“Selfishness.” Interesting word choice, that. In Europe (and to some degree in America), the geezers and grievance lobbies watch as the social welfare system sinks under the weight of its ponzi scheme ridiculousness and, with little more than a shrug, demand healthy COLAs and added benefits. Sure, the whole state is going bankrupt, but who gives a damn – I’ll be dead by then.

If you think about it, socialism is actually about the most selfish system there is.

But debating any Jonah Goldberg statement is a waste of time.

He doesn’t say what any red-blooded libertarian would say: he doesn’t want to live in Europe because he would have to pay higher taxes and have less money to spend on himself. Much of “American culture” is in fact consumerism. Acquiring European high culture (and French high culture is indeed rather doctrinaire) would be too much work, albeit many Europeans have more free time in which to do it.

SAT’s are a biased sample indeed, as there can be a difference in the slice of the population that takes the SAT - i.e., if Filipinos are more likely to take the SAT than Chinese the Filipino test-taking pool may be of lower quality.

But that does not seem to be the case, as there is no reason to think that Chinese-Americans take the SAT at a lower rate.

As for the California tests, the vast majority do declare their identity, only 2-3% I believe do not.

One would also have to assume that the Filipino and Chinese populations resident in California are not representative, or differentially representative. Taken in isolation this would be a reasonable objection. But we do have IQ data for various Chinese populations, including Chinese-Americans, and these are very similar. On that scale there is no reason to think that Chinese-Americans are unrepresentative of the Chinese.

Sadly, we do not have IQ scores for Filipino-Americans. But the fact that Chinese outperform them both here and in the old country tends to support the notion that the Fil-American sample is not that far off from the original population.

Err, SATs test-takers are a biased sample—they are by definition kids who selected to take the SATs since the SATs are not mandatory (ETS would piss itself with joy if they were).

California STAR scores measure those who declare that ethnicity who reside in California. By definition it is a biased sample if Chinese v. Filipino culture writ large is at issue, unless the probability of a Chinese person and Filipino person attending California schools is identical. And STAR can’t tell recent immigrants from long-time nationals.

Inter-marriage totally fouls-up cultural explanations—which parent’s culture dominates the upbringing or is it an amalgam? Never mind that ethnicity may not be synonymous with cultural practice—a person born to lapsed Catholic parents is not really raised in a “Catholic” culture.

That would be an explanation, but that assumes that the population is constantly leaking its failures back to China.

I do not see how there can be selection and availability biases in the case of overseas Chinese or Jews.

Chinese are Chinese; they do not and cannot hide as something else. How is a Chinese going to pretend he is a Malay in Malaysia ? Even in the Philippines it doesn’t happen, in spite of considerable intermarriage.

And as for US test scores, the same thing. We do have test data broken down by Chinese and Filipino in California, and these apply to the entire population of students, that is the entire population who are required to take the public school tests. We have SAT data for the entire population of test takers also.

I think the burden is on you to show some plausible evidence of selection bias.

I disagree that G. claims “Culture is Destiny” but his “Maybe, just maybe” paragraph seems to treat culture as the determining factor v. governmental or economic institutions. His 1st v. 3rd world comparison in the last ‘graph is profoundly stupid—economic, social, and political institutions in the developing world are far different from the 1st world, let alone cultural or governmental variables.

Re the mention of ethnic Chinese in southeast Asia and Jews in the US, the problem with the “their culture makes them perform better” argument is that it usually rests on selection or availability biases: the observer looks at Chinese or Jews who succeed and never looks at those who don’t. Or the sample is drawn from a biased population. Also, deciding who is part of group X v. Y is difficult,

Thank you for the reply. It is a pleasure to discuss substantial matters.

I have heard talk about the Philippines missing the window of opportunity and getting priced out of the manufacturing for export niche by China. I don’t think this is a very useful explanation. Other countries also came late into the game and are doing better.

I do follow the education literature, and I have not noticed anything that gets into the guts of that question. As far as I can tell the mechanics of the effect of culture on educational performance is still a mystery. The best attempt I have seen was Ogbu’s, but he was dealing with black people and his reasearch was not quantitative.

Since this economic effect runs in parallel with the measurable economic outcomes, I thought there must be some connection, or at least there was some light to be shed from one field to another.

I don’t know of any studies on the differences in the demographics of different Asian immigrant groups, if you have such a reference it would be very interesting. From observation of our local populations here in San Francisco, I cannot detect much of a difference. If anything the social background of the local Chinese is if anything lower than what is typical of the local Filipinos.

The Chinese in the Philippines are predominantly the descendants of poor peasants imported as coolie labor. When I was a kid you would still see Chinese pulling rickshaws in Manilas Chinatown, and it was common to find Chinese servants in wealthy households. No more.

Despise all my wishes, and because of Luis and Daniel (jeez, thanks a lot, you too), this thread has indeed degenerated into an effort to talk sensibly about the role of culture in economic development.

Under these circumstances, there’s always a risk to imply that Mr Goldberg ever had a point about culture etc.

But he had not. His article is nationalistic stupidity dressed with cool sounding words, one of them being “culture”. You can see that because it is tailored to make an american bigot feel warm and fuzzy inside (not! sucking-up! to! anything!) and because the examples are ridiculous.

So there are intelligent people out there, willing to pick up the silly thing, play along and make something interesting out of it : grats, and thanks. But giving jingoism the derision it deserves is healthy too, in my opinion. Did I mention Goldberg is a nationalistic idiot?

I admit I may be reacting – as you say – to the article of a strawman Goldberg. Please let me know when the real one begins to write.

http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/thronekissers.html

Moreover, he misses the significance of his own stats. The real shocker here is that two-fifths of Medicare patients and three-fifths of Medicaid patients aren’t satisfied despite receiving medical treatment on someone else’s dime. How good can these programs be if so many patients are unhappy even when their treatment is free?

Luis’s point is exactly on—this is precisely why more and more prominent economists are trying to investigate cultural explanations, and put more theoretical depth into what we mean by “culture”, instead of using it as a catch-all. Last I heard, economists were social scientists, so Henry’s statement that cultural explanations have a “god-awful” reputation among social scientists seems off. One can add to this the whole “social capital” literature, much of which I think should have a god-awful reputation but clearly does not among many social scientists. It is not hard to find schools of social science who have been turning more, not less, toward cultural explanations.

There are of course a ton of potential problems with such explanations, but let’s not just scoff at them or write them off. It’s not like non-cultural social science explantions (perhaps those favored by Henry?) have proved themselves to have a lot of explanatory power.

Scoffing at Jonah Goldberg is of course a different matter.