In our culture, we're socialized to minimize our "self." Your life is defined by the roles you play in the extended family at various stages of life: child, father, etc. You spend a life laboring to provide for your kids, and the reward at the end is raising your grandkids and sharing their joy as they experience everything in the world for the first time through fresh eyes. It completes the cycle of life. If you don't have grandkids, you're stripped of purpose and robbed of your reward.
I can understand at an intellectual level that other people are raised differently and probably have a different emotional reaction, and, at an intellectual level, I understand that viewpoint is valid. But I genuinely cannot put myself in that mindset. The idea that you could live a fulfilling life without grandkids is predicated on being something I don't know how to be.
For whatever it's worth, it's my perception that even within the US there are many who come from a culture where it's expected for adults to settle down and raise a family at some point in their lives. That describes my background, and I would like to have kids myself.
I believe for many, the desire is there, but it's not so strong as to overcome the forces against it. It's a major life decision and can make the difference between relative financial stability and a decent retirement or struggling their whole lives and standing in a grocery store all day bagging groceries to keep a roof over their head in their 70s.
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
Remember that the study is westerners trying to make sense of psychological surveys conducted in east asia with the words they have in their vocabulary.
I agree that “cooperation” isn’t the perfect word. What they really mean is that east asian countries are good at large-scale projects: rice farming back then, building high speed rail today.
But westerners overlook that east asian societies, specifically China, often tolerate openly self-interested behavior: pursuit of personal advantage, or advantage for one’s family, without regard to others. There’s a funny Ronny Chieng joke that east asian mothers want their kids to be doctors, but view “helping people” as an undesirable consequence of the job.
By contrast, we think of westerners, and Americans specifically, as highly individualistic, but many subgroups of Americans have a high level of self-organization. They’ll make and socially enforce rules without anyone telling them what to do.
I've always thought that the American individualist/China familial is looking at things absolutely upside down. For the Chinese, the family mimics the tyrannical nature of the government (and/or the other way around). The keyboard social observer of me find the American family value of equality, respect for autonomy, unconditional love and support more conducive to forming stronger bonds. Anyone who's lived in a typical Chinese family should wonder why the hell there's the stereotype that Americans are more individualistic?
> Anyone who's lived in a typical Chinese family should wonder why the hell there's the stereotype that Americans are more individualistic?
For me, it was finding a lot of my American friend’s grandparents lived in nursing homes. That really shocked me, since just about everyone I knew in Taiwan lived with their grandparents.
The other one was learning quite a few of my American classmates had to pay their own college tuition. Not because their parents couldn’t afford it, but simply because they were seen as “adults” so were on their own.
Or people getting divorced multiple times each, parents having extensive hobbies that don't involve family, grandparents who don't help raise kids, how much input grandparents have into how kids are raised, etc. My wife is Anglo-American and I'm south asian and the culture shock is real. In my family you have all these rules to allow people to save face, suppress open conflict, etc. In her family, you just say what you mean and if the other person doesn't like it, you just get divorced, or "go no contact," or otherwise just stop dealing with each other.
Every culture has “certain norms” that “are not to be crossed.” It’s precisely because Anglos have so few thag they stand out. For most non-Anglos, the concept of such speech policing isn’t even thought of as objectionable. I was discussing the Charlie Hebdo shooting with my dad, who is staunchly anti-religious but from a Muslim country. He was like “well why do you need to draw pictures of the Prophet Mohammad?” To him, it’s entirely a cost (social conflict) with no benefit.
caste system will likely never die in India. I once even joked to my friend that one day when Indians will start accepting gay marriages they would post a matrimonial ad something along these lines - "Looking for an intelligent, well-behaved, educated, fair coloured gay groom for our son (Brahmin only)".
There are some states where caste doesn't matter like Telangana (not 100% casteless society but better than most states in the country). Also urban India is relatively casteblind.
Worth remembering that many felt the same about male friends saying "I love you" between each other was seen the same way just like 2-3 decades ago, that it'll never be socially acceptable. We had a transition period where it was "required" to add ", no homo" at the end, but today seems like most men are comfortable saying it to each other as friends without adding that disclaimer.
Big progress in just 2-3 decades, so never say never :)
It's very relevant. Untouchables are fairly regularly murdered with the police doing nothing, and scandals breaking regularly about caste based discrimination showing up in US corporations from immigrants even.
Its true. Only problem we avoid speaking such things to westerners is that your left-brained 90IQ liberal arts media picks it up and spins as an anti-brahmin narrative (who are less than 10%) while most perpetrators of such crimes are landholding classes (often grouped as "other backward caste" for political reasons).
I see it as proof that a subcontinent doesn’t necessarily need to be centralized into a single country. Colonization unnecessarily made that happen, and there’s no going back now.
It could be colonization but it would predate the British. The British East India company colonized India in the first place by exploiting the lack of cooperation. At the time, there wasn’t the overwhelming disparity between the countries there is today. Mughal India was one of the gunpowder empires, with the largest military in the world in the late 17th and early 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_the_Mughal_Empire. The per-capita GDP gap between India and Britain was only a factor of 2. But India’s vastly large population meant it had about four times the state revenues.
Britain couldn’t have, and didn’t, colonize India the way the Mughals had: through a direct land war. Instead, the British East India company entered into deals with various port cities one by one to establish toe holds. Then in the Battle of Plassey, they overthrew the Nawab with just 750 British soldiers and 2,000 Indian mercenaries against a Mughal army of 50,000. The British persuaded the Mughal generals to defect, and the Nawab, fearing further defections, capitulated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plassey
The history of colonization is far more complicated than that.
For example, the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines was a relative cakewalk where there was little to no cooperation (most of the island chain), but to this day the Muslims in the south still retain an autonomous region despite centuries of foreign occupation and interference by a host of nations, due in large part to their higher degree of cooperation.
Nope. India had guns and cannons, and more of them than the British East India company!
Robert Clive overthrew the Nawab of Bengal with 800 europeans and a dozen artillery pieces: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/battle-plassey. He also had 2,000 Indian soldiers (Britain conquered India with Indians doing the work). The Nawab had an army of 50,000 along with 50 artillery pieces.
> India had guns and cannons
India didnt really exist yet. 26 different states had guns and cannons. plenty of people who had guns and cannons were defeated by the British.
> Robert Clive overthrew the Nawab of Bengal with...
I believe the indian rulers at the time could match the british technologically. even at Plassey the british had superior tech
In the 1600s, the Indians probably had superior land-war weaponry. https://easy-history.com/the-military-revolution-in-india-pa.... By the 1700s, the British had leap-frogged the Indians by getting to iron-based canons earlier. But we’re talking incremental improvements. The point is that the Indians had a modern, gunpowder-powered military.
On the other side of the equation, the British were vastly outnumbered. Before 1800, the east india company had less than 20,000 Europeans in its army. On the other side, the Indians had hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Iron canons versus bronze canons weren’t the reason the British were able to overcome the Indian armies. It was that the EIC was able to get thousands of Indians to fight on their side, and exploited the divisions between the various Indian states.
But the subsequent consolidation of power in campaigns against the Maratha has similar features. The east india company won by exploiting division and conflict among the Maratha: https://www.worldhistory.org/Anglo-Maratha_Wars. What’s crazy is that during these wars, the East India Company armies were mostly Indians, with 15% or so being European soldiers.
> Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes. Most Western countries just can’t compete…
Why do you think New York or Chicago isn’t like this? What could western countries change?
This is obviously oversimplified but I think this is a big factor:
Singapore is a business masquerading as a country. While it is technically democratic, in practice there are some barriers preventing truly free and fair elections. That being said, the leaders in Singapore are not corrupt and truly do focus on what's best for the country. As a result decisions are made quickly, for the greater good, and are not politically driven. The leadership have the latitude to make decisions that they believe will make the country better. Sometimes these decisions don't have a lot of public support (because people are naturally more short-sighted) but, because of the political system, they don't need to rely on public support.
In the case of Singapore, I think this dynamic has led to a compounding effect of good decisions that have put the country in such a strong place today. You see this similarly with Norway's oil fund; it was likely unpopular initially to reinvest so much money into savings, but today it's paying off where they have a $2T savings account, from which they can withdraw up to 3% annually ($60B) for the needs of Norway.
> That being said, the leaders in Singapore are not corrupt and truly do focus on what's best for the country. As a result decisions are made quickly, for the greater good, and are not politically driven.
But what makes them act this way, lol? That's what every country wants out of its leaders. Why is Singapore able to do it? I know that's a hard question to answer...
> Singapore is a business masquerading as a country
I don't see why this would lead the country to being well organized. All the big businesses I've seen are very inefficient and disorganized internally, where decisions are made slowly, mostly to benefit the decisionmaker's little princedom inside the company.
I think it’s a mix of valuing education more, a strict enforcement of the law with severe punishment, a small area to maintain, electing educated politicians and demographics. Asians tend to commit less violent crimes. Markham in Canada for example has a much lower violent crime rate than most of the Canada and is predominantly Chinese.
Wealthy Asians tend to commit less violent crimes. If you go to a country with less law and order (like PNG), you’ll see more violence.
America and other countries had a spike of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Chinese gangs in the 80s/90s due to a refugee influx from Vietnam. Turns out a forcibly relocated, non-wealthy population who has to readjust to live in a new country is going to have issues, even if they are Asian.
The correlation between per-capita GDP and homicide rate is fairly weak, and if you graph it and color-code it you can clearly see that asian countries tend to have lower homicide rate at similar income levels: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc?y...
Countries like Bangladesh have fewer homicides than Canada, and less than twice as many as the U.K. or Sweden, while much richer Latin American countries have 5-20 times as many.
Chicagos biggest problems are corruption and special interests. Corruption means that labor has become very expensive for the government and most civil servant leaders tend to be incompetent. The incentives created when being in leadership is not about competence led to an environment where very few in the government are interested in improving the systems they run and those that focus on improvement generally don’t rise to obtain more power. The power of special interests means that it is impossible to make quick decisions, even if they are obvious. Everything is a long, drawn out process, so the decisions that are made tend to be the ones that benefit people who can pay lobbyists. Singapore is pretty much a benevolent dictatorship. Their government makes quick, technocratic decisions that legitimately attempt to make society as a whole better in the long run. The short term popularity of these decisions is effectively irrelevant, which allows them to do things like employing slaves and being extremely tough on crime.
A country where 10% of people are citizens, there’s a few expats, and nearly everyone else is a Bangladeshi or Nepali slave laborer doing all the work. With no rights, no prospect of citizenship, etc. The Davos view of where societies are headed.
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