superb railways left by the British which even put 1950’s Japan to shame, etc) somehow “failed” to realise that Capitalism is the best ball game and has lost all these to a Communist state? Answer is easy : India had the headstart since 1946, yet the average IQ here has made it missed the train.

Anonymous said...

India = Silicon Valley + Africa ?

A few hundred million (relatively) affluent middle class knowledge workers surrounded by almost a billion slumdogs is not a desirable development outcome. It may in fact be unstable (see below).

The only way I know of to raise the standard of living of a billion people is through the well-traveled (but dirty and energy intensive) path of industrialization and manufacturing. That is how the West, Japan, and Asian Tigers did it, and what China is doing now. Software parks and call centers are wonderful gleaming instantiations of modernity, but only a small fraction of the population in India have the cognitive ability to write code or deliver complex services in English. India optimists are only thinking about the elite minority -- what about the rest of the population?

WSJ: ...Calorie consumption by the bottom 50% of the population has been declining since 1987, according to the 2009-10 economic survey conducted by India's Ministry of Finance, even as those at the top of society struggle with rising obesity. Mainly because of malnutrition, around 46% of children younger than 3 years old are too small for their age, according to UNICEF.

The entire software and technology-services sector, including call centers and outsourcing, directly employs just 2.5 million workers, a tiny fraction of the overall work force.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/03/india-silicon-valley-africa.html

RKU said...

Seriously comparing India with China is actually in the same vein of logic of comparing American Blacks with American whites - almost the same IQ gap.

Actually, that's not quite correct. If you go by the Richard Lynn numbers, I think the China/India IQ gap is something like 20-25 points, or perhaps 50% larger than the American black/white gap, and nearly all the local sociological indicators seem completely consistent with this. Now an unknown portion of India's deficit might be due to nutritional/deprivational factors, but it's still rather amusing how much foolish India-boosting there tends to be on lots of HBD blogsites.

Actually, Mexico's population is vastly superior to India's on nearly all measures of income, education, health, life expectancy, etc., so perhaps the real question HBD-bloggers should be discussing is whether China or Mighty Mexico will win the looming contest for global supremacy...

Steve Sailer said...

They're assembling pretty good quality Ford Fusions in Hermosillo, Mexico right now. I think Mexico would be doing even better if not for China.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if this is soo old and Freakonomics, but there was a pretty major story, I think in the Washington Post, about cheating on school tests. fit in wiht a lot of stuff you talk about, even Rhee and all. Very juicy.

nsam said...

--
Ultimately, an impressive college credential from a good college serves to a prospective employer as an extended IQ test, a sort of legal signaling device. In the US, colleges are allowed to base their recruitment on SAT scores (essentially an IQ test), but employers could get in legal trouble if they were to conduct any such tests. So knowing that a college is rigorous in its admission standards is a way to signal prospective employers that the graduates from that college are already vetted. I believe that college credentials as a requirement for most jobs would vanish, if employers were allowed to perform the tests that colleges routinely require of their students.

In a country like India, where so many of the colleges are new, no such signaling mechanism operates right now. So a college degree is essentially worthless as a signaling device, as so many employers in India are finding out. Such being the case, why even rely on the college degree? Why don't employers take the matter into their own hands, and start imparting training as part of their recruitment effort? Those questions are what led us to create our own training program, which we call Zoho University, to come into being. Today, over 10% of our employees have come from this program, and we expect this ratio to go up to 30% in the next few years, as we expand our program.
---

http://blogs.zoho.com/general/wsj-india-graduates-millions-but-too-few-are-fit-to-hire-yes-but

Anonymous said...

RKU said “Actually, that's not quite correct. If you go by the Richard Lynn numbers, I think the China/India IQ gap is something like 20-25 points, or perhaps 50% larger than the American black/white gap, and nearly all the local sociological indicators seem completely consistent with this”.
--------------

Agreed. And please excuse me for my very loose analogy on American Blacks vs. American Whites.

Also agree with your much more realistic contest (relatively, of course) of China VS. Almighty Mexico.

I did, however, stated that the IQ gap between India and China mimics that of the Black-White. According to Lynn, the IQ gap of Sub-Sahara Africans and European Whites is 20 or so points, about the same gap between the Indians and the Chinese.

We all know that the differences of ground reality between India and China seem to be less dramatic than that between Europe and Sub Sahara Africa. I speculate that it’s likely due to the fact China’s potential is still largely untapped (e.g. political system) yet. When China reaches the next stage of development, we would perhaps witness more seminaries then?

This brings up another interest giga contest (perhaps even more realistic, in line of China VS. Mexico), which perhaps Steve is at the best position to answer/research:

both with 1 billion plus people, similar level of IQ average, similar level of Human Development Index, 1000’s of tiny tribes and languages, and closer linkage racial heritage ( in contrast to the that Chinese vs Indians), which has more potential, a geographically much larger, natural resource-rich yet politically segmented Pan Sub Sahara Africa States, or geographically much smaller, relatively resourceless (natural) yet politically single state India?

Thus Africa VS. India?

TGGP said...

Bad management in India.

Anonymous said...

When I was a graduate student in the 60s, we had a few Indians, but they have gradually disappeared from US campuses. The ones I personally knew were mediocre, and very arrogant.

"Mediocre but arrogant" sums up the Indian personality, in my experience. My experience stems from working with them in the IT field. All this garbage about how we're importing genius with the H1-b program is a bad joke.

David Davenport said...

Steve, a while back you wrote an iSteve piece about educational software. Here's this:


500 Startups Demo Day: Motion Math Looks To Make Learning Fun Again

Rip Empson
Apr 7, 2011

Dave McClure’s seed fund, accelerator, and incubator, 500 Startups, held an open house in Mountain View today...

Among those nifty ideas presenting today is Motion Math, a startup creating a suite of educational apps intended to give kids a more interactive (and fun) way to learn challenging topics. The startup (which just raised an undisclosed seed round from 500 Startups and a flock of angels) wants to leverage the engaging physical aspects of the mobile experience, like the touch interface and accelerometer, to create that interactive quality which will help kids internalize what they’re learning.

...

At Stanford, they studied a theory called “embodied cognition”, which is essentially the belief that the mind and body interact on the fly as a single entity, and movement is based not on internal reactions, but the immediate interaction with physical environment. What does that mean? Well, it’s essentially academic research that gave birth to one of the startup’s principle ideas, which is that physical experience of intellectual data — like fractions — leads to increased understanding and digestion.


...

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/07/500-startups-demo-day-motion-math-looks-to-make-learning-fun-again/

Accelerometers are devices which measure the one, two, or three dimensional acceleration an object experiences -- which way it's tilted, how much it's shaken, etc.* Iphones and, I suppose, some other smart phones can measure how many steps a kid takes, or how many times the kid shakes the phone, and incorporate that into arithmetic learning software.

Note that the education establishment doesn't control smart phone apps. Some currently available apps:

*iWalk, Pedometer and iSteps Distance | Mapping and Exercise

An interesting and very useful utilisation of accelerometer functionality to calculate the steps you take whether you’re walking, jogging or running. In addition Jump Rope is a virtual jump rope for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Press the Start button and begin jumping using your iPhone or iPod Touch as if it were the handle of a jump rope.


P.S. Smart bombs and other smart
munitions depend on accelerometers as well as GPS and laser guidance. Miniaturized accelerometers on a chip exist nowadays because the US Dept. of Def. has funded accelerometer R&D for decades.

RKU said...

Actually, I think there are some pretty obvious ev-bio reasons for these purported Indian cultural/personality traits.

It's really quite amazing how many human mysteries begin to resolve themselves once you begin thinking along properly constituted ev-bio lines...

as said...

"What is that smell - pungent, a mix of old sweat and bad curry - which wafts from the dwellings of 1st generation Indians?"

One problem is that Indians tend to use corn oil or vegetable oil or some other cheap oil when cooking.

When something's fried in this kind of oil, it smells absolutely terrible.

I think this would describe the "old sweat" and "curry" stink that you are talking about.

namae nanka said...

I agree with what 'A random Indian' posted, and:

"There is no focus on pronounciation"

I was guilty of the same mistake for years. :)


"Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000"

Even IITs had to increase them, and to ruin them further, the number of IITs themselves have been doubled. Of course, all this was preceded by the degradation of the JEE standards.


"Answer is easy : India had the headstart since 1946, yet the average IQ here has made it missed the train."

Going off a tangent here:
Outside of the inhabitants themselves, we have democracy; the Congress party being our version of loony Democrats, with Muslims as Blacks politically, and scheduled castes as Blacks when it comes to affirmative action, as in straightforward quotas.

And (a relief?) there are a lot of regional parties that do well with their own tribes.
Every one gets the vote and every one shares in the collective misery inflicted by one of their own community, which lessens the pain of the blow considerably and keeps the charade rolling.

Considering the amount spent on elections and the issues that are brought up during elections, I used to have a pet-theory that economic progress was first and foremost, a fundamental necessity in order to keep a democracy functioning.

So I cringe when western media talks of I&C in the same breath and touts democracy as a big plus for India. The former is laughable when you look at the numbers, but the latter is so outrageously funny that it stops being a joke once you have given a little thought to the matter and caught a glimpse of reality.

But then, democracy is something that we were left with, socialism is something we imposed on ourselves and didn't had the foresight to cast off before it officially became a joke.

But then, socialism used to be fashionable back in the day, and some european nations seem to have used the concept well too.

Repeating the common refrain of some sailerites, 'chinese as copiers and not inventors'. The same thing goes for us.

We continue in the same vein, the current influx of UN-sponsored feminism won't help, for instance- quotas for women in parliament was a battle-cry last time I bothered checking with the Indian political scene; nor will consumerism that is supposed to help drive the economy upward without creating anything worthwhile on ground.

The biggest difference between us and china? They are slipstreaming behind US, and not merely copying it.
Hope? If the United Soviet States of America collapses before we do, we would finally look at our political structure with the same concern with which we looked at the economic one when USSR went up in smoke.

Advantages? Young population and +100 to nationalism for the next four years due to the cricket world cup victory last week.

P.S. - The only genuine Indian philosophy that I gleaned from history lessons, besides the Gandhian antics, was that of NAM. Tch, Nehru, you idealist!

Anonymous said...

Maybe the deficiencies of India could be understood better by looking at its satellite nations. But, suppose we first consider China and its satellites--Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong before reunification.
By satellite, I don't mean 'puppet', which Japan certainly wasn't. And even small Korea long maintained its independence from China, and Vietnam was a thorn on China's side for over 1000 yrs. Even so, all those smaller nations are not only racially similar to China but were culturally profoundly influenced by China, especially in Confucianism, Taoism, literature, music, architecture, manners, spirituality, etc.
At this point in history, it's fair to say all those satellite nations have been successful(with Vietnam as a late-climber). Of course, there's North Korea and Mongolia, but NK is ruled by a psychopathic cult, and Mongolia wasn't really a satellite of China. Though racially similar, Mongols essentially maintained their barbarian-nomadic ways. Though some Mongols periodically attacked and invaded China, many were absorbed by China. As for those remaining in Mongolia, they were more into tents and horse milk than pagodas and Confucian texts.
One could base the success of China's satellite nations on racial homogeneity or higher IQ. But the influence of Chinese culture surely played an important role(instilling them with values and outlook that constructively accept/adopt the modernity of the West). Also, in Chinese-ruled Singapore, even non-Chienese seem to be doing pretty well. And if we include overseas Chinese minorities as a satellite community of China, they also seem to be successful. This is even more amazing when we consider that Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and China went through some of the most horrific and grueling periods in the 20th centur--civil war, world war, mass deaths under communism, etc. Vietnam War killed 2 million. Korean War 3 million. Number of Chinese deaths in 20th century from all sorts of disasters have to reach at least 100 million. Yet, East Asia seems to have rebounded. And though North Korea is a hellhole, one gets the sense that things CAN dramatically turn around if the Kim clan is gone. And though Taiwan has lost its diplomatic standing in the world after Nixon met Mao, it went from success to success ever since. The biggest problem of East Asia is prolly alarmingly low birthrates, but that is more a symptom of success than failure since rich nations tend to have fewer kids than poor ones.

Now, let's look at the cultural satellites of India: Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan. Sorry to say, they are all basketcases. What could be the reason for this? Geography? Isolation? (Nepal and Bhutan seem to be lodged between India and Tibet, making it less accessible by sea routes, but that was never a problem with Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). This article on Pakistan is plenty depressing:

http://www.economist.com/node/18488344

What's interesting is it says there is a core group in Pakistan that is modern, urban, forward-looking, and in tune with the rest of the world. But there's a serious disconnect between this group and the rest of the nation. Like the Shah and modernizers in Iran, there's little rapport and trust between the urban elites and the masses. Of course, things are worsened by the fact that Pakistan is Muslim--currently the most troublesome and craziest religion on Earth--and borders one of the craziest and troublesome nations on Earth--Afghanistan.

Anonymous said...

My hunch is India has the same problem in some fundamental way. There's little love and trust between its elites and the masses. To be sure, Indian masses are not all unwashed(though I don't count washing in the foul Ganges washing). There is a middle class India. India is not simply 'few rich and all poor'. There are many layers between the rich and the poor, like there were many castes in Hindu religion. Though the poor may still outnumber everyone else--the case in China also--, there has been a dramatic, even shocking, rise of middle class in India. (Given the sudden rise of India and Brazil, nations written off as totally hopeless even up to the 80s, I think all bets are off until later. If Indians play their cards right, they may surprise us yet many more times.) The question is, 'is the divide merely economic--as in most East Asian nations--or is it cultural, ethnic, racial, and even spiritual(caste legacy)?' And does it help that the Indian elites mainly speak English when most Indians still speak Hindi or some other language as their main language? The fact that the Russian elite mainly spoke French in the 19th century didn't endear them to the Russian masses, and vice versa. And though India does have an English-advantage over China, the Chinese elites and the masses probably feel closer cuz they all speak Chinese--even Cantonese speaking south also master Mandarin.
Though India's main language is said to be Hindi, there's greater linguistic diversity in India, and many non-Hindi speakers, I was once told, resent having to learn and speak Hindi. So, the elites of various groups settled on English as a kind of neutral language; this way, no side wins but no side loses either since none can claim English as ITS language.

Given the diverse and messy nature of India, it may make more sense to compare it with Indonesia and some Latin American nations. There are just too many factors at play in India to speak of it as we speak of China or Japan. Also, India, like Indonesia and Latin America, was essentially the political creation of Western imperialism. Though empires had existed in the subcontinent, it was the British who united that piece of geography as 'India'. Given the artificial nature of its creation, it's been difficult to organically define or practice a meaningful Indianness.

Certain qualities or cultural assets seem to be lacking among the satellite nations of India: drive, ambition, ingenuity, awareness, ruthless desire to seek their day in the sun. They seem mired in superstition, tradition, squabbles, corruption--not the kind that greases the wheels of business(as in China or Vietnam)but corrodes them.

I suppose things are more complicated in nations like Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and parts of Indonesia, which are culturally--and maybe even racially--a combination of India and China, like Central Asia is between Europe and Asia. One might say Thai food is a wonderful mix of both cuisines, though I never much liked it myself. (I like my peanut butter on a sandwich.) As for Tibet, racially closer to China, cuturally closer to India, or at least the part of India that used to pratice Buddhism.

Anonymous said...

One wonders what might have been if Buddhism had prevailed in India. Buddha called for the end of all castes and superstitions. Indian culture might have been more streamlined, less messy, more focused, and united. But then, the passivism at the core of Buddhism never did much for social, economic, or political dynamism. Buddhism was big in Japan, but the monks and priests didn't do much to fight social ills and injustices around them. Such action would have constituted 'attachment' to the world, a big no-no in Buddhism.

Even so, what with all its problems, it's interesting that India influenced East Asia much more than the other way around. Confucianism, Chinese style art, and such things didn't make a great impression on India, but Buddhism, an outgrowth of Hinduism, had a profound impact on East Asia. Just as the West did more with Christianity than its birthplace the Near East, the East did more with Buddhism than India.

As a purified kind of spirituality, it might have played a role in promoting an orderly(and clean) outlook on life in the East, even if it was passive. Besides, passive isn't the same as lazy. In some ways, seeking nirvana via Buddhism was more austere, disciplined, and demanding than seeking Heaven in Christianity. The art of Zen played an especially important role in the disciplinarian and order-freakish culture of Japan, just like Pietism played a significant role in the culture of sobriety, purposefulness, and thoroughness among Northern Germans. I remember reading that China and Korea, at one time, also were heavily influenced by Buddhism, but the neo-Confucians gained the upperhand and Buddhists were either exiled or allowed to practice their religion in the recesses of the kingdom. This may explain why Chinese and Koreans tend to be more didacticly moralistic and less disciplined than the Japanese, for whom Zen Buddhism and Shinto and militarism co-existed side by side. Of course, Japan was also profoundly impacted by Confucianism, but it was one of the elements of Japanese culture, not its overbearingly stuffy core.

Anonymous said...

In India, the vast majority of the population can't afford basic education, nutrition, and healthcare for their children. The Indians you see here are not the elite of India - they are the elite of the small percentage that were born into some small amount of wealth.

Before you say that there's a correlation between wealth and IQ, I will note two things. First, many obtained their wealth when land prices went up, so it's not earned on the basis of merit or achievement. Second, among families with at least a moderate degree of wealth, it seems all the kids end up college educated, even if the parents are illiterate.

Second generation Indian-Americans do really well in this country. About as well as Jewish-Americans, from my experience. If this kids represent the regression to the mean, then Indians have a much higher mean than 81. Probably even higher than 90.

Somebody is going to say "well most Indian-Amerians are Brahmin." Wrong! Patel and Singh, two middle caste names, are the most common Indian-American surnames. While many IAs are Brahmin or upper caste, a very large percentage are from the middle of the caste ladder too. From what I noticed, however, Indian kids from all caste/regional backgrounds perform about the same. You see lots of Dr. Patels and Dr. Singhs in America.

Google any investment bank, venture capital, or hospital website... then count the number of Indian-American kids - specifically note the amount of Patels. You might be surprised.

I'm willing to believe that Indians have a lower IQ mean than the West or some parts of East Asia, but this 81 number if absolutely ludicrous. If you believe this is India's true potential, you are a buffoon and don't know much about anything. Let's be realistic and acknowledge that India likely has a moderate IQ and a high variance, so most people are mediocre (not dull) and a small proportion (who often immigrate) are fairly bright.

Yes, Sikhs in the UK and Canada arrived mostly as peasant laborers. Despite that, they're only a little lower than whites in income. As a group, Sikhs are about average, in IQ, for the Indian population. Not elite, but not subpar either. Sikhs are pretty hardworking too, so maybe that means they overperform relative to IQ, but I'd bet they have a mean IQ at least in the low 90s. Maybe slightly higher.

India does have assortative mating for IQ among the elite classes, but not among the masses. Many of the Indian IT guys are from the masses, but have fathers whose land shot up in value and sold it off.

Michael Farris said...

"It's difficult for Indian people to afford an education."

See? Restricting access by economic means. Places worse off than India have done better jobs in distributing education.

The irrational mania about keeping higher education in English is basically about restricting access. It certainly does not serve any goal about improving local conditions.

Anonymous said...

"Actually, I think there are some pretty obvious ev-bio reasons for these purported Indian cultural/personality traits.

It's really quite amazing how many human mysteries begin to resolve themselves once you begin thinking along properly constituted ev-bio lines..."

Really? What's the theory? Let's see some predictive validity for once. Those of us from India know what the personality types of different caste-region combinations are like. Let's have you predict the personality type for these 2 castes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nair

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddy

I really call BS here - I have witnessed personality types changing *significantly* from one generation to the next which makes the ev.psych hypothesis suspect.

as said...

as: "It's difficult for Indian people to afford an education."

Michael Farris: "See? Restricting access by economic means. Places worse off than India have done better jobs in distributing education.

The irrational mania about keeping higher education in English is basically about restricting access. It certainly does not serve any goal about improving local conditions.

No, no you misunderstand.

A society has to produce a certain amount of wealth in order to be able to "produce" schools and "produce" teachers. So, for the educated portion itself, it's quite difficult to do it. They have to do it forthemselves AND they have to do it for a vast number of indigents.

This situation is difficult to make work when most people are productive and there is a small minority of poors. But in India, the situation is reversed.

---

For every English language school, there are scores of native language schools. These are the schools that most people attend. And semi-educated people try to learn Hindi, not English as a second language because it's much easier.

---

The whole education and access to education to India is overblown. I know lots of people who believe that if only Indians had "access" to education, they would be much better off. But they have cause and effect reversed.

Anonymous said...

"Second generation Indian-Americans do really well in this country. About as well as Jewish-Americans, from my experience. If this kids represent the regression to the mean, then Indians have a much higher mean than 81. Probably even higher than 90."

Looking at the present state of the country, 81 looks right. Even if India could organize the distribution of good nutrition and education to everyone, how long will it take to improve the iq of an entire future generation?

You are crazy to compare Jews to Indian American accomplishments. Harvard College is 25% Jewish (2% of us population). Indians (1% of US pop) are at most 5% of Harvard College.

Anonymous said...

Harvard College is like sprinting. Everybody tries it so the Olympic champion truly is the fastest man in the world. Most very smart and ambitious 17 year olds will apply to Harvard College so the composition of a class generally reflects the smarts and energy of an ethnicity.

Anonymous said...

“Second generation Indian-Americans do really well in this country.”

...

“ Harvard College is 25% Jewish (2% of us population). Indians (1% of US pop) are at most 5% of Harvard College.”

...


The fact that many people including many Americans always opinion that “ Indian-Americans do really well in this country’”( implying that they do better than the white Americans) forces me to look at America in a new light. Is America become so corrupted, dysgenic, and politically correct that it’s helpless I wonder, since Indians, of all castes, are nobody in the hierarchy of even South East Asia, their own backyard. It then just doesn’t make a logical sense that “they are really well” in a higher average IQ society such as white America, even though with their creme of the crop such as Brahmins.

No, I don’t buy that heavily media-hyped story of “Indians are doing really well In America”.

“Doing very well” is a very confusing term. Indians are the second largest group of illegal aliens in the US. It makes up far more than just 1% of Americans as in the official count. For every 1 Indian “doing very well “in the Ivy campus, have you counted probably 10 more of them in the backyards of some dodgy 7-11s or Motels earning the minimum wage?


“American” is also a confusing term. The questions these people (that “ Indian-Americans do really well in this country’”) must ask themselves in the same breath are:

Aren’t German Americans not doing really well, if not much better than Indian Americans?

Aren’t Norwegian Americans not doing really well, if not much better than Indian Americans?

Aren’t Chinese Americans not doing really well, if not much better than Indian Americans? , etc. so on so forth.

People don’t see the answers to these questions intuitively because they all look the same: a white faced American.

One thing only can justify “Indian-Americans do really well in this country”. That is their average IQ , and/or SAT record, not “accomplishments” such as a even more burring concept of “richer”, “seemingly more studs in some campuses” , “Silicon Valley”, etc – many could be explained by Affirmative Action and their tribal strategy as a well organised/coordinated tribal group even with a lower IQ will outdo a much larger yet disorganised group in evolutionary survival.

Then again, Indian Americans are lumped together with highly intelligent East Asians some South-east Asians into a single category called “Asians” in all stats. Nonetheless, if Lynn and Rushton are largely right on IQ, then German Americans, Norwegian Americans , Dutch Americans etc etc will logically overwhelm the “doing very well” American Indians both in absolute numbers / qualities, AND in the relative term, without doubt . If America doesn’t see that, then there is something profoundly wrong with America.

Anonymous said...

Steve, by common consent living conditions in India are 'unbearable' (save for the very rich, of course).This is not a word I came up with but it is from an official repoert commisiosned by Indians in South Africa when they considered the possibility of returning 'home', in the same vein virtually no Indian ejected from East africa by black nationalist governments in the 60s and 70s ever wnet back to India - they all went to the UK.
I have the suspicion that the hidden agenda of the Indian government is not to foster economic growth to improve the live of the bulk of Indians, but rather to unload as many of their fellows as humanly possible to the gullible fools who run the west.
The current line is that 'Indians are highly intelligent super-race without whom the west could not function' - a meme swallowed whole and eagerly by the western political class.Of course, the current H1B1 wave is merely the first showing of a rather long vanguard.....
The silly b*stards who run that god-awful dictatorship the EU, were stupid enough to fall for Indian blandishments and linked trade with the promise to accept even more Indian immigrants.
As a parting shot I note that the UK exports more to tiny Eire than it does to India, China, Russia and Brazil combined.

Anonymous said...

Indian-Americans are 10 percent of medical school students in this country. Jews are a little bit less than that, but 2 percent of this country's population. Culture has something to do with that, but don't deny a reality of stupendous success for 2nd generation Indian-Americans. It seems like every other IA kid I know is joining an i-bank, entering residency, doing an MBA at some top 20 school, getting into law school, etc.

Indian-Americans are about equal to Jews in median income too overall, according to a Pew Survey. When controlling for age, I'd bet even a little higher (IAs are a little younger).

Based on Japan's economic performance before it opened itself up to Western influence, you'd guess 81 IQ. You'd be wrong. It's not like 81 IQ countries send much technical labor overseas anyway.

I'd believe that under better economic conditions, India will rise to somewhere in the low/mid 90s.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I think there are some pretty obvious ev-bio reasons for these purported Indian cultural/personality traits.

I hope this is better than your Chinese paper Unz...

Anonymous said...

Indians are sexier, spell better than absolutely anyone else and tell great stories. Their food is better too and doesn't give you diabetes if you eat it more than once a week.

Anonymous said...

Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 1889

Neither at Penang, Singapur, nor this place have I seen a single Chinaman asleep while daylight lasted. Nor have I seen twenty men who were obviously loafing. All were going to some definite end—if it were only like the coolie on the wharf, to steal wood from the scaffolding of a half-built house. In his own land, I believe, the Chinaman is treated with a certain amount of carelessness, not to say ferocity. Where he hides his love of art, the Heaven that made him out of the yellow earth that holds so much iron only knows. His love is for little things, or else why should he get quaint pendants for his pipe, and at the backmost back of his shop build up for himself a bowerbird's collection of odds and ends, every one of which has beauty if you hold it sufficiently close to the eye. It grieves me that I cannot account for the ideas of a few hundred million men in a few hours. This much, however, seems certain. If we had control over as many Chinamen as we have natives of India, and had given them one tithe of the cossetting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even nervous, regard of their interests and aspirations that we have given to India, we should long ago have been expelled from, or have reaped the reward of, the richest land on the face of the earth. A pair of my shoes have been, oddly enough, wrapped in a newspaper[Pg 257] which carries for its motto the words, "There is no Indian nation, though there exists the germs of an Indian nationality," or something very like that. This thing has been moving me to unholy laughter. The great big lazy land that we nurse and wrap in cotton-wool, and ask every morning whether it is strong enough to get out of bed, seems like a heavy soft cloud on the far-away horizon; and the babble that we were wont to raise about its precious future and its possibilities, no more than the talk of children in the streets who have made a horse out of a pea-pod and match-sticks, and wonder if it will ever walk. I am sadly out of conceit of mine own other—not mother—country now that I have had my boots blacked at once every time I happened to take them off. The blacker did not do it for the sake of a gratuity, but because it was his work. Like the beaver of old, he had to climb that tree; the dogs were after him. There was competition.

Is there really such a place as Hong-Kong? People say so, but I have not yet seen it. Once indeed the clouds lifted and I saw a granite house perched like a cherub on nothing, a thousand feet above the town. It looked as if it might be the beginning of a civil station, but a man came up the street and said, "See this fog It will be like this till September. You'd better go away." I shall not go. I shall encamp in front of the place until the fog lifts and the rain ceases. At present, and it is the third day of April, I am sitting in front of a large coal fire and thinking of the "frosty Caucasus"—you poor creatures in torment afar. And you think[Pg 258] as you go to office and orderly-room that you are helping forward England's mission in the East. 'Tis a pretty delusion, and I am sorry to destroy it, but you have conquered the wrong country.

Let us annex China.

Hapalong Cassidy said...

Nice to see that the debate is becoming more even. What I mean, is that whenever an article comes along mentioning how India is behind China, you usually get most whites coming to the defense of India. The reasons for this are: (a) in interpersonal dealings, most whites are likely to have a better impression of Indians than Chinese, since Indians are more likely to have a better grasp of English and generally tend to be friendly, (b) Unlike India, China was never directly colonized by Western powers (except for Hong Kong and Macao), so they are farther removed from the Anglosphere than India, and therefore much more likely to be to get bad press than India (c) Indians at their core are Caucasians, so it's only natural that whites would side more with them rather than the Mongoloid Chinese.

But like I said, from this thread it looks like people are finally waking up.

catperson said...

It's absurd to think India's genetic IQ is 81. Compare India to black Africa. They average IQ 67, but blacks reared in America are much taller and have an average IQ of 85. Part of this is white admixture, but even very dark skinned blacks average IQ 80. This suggests to Richard Lynn that American nutrition raises IQ by 13 points from third world levels.

This implies that India (which is at least as malnourished as Africa and probably more so), has a genetic IQ of at least 94 (81 + 13). Indians born in America probably score even higher than the genetic mean because they come from India's genetic elite (the wealthy).

Anonymous said...

Another edited version of same comment:

"
Software Executive says Indians are Incompetent Programmers, Cheats and Frauds

http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102709.htm"



Nearly anyone who has ever worked with Indian programmers will attest to this. The Indian programmers who come to the US are supposed to be the IQ cream of the crop but yet they are usually not very bright. I worked for a java programming outfit for a few years that hired many Indians. Indians' code was so inferior that everyone used to [make fun of it]. In intellectual abilities, Indians are probably only slightly higher than blacks. The only reason companies' are flooding the US with them is because they work for peanuts.

Anonymous said...

India's elite businessmen seem to be better at influence peddling than they are at innovation.

In 1993, as Apartheid ended, an Indian family called the Guptas immigrated to South Africa. They have managed to acquire vast influence in the stinkingly corrupt ruling ANC under Jacob Zuma, arranging lucrative mining rights deals, and even approving the appointments of government officials.

They are not low profile either, and have launched a propaganda paper called the New Age, are destroying and old Johannesburg suburb with their large "compound".

I would expect the same to happen if the US started opening to elite businessmen from India.

Anonymous said...

"You are crazy to compare Jews to Indian American accomplishments. Harvard College is 25% Jewish (2% of us population). Indians (1% of US pop) are at most 5% of Harvard College."

That's where most people make a mistake. You need to look back 17 years and see what the Indian population in the US was then. You assume some stability in the percentage of Indians in the US whereas that's not the case. Make that 1% one-third of a percent. Second, don't look at college admissions (East and South Asians are discriminated against) and look at elite contests which are a better barometer. Your conclusions might change a little

Anonymous said...

indian literacy went up to 74% in the 2011 census, from 65 percent a decade ago. the key to Indias future is to build its own internal markets, and not to orient its growth strategy to a west that is declining demographically and economcally.

the emphasis shouldnt be on english. nobody ever hears about the japanese worrying about english, right?

Anonymous said...

With legal salaries that high in India and presumably growing, I would want to apply for a job in India. 20k means living like a king over there.

Anonymous said...

"I once saw a documentary on India which showed a clan of members of the left side of India's bell curve grabbing rats by their tails, smashing them against the ground, holding them over an open fire and eating them straightaway - all with savage glee. It was quite disturbing and eye-opening, since I mostly think of Indians as pleasant professional or mercantile types based on the Indian immigrants I have encountered."

I think Chinese do this with dogs and cats, and North Koreans do this with its dog-like people.

I had a Chinese-American friend in the 80s whose father was a rich restaurant owner. He visited China in the 80s and met up with old relatives and their children in a small village. I was told the government supplied the family with a chicken, but the family, living in dire poverty, had never seen a chicken and didn't know how to prepare it. My friend's father, a big fat guy, prepared it for them, and they gulped it down in a few seconds. She thought, how sad; I thought, how hilarious!

Anonymous said...

"India has 1.2 billion people. Take the top 2% of Indians in terms of talent and you get 24 million people. Send 1/8th of those drawn at random to the US and you get the number of Indians we now have - 3 million. That subclass of Indians is now the second richest ethnic group in the United States, but what do the top 2% of non-Jewish white Americans look like? Probably not too shabby, either. Almost definitely richer than the Indians."

India wastes its own brains, and America steals them. But I guess we can't blame the US since it's 'finders keepers'. If Indian society is too stupid and corrupt to utilize its smartest people, America will take them.

Anonymous said...

"South Asians are more Extroverted than NE Asians, whereas NE Asians are probably more Conscientious."

Not when it comes to treatment of animals. While some Hindu sects are very cruel to animals, some are very kind. But it seems like ALL Northeast Asians are viciously cruel to animals. Even so, Japanese don't eat dogs.

rinse & repeat said...

"SomeBozo said...
@Anonymous software eng. in SV: Well how many brilliant non-Indians do you know? Maybe you're just not in a brilliance-requiring industry. Though having said that I was in a hedge fund that /did/ require brilliance, and I don't recall any Indians. Some Chinese, one Iranian (I think). But enh, too small a statistical sample. One brilliant guy at grad school (an nth-tier one, because American schools didn't trust his perfect-score GRE!), and a wicked-smart guy at another company. /my anecdotes."

saywhat? I'm not brilliant enough to understand all those anagrams...

Anonymous said...

For whatever reason, the Western powers allowed Japan to 'catch up' and become a Asiatic copy of the West. Why, who knows? Maybe Westerns had genuine respect for Japanese people and culture. Maybe Westerners were flattered and impressed by the fact that here finally was a non-white race that seemed eager to learn and imitate the 'higher civilization' of the West than stubbornly choose to be reactionary and recalcitrant, like most of Asia, Africa, Middle East, etc. After all, teachers favor the most eager students, and Japan, for a while, played the dutiful student eager to earn the diploma of 'honorary white peoplehood'.

Japanese carried out extensive industrialization in Korea(mostly in the mineral rich north)and in Manchuria, with its vast reserves of coal and iron ore, thereby spreading the template of industrialization on the Asian mainland, which may have also had far-reaching repercussions.

After WWII, US allowed Japan to re-industrialize, especially given the dynamics of the Cold War and China's fall to communism. Especially since Japan was short on natural resources, its only hope for recovery was manufacturing and export. The Japanese model was closely followed by South Korea, and to a lesser extent, Taiwan and Singapore. China remained outside the orbit of East-Asia-under-the-umbrella-of-US-protection but communism also emphasized heavy industry(despite Mao's cult of the peasant). 20th century communism's main model was Stalinism, which led to rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, sufficient even to defeat Nazi Germany. However, communism was, in the long run, not a workable solution. Worse for China, Mao lacked the focus, discipline,and patience of Stalin. He rushed into crazy ideas like the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution.
Even so, China could look all around and note the successes of East Asian nations such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and overseas Chinese... and arrive a the realization that capitalism is the best path for industrialization and prosperity(and also that modern capitalism was no longer rigged only favor of Western imperialist powers; after all, Japan and EA tigers had caught up to the West playing by the same rules). Had it not been for the success of Japan, followed by the tigers, maybe the Chinese would not have been convinced of the rightness of the path they eventually took.

Anonymous said...

For India, there were no comparable models like Japan or East Asian tigers. Under British imperialism, Indian industry/manufacturing had been suppressed(except for very light industry). Though WWII destroyed much of Japan's industry, Japan still had some factories and a large pool of engineers and people with technological know-how. When India won independnece, it had an extensive pool of political leaders but few industrial experts. Also, the kind of economic experts that existed got their ideas from the latest ideas flowing from Europe, especially UK, and this was bound to have a terrible effect on India. UK and European nations in the post-war era were able to rebuild quickly since they had a pre-existing industrial base(or one which could be repaired or rebuilt). Also, Europe and UK could afford socialism since they had surging capitalist economies in the postwar era. To distribute wealth, a nation must first create it. The problem with India was that its leading economic intellectuals, mostly socialist or Keynesian in their leaning and assumptions, happened to choose the wrong ideology/approach at the wrong time. India hardly had a modern economic base, but it decided to go socialist. But if a nation doesn't have much of a tax base, how can it afford a welfare state? The solution to this problem for Nehru was to create a modern industry via socialist guidance and controls, but as we all know, socialism works better as a distributive system than as a productive system, which is why even 'socialist' Sweden has an economy of privately held and run entities; wealth is produced by the private sector and only taxed/distributed by the public sector.

India faced a double whammy with its choice of socialist Keynesianism since it has no viable tax base and since a command economy is a poor way of producing wealth. In some ways, socialist productivism is worse than communist productivism. Stalin killed millions but the iron-fisted controls under communist totalitarianism at least led to rapid industrialization. India's command economy, on the other hand, operated within a 'democracy' of sorts, which meant a lot of people could get away with bullshit. In Stalin's Russia, anyone suspected of absenteeism or 'sabotage' would be shot or sent to the gulag, which is why managers pushed their workers and workers did their work. (Once Stalinism eroded away and was replaced by socialism-with-a-human-face, Soviet economy also failed to produce much, which is why Soviet Union came to rely more on petro-dollars and foreign imports.)

Anonymous said...

Another bummer for India was that its elites were the darling of the the liberal West. If Maoism was a bit too strong for many liberals and if nations like Taiwan and South Korea were seen as 'running dogs of neo-imperialist capitailsm', many Western progressives(who dominated western intellectual and political discourse) were impressed by (the illusion)of India as a neutral yet left-leaning democracy. Martha Nussbaum gets teary-eyed thinking about the India of Nehru's ruling party. (India was also the land of Gandhi, and for 60s counterculture intelletuals, the paradise of Ravi Shankar, spaced-out New Age-ness, and soma.) With West's leading intellectuals egging on the India's path to development--as an enlightened and humane third wary between capitalism and communism--and with Indian intellectuals/elites slavishly seeking approval from Western elites, India failed to develop the kind of single-minded national economic policy like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore--ironic since India was politically more independent of the West than any of them.

We see the same pattern with Pakistan. It often seemed as though father Bhutto and his daughter Benazir cared more about winning approval from liberal Western intellectuals than gaining the support of their own people. Maybe even with Indian and Pakistani independence and pride, the old habit of sucking up to the white man is still alive and well in the subcontinent.

What India really needs is more Gurubhais. That guy kicked ass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iznkgx7hmmo

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAbycIL5__4&feature=related

I'll bet this movie is more fun and better than the upcoming ATLAS SNORED.

Anonymous said...

SHIVA SHRUGGED?

Anonymous said...

ELEPHANTHEAD?

Anonymous said...

Besides low IQ the Hindu or caste-based culture must account for India's hopeless poverty, horrible hygiene and general backwardness. India has far more malnourished people as a percentage than subsaharan Africa, or even it's equally poor or poorer neighbors. It is also the states In India where Brahmins are most concentrated that are the most hungry and poor.

The holy places of every religion are kept spotlessly clean but go to the Brahmin holy city of Varanasi and you will be shocked. There are decaying human corpses floating by on the filthy, polluted Ganges while the Brahmins bathe in it and sip it's holy water as if it was nectar!

Anonymous said...

http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/filthy-india-photos-chinese-netizen-reactions.html


Filthy pictures, the Chinese are not amused with "India vs China".

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

"India wastes its own brains, and America steals them. But I guess we can't blame the US since it's 'finders keepers'. If Indian society is too stupid and corrupt to utilize its smartest people, America will take them."

Assuming there are many brains to waste - a question as yet unanswered.

But what concerns me is whether those Indians who come here see themselves as Americans first, or as Indians with a US passport. I've known plenty of racist, radicalized Indians, and when I see an Indian out in public they seem to tenaciously stick to their own - even the ones with American accents.

Anonymous said...

Considering the highest performing Indian country is Mauritius which is a $7k per capita kind of place run at the top by a French and Chinese elite, an IQ in the 80s seems highly plausible.

Anonymous said...

"You assume some stability in the percentage of Indians in the US whereas that's not the case. Make that 1% one-third of a percent."

I'm counting the class of 2014 so there's no need to estimate the Indian population in 1990.

Indians are 1% of the country.

"(East and South Asians are discriminated against) and look at elite contests which are a better barometer."

I doubt there is anything like the Jewish quotas currently.

Harvard College admissions is an elite contest and open to all 17 year olds. It's probably the best measure of intelligence, well-roundedness, and ambition of an ethnic group in the US. So if Jews are likely 4-5 times better represented per capita than Indians, its evidence that a population of smart Indians doesn't measure up to Jews. This should be obvious but Indians are tireless braggers and won't concede the obvious.

Anonymous said...

"Based on Japan's economic performance before it opened itself up to Western influence, you'd guess 81 IQ."

Nope. When the Portuguese first visited Japan in the 16trh century, they reported an insane literacy rate there - something like 90%, I believe India hasn't gotten there even now, in the 21st century.

"For whatever reason, the Western powers allowed Japan to 'catch up'"

After the Japanese saw superior Western technologies, they caught up to them by themselves. This talk about them being "allowed" to catch up reminds one of the left's view of wealth as a magically-appearing resource which the rich hoard out of the blackness of their hearts, as opposed to the reward one gets for hard work. Where's the evidence of the West not allowing anyone to catch up, of preventing it?

"which is why Soviet Union came to rely more on petro-dollars and foreign imports"

That's simple ignorance. The Soviet Union was pretty much self-sufficient. It simply didn't import much. Unlike every other industrialized nation of its time, it made everything from matches to tractors to blue jeans to satellites to electronics itself, with local labor and from local materials.

"Under British imperialism, Indian industry/manufacturing had been suppressed(except for very light industry)."

Sounds implausible. Do you really think that if an Indian entrepreneur decided to start a steel mill, some Brits would have come to shut it down?

"After WWII, US allowed Japan to re-industrialize..."

Again that word "allowed". Has anyone ever forbidden Papua New Guineans to industrialize? Who, when and why, I really want to know.

"Especially since Japan was short on natural resources, its only hope for recovery was manufacturing and export."

I hear that Haiti is also short on natural resources.

"However, communism was, in the long run, not a workable solution."

Then why did it have to be abolished by the USSR's internal enemies politically? Why didn't they just wait for it to disintegrate by itself economically?

"like Alexander's Macedonians became one and same with the Greeks.) "

The Macedonians were most likely just backwoods Greeks.

Anonymous said...

If we assume a mean IQ of 94 for Indians and 80 for blacks, Marutius has an IQ of 90-91. Only a little higher than Mexico, but a much worse geographic location. The black population likely has a drag effect here.

An issue with Indians might be that if the mean is something like 94, and the variance is high, the population might have a sufficient level of human capital to achieve liftoff to first world status. Yet it'd still have enough human capital to succeed in some industries and even export skilled labor.

Anonymous said...

the dream school for indian americans is a 7 year BS-MD program, preferably Brown, Northewstern or Michigan but evdn a state program will do. its certainly not Harvars College. Jews and Indians actually make great allies-family oriented, academically oriented, non Christian, etc.

Anonymous said...

"I'm counting the class of 2014 so there's no need to estimate the Indian population in 1990."

The class of 2014 primarily comprises those Indians who were born in the year 1992/1993.

"This should be obvious but Indians are tireless braggers and won't concede the obvious."

Learned from White Americans. This is a quintessentially American trait.

Anonymous said...

Several issues:

1. Indians are not Caucasoid.

Bhasin (2006), in the study Genetics of Castes and Tribes of India: Indian Population Milieu:
[QUOTE] “India has been peopled by human groups carrying a diversity of genes and cultural traits. We have almost all the primary ethnic strains Proto-Australoid, Mediterranean, Mongoloid, Negrito and a number of composite strains. It is homeland of over 4000 Mendelian populations, of which 3700 endogamous groups are structured in the Hindu caste system as ‘jatis’.

In short, the older view that north Indians are mainly Caucasoid whereas southern Indians are mainly Australoid is incorrect. Indians, both from the north and the south, seem to be a racially admixed population with each individual genotype exhibiting membership in multiple gene clusters, albeit in varying degrees in terms of Caucasoid/Mongoloid/Australoid admixture ratios...

To repeat, most of the major Indian populations are so racially admixed that they exhibit membership in multiple gene clusters and are therefore homogeneous genetically on a subcontinental level." [/QUOTE]


2.On Buddhism :

Buddhism was not originated in India, but Nepal. Buddhism is not more popular / relevant in India than in probably Brazil. The basic form of original Buddhism of Nepal has been dramatically improved after it passed onto China, Korea and Japan about 1200 years ago.

Han Chinese brand of popular Buddhism is mainly Chan Buddhism and the corresponding (and quite similar) Japanese version is called Zen Buddhism, both being philosophically much more superior than its original form in Nepal, and that of today’s India.

This, however, is not surprising at all, as it generally reflects the corresponding IQ gap between Northeast Asians and South Asians.

Anonymous said...

Please explain in what ways East Asian Buddhism is superior to what originated in India? Every single major Buddhist text of both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism was written originally in either Pali or Sanskrit within some corner of India or Sri Lanka. The Buddhist traditions of China, Japan, and Korea were rather weak and simplistic and an amalgam of previous shinto/confucian/ancestor worshipping rites. Take a look at these countries today and it is quite evident that they are nonreligious, atheist societies. True, conservative Buddhism is what one can find in Sri Lanka and the countries of Southeast Asia which have been much more heavily influenced by Indian culture, religion and philosophy.

Anonymous said...

"Han Chinese brand of popular Buddhism is mainly Chan Buddhism"

Is that Chan for Jackie Chan? Chinese Buddhist monks seem to be into Shaolin Kung Fu.

Anonymous said...

In my highschool graduating class of 1985, the valedictorian spot was shared by a Chinese girl and an Indian guy. Rest of the top 10 were 6 Jews and 2 white gentiles.

Anonymous said...

Also I forgot to mention that Nepal in ancient times was just another kingdom of India and even today the majority of Nepal's population is Hindu. The national language of Nepal is a dialect within the Hindi belt of languages present across Northern India and the demographics of the country skew towards a majority population of Indo-Aryans(not mongoloids/tibetans). Buddha's birthplace in Lumbini, Nepal is within a hair's width of the Indian border and the remaining three holy sites of the Buddha are within the borders of the present day Indian republic.

Anonymous said...

"That's simple ignorance. The Soviet Union was pretty much self-sufficient. It simply didn't import much. Unlike every other industrialized nation of its time, it made everything from matches to tractors to blue jeans to satellites to electronics itself, with local labor and from local materials."

It had to import grain from the US and Canada to feed its people. And people stood in line to buy stuff like tooth paste(made of who knows what?) and toilet paper(with the texture of sandpaper; I know cuz I've seen and felt them thanks to friends who visited the Eastern bloc. Even in the post-communist 90s, they were using sandpaper toilet tissues).
Also, Soviet Union relied on Warsaw Pact nations to produce a lot of consumer and electronic goods--hilarious by Western standards(East German camera technology was considered tops in the East but it was utter shit).
And of course, Warsaw Pact nations came to depend heavily on loans from the West!

-------------

"Under British imperialism, Indian industry/manufacturing had been suppressed(except for very light industry)."

"Sounds implausible. Do you really think that if an Indian entrepreneur decided to start a steel mill, some Brits would have come to shut it down?"

In a class on modern Indian history I took in college, the professor said that rules were not always followed to the letter, and some industry was allowed to grow. But Gandhi wasn't kidding when he told his people not to buy British-made cotton. He was protesting the imperialist policy of unequal economic rights between the mother country and the subject nation. In a way, the Founding Fathers revolted agaisnt the British cuz Britain wanted to use the American colonies the same way: as a source of raw materials but not an independent industrial powerhouse. Founding Fathers wanted complete economic rights and independence for 'Americans'.

"Again that word 'allowed'. Has anyone ever forbidden Papua New Guineans to industrialize? Who, when and why, I really want to know."

I use that world because if the West really wanted to, it could have conquered and colonized Japan in the 19th century, much like the French conquered and colonized Indochina. Japan would have been defenseless against Western encroachment in the 19th century, just as the much bigger China was--and just as Korea was defenseless against Japanese annexation.

And following WWII, the future of Japan was in American hands. Americans could have forced Japan to de-industrialize and maintain a largely agrarian economy. Japan, following WWII--more than in the 19th century--was America's bitch. If Japan had been occupied by the Soviets than by Americans, one wonders what the fate of Japan would have been. Despite the talent of the Japanese, Japan most likely would have been East Germany of Asia.

Anonymous said...

Anon wrote - Sounds implausible. Do you really think that if an Indian entrepreneur decided to start a steel mill, some Brits would have come to shut it down?

--

Yes, happened most of the time

When the Indian millionaire Birla, tried to open a Jute mill, the british harassed him for decades before he finally was able to build his jute mill and he out-competed white jute mill owners

Anonymous said...

"Harvard College admissions is an elite contest and open to all 17 year olds. It's probably the best measure of intelligence, well-roundedness, and ambition of an ethnic group in the US."
--

Per Espenshade, Asians face a 150 SAT point penalty compared to whites ( jews are in the white quota )

Anonymous said...

"I once saw a documentary on India which showed a clan of members of the left side of India's bell curve grabbing rats by their tails, smashing them against the ground, holding them over an open fire and eating them straightaway -"

There is an untouchable caste in Bihar called Musahar - Mus = mouse ( similar to latin 'mus' ), Ahar = eater, that specialises in eating rats

There is also an untouchable tribe called Irula, that specialises in snake charming and they also eat a lot of mice

Anonymous said...

Revilo Oliver on India:

"[India probably was] a territory that was...conquered by the Aryan invaders and ruled by them.... The inevitable result was miscegenation, both biological and cultural. The consequence of the long and intimate association of the dominant Aryans with their subjects of a different race...was that "a spirit alien in nature," corresponding to the dilution and hybridization of the racial stock.... What happened, in other words, was a kind of spiritual mongrelization that, in all probability, largely preceded and certainly facilitated the biological mongrelization."

~ Revilo P. Oliver, "Ritual and Aryan Worship"

Anonymous said...

"It had to import grain from the US and Canada to feed its people."

But you can't seriously compare the amount of stuff that the Soviet Union imported with the amount of stuff imported per capita by every other industrialized nation of its day. You're comparing dust particles with mountains here. That grain was nothing compared to everything the US imported and couldn't live without during the same period. As for quality, it was exactly what you'd expect - better than the Chinese crap the whole world has to live with now, but not as good as the high-end European stuff of that time.

"If Japan had been occupied by the Soviets than by Americans, one wonders what the fate of Japan would have been."

Last time I looked, the Czech Republic and Hungary weren't agrarian wastelands.

Anonymous said...

"
Software Executive says Indians are Incompetent Programmers, Cheats and Frauds

http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102709.htm"

I know Sailer doesn't approve comments with racial epithets but hopefully he'll approve this one since I am not calling someone a name but only using an epithet to illustrate a point in programming culture.

Indians are notoriously bad programmers. At a software company I worked for in Houston people jokingly would refer to Indian code as "caca code" (a racial epithet for "macaca code").

Noah said...

Re: Bhasin (2006): "To repeat, most of the major Indian populations are so racially admixed that they exhibit membership in multiple gene clusters and are therefore homogeneous genetically on a subcontinental level."

India is miscegenation central. It's the Brazil of Asia.

With an average IQ of 81, I find Indians (both in the behavior and intelligence) not to be much different from blacks.

My former company hosted an Indian engineer (of course, to drive down wages of white engineers). Although not too bright, he was polite. His American-born children, however, were a different story. They quickly adopted black culture. His children dressed like American blacks and would mimic rap music. In essence, they thought they were black (which is unsurprising since Indians look like straight-haired blacks).

This will give you an idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnOmB88UuTg&feature=fvwrel

Anonymous said...

The Upper caste blend in the US Indian diaspora is about 50%, vs about 20% in India

http://www.ruralmedicaleducation.org/admissions_comparing_probability.htm

Med school over-representation factor

Indians = 11X
Chinese = 4X
White = 0.87X

http://www.ruralmedicaleducation.org/underserved/admissions_ratio_by_birth_origin.htm

1 in 200 of White High school students gets into med school

1 in 60 for Chinese

1 in 20 for Indians

Anonymous said...

"Buddha's birthplace in Lumbini, Nepal is within a hair's width of the Indian border and the remaining three holy sites of the Buddha are within the borders of the present day Indian republic."

Yes Buddha was a non- mongoloid Indian who rejected Vedic Hinduism, it's sacrifices to the gods (including animal and even human), it's caste system, it's superstitions. India was better off for it. When Buddhism was finally defeated by the Brahmins, India declined and was defeated itself by handfuls of afghans, Mongol-Turks, and englishmen,

Even today within the Indian subcontinent Buddhist majority Sri Lanka has about twice the per capita income of India and ranks much higher in the Human Development Index. Buddhist Sikkim in the Himalayas looks like Shangri La compared to much of India.

Anonymous said...

RE: Indians and Med School

Indians are well organized and, contrary to popular myth, are recipients of affirmative action.

First and foremost, Indians look out for their own:

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc

Anonymous said...

"The Upper caste blend in the US Indian diaspora is about 50%, vs about 20% in India"


Evidence? The Patels for example aren't upper caste. The Sikhs are mostly of peasant stock. The upper caste proportion in India is closer to 15%.

The H1-Bs are disproportionally south Indian brahmins.

Anonymous said...

india exports more cars than china. india is going to be fords asia hub for small cars. it also exports its own cars, eg tata, which owns land rover and jaguar

Anonymous said...

"If we assume a mean IQ of 94 for Indians and 80 for blacks, Marutius has an IQ of 90-91."


There is no logical reason to assume this. In fact, all the data says the average IQ of Indians is 81.

Anonymous said...

English Woman Speaks Frankly About Difficulties of Having Mixed-Race Baby with Man from India

Lowri Turner

Daily Mail, UK, 13 July 2007


"She's getting very dark, isn't she?" This is what one of my friends recently said about my much adored - 12-week-old daughter.

She didn't mean to be rude. But it was a comment that struck me with the force of a jab to the stomach.

Immediately, I was overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions. I felt protective, insulted, worried, ashamed, guilty, all at once. The reason? My lovely, wriggly, smiley baby is mixed race.

...

I am white and I have two sons from my first marriage who are both milky complexioned and golden haired. My twin sister, who I spend a lot of time with, has a Danish partner. As a consequence, she has two boys who are also pale skinned and flaxen haired.

Into this positively English next generation, I have now injected a tiny, dark-skinned, dark-haired girl. To say she stands out is an understatement.

...

The truth is, whatever the label, the fact there is a label proves that my daughter's conflicting parentage matters.

...

But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me.

I know that concentrating on how my daughter looks is shallow. She is a person in her own right, not an accessory to me. But still, I can't shake off the feeling of unease.

I didn't realise how much her looking different would matter and, on a rational level, I know it shouldn't. But it does.

Evolution demands that we have children to pass on our genes, hence the sense of pride and validation we get when we see our features reappearing in the next generation.

With my daughter, I don't have that. Do black fathers who marry white women and then have paler-skinned children feel my sense of loss? Or maybe Chinese mothers or Middle-Eastern grandparents grieve when they see a child they know to be their own, but whose features don't reflect that?

...

Even admitting to having mixed feelings about her not being blonde and blue eyed, I feel disloyal and incredibly guilty.

I know the obvious comment is that I must have known how a child of our union would look when I married an Indian man, but it is a wise woman who thinks that far ahead when she falls in love.

I didn't think about any of this before I got pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. Her colour and culture were immaterial then.

But self-flagellation is not useful. I have more pressing concerns. I am now the mother of a 'black' child, even if she is more the hue of weak tea than espresso.

This is a role for which I am utterly unprepared. Part of me thinks I should be playing sitar music to her in her cot, mastering pakoras and serving them dressed in a sari, but that would be fantastically fake coming from me.

When she was born, pale but with lots of dark hair, I asked the midwife if her eyes would stay blue. 'Asian genes are very strong,' she said in what I took to be an ominous tone.

No more Brady Bunch kids for me. The midwife has been proved right and every day my baby's eyes get a little darker.

...


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-467787/I-love-mixed-race-baby--does-feel-alien.html

rec1man said...

The H1-Bs are disproportionally south Indian brahmins.
--

wrong - most H1B are Telegu non-brahmin mid-level castes like Reddys

Anonymous said...

RE: Indians and Med School

Indians are well organized and, contrary to popular myth, are recipients of affirmative action.
--

Wrong - Indians dont get affirmative action for college admissions

Anonymous said...

Evidence? The Patels for example aren't upper caste. The Sikhs are mostly of peasant stock.
--

I am classifying Patels and Sikhs as non-upper castes, They are mid-level castes and these mid-level castes are about 50% of the US diaspora and about 80% of the UK diaspora.

Which is why the UK diaspora is less high functioning than the US diaspora

Anonymous said...

Evidence? The Patels for example aren't upper caste. The Sikhs are mostly of peasant stock.
--

I am classifying Patels and Sikhs as non-upper castes, They are mid-level castes and these mid-level castes are about 50% of the US diaspora and about 80% of the UK diaspora.

Which is why the UK diaspora is less high functioning than the US diaspora

Anonymous said...

First and foremost, Indians look out for their own:
--

Wrong again, Indians do look out for their own caste- not all Indians

Little John said...

Indians are getting into top tier schools in the US because of affirmative action and ethnic lobbying.

Many have speculated that the Indian Lobby is the second most powerful ethnic lobby in the US (next to AIPAC). Notice that like AIPAC (and unlike La Raza and the NAACP) the Indian Lobby rarely receives bad press.

Despite the data that Indians are the second largest group of illegal aliens in the US, often criminals, shoddy programmers and piss-poor scientists, and have an average IQ of 81, the Indian Lobby still is able to present Indians as "model immigrants."

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1404/article_1241.shtml


...

rec1man said...

When Buddhism was finally defeated by the Brahmins - wrong again

Islam wiped out buddhism in Central Asia ( remember the Bamiyan Buddhas ) and in India too.

Buddhism was centralised in Monasteries and when the monks were beheaded by the muslims, Buddhism died out. Whereas despite much massacres it was impossible to wipe out the brahmin 6% of the pop.

As a result of contact with islam, buddhism came up with a ritual - Kalachakra puja - which calls for holy war against muslims.

Myanmar, is buddhist and has much poorer socio-economic profile than India.

Buddhism is also dysgenic like Roman Catholicism
It promotes celibacy and the higher IQ segment become celibate monks and the residual population is enstupidated.

John said...

I think that there is a misconception in the West that China is geared toward manufacturing and trading of manufacturing goods. I see in the people commenting this thread about China being strong in physical manufacturing and India more relying on brain power and so on.

One can see where we get this based on the stuff we see in Walmart and other places.
In fact, if you look at the opinions of the best Western economists specializing in China, like Jonathan Anderson of UBS, you will see that while China do indeed export a lot of stuff, their economy is not export driven. That is to say, the value added of their exports are not small, but not overly big portion of their economy. It is still important to them in that it help bring their operations to modernity.

I think their economy is not that different from all the other ones that follow this trajectory to modernity. Having gotten to this point, they are capable of completing this journey with or without the help of the West.

The other side of the misconception is also not true. India, while doing a lot of work for the West that requires above normal IQs, shows little evidence of being an intellectual power house. A recent publication by the society of London indicated that China now has the number two position behind the U.S. in scientific publications. India was in tenth place. Its IITs etc. was probably more geared for their students to get jobs in the West than doing research and developments. Now before everyone jumps on the quality of their paper, let me be the first to say that there are probably a lot of junk and intellectual dishonosty in these publications, however, if you look at the curve of where they come from, you will see their future is bright. While India is also rising, I doubt they are in the same league.

Anonymous said...

indian americans completely get quota'd out of med school slots by med school deans who really cant stand the idea of browning out their schools.

they usually justify this by citing the need for more swpl extra curriculars (rain forest visits, etc) and well roundedness. well roundedness is actually code for white affirmative action.

but no one wants to talk about anti asian racism by the white powers that be in this country.

Anonymous said...

"Actually the mean IQ of all Indians born in America is 112, not Brahmins only:"

This is why Indians have such a reputation for deceit and dishonest. It is absurd to make the above conclusion based on simple test given to a small sample of immigrant children whose parents are among the best educated in India. That test is not even an IQ test as your link admits:

"Just how smart are Indian Americans? We don't know with much certainty. Most data sets with information on ethnic groups do not include IQ scores, and the few that do rarely include enough cases to provide interpretable results for such a small portion of the population.

The only direct evidence we have comes from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, in which a basic cognitive test called "digit span" was administered to a sample of newly arrived immigrant children.

Anonymous said...

"It would be extremely unlikely for Indian American kids to have a mean IQ this high if the genetic mean in India were only 81. Obviously malnutrion is holding India back, and not just the poor. Even the rich and powerful in India are often short, skinny, and malnourished looking. The malnutrion impedes all levels of Indian society."

Even the rich are malnourished in India and that is supposed to explain it's low IQ, well below the global average. Lol. Seriously stop trying to deceive us. The test above from which the author of your link deduced an IQ of 112 was given to immigrants from India,. How do you reconcile that with your ridiculous claim?

And based on your reasoning the Malays of Indonesia must actually have IQs higher than white Caucasians.

Anonymous said...

"I am classifying Patels and Sikhs as non-upper castes, They are mid-level castes and these mid-level castes are about 50% of the US diaspora and about 80% of the UK diaspora."

Whats a "mid-level caste"? In the varna system you are either upper caste/ dwija or you are low caste. The Patels are sudras and most Sikhs are descended from peasants or sudras.

Where is your evidence that 50% of Indian-Americans are dwijas or upper caste?

Anonymous said...

(Decades later, Krishna Menon, a Gandhian and one-time Indian Defense Minister, was still fortifying his sanctity by drinking a daily glass of urine.)...

Bear Grylls can out-drink him any day of the week:

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/CDl/#by=sp

Anonymous said...

but no one wants to talk about anti asian racism by the white powers that be in this country.

Well, that would be a problem if it were in an asian country. As its occurring in a country founded by and for white folks you've got nothing to complain about.

Anonymous said...

Re Supression of Indian industry...

Yes, happened most of the time

When the Indian millionaire Birla, tried to open a Jute mill, the british harassed him for decades before he finally was able to build his jute mill and he out-competed white jute mill owners


Except, I'm guessing, when it didnt. Who did TATA come into existence then, before 1948?

Anonymous said...

Tata may have come into existence , but an exception proves the rule.

India during British rule was harmed a great deal no matter how you look at it. Massive amounts of wealth from royal coffers flowed to British lands. And yes, there was racism. There was oppression. There was pressure to keep the native economy down. This is recorded history.

None of this excuses the utter farce that the post-independence governments turned out to be, though. It's not a one-way thing, plenty of factors have contributed to where India is now.

"Well, that would be a problem if it were in an asian country. As its occurring in a country founded by and for white folks you've got nothing to complain about."

Racism or affirmative action - neither is fair. No matter the country.

Anonymous said...

The Birlas are Marwaris - known as the 'Jews of India'.
In the Calcutta of the 1920s there was a massive scandal involving Marwaris selling rancid cooking oil.

Anonymous said...

" If British India didn't exist there would be no India. Rather there would be over a dozen states in South Asia. The north would be as poor as Africa and Nepal with a per capita of $300/$400. Gujarat and southern states would be lower middle income countries like Thailand."

Yes, there'd be no unified India - but these states were extremely rich when the British conquered them in terms of jewels, gems, textiles and other such things. IF they had been left alone, it is plausible that they could have traded those things for materials which they could have used to start industry. Either way, given their past wealth, $300/$400 is implausible.

catperson said...

It is absurd to make the above conclusion based on simple test given to a small sample of immigrant children whose parents are among the best educated in India.

I agree that Indian American kids are not representative of India's gene pool. They have an IQ of 112, meanwhile I estimate India's IQ (corrected for malnutrition) is 94. Indian American kids, as you correctly note, are children of an elite and not representative of India. However that doesn't mean the sample of Indian American kids is not representative of Indian America which was my point.

I agree that the sample size is small, but it's the best data we have so far on the IQ's of Indians in America.

That test is not even an IQ test as your link admits:

Actually backwards digit span is one of the oldest and best established measures of IQ. It forms part of the original Binet test as well as every single edition of the highly respected Wechsler scales. It's also probably the most culture fair test there is.

Yes, it's nowhere near as g loaded as a full IQ, however there's no reason to think it would overestimate Indian genetic ability. If anything, less g loaded tests tend to minimize group differences, so the true Indian American IQ is possibly higher.

Even the rich are malnourished in India and that is supposed to explain it's low IQ, well below the global average. Lol.

It's supposed to explain part of India's low IQ. I do think India has a genetically lower average than whites but not 81. A genetic average of 94 makes sense given the high achievement of India's elite in America in so many g loaded fields. There's simply not enough genetic distance between Europeans and non-white caucasoids for a gap much more than 6 points, unless some pretty extreme selection took place since these groups diverged.

Further, we know from the Flynn Effect and from the IQ and height gap between American and African blacks that nutrition is an extremely potent force (adding 13 points to "pure" blacks in America compared to Africa), so it would be incredibley foolish to just ignore the severe malnutrition in South Asia (60% of kids are stunted, average man in India is nearly half a foot shorter than American men, even the elite is short and scrawny)

The test above from which the author of your link deduced an IQ of 112 was given to immigrants from India,. How do you reconcile that with your ridiculous claim?

Well if those kids were born in India and did not enjoy the benefit of American nutrition, it's even more impressive that they averaged IQ 112. On the other hand, digit span seems to measure a part of the brain that is relatively preserved from the damage of malnutrition. The Flynn Effect is also hard to detect on Digit span tests in most studies.

And based on your reasoning the Malays of Indonesia must actually have IQs higher than white Caucasians.

Why?

Little John said...

Question for commenters:

I've long wanted to ask this.

Why do Indians have such a reputation for deceit and dishonesty?

Seriously, the two Indians I've known well (who were raised in the US) were both pathological liars -- and they used to accuse their cousins in India of being bigger liars. These two men would lie about the most inane and ridiculous matters.

The Indians (from India) I worked with at a company would often be caught lying about trivial matters... the director would tell us just to ignore it.."it's their culture," he would say.

Look at Indian stock brokers -- notorious liars. A bunch of them just went to jail.

Is there a evo-bio explanation for the rife dishonesty among Indians?

Mithra said...

John

I think that there is a misconception in the West that China is geared toward manufacturing and trading of manufacturing goods. I see in the people commenting this thread about China being strong in physical manufacturing and India more relying on brain power and so on.

One can see where we get this based on the stuff we see in Walmart and other places.
In fact, if you look at the opinions of the best Western economists specializing in China, like Jonathan Anderson of UBS, you will see that while China do indeed export a lot of stuff, their economy is not export driven. That is to say, the value added of their exports are not small, but not overly big portion of their economy. It is still important to them in that it help bring their operations to modernity.

I think their economy is not that different from all the other ones that follow this trajectory to modernity. Having gotten to this point, they are capable of completing this journey with or without the help of the West.

The other side of the misconception is also not true. India, while doing a lot of work for the West that requires above normal IQs, shows little evidence of being an intellectual power house. A recent publication by the society of London indicated that China now has the number two position behind the U.S. in scientific publications. India was in tenth place. Its IITs etc. was probably more geared for their students to get jobs in the West than doing research and developments. Now before everyone jumps on the quality of their paper, let me be the first to say that there are probably a lot of junk and intellectual dishonosty in these publications, however, if you look at the curve of where they come from, you will see their future is bright. While India is also rising, I doubt they are in the same league.

The most honest and informed comment I have seen.

Little John said...

A follow-up question for commenters:

There are hundreds of examples I could give of the daily dishonesty of Indians. But I'll give two:

(1) At a company where I worked, a couple people saw an Indian eat the last donut. It was no big deal, but we were joking with him, asking him why he ate the last donut. He was adamant, swearing up and down that he didn't eat it, although two people saw him through the window. He then made a complaint to the manager saying that people were falsely accusing him of things.

(2) In college, all the Indians I knew were notorious cheaters. When they found out I didn't cheat, they thought the reason was I was afraid of getting caught. So they told me about safe ways to cheat (where you weren't likely to get caught). When I told them I didn't cheat on principle, they were dumbfounded. They just couldn't understand.


I've asked others working high-tech / engineering about the dishonesty and deceit of Indians and apparently it's very widespread. A friend who teaches at an engineering school said that Indians by far are the biggest cheaters in his classes -- but they're difficult to catch...and if you catch one of them his friends will accuse you of racism and picking on Indians.

In short, is there a bio-evolution explanation for the dishonesty and deceit of Indians? What are others' thoughts?

Anonymous said...

"It's interesting that all the smartest peoples are from Asia. Ashkenazi Jews have 60% of their DNA from West Asia. India is in South Asia. Mongoloids are from East Asia. Agriculture was invented in the middle east. No wonder Asia has more people than any other continent. Darwin's survival of the smartest."

Then why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe and not the Far East? And not only did the Far East fail to bring about the Scientific Revolution, after these ideas were introduced in the West the Far East still ignored them for centuries.

Anonymous said...

Yes, there'd be no unified India - but these states were extremely rich when the British conquered them in terms of jewels, gems, textiles and other such things.

IIRC, only the kings and princes had the gold and gems. Everyone else was as poor as everyone else in the world.

IF they had been left alone, it is plausible that they could have traded those things for materials which they could have used to start industry. Either way, given their past wealth, $300/$400 is implausible.

If they had been left alone (like Thailand) something like that could have happened, although you overestimate the value of royal trinkets.

Nearly all Asian ruling classes, regardless of their colonial status, were stubbornly conservative about their feudal economies. Few really wanted to industrialize. Japan is the exception proving the rule. For one, industry would produce a large urban working class prone to "catching" communism. The maharajahs really feared that.

After all, the after-the-fact myth that Britain forced India at gunpoint to stay pre-industrial started out in the 1960s as communist propaganda.

Svigor said...

Racism or affirmative action - neither is fair. No matter the country.

To hell with the golden rule, then. Nothing fair about reciprocity, after all.

Anonymous said...

Culture has something to do with that, but don't deny a reality of stupendous success for 2nd generation Indian-Americans. It seems like every other IA kid I know is joining an i-bank, entering residency, doing an MBA at some top 20 school, getting into law school, etc.

Can we stop giving them affirmative action then?

Svigor said...

but no one wants to talk about anti asian racism by the white powers that be in this country.

Same way no one wants to talk about the anti-everyone racism by TPTB in India, China, Israel, and practically everywhere else outside the west; their racism starts at the front door, which slams in everyone's faces.

Anonymous said...

Little John,
It's evolutionary biology.You see India has always been a very densely settled land with a congenial climate - therefore there has always been intense competition between peoples for scarce available resources.Dishonesty/cunning/fraud are winning strategies in such an environment.

Anonymous said...

Per Espenshade, Asians face a 150 SAT point penalty compared to whites

Why are Asians so dishonest? Espenshade found that Asians face a 50 point penalty compared to whites, while blacks have a 230 point advantage and Hispanics have a 185 point advantage compared to whites.

Also, recruited athletes have a 200 point advantage and legacy admits get a 150 point boost.

catperson said...

Then why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe and not the Far East?

Perhaps because of Ashkenazi Jews, who are fundamentally Asian (60% of their DNA comes from the Middle East).

Anonymous said...

“Then why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe and not the Far East?”


It’s down to the different evolutionary paths they accidentally followed.

A smart guy under unified Imperial China indulging in studying the sky had neither incentive nor interests to research and write about what he really thought without attributing it to mystical power of the emperor. Otherwise he would have his and his extended family’s heads chopped off before the dawn. For instance, after Ming Dynasty’s Zhenghe’s fleets, to build a sea-faring ship was Capital Penalty in China.

Meanwhile in Europe, on the other hand, people had no risk, and have been encouraged with great rewards dictated by cutting throat inter-state competitions, to do free research and to form independent institutions for peer reviews.

Yes, China is the longest continuous civilisation on earth, but with a heavy price tag to pay for. After 400 years, she is still paying the instalments today…

Anonymous said...

"Tata may have come into existence , but an exception proves the rule."

The Tatas being parsis, originally from Iran were treated differently than the black/brown native Indians. The British were obsessed with race and color and played that game to the max, to the detriment of Indians. Likewise they imported baghdadi Jews like the Sassoons of opium trade fame into India, rather than use the native black Cochin Jews. Among the natives they played the same game, elevating punjabis and mongoloid gurkhas to martial race status to lord it over the non-martial darker skinned native majority.

Anonymous said...

Forget about India v. China, Steve. Perhaps you'd like to write some insights on India v. Africa, quite seriously.

I wish that China could have enjoyed enlightened European style of "free research" since 17th century. Forget about Americas then, as with Chinese sheer brain power and number count, combined with that of the Europeans, humanity could have colonised Pluto by now...

...and we wouldn't have this mass Indian immigrantion problem perhaps? ^^

Anonymous said...

"it would be incredibley foolish to just ignore the severe malnutrition in South Asia (60% of kids are stunted, average man in India is nearly half a foot shorter than American men, even the elite is short and scrawny)"

It is really foolish to equate IQ with height. The high IQ Japanese when they invaded China in WWII were called dwarves even by the Chinese who weren't exactly giants themselves.

You are making a lot of silly excuses for India's failures. Anyone can see that India does not look like a country run by intelligent people. If as you claim chronic malnutrition is the reason why Indians of all castes and classes are so unintelligent making India such a hellhole then the future looks hopeless, for India is adding almost 20 million new mouths to feed to an already severely underfed population.

So based on your reasoning Indians will get evenHungrier and dumber and India will lag even further behind the rest of the world.

Anonymous said...

"It's interesting that all the smartest peoples are from Asia. Ashkenazi Jews have 60% of their DNA from West Asia. India is in South Asia. Mongoloids are from East Asia."

1. So deceitful and dishonest of you to lump India which has tested IQ well below the global average, with China and ashenazi Jews who test well above it!

2. The Ashkenazi Jews, whose DNA is half European, score much higher than Mizrahi Jews whose DNA is similar to other middle eastern peoples.

Svigor said...

Perhaps because of Ashkenazi Jews, who are fundamentally Asian (60% of their DNA comes from the Middle East).

What'd they do, project it psychically from the shtetls? Psi-locks? What?

Svigor said...

So, if we're to automatically assume that India's IQ is going to rise by 13 points when (not if, of course) they solve their malnutrition problem (never mind the hate fact that 1 billion people eating first-world levels of meat will mean that much higher food prices), shouldn't we also assume that mean Chinese IQ will rise to, what, 118? They'll be lording it over the American-born Chinese (dummies that they are) then!

Ah, the future, it gets to stay the future forever!

Svigor said...

The Tatas being parsis, originally from Iran were treated differently than the black/brown native Indians. The British were obsessed with race and color and played that game to the max, to the detriment of Indians. Likewise they imported baghdadi Jews like the Sassoons of opium trade fame into India, rather than use the native black Cochin Jews. Among the natives they played the same game, elevating punjabis and mongoloid gurkhas to martial race status to lord it over the non-martial darker skinned native majority.

Indians blaming their racism on the British. Now I've heard everything.

No, Indians are the most racist people on Earth because they're the most diverse people on Earth.

Svigor said...

I wish that China could have enjoyed enlightened European style of "free research" since 17th century. Forget about Americas then, as with Chinese sheer brain power and number count, combined with that of the Europeans, humanity could have colonised Pluto by now...

Yes, the hybridly-vigorous-tastic European-Asian cognitive elites of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, etc., are even now planning their mission to Alpha Centauri.

Anonymous said...

"Indian mean IQ is stunted by malnutrition, and it should rise dramatically given better environment...e.g. massive foreign aids for a start" (Patel)

"Sub Sahara African mean IQ is stunted by malnutrition, and it should rise dramatically given better environment...e.g. massive foreign aids for a start" (Jamal)

"African immigrants in America have on average the most academic degrees per population than all other ethnicities ..." (Jamal)

"Indian immigrants In America have the highest income of all ethnicities..."(Patel)

"Africans kickstarted Chinese civilisation..." (Jamal)

"Brahmins have one of the highest average IQ in America. 112! And 42% of NASA scientists are Indians..." (Patel)

...

oh yeah " the evil Brits looted us for centuries..."(Patel & Jamal)

...


My awakening:

These two gentlemen seem to be the greatest pen pals of the modern time. Steve, take note.

Anonymous said...

“Yes, the hybridly-vigorous-tastic European-Asian cognitive elites of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, etc., are even now planning their mission to Alpha Centauri.”


LOL. To be fair, those are Turks-Mongols elites. Perhaps Allah prefers them to stay on earth?

Hybrid is good for neither the Chinese nor the Europeans on a mass scale. I guess most of them are HBDers, given a choice.

Yet first thing first, how far is Alpha Centauri from Pluto? I almost could imagine that our Indian friends might want to have some Khans to brag to during the journey?

Anonymous said...

"Yes, the hybridly-vigorous-tastic European-Asian cognitive elites of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, etc., are even now planning their mission to Alpha Centauri."

Some of those people of mixed-race look really weird and ewww, but some look strangely exotically super-beautiful.

Anonymous said...

“Then why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe and not the Far East?”

A smart guy under unified Imperial China indulging in studying the sky had neither incentive nor interests to research and write about what he really thought without attributing it to mystical power of the emperor.

This smart guy was most likely a dilettante who kept his research and writings private - not out of fear, but because he simply felt no need to publish and publicize. He might have thought that nobody else would understand.

For instance, after Ming Dynasty’s Zhenghe’s fleets, to build a sea-faring ship was Capital Penalty in China.

So China did have its equivalent of Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno after all!

Meanwhile in Europe, on the other hand, people had no risk,

Except for being burned at the stake?

catperson said...

It is really foolish to equate IQ with height. The high IQ Japanese when they invaded China in WWII were called dwarves even by the Chinese who weren't exactly giants themselves.

I'm not equating IQ with height. If a race is short for genetic reasons, then it says nothing about their intelligence; however Indians appear to have a very similar genetic potential for height as whites (indians in North America seem just as tall as whites), thus the extreme short stature in India implies they are stunted by malnutrition.

If malnutrition has stunted Indians so severely in a variable as heritable as height, imagine how much damage malnutrition has done to Indian IQ (which is less heritable than height). Obviously phenotypes in India are way below their genetic potential both physically and mentally. White populations also used to be short with IQ's around 80 until the Flynn Effect. The Dutch saw their IQ's rise 21 points and they went from Indian level height to being the tallest people in the first world.

Anonymous said...

Only 13% of Indian youth are getting 12 years of education, the equivalent of high school, and that too in a miserable educational system that is based entirely on rote learning. The great majority of college graduates are hopelessly unqualified to do the work their education is supposed to train them in. Like Africa, India has to import Chinese civil engineers to upgrade it's pathetically third rate infrastructure. Literacy rates are below Papua New Guinea. Hunger and malnutrition is worse than any other region. Sanitation is the worse in the world. Electricity is unreliable even in the biggest cities. India adds a population equal to that of the United States every 15 years.

India is heading towards a catastrophe.

rec1man said...

Whats a "mid-level caste"? In the varna system you are either upper caste/ dwija or you are low caste. The Patels are sudras and most Sikhs are descended from peasants or sudras.
--

Dwijas - Brahmins and Merchants and Nobility are upper castes about 20%

Sudra - Other Backward castes ( mid-level ) = peasants like Sikhs and Patels another 40% ( most of UK diaspora )

And below them are lower caste = Untouchables, tribals, and muslims
, another 40%
( Caribbean Hindus, Fiji Hindus)

Anonymous said...

I hereby invoke apu's law. As the length of a thread bout india approaches infinity, the likelihood of an indian poster proclaiming indias intellectual superiority approaches 1. I suppose nahasapeemapetalons corrolary would be that poster would continue to do so long after everyone has left or stopped caring.

Anonymous said...

"I'm not equating IQ with height. If a race is short for genetic reasons, then it says nothing about their intelligence; however Indians appear to have a very similar genetic potential for height as whites (indians in North America seem just as tall as whites), thus the extreme short stature in India implies they are stunted by malnutrition"

Where is your evidence that Indians in north America are as tall as whites?

On the other hand there is plenty evidence that younger Japanese are growing much taller than their parents and grandparents. But there is no evidence they are any smarter than their short and scrawny yet highly intelligent ancestors who amazed the world by modernizing so rapidly.

You need better excuses for India's inability to match the success of east asians. Even countries like Thailand and Phillipines look far better off than India.

Anonymous said...

”This smart guy was most likely a dilettante who kept his research and writings private - not out of fear, but because he simply felt no need to publish and publicize. He might have thought that nobody else would understand.”

-----

Dilettante maybe or maybe not, yet you are very correct that Imperial China indeed had many of these guys who hide their great findings including one who secretly established Gravity Theory – a full 300 years ahead of Newton… don’t believe me? Oops, since he kept his little secret, you could never disapprove the claim, could you?

Then your initial question “why the Europeans went on with industrialisation while the Chinese stagnated” will have a quite easy answer: Chinese didn’t stagnate, instead they went to Mars, secretly…

If you still can’t step outside of your messy logic, allow me to say this: very intelligent people, that is to say people like myself, usually are exceptionally good at spreading their new found ideas and insights unlike what you assumed.

That’s why I am writing to you^^

That’s also why Newton himself was a household name;

Confucius went through all Warring States to teach his principles;

Da Vinci was a pan-European celebrity;

Einstein went inter-continental…

If Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno has kept their little secrets to themselves, they wouldn’t have been asked by the Church for a serious talk, would they?

Heck, if Steve Sailer just had shushed about HBD decades earlier, you and I wouldn’t have had this very conversation under his worldwide blog at this moment, would we?

Get the point?



“So China did have its equivalent of Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno after all!”
------

I didn’t state that China hadn’t. On the contrary, she had abundant, till today.



”Except for being burned at the stake?”

------

I was talking about European Enlightenment from 17th century onwards whereas you hit back with Dark Ages. Apple Orange.

Anonymous said...

"White populations also used to be short with IQ's around 80 until the Flynn Effect."

----

Your "Flynn Effect"is granted since today, now please kindly show me some intelligence, will you?


"The Dutch saw their IQ's rise 21 points and they went from Indian level height to being the tallest people in the first world. "

-----

How about Japanese? They must have eaten too much bad sushi all these decades, agree?

Anonymous said...

"I know the obvious comment is that I must have known how a child of our union would look when I married an Indian man, but it is a wise woman who thinks that far ahead when she falls in love.

I didn't think about any of this before I got pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. Her colour and culture were immaterial then.

But self-flagellation is not useful. I have more pressing concerns. I am now the mother of a 'black' child"

What is wrong with this woman. She can fall in love with and marry an Indian man but is having problems loving and accepting the child she made with him because the child is "black"? Isn't her husband even darker than the daughter she begot him?

Anonymous said...

"Yes, the hybridly-vigorous-tastic European-Asian cognitive elites of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, etc., are even now planning their mission to Alpha Centauri."

Tajiks are the standouts in Central Asia. They are Persians and not at all hybrids. They are also far poorer than Iran, and the poorest in Central Asia. There's something malfunctioning about every former Soviet republic.

Anonymous said...

Some commentators are claiming China was not as malnourished but this is unlikely to be true. The Chinese were not well fed 30, 40, 50+ years ago. Particularly during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) there was massive starvation.

To give you an idea of what happened then. Here's a sample:

"In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961."

"Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/opinion/16iht-eddikotter16.html

The Chinese of senior and middle management age right now grew up in starving or hungry times depending on situation but they are performing extremely well.

Anonymous said...

"Islam wiped out buddhism in Central Asia ( remember the Bamiyan Buddhas ) and in India too."

One the one hand Hindus, especially Brahmins, boast that Shankaracharya defeated Buddhism and on the other you blame Muslims. You can't have it both ways. Buddhism had already declined a great deal in India before the Muslim invaders finished them off.


"Myanmar, is buddhist and has much poorer socio-economic profile than India."

Myanmar is poor but it's poverty does not shock visitors like India's does.


"Buddhism is also dysgenic like Roman Catholicism
It promotes celibacy and the higher IQ segment become celibate monks and the residual population is enstupidated."

India was made stupid, weak and divided by the Brahmins not the Buddhist monks they replaced. It remains so today. Just look at it.

The east Asian nations, China, Japan and Korea, embraced the Buddhism that Indians rejected a few centuries after Ashoka the Great adopted and popularized it. These countries had celibate monks and still do today. Compare them to Hindu India. Who looks "enstupidiated"?

Anonymous said...

"In sri lanka, the buddhist sinhalese instituted radical affirmative action against the Hindu tamils. The reason was that they could not compete academically. The reason they couldnt compete was because each generation, the cleverer sinhalese buddhists became celibate monks and got removed from the gene pool This went on for 100 generations."

The Buddhist Sinhalese of Sri Lanka enjoy a far better standard of living than most any major ethnic group in India, including the Tamils.

In Malaysia the Hindu Tamils are at the very bottom socio-economically. Tibet and Sikkim are full of monks, but the Tibetans in China and India aren't starving or begging like so many Hindus.

Anonymous said...

I'm not too sure celibacy would have any effect - besides the small numbers affected, if you have more celibacy, you have less resource competition for the children of the people who did not become celibate, who then have greater numbers of offspring, so you might end up with the same or equal reproduction amongst intellectual elites.

( However, I could imagine celibacy selecting (genetically or culturally) against supernaturalism combined with intelligence though (i.e. the men who are both intelligent and have intelligent sons and daughters tend to have less religious feeling, or else they would be more inclined to join the religious class, and pass their lack of feeling on to their children), which may help explain Europe to some extent (particularly those parts of it that retain their traditional association with reproduction being ungodly, unlike the "Be fruitful and multiply" sects).

Whereas in Hinduism, or to a lesser extent Judaism or Islam, intelligence is selected to be precisely compatible with superstition for greatest reproductive success, leading to different cultural patterns and the persistence of a "high intelligence yet superstitious" intellectual tradition to a fever pitch less known than in East Asia and Europe. )

Besides which, my perception was that becoming a celibate member of the Buddhist sangha was largely a temporary thing amongst Buddhists - although if there were a difference between South East Asia and East Asia in this matter, it might be that staying in the celibate Buddhist monk class would be more attractive as it gave access to political power (while religious power was crushed in East Asia proper).

"Myanmar is poor but it's poverty does not shock visitors like India's does."

Although a caste system might promote selection for intelligence, it may provoke downward mobility less - its all "mate with your caste or leave no children and be socially shunned when you try to move into 'poorer' occupations" in a real caste system, which is pretty much the opposite of Unz speculations about China where the poor are constantly replaced by the winners of a bellum omnium contra omnes between entrepreneurs.

Anonymous said...

"Although a caste system might promote selection for intelligence"

How did you manage to reach that conclusion despite all the evidence to the contrary?

The caste system has been in place in India for centuries. What have been the results? Stupidity, superstition, backwardness, weakness, defeat, degradation, filth in mind and physical environment...

Anonymous said...

A country of "snake-charmers" and "Rat-Eaters" getting compared with Eighth wonder of the world. WOW. We must be doing something right.

Anonymous said...

"India v. China, Again"

Conclusion: 81 : 105 , Again.

Next question?


P.S. @ Flynn : please kindly update your theory to Category 4 Level, so that we can see some awesome 30-point Tsunami Effect within say 20 years?

catperson said...

On the other hand there is plenty evidence that younger Japanese are growing much taller than their parents and grandparents. But there is no evidence they are any smarter than their short and scrawny yet highly intelligent ancestors who amazed the world by modernizing so rapidly.

Today's Japanese are far more intelligent. They score much higer on IQ tests (the Flynn Effect was first documented in Japan by Richard Lynn), they can handle much more complex technology.

You need better excuses for India's inability to match the success of east asians.

I don't deny that Indians are genetically less intelligent than whites and East Asians, however a relatively small gap in cognitive genotype can translate into a huge gap in cognitive phenotype, because low IQ populations can't figure out how to solve the problem of malnutrition, so both India and black Africa have IQ's about 13 points below their genetic level.

We know this is true for black Africa because "full-blooded" blacks in America are several inches taller and 13 IQ points smarter than blacks in Africa. And this is not because blacks in America are an elite, as the vast majority of "full-blooded" black Americans came as slaves, suggesting their ancestors were less intelligent than the Africans who stayed in Africa and evaded slavery.

If black Africa's IQ of 67 is 13 points below their genetic potential, then it's axiomatic that India's IQ of 81 is at least 13 points below their genetic level because India is even more malnourished than black Africa. This isn't rocket science people. Think about it.

Anonymous said...

India is miscegenation central - the Brazil if Asia.

I find Indians to be much like black people. Perhaps a little smarter (only a little), but with many of the same negative personality traits.

The widespread dishonesty and deceit of Indians (discussed above) is troubling and probably has evolutionary causes.

Anonymous said...

"Stephanini, Tim. "Indian H-1B Workers Incompetent Cheats and Frauds." VDare, Oct. 27, 2009.

http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102709.htm"


The average IQ of India is only 81.

These people aren't very bright -- which any computer programmer who has ever worked with Indian programmers will attest.

gob smacked said...

"What is wrong with this woman. She can fall in love with and marry an Indian man but is having problems loving and accepting the child she made with him because the child is "black"? Isn't her husband even darker than the daughter she begot him?"


There is something truly irrational about sexual attraction and activity. Something self-destructive. For years I wondered about arranged marriages and the control that parents exercised over their offsprings' choices; the perrennial tendency to lock girls away between puberty and marriage, for their own protection. Now I understand. The choices made are so insane, so often regretted for the rest of life, that I consider adolsecence to be 10-12 years of mental illness for both sexes, in most people.
The strange thing about this woman is not that she regrets her choice but that she nearly middle aged when she made it.

Anonymous said...

@catperson,

First, there is no evidence that the average height of American born Indians are 6" taller than their Indian counter part. I have many Indians going to the same school as my kids, while there are a few taller ones, many are below average by white standards. Even if they are taller than their Indian counterpart, they represent the previledged ones back in India and would be expected to have better genes, including heights. An Indian with a good job in the U.S. is a highly sought after mate.

Second, Indians are genetically distinct from Europeans and East Asians. They form a separate cluster with most Middle East and North Africa. So you cannot compare the height of the Indians in the West and expect them to converge to white standards.

Third, India is nowhere near as malnurished as most parts of Africa. Just look at the CIA GDP per person index. India today is at $1200 where as most of Africa ranges from just over $100 to $800 in Kenya. Plus Africa has some of the worst governments on earth. While India has bad government, it is not as bad.

Finally, there are many examples of where people grow up with very bad nutritions due to war and bad government policies. We did not see their IQ drop by 13 points. Nor do we see the subsequent generations gain that much. China was badly nurished. You can't get any worse then millions starving to death. We saw their IQ go up from 100 to something like 104 after they gain much better nurishment. In the case with India, improvement will be long time coming since the current policy is not helping the masses. We also should expect modest improvement in IQ when it finally does come.

Nigel said...

"What is wrong with this woman. She can fall in love with and marry an Indian man but is having problems loving and accepting the child she made with him because the child is "black"? Isn't her husband even darker than the daughter she begot him?"

It's called ethnic nepotism. The more genes we share with others, the more we care for them. The woman will have less of an ethnic genetic interest (EGI) with her mixed-race child since she shares fewer genes with it. In general, people want their children to look like them so that they can see more of their own features in their children. Since her "black child" (aka Indian child) won't carry as many of her characteristics as it would if she married an ethnic Englishman, she will have less of a genetic investment in the welfare of the child.

See:
http://www.mankindquarterly.org/samples/SalterMQXLVIII-3.pdf

Anonymous said...

@catperson,

Why are you comparing Indians to Western whites when there are plenty of examples of what India will end up down the road from countries belonging to the same genetic cluster as Indians, namely, Middle Easterners. Most of the populations in the Middle East are pretty well nurished. They are not as tall as the Western whites and their IQ is pretty consistently at mid eighties. For India to reach Middle Eastern level of income and nurishment would be quite an accomplishment and would take decades if India can get there at all.

I think given the evidence from countries belonging to the same genetic cluster, you would expect India to top out in the mid eighties, similar to Iraq or Saudi Arabia.

Anonymous said...

According respected business daily, Financial Times, the stock advice by British diplomat to visiting dignitaries to India was to “reach a point when you feel you are overdoing flattery, and then double it”.

Indian drink too much of their own Kool-Aid, and got angry and defensive once others call them out. The most interesting part of the story is really about the WSJ article, but the angry responses from Indians.

catperson said...

Actually India is far more malnourished than Sub-Saharan Africa. On page 184 of Richard Lynn's book "Race differences in Intelligence" he cites data collected by UNICEF.

As of the 1990s, 41% of sub-Saharan Africa was stunted.

A collosal 61% of South Asia was stunted.

If black African IQ is 13 points below their genetic potential with 41% stunted, then a India must also be 13 points below their genetic potential too (and perhaps much more) considering 61% are stunted.

Indians and Arabs might belong to the same race (non-white caucasoids) and I admit Arabs don't score much better than Indiands despite superior nutrition.

However even Arabs are way behind first world standards when it comes to nutrition. 24% of the middle east/North Africa is stunted, compared to probably 0% of North America. Average adult male height in the middle east is probably only 5'7" compared to 5'10/5'11" in North America. Just the fact that the middle east invented agriculture suggests they have more intellectual potential than we see from them today

Anonymous said...

@catperson,

"However even Arabs are way behind first world standards when it comes to nutrition. 24% of the middle east/North Africa is stunted"

If you lump them all together, there are still proverty in that region. However, there are gradation of economic development in the Middle East, based mainly on how much oil they have under their feet. Some countries such as the Saudis or Kawaities are approaching Western nutrition. Did you see them approaching Western height and IQ? Nope, in fact, they score pretty similar to the ones that are poorer, like Egypt.

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