Nothing illustrates China’s meteoric rise as some well chosen numbers.
By the end of the 1990s, China had come to dominate the mainstays of geopolitical power in the 20th century – coal and steel production. As a consequence, it leapt to the top of the Compositive Index of National Capability, which uses military expenditure, military personnel, energy consumption, iron and steel production, urban population, and total population as a proxy of national power. Still, one could legitimately argue that all of these factors are hardly relevant today. While Germany’s fourfold preponderance in steel production over Russia may have been a critical number in 1914, China’s eightfold advantage in steel production over the US by 2014 is all but meaningless in any relevant comparison of national power. The world has moved on.
By the end of the 2000s, like Victorian Britain in the mid-19th century, China became the workshop of the world, overtaking the US in both manufacturing and coming very close to it in terms of PPP-adjusted GDP. As a consequence, this was when China also overtook the US on a wide range of consumer welfare and ecological impact indicators, such as exports, CO2 emissions, Internet users, energy consumption, car sales, car production, and number of patents issued. Still, its presence in the hi-tech sector was still pretty modest, and innovation was low. This was not yet an economy that could furnish first-class armaments, or inspire far off peoples to carry out color revolutions in its name.
But as of this year, China is hurtling past yet another set of inflection points – the hi-tech component of its economy, roughly comparable to any of the major European Powers a mere decade ago, is now about to converge and then hurtle past that of the US by the end of the 2010s (even if in per capita terms it remains considerably behind, like South Korea 20 years ago).
This process can be proxied by three indicators: Number of scientific articles published, operational stock of industrial robots, and number of supercomputers.
Science Articles
The SJR maintains a database of scientific publications by country and subject for the past 20 years.
In 1996, China published a mere 29,000 papers, well behind Japan, the UK, Germany, and France (50,000-90,000) not to mention the US with 333,000. As of 2015, however, China had surged to 416,000 published papers, still modestly behind the US with its 567,000 papers but far ahead of everyone else.
Now to be sure, Chinese papers are still considerably less cited than those of the developed world. And yes, this reflects the fact that, on average, the quality of Chinese scientific output remains inferior – less innovative, more derivative – than that of the US. This extends to outright plagiarism; the negative stereotypes about Chinese academia are somewhat borne out by a study that showed that 7-8% of Chinese articles on arXiv.org were flagged for text overlaps, compared to less than 4% for the US and the UK.
Nonetheless, in the “hard”/STEM spheres that arguably matter more for technological progress – and which have much less in the way of a replicability crisis – China is already ahead of the US in terms of total publications: 34,000 to 28,000 in mathematics; 67,000 to 52,000 in physics and astronomy; 63,000 to 36,000 in chemistry; 120,000 to 67,000 in engineering; 49,000 to 41,000 in computer science. The only major spheres here in which the US remains considerably ahead are the more biologically orientated sciences, such as: 196,000 to 69,000 in medicine, 83,000 to 59,000 in biochemistry/genetics, 23,000 to 7,000 in neuroscience, and 18,000 to 14,000 in pharmacology. Otherwise, the US retains clear dominance only in the the softer spheres of social science and the arts: 54,000 to 7,000 in the social sciences, 10,000 to 2,000 in economics, 23,000 to 2,000 in psychology, and 27,000 to 2,000 in the arts and humanities. In one subcomponent that is arguably outright negative value added, that of Gender Studies, the US published 1,456 documents to China’s 23.
The overall trends cannot be denied – Chinese scientific output is rapidly approaching American levels and will probably outright overtake, at least in absolute numbers, by around 2020.
Robots
Until recently, the general consensus was that automation would be an issue mainly for developed countries with high labor costs. China, then still seen as a country of boundless, cheap, and disciplined if unskilled labor, was not expected to be deeply affected by those developments (except perhaps to the extent that it would be challenged by renewed competition with First World manufacturing “reshoring” back to the American rustbelts).
This was, until recently, a logical enough viewpoint. Traditionally, the world’s operational stock of industrial robots was concentrated in the most advanced manufacturing economies, with the highest per capita rates seen in Japan (which accounted for a third to half of all industrial robots during the 1980s and 1990s), Germany and the Germanic lands, Northern Italy, and more recently, South Korea. In contrast, until the early 2000s, the publicly available databases generally didn’t even bother to estimate the numbers of industrial robots in Chinese factories so small and insignificant were their numbers.
But from the late 2000s, the robotization of Chinese industry began to explode.
China went from having 32,000 industrial robots in 2008 (~Spain), to 189,000 by 2014 (~Germany) and approximately 263,000 robots by 2015, which puts it ahead of the 259,000 robots in all of North America and just behind Japan’s 297,000. It is therefore safe to assume that China took first place this year. By 2018, China is projected to have 614,000 industrial robots, equal to that of Japan and North America combined.
It is also worth noting that China dominates the global machine tool production industry, having overtaken the two leading countries in that sphere – Germany and Japan – around 2010. As of 2014, China accounted for 30% of the world’s yearly production of machine tools. This is of special interest not only because of this industry’s inherent technological sophistication, but also because of its strategic importance as the only part of the industrial economy that actually reproduces itself and makes everything else possible.
Supercomputers
A third excellent proxy for a country’s technological sophistication is its stock of supercomputers, which enable detailed simulations of phenomena as disparate as global climate, protein folding, and nuclear weapons reliability.
China emerged on the supercomputing scene in force during the early 2010s, when it became the world’s (distant) second to the US. However, within the space of the past year, it has surged ahead. According to the June 2016 list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, China is now marginally ahead of the US in terms of total number of systems, with 168 top systems relative to America’s 165, and well ahead in terms of performance share, with 211 petaflops total to America’s 173 petaflops.
China also hosts the world’s most powerful single supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, which is nearly three times as powerful as the world’s second best (also Chinese) and five times as powerful as the top US supercomputer. Remarkably, it is based entirely on Chinese processors, the US having banned the export of Intel chips used in previous Chinese supercomputers for national security reasons in 2015. Evidently, this has had negligible effects on Chinese technological progress, because China has no dearth of native human capital and a state-backed program to reduce reliance on foreign technologies.
Forget the war against terror, forget the Syrian conflict, forget Ukraine – when historians look back on this period, they will identify China’s emergence as a technologically capable continental economy (soon to far overtake the US in absolute size) that is less and less reliant on the West for its technological convergence is by far the most important geopolitical trend of the century.
As this process unfolds, China is likely to start being more assertive on the international stage. We are already seeing this in the South China Sea, and its recent aquisition of its first foreign military base in Djibouti and plans to multiply its (as yet meager) power projection capabilities by building over 1,000 heavy strategic aircraft – that’s far more than what the US and Russia have combined. (Note that my standing projection is for China to overtake the US in total military power by 2030 and in naval power by around 2040).
It will also come to assume a much bigger presence in science, culture, and soft power generally, though this will take some time to recognize given the long lag times between invention and recognition.
Its also worth emphasizing that this technological emergence is quite specific to China, not to the BRICS in general. South Africa is basically an affirmative action BRIC and not worth mentioning further, while Brazil is the country of the future – and always will be, as per De Gaulle’s witticism. Despite strong recent economic growth, India’s presence in all the aforementioned spheres – published papers, supercomputers, industrial robot stock – is comparable to that of a typical middle-sized European country, its huge population being nullified by underdevelopment and an average national IQ in the low 80s.
As for Russia, while general economic output has recovered and exceeded Soviet era levels, its scientific and technological superstructure remains depressed: Russia’s share of global science papers as of 2015 is now 1.9% of the world’s total relative to 7.6% in 1986 (a drop made all the more remarkable by the USSR’s absence of a “publish or perish” scientific culture); its respectable Soviet-era stock of ~60,000 industrial robots has now almost entirely depreciated without getting replaced; and the quantity of Russian supercomputers in the top 500 in any given year has stabilized at around 5-10 since the late 2000s (i.e., comparable to Sweden). This is a consequence of the post-Soviet degradation of Russia’s human capital, especially its more elite elements, due to the 1990s brain drain; the ultimately lackadaisical approach to industrial and technological policy under Putin; and the intrinsic limitations of a ~97 average national IQ (in comparison, China, Germany, Japan, and the advanced parts of the US and Italy are in the low 100s).
Chinese “progress” is a result not only of hard work and diligence, but also of a credit bubble the likes of which the world has never seen. The hangover will also be unprecedented. Presenting those mind-boggling numbers as an achievement is premature, at best.
Russians, on the other hand, are the most financially disciplined people on the planet today, with the lowest national stock of debt in the world. If they wanted to buy 1000 supercomputers, they could, but those contraptions would simply repeat the fate of the 60 000 dead robots (that were probably producing crap that nobody wanted to buy).
Japanese and German IQ is so high that both nations are dying out. They must be thinking so hard and so often that there is no time and energy left to have kids. When their former countries are re-colonized by dimmer folks, some stand-up comedian somewhere will rightly ask if the high IQ was the tell-tale sign of the terminal stupidity.
This was not yet an economy that could furnish first-class armaments, or inspire far off peoples to carry out color revolutions in its name.
I don’t think the latter can happen in the foreseeble future. That’s too bad because Chinese influence would be better for the world than neoconnery and cultural Marxism, but I just can’t imagine them winning the big battle of BS.
Otherwise, the US retains a preponderance in the the softer spheres: 10,000 to 2,000 in economics; 54,000 to 7,000 in social sciences, 27,000 to 2,000 in arts and humanities, and 23,000 to 2,000 in psychology. In one subcomponent that is arguably outright negative value added, that of Gender Studies, the US published 1,456 documents to China’s 23.
Heh, heh, exactly what I was talking about. And I bet that the quality of their BS is lower too, not just the quantity. Meaning that their economists are probably not as wrong, arrogant and fraudulent as the Western ones.
It will also come to assume a much bigger presence in science, culture, and soft power generally
As I said above, I would like that to happen, but I don’t expect it to happen. I doubt they have the HBD capacity to get to the top either in STEM innovation or demagogical BS. It would be interesting to find the earliest mention of them being less original, more derivative than Westerners. The older the stereotype, the better it reflects reality. Westerners started visiting China regularly in the 16th century. I’m curious what they wrote about it then. China had extensive contacts with India for a much longer time than that, since the introduction of Buddhism. The smarter sort of East Indians aren’t lacking in originality. I wonder if they noticed the difference 1000 years ago.
Not to draw on any more distant history, the US accumulated an astonishing quantity of debt, the likes of which the world had never seen, in WW2. By your silly argument it should have been irreparably damaged thereby.
Pretty much from the beginning. China was marked by a lack of intellectual curiosity (historian of science Toby Huff has written a lot about that).
There are however additional factors to consider:
(1) As I frequently point out, Europe leaped far ahead of China in terms of literacy as early as the 16th century. (=> much greater potential pool of intellectuals)
(2) Nutrition and disease load differences means that European historical IQs probably weren’t quite as depressed as Chinese.
(3) European peoples have been subject to dysgenic trends for the past century (Britain since as early as the 1870s). China has only been subject to them for half a century.
(4) Dysgenic trends are likely to proceed faster in the West than in China because the former have opted for the double whammy of importing Third Worlders en masse.
East Asians are indeed very likely less curious than Caucasians (also see my post on LessWrong demographics).
Still, at some point, absolute differences in IQ will make themselves felt, regardless of other HBD differences that favor Europeans. How many IQ points does the East Asian/European differential in curiosity and/or other factors translate to in terms of real life performance? I would estimate 10 at most, but probably closer to 5.
First of all, I never used the word “irreparably”, although it could very well be the case. Time will tell. Japan definitely looks as such, and China boldly repeats the same errors.
Second, there is absolutely no comparison between the US after WW2 and China today. America’s population grew from 140 million in 1945 t0 340 million today (including illegals).
Chinese population is projected to start declining from 2035 onward.
And population growth makes all the difference in debt dynamics.
Reports of Japan’s death have been much exaggerated. Its massive debt is basically a quirk of domestic accounting, and is made moot by its possession of the world’s biggest net international investment position (+75% of GDP).
GDP dynamics make all the difference. (Otherwise African countries would never default LOL). China easily has at least a couple of doublings left in terms of nominal GDP.
Very perceptive comment on Chinese tech being less reliant on the West as the Geopolitical trend of the century. This will have a huge effect on the world, not just China, and will help bring about the multipolar world the West is so desperate to stop.
Another factor to consider when it comes to robots is how I think Americans will impede robotics through unions and regulation while China will not.
There is only so much domestic loan the Japanese government can get in Japan.
His industrial policy appears/ed to be to cultivate links with European business at the expense of purely domestic industries and technology partly, I presume, in the hope that the European business elite would counterbalance the anti-Russian political elite: that worked well!
The depressed academic performance is largely due to a lack of will to spend enough money for anything better; what proportion researchers at western universities are natives? In Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (much higher % of world papers btw), the only real expenses are wages which are currently shockingly low world standards. The academic community there can take some of the blame for this; sport and the arts have prospered largely due to their ability and willingness to schmooze and get funding from politicians. They should take a leaf out of Gergiev’s book. This situation could be reversed quite quickly if it were a point of national pride/disgrace.
Is this still the case NOW? My own personal experience (biased though it is as the majority of east Asians I’ve known are from stem) is that it isn’t any longer true.
At least since the 70s, there’s been a “Geek” stereotype in mainstream western culture that could really slam that into reverse. There are certainly enclaves where this isn’t the case, but they’re becoming increasingly elite/inaccessible (Try buying a family home in Palo-Alto, Oxford, Cambridge etc without an inheritance). I guess this reinforces dysgenic trends.
Bear-ly? Is this a Russian thing, Anatoly? 😉
Right.
I’ve been reading that same story in the WSJ too for the past 25 years or so, telling us how the Chinese “bubble” is going to pop any day now, and it hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, during that same time period, Amerikastan has gone to hell in a hand-basket.
The exchange of information between Jesuits and the Ming court was very one-sided, e.g. Chinese still believed in a square earth
1) An average IQ of 97 is actually pretty respectable, considering that global average IQ is around 85. Countries with average IQ’s over 100 are only around 25% of the world’s population.
2) The Lynn/Vanhanen global IQ study of 2002-2006 found a smaller IQ gap between Russia and Germany: Although they did put the Russian average at 97, they put Germany at 99, rather than low 100s. The highest average for any European country was Italy at 102 (China and Japan were 105).
3) I suspect that 97 figure for Russia is a bit out of date, and that Russian IQ is rising to converge with that of Western Europe. In the past decade Russia has experienced significant improvements in public health, with life expectancy increasing by six years, and alcohol consumption falling by about 25%. Given that there is some correlation between IQ and health, it seems likely this would produce some noticeable rise in IQ as well.
This comment is a test. I believe Razib Khan has maneuvered to prevent me from commenting on this website as he is a coward. Feel free to delete.
My two bits:
China is a classic case of “big push catch-up” — copy the industrial techniques of more advanced nations in order to close the gap as quickly as possible, hope demand materializes, and hope the inefficiency isn’t too punishing. What has occurred in China is the largest misallocation of resources in human civilization (empty Ordos, etc.). Of course, copying others will only allow a society to draw even — however briefly — with its more innovative/creative competitors, who continue to toil in the van; and one can only build so many bridges to nowhere in order to goose GDP. There’s a reason China hasn’t accomplished anything original since the Song.
Make no mistake: just as East Asia’s high IQ is a genetic reality, so is its utter lack of curiosity and creativity (subject to remedy by CRISPR?). We now know that many aspects of personality are highly heritable, and the rigidly traditional and authoritarian nature all East Asian cultures has probably selected for drones, not heroes (conversely, all of the cultural accomplishments of the West are likely a result of the sublimation into the realm of art and knowledge of the Euro’s inherent restlessness).
As Western societies continue their population replacement, it’s easy to imagine a phase of global stagnation and instability with an unproductive lower-IQ West and an unproductive and despotic higher-IQ/uninspired East. It smells a lot like dystopia; “Last Man” times; the lowering and petrification of mankind Nietzsche lampooned as “Chinisianity”.
I’ve also assumed for years that these Chinese bubble stories are wishful thinking. It’s very easy to understand what the basis of the Chinese economy is – just look around yourself. Where were the clothes on your back, the device on which you’re reading this, the chair on which you’re sitting, etc. made? Making things that people want to buy sounds like an extremely healthy basis for a national economy.
Also, I’ve been reading for years that the Chinese own an enormous share of the US government’s debt.
I’d say that the biggest threat for them is a Chinese version of Gorbachev/Juan Carlos/De Klerk/Merkel – a vain, psychologically-insecure “reformer” eager to give away the family store for a chance to be patted on the back by the “cool” peolple.
“Westerners started visiting China regularly in the 16th century. I’m curious what they wrote about it then. ”
Here, China circa 1793
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/01/china-1793.html
Given that Russia’s population is about one tenth of China and yet its performance in IMO is on par with China, its national average IQ should equal or exceed that of China. Russia problem is probably due to people there getting drunk and hence reduce productivity.
another risk for China is that the USA sometimes in the next decades simply says: we won´t pay back any debts at all. They would of course find some legitimation, like: “you are racists because you do not let Uighurs take away 20 percent of you territory and ethnically cleanse it of non-Sunnis” or “we need the money to invest in the bright future of our new 30 million Nigerian immigrants”. China could do nothing about it, the very day the USA would have cleaned its public finances and China would suddenly have a gigantic hole in their public budget because of the write-off.
yet another risk lies in the simple fact that there are still two major nuclear powers in the world, USA and Russia. In the end they can do whatever they want and everybody else, including China, has to cope with it.
Stories like this one pop up all the time and then the tech industry begins hard lobbying for a huge increase in H1B Visas. The story is bullshit and so is the need for foreigners to fill tech jobs, or any jobs, when our real unemployment is over 20%.
Ron Unz assures me that Super-Flynn will work its voodoo on the Hispanic Mestizos and Amerinds pouring into the USA real soon….
So, no worries. Hispanics in the USA will start producing Mestizo versions of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Claude Shannon any day now.
Here is one of the bullshit stories. Check out this woman who shamelessly pronounces her country to be the world’s next scientific superpower.
https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Nation-Indian-Science-Taking/dp/1444710168
And how is that going to happen? Their best people end up in the Anglosphere. eg the guy who won a Fields medal a couple of years ago and the Silicon Valley CEOs
Even their billionaires seem to end up in London – Mittal and Hinduja.
Off hand, I can’t think of a single high profile Chinese billionaire who has upped sticks and gone to the West.
There are some smart ones ending up in the Anglosphere but the majorities are scam artist masquerading as H1B talents.
Here is a list of companies ruined or almost ruined by imported Indian labor
Adaptec – Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple – R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Apple – Indian national and former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta charged with leaking Intel and Apple secrets over the phone.
Australia’s National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
Barclays Bank – UK executive management was corrupted by Shriti Vadera, the Indian-origin economist. His advice led Barclay’s CEO and other execs to rig Libor interest rates.
Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
Caymas – Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
Caterpillar misses earnings a mere 4 months after outsourcing to India, Inc.
Circuit City – Outsourced all IT to Indian-run IBM and went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
Cisco – destroyed by Indian labor, laid off 55,000 in 2012, going down the drain.
ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
Computer Associates – Former CEO Sanjay Kumar, an Indian national, sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for accounting fraud.
Deloitte – 2010 – this Indian-packed consulting company is being sued under RICO fraud charges by Marin Country, California for a failed
solution.
Dell – call center (closed in India)
Delta call centers (closed in India)
Duke University – Massive scientific fraud by Indian national Dr. Anil Potti discovered in 2012.
Enron, WorldCom, Qwest, and Tyco all hired large numbers of foreign workers from India before their scandals.
Fannie Mae – Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty and sent to prison.
Goldman Sachs – Kunil Shah, VP & Managing Director – GS had to be bailed out by US taxpayers for $550 BILLION.
GM – Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later
HP – Got out of the PC hardware business in 2011 and can’t compete with Apple’s tablets. HP was taken over by Indians and Chinese in 2001.
So much for ‘Asian’ talent!
HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006)
IBM bill collecting system for Austin, TX failed in 2012 written by Indians at IBM
Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned)
Intel – Trade secret stolen by Indian national Biswamohan Pani in 2012.
JetStar Airways computer failure brings down Christchurch airport on 9/17/11. JetStar is owned by Quantas – which is know to have outsourced
to India, Inc.
JP Morgan – Outsourced subsidiary & IT integration to India in 2009 for $400 million, lost $2 billion in 2012.
Kodak: Outsourced to India in 2006, filed for bankruptcy in Jan, 2012.
Lehman (Jasjit Bhattal ruined the company. Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers)
London Olympics 2012 Security – Botched by India’s G4S
Medicare – Defrauded by Indian national doctor Arun Sharma & wife in the U.S.
Microsoft – Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it’s lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing.
MIPS – Taken over by Indian national Sandeep Vij in 2010, being sold off in 2012.
MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled)
MyNines – A startup founded and run by Indian national Apar Kothari went belly up after throwing millions of America’s VC $ down the drain.
Nomura Securities – (In 2011 “struggling to compete on the world stage”). No wonder because Jasjit Bhattal formerly of failed Lehman ran it.
See Lehman above.
PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed).
PepsiCo – Slides from #1 to #3 during Indian CEO Indra Nooyi’ watch.
Polycom – Former senior executive Sunil Bhalla charged with insider trading.
Qantas – See AirBus above
Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure)
Reebok – Massive fraud and theft in India second in size only to Satyam fraud
Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at least 2 Quantas planes in 2010, cost
Rolls $500m).
SAP – Same as Deloitte above in 2010.
Singapore airlines (IT functions taken over in 2009 by TCS, website trashed in August, 2011)
Skype (Madhu Yarlagadda fired)
State of Indiana $867 million FAILED IBM project, IBM being sued
State of New York – Hired Indian-infested CSC in 1998 to build a new system, was 33 months late and $166 million over budget, a cost
overrun of 47 percent. And then the system failed. So much for “they can do it better, cheaper, faster”. CSC also holds the sole contract for
NC’s Medicaid system redesign. That project is hundreds of millions over budget and years late. India, Inc. is taking its time to maximize the
amount it can grift out of America.
State of Texas failed IBM project.
Sun Micro (Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001, collapsed, had to be sold off to Oracle).
UK’s NHS outsourced numerous jobs including health records to India in mid-2000 resulting in $26 billion over budget.
Union Bank of California – Cancelled Finacle project run by India’s InfoSys in 2011.
United – call center (closed in India)
US Navy F-18 jet crashes into Virginia apartment building on 4/6/12 after outsourcing F-18 work to India’s Tata.
Victorian Order of Nurses, Canada (Payroll system screwed up by SAP/IBM in mid-2011)
Virgin Atlantic (software written in India caused cloud IT failure)
World Bank (Indian fraudsters BANNED for 3 years because they stole data).
The most optimistic projection I’ve ever seen of Chinese economic growth is by Robert Fogel in Foreign Policy. He predicts nominal GDP at 123 trillion by 2040. Foreign Policy doesn’t like the People’s Republic of China much, almost always runs negative stories but Fogel has a Nobel prize and such a bombshell prediction makes for compelling reading so they ran his piece in 2010.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/01/04/123000000000000/
It seems possible when you consider real growth, currency appreciation, and inflation of around 125% by 2040 all work together to raise nominal GDP.
I also wonder to what extent Foetal Alcohol Syndrome plays in this. I doubt it’ll be significant, but there ought to be some data out there that could confirm either way. As far as I understand it, Russia’s particularly destructive drinking culture is concentrated in mainly middle aged men (Anecdotally, I’ve found younger, non-underclass Russians I’ve met to be quite priggish about alcohol), but if female drinking during pregnancy is even slightly worse in some sections of society than western Europe, it’ll have an effect.
You are quite right, Erik. The Chinese were holding so much US debt that, when our economy crashed back in 2008, they got seriously worried that they were overexposed. Instead of investing so much in US T-bills, they decided to invest more in productive assets, like the BRICS bank and AIIB. They have also increased their reserves of precious metals. Since the contents of China’s sovereign wealth fund is officially a state secret, exact estimates are unavailable. However, it is believed that they reduced their dollar-denominated assets from a peak of 2/3 of their national savings to just under half in less than 10 years.
China is one of the few places that needs more gender studies. Take a look at these figures for gender ratios of young children in 2009 broken down by province.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_sex_ratio
Huge provinces of 100 million like Henan have a gender imbalance of 142 boys for 100 girls in the ages of 1-4 in 2009. This ratio is only gradually becoming less balanced. There is no strong impetus in China to discuss this imminent disaster or solve it with all resources possible.
If there were more gender studies focused academics forcing gender selected abortions to be heard about in the national discourse then perhaps the huge tragedy that is coming could be contained by now to not roll into another generation.
Sourcing extremely dubious.
You forgot Motorola, which, if memory serves, was destroyed by a Parsee female.
My unscientific anecdotic experiences tells the opposite. That the preference for boys in China actually end up having more women than men in China.
From the Chinese of the one child era I met, if the Chinese is a male, then invariably he is either the only child in the family or he has older sisters but never younger sister. If the Chinese is a female, you can for sure know that she does not have an older brother but may have older or younger sister. This tells me that most Chinese choose to have a second child (or sometimes third child) if they don’t yet have a son.
Also there is the social phenomenon of ‘left-over women’ but not ‘left-over men’ of people born in the age of the one child policy.
It looks almost intentional.
I don’t think China will have much influence on culture. If you look at Western/global pop culture for example, it’s clear that blacks have significant and disproportionate influence, and blacks are about the exact opposite in terms of personality and behavioral disposition compared to the Chinese. For whatever reason, the Western/global cultural market seems to demand black influence, which is rooted in black personality and behavioral traits that are radically different from those of the Chinese, and this seems unlikely to change.
I think China will remain in a defensive posture with respect to culture, and try to protect itself from external cultural influences, rather than have a significant influence outside of China and perhaps East Asia, like this recent article illustrates:
“China regulator to curb news that promotes “Western lifestyles””
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/China-regulator-to-curb-news-that-promotes-Western-lifestyles/articleshow/53922804.cms
I have seen interviews with president Xi where he clearly states that China is still a developing country and that it still has a long way to go before it can be considered developed. I tend to agree with this viewpoint, the past two centuries left China so stunted that it will probably take another century to recover from it.
Latest study from Stanford Uni on Chinese students critical thinking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/world/asia/china-college-education-quality.html?_r=0
“””Study Finds Chinese Students Excel in Critical Thinking. Until College.”””
In science and engineering there are only narrow ranges of feasible near optimal solutions, creativity is not as critical in the artistic fields. Those critical of creativity of East Asians conveniently ignore the results from the OECD PISA Creative Problem Solving survey,
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisainfocus/pisa-in-focus-n38-(eng)-final.pdf
The mantra for westerners tend to be “learn from your mistakes” while for the easterners it tends to be “learn from other people’s mistakes” which sometimes is mistaken as lack of originality but they sure are more time and resources efficient. But when the crunch come they are no less creative, as the OECD results have shown.
And they didn’t know the wheel! Serious!
High IQ is important as is the ratio of socializing to systemizing brains.
The biggest risk to China is the betrayal by their elites. This is what the West is counting on that Chinese oligarchs will join the Oligarch International. In this respect it is very interesting to observe planning and action of Jewish elite for whom penetration and infiltration of non Caucasian society is a serious challenge. Mimicry does not work too well if you are of a different race. So far Jews have very good PR in China while they failed completely in Japan which is quietly antisemitic. Phenomena like Tiger Mom help to produce slant eye Jewish elites. Jewish-Chinese marriages are promoted in liberal Jewish press. Once the slant eye Jews are produced the mimicry and the infiltration of Chinese elites will be much easier.
East Asians being non creative and having no influence on culture is pure nonsense. The West has a bias towards black culture which is promoted by the media industry. Korea is now a major cultural exporter. Millions of non Koreans watch Korean serials. Saudi teenage girls in their burkha world watch Korean romance soaps in their rooms. No Hip Hop or Rap there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Wave
Without black influence East Asians already had a indigenous art and music scene from ancient times.
And Japan has had a long history of influencing the West in the arts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japonism
May I know what great questions are being answered by these record breaking supercomputers? Presumably in the future someone will network a million processors and claim the title. But is he any better off than a guy with a brain and a table of integrals with a Mathematica program for some involved calculation. All the stuff that the Chinese excel in are free of competition since no one with domain knowledge sees the point of it. As in their claim to have the world’s largest radio telescope. That part of the spectrum has been mined all the way from Jodrell Bank to Areceibo.
One does not need Rock music or Rap music to be creative. This is the rubbish modern westerners have fooled themselves with thanks to their crazy media industry propaganda. There was a lot of creativity in the arts in centuries past and classical musicians like Mozart or Beethoven were far far more creative than your local rap artist can ever dream of becoming.
Just because Whites do not like following modern East Asian culture (and those who do are called Weebos) does not mean the rest of the world does not.
Modern East Asian cultural influence in the Middle East
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Wave
“In 2008, Yediot Aharonot, the most widely circulated daily Israeli newspaper, described the popularity of Korean dramas in Israel as a “revolution” in cultural tastes, and in 2013, popular Israeli newspaper Calcalist published a three-page cover story on how K-pop had “conquered” Israeli youth.
In 2008, a Korean language course was launched at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offering lectures on Korean history, politics, and culture.[72]
It is hoped by some commentators that the surging popularity of Korean culture across Israel and Palestine[96] may serve as a bridge over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[72] The Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported that some Israeli and Palestinian K-pop fans see themselves as “cultural missionaries” and actively introduce K-pop to their friends and relatives, further spreading the Korean Wave within their communities.[97][98]”
Autumn in My Heart, one of the earliest Korean dramas brought over to the Middle East, was made available for viewing after five months of “persistent negotiations” between the South Korean embassy and an Egyptian state-run broadcasting company. Shortly after the series ended, the embassy reported that it had received over 400 phone calls and love letters from fans from all over the country.[99] According to the secretary of the South Korean embassy in Cairo Lee Ki-seok, Korea’s involvement in the Iraq War had significantly undermined its reputation among Egyptians, but the screening of Autumn in My Heart proved “extremely effective” in reversing negative attitudes.[100]”
War Nerd on Saudi Arabian youth from Najran in South Saudi Arabia
https://pando.com/2014/10/09/the-war-nerd-technology-culture-wars-jihad/
“And in a way, the most corrosive of all the alien influences attacking Najran were the most seemingly innocuous: K-Pop and Korean Soap Operas. It’s amazing that there are still people in the old countries, like the US, who don’t realize yet that Korea has taken over world culture. They don’t need your stinkin’ American pop no more. They’ve got Sistar and they’re humming “Can’t Go to Sinchon.”
The Korean dramas Najran girls watch on their computers are intensely romantic—and “romantic” is a Western, alien import, a very dangerous one in a world where marriage is between or within families, and where young women expect to feel little or no affection for their husbands. When you’re stuck in your room—and your room’s windows have been boarded up to prevent heterosexual gazes from passing in or out—it’s quite a trip to be suddenly transported to a Korean beach, where two young lovers are strolling, having a heart-to-heart on a program called “Autumn in My Heart.”
All the girls who were sequestered inside the bomb-barriers at the Girls’ Preparatory Year Program in Najran loved these shows. Many of them wanted careers like the ones they saw the heroines of such programs following. And none of that—the romantic dreams, the careers, the mobility, even the chance to walk on a beach with your hair exposed sufficiently to blow in the wind—are possible. This is the sort of cultural tension that jihadis feel, and start shooting in their idiotic way to try to stop. And they have about as much chance, in the long run, as a man firing a rifle at a leaking levee to try to keep the flood out. “
Poormouth
“And Japan has had a long history of influencing the West in the arts.”
Seven Samurai (1954) -> The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Yojimbo (1960) ->A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Rashomon (1950)->The Outrage (1964)
Yojimbo (1960) ->Last Man Standing (1996)
Published in a peer reviewed medical journal, BMJ no less. The data is drawn from the Chinese mid-census so on its face its not dubious at all.
Unless there is academic fraud or the Chinese census is highly dysfunctional (would not be in this instance able to call it a propaganda organ as it is cranking out data that policymakers and the public would find very unsettling), this is an accurate gauge of an impending social disaster in China.
And you can flip it the other way, since Akira Kurosawa was greatly influenced by John Ford. And a great many Japanese films have been adapted from Western sources: Ran (King Lear), Throne of Blood (Macbeth), Yurusarezaru mono (Unforgiven ), Saidoweizu (Sideways), High and Low (King’s Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery ), etc
I read the Los Angeles Jewish Journal regularly. In the last 10 years it has had numerous articles about the similarity between Jewish and Chinese culture. The articles conclude that Jewish and Chinese culture are superior to American culture .
There are a few qualms about marriages of Chinese women and Jewish men but consensus is that those intermarriages are a good thing
The writers seem to have some fantasy of docile perfect wife and mother Chinese woman who is also a STEM professional
There are lots of Chinese takeout joints in the world. Imagine how many there are in China. How do you think all those takeout and delivery orders are taken and processed?
It is in glaring contradiction with the data produced by the actual census.
I’m so sorry to tell you twerpy Gen Xers… but tell you I will: Robots are pathetic!
“…the intrinsic limitations of a ~97 average national IQ (in comparison, China, Germany, Japan, and the advanced parts of the US and Italy are in the low 100s)”.
That sounds quite silly to me. In the first place, there are many Russian geniuses and world-leading experts in almost any field you care to mention. Russian science and technology is second to none in quality, if not in quantity – and it’s quality that counts.
Moreover, the difference between an IQ of 97 and one of 105 is vanishingly unimportant compared to other factors such as energy, determination, creativity, congenial work environments, helpful management, membership of a good team… There are many thousands of people in the West with IQs of 150 and more, and they do not tend to fare any better economically than the average – just ask Mensa!
I heartily agree with Tom Welsh’s comments as regards IQ and intelligence among Russians.
Besides, people tend to forget that Russia is the largest country on earth and that it comprises many nationalities as well as religions, not to mention an awful lot of immigrants from places like Central Asia and the Caucasus, which regions have much lower education standards than in Russia proper. Out of one hundred and fifty million or so citizens of the Russian Federation, no more than eighty million are ethnic Russians, and so just that would explain that the IQ figures for Russia as a whole would be skewed to the downside.
Let’s face it, the Russians have the single most intelligent and capable leader in the world today, and if we compare Putin with the likes of Holland, Merkel and Obama, the contrast is enough to make me want to cry ( I’m American and I grew up in France).
And besides intelligence, what the Russians have in spades is resourcefulness and resilience, as well as sheer tenacity, commodities in short supply in the vaunted West.
All the best from Irkutsk, Siberia AR
the question is whether there are social institutions in which “drones” have actually a higher output than “heroes”. Maybe modern science – opposed to heroic 19th century science – produces is such a social institution. There is a lot of progress made by many incremental steps, each achieved rather with industriousness than with genius. Also I think those people who actually produce the wealth in the West – which is MINT people – tend to have rather asian personalities.
One of the last shows my sister watched was a Korean show about rappers.
I always cringe when I read the term “critical thinking”. I have never understood what this is supposed to mean. Either it is critical, then it somehow transcends the framework of the respective subject and you can not assess it in meaningful way. Or it somehow repeats known pattern, so you can assess it but than it is not critical.
white women are interested in black culture, white men are interested in east Asian culture. Obviously this has to do with white men being interested in east asian women and white women being interested in black men. But it is not only that. For example I think quite a lot of white men like Samurai movies, while white women would find this rather boring. Then again white women might rather like typical african narratives about some kind of matriarchal big mama figures and young men who try to seduce women.
Must be a state of mind / culture thing. When you live life on the edge, you learn to squeeze out as much imediate expense as possible, even if it costs you more in the long run.
I kind of lean in the direction of Mitleser … the list is so long that one can’t help but to think t might e sabotage.
Since the start of the 21st century Japan has been awarded 16 Nobel Prizes. In comparison 10 were awarded to France, 9 to Germany, 6 to Russia, 2 to Italy, and 1 to Spain.
If you look at things like average GDP then China is still poor, there may be islands of wealth but the vast masses of China are still living in third world conditions.
Actually, recently a lot of White (and even black) women are getting into Japanese anime culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE5xkm4meyE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h5Sjn0BKPw
And best of all check out this girl from the Island of Mann, UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIS5BDual20
The results of PISA 2015 will come out at the end of the year. Should be interesting to see if there are any notable changes in countries’ performances. Also, hopefully we’ll get full results for China.
One possible significant problem for China is the looming prospect of artificial intelligence/superintelligence. If they are just a bit late it might be impossible to catch up. Is there anything written on what it would mean for geopolitics/war and peace? One last war to end war, American empire forever? Or pacifist AI, or no big change, business as usual?
On February 18, 2010, the ‘New Scientist’ reported that the “Scientific output has grown 11 times faster in Iran than the world average, faster than any other country“.
On March 28, 2011, the ‘New Scientist’ reported that “Iran has the fastest rate of increase in scientific publications in the world”. Iran’s scientific output rose 18-fold between 1996 and 2008, from 736 published papers to 13,238, according to the magazine.
“And if political relations between Iran and the US are strained, it seems that the two countries’ scientists are getting on fine: the number of collaborative papers between them rose almost five-fold from 388 to 1831 over the same period,” wrote Andy Coghlan.
The British Royal Society , UK’s national academy of science also reported on March 28, 2011 that the Islamic Republic along with Turkey, Tunisia, India and Brazil are rapidly emerging major scientific powers to rival the traditional ‘scientific superpowers’ of the US, Western Europe and Japan….
https://rehmat1.com/2011/03/31/iran-tops-in-science-growth-for-the-second-year/
Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith FRS, Chair of the Advisory Group for the study, said: “The scientific world is changing and new players are fast appearing. Beyond the emergence of China, we see the rise of South-East Asian, Middle Eastern, North African and other nations. The increase in scientific research and collaboration, which can help us to find solutions to the global challenges we now face, is very welcome. However, no historically dominant nation can afford to rest on its laurels if it wants to retain the competitive economic advantage that being a scientific leader brings.”
What’s the exact difference in national averages between the two data sets?
Leftover women is a phenomenon experienced in professional circles in first tier Chinese cities. Lots of educated women working in central business districts and can’t find enough men with similar status or are just unreasonably picky and wait too long. Definitely doesn’t reflect the demographic situation across China.
In the remotest depths of Yunnan, perhaps.
Otherwise China is a thoroughly middle-income country now. Not “masses” by any means.
Yes, but the US leads the world in production of Gender Studies graduates, Black Studies graduates, White Guilt, Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings, etc., so all is well, right?
This really cracked me up back in 2013:
http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2013/07/23/south-korean-soap-operas-just-lowbrow-fun-2/ – South Korean Soap Operas: Just Lowbrow Fun?
http://www.chinasmack.com/2013/stories/chinese-fans-of-korean-tv-dramas-mostly-have-low-education.html – “According to the paper, viewers with high education and high income prefer “rational and light-hearted” TV shows, therefore, they mostly prefer American TV shows.
Whereas the reason why viewers with low education and low income prefer Korean TV shows is because the logic of some Korean TV series is so bad, you don’t have to use your brain when watching them, and can simply “let off steam/release emotions”.”
Not people in Europe think of American TV as relatively highbrow and rational, but it seems like this may be to the US disadvantage in some parts of the world (possibly the Arab world)…
” yearly production of machine tools. This is of special interest not only because of this industry’s inherent technological sophistication, but also because of its strategic importance as the only part of the industrial economy that actually reproduces itself and makes everything else possible.”
You’re wasting your breath. It doesn’t matter how many time you say this. People, including commenters here, today, will go on about “high tech” as though technology were only information and computers. They just know too little about how things are actually made to get the point that to make state of the art computer chips requires state of the art precision machinery and that that is the limiting factor, not intellectual-theoretical understanding of the chemistry or physics of miniaturization.
The USA exported its factories to China and in the process, its machine tools, which the Chinese then cloned. That’s how they caught up in one generation. In their arrogance, American businessmen assumed that the dim-witted Chinese would be content to merely tend our machines for generations while American owners would reap the profit from arbitrage of world labor costs. Fools and nitwits. They based their projections on economist’s models and economists know nothing about machine manufacturing technology. But the Engineers who run the Chinese government do! (unlike the lawyers who run ours)
As regards robotics and computing in general, I don’t think the ramifications of this are discussed enough in general, let alone for the individual case of China (and Chinese abroad).
Look how many Chinese (let’s just talk about them, as opposed to the other Asians we care about like the Japanese and Koreans, and not talk about Indians at all), eventually being wind up being rote symbol manipulators? This isn’t any different from other ethnicities like whites, or whoever really, that wind up being veal in the cube farms.
But change is coming. I, and a whole lot of other people think we see it on the horizon. To me it seems that a whole lot of people, and a lot of Chinese are going to be made redundant.
And that is just with the technological capabilities we have now. My impression is we have about one or two more Moore’s Law cycles in the tank. But my belief is we have the capability to change a whole lot of things with what is possible now – once we figure out how to use it, the AMA/Insurance Industry/Governments-on-the-hook-for-healthcare wars are fought.
The healthcare thing is just one example, and there are many more. But looking at what’s possible now, does anyone think it is really out of line to think that any physician whose primary purpose is to look at little white dots on some kind of photograph and wisely intone “This is cancer,” or “Non-something-or-other Thrombosis” isn’t at risk of being out of a job?
Maybe the Chinese bell curve is right shifted compared to the white one. Maybe their culture is superior, whatever.
But in the end they are going to run into the same problem everyone else will have. An ever increasing number of people who frankly just don’t matter as regards being productive in the economy, and who basic purpose is to be consumers to give some kind of reason to do anything to begin with.
Look everything happens at once in the world. I won’t dispute a single thing you’ve written about the rise of China (for lack of in-depth knowledge, and because my perspective indicates it may be irrelevant).
But that is not the only thing that is going on.
I wonder how effective the Chinese toolkit is going to be in a situation where conditions favor someone who is the very best couch potato they can be? And to my eye the US is kinda getting there in a hurry.
Here is a problem with measuring scientific achievement by Nobels.
In 2014, three Japanese scientists were awarded Nobel prizes in Physics for inventing a blue LED. Ironically, the man who invented the LED in the first place, a Russian scientist named Oleg Losev, never got any prize.
So, inventing a thing – no Nobel. Improving on that same thing – Nobel.
I think Razib holds secret meetings to discuss my paranoia.
Well the Middle East is not the only place to experience K wave, Latin America is influenced a lot by it too.
http://world.time.com/2013/08/01/forget-politics-lets-dance-why-k-pop-is-a-latin-american-smash/
Forget Politics, Let’s Dance: Why K-Pop Is a Latin American Smash
Lapped up by a Spanish-speaking market that adores K-pop’s lavish production values and upbeat message, a Korean wave is sweeping through Latin America
By Anjani Trivedi Aug. 01, 2013
The export success of artists like Don Omar and Shakira in previous years may have given the Latin pop business a few global ambitions, but in Latin America itself the sound that’s making waves right now is Pop Coreano, or K-pop. Driven by South Korean entertainment companies seeking fresh markets for their superslick music stars, and lapped up by a Spanish-speaking youth market that adores K-pop’s lavish production values and infallibly upbeat message, a Korean wave is sweeping through Central and South America, attracting large audiences and inspiring cultish devotion.
….snip…..
There’s a shopping center in the Peruvian capital with entire floors dedicated to South Korean music, cuisine and clothes. On YouTube, K-pop videos with lyrics translated into Spanish notch up millions of views, as fans in Peru and throughout the Hispanophone world log on for their K-pop fix. In other words, South Korean popular music “has reached a certain critical mass and it’s become a niche in and of itself, everywhere,” says Mark Russell, author of Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music and Internet Culture.
I always assumed that China had overtaken the US in manufacturing by the 1980s.
If the competition is to publish a lot of unintelligible papers on topics nobody cares about, trends certainly favor China.
Fukushima Daiichi isn’t quite done with Japan, either. It teeters on the brink. One good shake and it’s nuclear fire time. If they can get out in time, I suppose we’ll have lots of Japanese nuclear refugees.
Razib Khan is an insecure little twit. Disagree, he’ll mod your remark into the ether. He’s also politically correct as to race and gender issues. He needs to keep his place in certain circles. For all I know or care, he’s gender-transient.
New music pretty much sucks. Lousy scores, too much la-la-la. This stuff created is pumped out by the mile by the low-IQ, for the low IQ. Those that love this stuff with these dopey girls would simply HATE Mozart.
Sexual Studies, and the entire SJW genre’, there are a host of those. Should “Studies” graduates be counted as “higher educated”? Seriously.
China’s leading technology:
Quantum mechanics: computing, communication(satellite)..
Genetic engineering(BGI)
The whole supercomputer issue is somewhat irrelevant since all the latest designs are massively parallel computers where a lot of relatively insignificant microprocessors are configured in a huge array that shares memory. Back when Seymour Cray was designing the world’s fastest computers they had one main processor with ancillary processors for special conditions and it took a lot of brainpower to figure out how to make a machine faster. The last Crays were wired in such a way to minimize wire length.
Anybody who wants to can ramp up a 128 processor design to a 65536 design. The question is whether you can do anything with those extra 65408 processors.
I bet their dramas are popular there due to the telenovela crowd. Probably true in Nigeria as well. That’s a kind of market that exists across the whole Middle-low Income world. I hear Turkey does very well in that market as well.
Don’t get me wrong, for example, like for example I think Korean cinema is great and in a lot of years (most years) the Top Ten Korean box office beats out most Western countries.
It just kind of makes me chuckle that given the stereotypes of North East Asians as stoic, shy, refined nations, the Koreans have basically conquered the world telenovela market by making a product that’s more bonkers, irrational and sentimental than anyone else.
Same thing with music; they’re well geared up to go anywhere the dominant musical aspiration is factory Europop stuff. Which is a lot of the world. Anglosphere places like the US and Britain, which place a lot of pride on authenticity and having a proper blues/folk/underground roots, would tend to be the really closed markets for that (though less so now, with all the Swedish hit factory / Disney crap).
The Chinese certainly have a challenge ahead of them, and soon, but I would not bet against them keeping their shit together as well as any of the rest of the world when the bubble bursts.
Their big problem is that defaults and bankruptcy would affect the hierarchy most, and they (the hierarchs) really don’t want to take the losses. The only other way to reorganize is to socialize the losses (put the burden on the people) which might make it difficult for hierarchy to stay in power.
At least they have a choice. In the West we have bankruptcy laws to handle the commercial debt, but the real problem is unfunded liabilities like pensions and social programs. Those can only be resolved by putting the burden on the people if countries are to remain intact (unless one believes in the “Growth Fairy”).
Interesting times.
That’s the big factor for the future.
Highly informative. But this puzzled me:
…the intrinsic limitations of a ~97 average national IQ (in comparison, China, Germany, Japan, and the advanced parts of the US and Italy are in the low 100s).
Surely the “advanced parts” of any country, even Russia, have an average IQ above 100?
But does IQ really matter?
At the tippy top perhaps it does, which is a good reason for not electing someone like JEB Bush as US President. But East Asia was mired in poverty for generations after the economic take-off in the West. Why? Not because the Chinese are dumb, but because they had a culture that failed to promote development. Now America and the West as a whole is stagnant while China advances economically and technologically at an astonishing speed. Why? Same reason, surely, that China stagnated in the past. The US and the West in general are committing suicide by submission to (a) political correctness which is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and generally self-destructive, and (b) a political leadership under the control of complacent and basically stupid, if high IQ, billionaires.
I’m not saying they’re on the level of Mozart, but Arvo Pärt or Kalevi Aho have written some great music. Unless you define “new music” as pop music, which mostly really sucks.
It was supposed to mean that one examined information and fit it in to a logically consistent worldview.
As used today it often means that one is skilled at taking information and performing mental gymnastics to twist it into one’s preferred worldview without suffering from toooo much cognitive dissonance.
But the Jesuits did get the secret of gunpowder, as Roger Bacon noted, and from that the development of the West flowed. For some reason, the Chinese stuck mainly with firecrackers while the Europeans got on with the business of making cannons and ruling the world.
Recently I heard the factoid on the news that in just in 2015 alone China committed $370-billion worth of intellectual-property theft. I am not and never will be impressed by anything that China accomplishes because most or all of it will be based on theft.
While folks are into comparisons, can anyone explain why Israelis have such a mow mean IQ, when Jews are supposed to be so smart?
“While folks are into comparisons, can anyone explain why Israelis have such a mow mean IQ, when Jews are supposed to be so smart?”
There are many types of Jews. The smart ones are the Ashkenazi Jews.
There are many types of Jews. The smart ones are the Ashkenazi Jews.
I see. Jews are like Americans and Chinese: there are the smart ones and the dumb ones, but overall not so bright.
That was well before the Jesuits and not a secret. It’s interesting to note that the Japanese adopted firearms technology from the Portuguese much more enthusiastically than the Chinese did, that is until later shoguns banned their production.
I have always heard the lesser inventiveness and creativity of East Asian societies explained as a consequence of respect for elders and authority, sometimes attributed to Confucian tradition rather than a lack of curiosity.
Apart from any limited personal experience I would expect the Cultural Revolution and other disruptive events of the last 90 years to have done much to change that. Also the single child family naturally inflates the sense of importance of the child and therefore his confidence to tell his seniors that they are wrong or superseded.
One might hypothesise genetic selection for conformism (cp. impulse control) but I would need persuading, though it might be characterised as in the same category as religiosity which seems likely to have been selected for because of the binding effect it had on the average citizen or tribal warrior.
Square earth or flat earth is Westerner’s prerogatives. Projecting Westerner’s superstition and ignorance onto others is the West’s (the White) effort to gloss over themselves by constantly trolling derogatively about other civilizations since they can sail out of the Mediterranean Sea. Trolling that arcane rhetoric nowadays proves the West has a mindset belonging to the past, stalled in the old days colonialism and constrained by the zero-sum cold war mentality.
“Cross Cultural Differences in Newborn Behavior”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHeSlMui-2k
So if I can show that the US in the 19th century showed a complete disregard for the ownership of “inerlekshual proppady” as Mickey Kantor used to call it, (spoiler: I can), you will no longer ever be impressed by anything the US accomplished in the 19th century?
Right. I meant the Franciscans, not the Jesuits.
I’ll get back to you on that one. But in any case, you seem not to have noticed that those BMJ figures refer to second and higher order births, not all births.
If contact with the Portuguese stimulated any interest under the Ming, I think the Qing, being a foreign dynasty, were probably very wary of innovation of any kind, but particularly in firearms
The West only moved ahead of Chinese in the last couple of centuries, before that the White were totally destructive barbarian without intellectual capacity to be spoken of, they are superstitious, bigotry, tribal and ignorant.
Projecting Westerner’s superstition and ignorance onto others is the West’s (the White) effort to gloss over themselves by constantly trolling derogatively about other civilizations since they can sail out of the Mediterranean Sea. Trolling that arcane rhetoric nowadays proves the West has a mindset belonging to the past, stalled in the old days colonialism and constrained by the zero-sum cold war mentality.
Toby Huff like the Nazis is just a horde of Westerns working to promote orientalism to gloss over themselves by constantly derogatively about others in the last few hundred years. Holding on the couple hundred years old theory of Orientals as the truth and ignoring the current facts that China overtaking the West surly are signs of lack of intellectual curiosity.
“The USA exported its factories to China and in the process, its machine tools, which the Chinese then cloned. That’s how they caught up in one generation. In their arrogance, American businessmen assumed that the dim-witted Chinese would be content to merely tend our machines for generations while American owners would reap the profit from arbitrage of world labor costs.” – I am not sure that you are describing the actual process and intent. The decision to open China and let it grow happened on very high levels. Some low level business managers were voicing concern about the dangers of technology transfer but they were shut up by the higher ups.
You do have a case, actually.
I have never seen a modern korean Soap Opera, but I know a Korean show from the nineties I think about a family of doctors. Taking this show as an example my impression is that part of the success of korean TV shows around the world has something to do with the fact that while South Korea has record low fertility by now, it had a high TFR up tp quite recently, at least compared to western countries. So the story of the show I know was very family orientated with a lot of aunts and uncles, and the usual humor which arises in such family constellations. I could imagine that people from developing countries with high fertility and much more family orientated social life than in the West could cope with this kind of stories.
Get back to us when you master the fork and spoon.
“In 2014, three Japanese scientists were awarded Nobel prizes in Physics for inventing a blue LED. Ironically, the man who invented the LED in the first place, a Russian scientist named Oleg Losev, never got any prize.”
That’s an extreme extrapolation. If so the same can be said for 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen for that matter. Nakamura’s Nobel Prize was award to the specific GaN semiconductor that emitted an intense blue light leading to white light LED’s. A lot of people from the 60’s to the 70’s tried and failed. It’s too bad Losev died at age 42 in the Siege of Leningrad.
can you imagine if china’s per capita gdp gets any where close to the american level? what a monstrous national gdp it will have.
can that even be possible?
from a book I have read, the emperor under dowager tried modernizing but forces including the dowager herself who were all about “traditions” fucked them over. they wasted 50 years after the opium wars. that is 50 years, half a century getting fucked over with by outside forces while the manchu royalty stood firm on “traditions”. add another 50 years of warlords and civil war + WWI and II. hell 25 years of disaster under wannabe emperor mao.
china it seems finally got back on track. in just 35 years, look at how much far it has come? kinda crazy.
China can’t even make a ball-point pen: http://www.ejinsight.com/20160121-what-ball-pen-tells-us-about-china-s-manufacturing-weakness/
Or even ball-bearings: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20837/german-chinese-bearings-test/
Most of China’s industrial robots are made by Germany, the US, and Japan. The Chinese are hopeless at precision engineering.
Given China’s population you would expect them to be much further ahead. But they are barely functional. China is the Congo of Asia.
The global average is 90.
This could explain why Asian women have lower levels of extramarital relationships and divorce? Cheating in marriage starts in the imagination not in the genitals.
This article is written by a Westerner about the dire state of the West, it is not written by Chinese to claim any credit. Yet the Westerners somehow has to drag Chinese into their debate by demonizing Chinese with bigotry from old days colonialism and zero-sun cold mentality in order to soothe their jealousy, resentment and fear against Chinese achievements.
You should know racism is a Western invention; if they have not invented that toxic racism they will view China overtaking US as the positive progress of mankind and celebrate it instead of bitching bitterly against Chinese all over the places.
You should say fork and knife, spoon is for drinking soup, the uneducated colonials using fork or fork and spoon to finish their meals.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110813170529/http://classics.lss.wisc.edu/~bbpowell/web/china.htm
Again, the per-capita GDP is a very tricky indicator. Visit Detroit, Big Easy or some hoods in places like L.A., Tacoma, or elsewhere–believe me, you will have a major rethinking of this whole “per capita” thing. World is more complex than that. F.e. judging by India’s GDP it should be a really swell nation, but it is not and, probably, will not be for a long-long time. Here, on UNZ, there is an outstanding piece by Hudson and Bezemer called… well, judge for yourself:
http://www.unz.com/article/finance-is-not-the-economy/
Taiwan was originally colonized by Westerners rather than Chinese. That was more than 400 years ago. This fact stands next to Africans failing to discover Madagascar. Pathetic lack of curiosity.
“In science and engineering there are only narrow ranges of feasible near optimal solutions, creativity is not as critical in the artistic fields.”
It actually takes “creativity” to find those narrow ranges. Steve Wozniak, for example, managed to find “near optimal solutions” for Apple II that completely blew away contemporary engineering.
Moscow has an average IQ of 106-107. It has the GDP per capita of the Netherlands (though much more unequal) and accounts for at least half of Russia’s scientific output. The leading university MSU, the top math/physics educational institution MIPT, the Kurchatov Institute, the Bauman design school, the Higher School of Economics, the finishing school for Russian diplomats MGIMO, etc., etc. are all in Moscow. The only institutions of real note outside Moscow are Saint-Petersburg State, the Steklov Institute, and (perhaps) Kazan State.
The ethnic Russian glubinka/periphery typically has an average IQ of around 95. Not coincidentally, its closest American analogue – a general sense of things being badly maintained, social problems, negligible scientific or cultural output, etc. – is White Appalachia.
“The USA exported its factories to China and in the process, its machine tools, which the Chinese then cloned. That’s how they caught up in one generation. In their arrogance, American businessmen assumed that the dim-witted Chinese would be content to merely tend our machines for generations while American owners would reap the profit from arbitrage of world labor costs. Fools and nitwits. ”
A “fool and nitwit” is the person who assumes that captains of industry were ignorant of the consequences of this blatant technology transfer to yet another client ‘Block’ of the ubermasters.
“American businessmen” are not in charge of setting strategic policy.
Let’s just imagine where Iran would be today where it not for the crypto-Soviet regime of Imam Mahdi’s (AS) chair warmers!
Just two examples for you, Rehmat khan or khanum (as it may be):
Nima Arkani-Hamed — not in Iran.
Maryam Mirzakhani — not in Iran.
Ashkenazi Jews in the West are 110 (closer to 115 in verbal and mathematical) IQ relative to the Greenwich mean.
Israeli Ashkenazi Jews are at 103.
Sephardic Jews are substantially lower, maybe 95. Arabs are of course even lower.
I suspect this was a result of self-selection. The hardcore Zionists went to Israel to toil on the soil and fight the Arabs. They are conservative and high fertility. The smarter sorts of European Jews went to America to get rich. They are liberal and low fertility.
Israel has an unimpressive GDP per capita for a First World country (around Spain’s level) but also has a respectable scientific profile and the world’s largest number of hi-tech startups per capita. This is consistent with having a mediocre average IQ but a very big smart fraction.
Incorrect. Europe overtook China scientifically in the 16th century. (In some areas, such as astronomy, it was never even behind).
I realize you are a Chinese nationalist and that’s fine but you have to ground your arguments in facts if people are to take you seriously. Nationalism without facts or logic is svidomism.
Sure, I see no reason why not.
It would basically be 10 Japans or 25 Koreas at that point. This is why I have been a “Sinotriumphalist” (originally a denigrating moniker from one of my fans!) pretty much since I started blogging.
As per the hyperlink I gave, China produces 30% of the world’s machine tools and imports 40%.
Ergo, it is 75% self-sufficient in that sphere.
It is certainly not a Japan or a Switzerland (yet) wrt to its technological sophistication but a “Congo of Asia”? Laughable.
I can – energy consumption. Travel to the Uighur Autonomous Region to see poverty that doesn’t even exist in Mexico. Then take all those 150 CC motorcycles and donkey carts hauling freight locally and replace them with trucks.
Haha, sure, because if a Chinese woman wants to marry a black man, everyone would not be bothered one bit about it.
“Ashkenazi Jews in the West are 110” & “Arabs are of course even lower.”
It is amusing to read the incessant congratulatory self-appraisals of the “Ashkenazi Jews”.
If your tribe ever manages to stop looking in the mirror — and saying “mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest of them all?” — you may catch a clue as to being set up (yet again!) as the designated scapegoat of the ubermasters.
How is it possible that you always end up in this situation if you are the smartest tribe on this planet? Ever considered some other group has been very effectively yanking your chain for, what, 2000+ years now?
Anatoly, shore up on your Russian Studies. Novosibirsk State as is way above Saint-Petersburg State in all things STEM. If Moscow State is Harvard + Prinseton, then Novosibirsk is Stanford, Saint-Petersburg State is Columbia or Penn State while Kazan State is Brown or Brandies.
[Racism in a Chinese laundry detergent advertisement]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Few8kJ0zfnY
I always wondered what purpose does this IQ pseudoscience serve and who benefits and who is fooled by it the most?
NGU was always extremely strong in STEM and it was always a direct competitor to Bauman’s MGTU, which was and is one of the toughest physics-math-engineering programs in the world. In reality–the toughest. They do hold their own entrance exams, which make Advanced Placement (Princeton Review) look rather tame. Again, one has to look at what Soviet/early Russian public school offered in STEM–many will not take it easily.
You made it sound like the Chinese didn’t know the existence of Taiwan.
The Han Chinese began settling in Taiwan in 13th Century. They never colonized Taiwan because it had very little value to them. The Dutch first established a trading outpost in Taiwan in 1622, and later fought and routed the Spaniards in 1642 . But in 1662 they were militarily defeated and driven off the island by the Ming loyalists, who would have not taken Taiwan had not been for the Manchurian conquest of China.
The Spanish Empire was one the largest empires in the world. By using your criterion, Spaniards would top the world in the curiosity department.
“[Los Angeles Jewish Journal] has had numerous articles about the similarity between Jewish and Chinese culture.”
Here is a Chinese American’s rather unkind comparative view of Chinese and Jewish way of life: http://www.bamboo-delight.com/download/Hidden_Secrets_of_Oriental_Wealth.pdf
But LAJJ has a point. I remember once (without prejudice) remarking to my WASP darling back in the school that Chinese are like the Jews of Asia. We were in a college coffee shop and the poor thing nearly shrank in her seat alarmed at my shocking lack of p.c. (She only mentioned the word Jew in a hushed soto voce 🙂
The distinction that Dr. Wu Tao-Wei, the author of the above Chinese how-to, makes is that Chinese do not damage their host nations. True, not true? Discuss.
Every older sister is matched by a younger brother, but many older brothers are not matched by a younger sister… I don’t see how this gets you more women. It’s been that way in China for decades, and it’s gotten them a gender imbalance for boys, as expected.
Is it not the case that rural America generally has a lower IQ than urban America, a difference one would expect elsewhere, including Russia, a less urbanized country than the US?
And is that difference not evidence of an environmental factor, a differential Flynn effect or some such thing.
Basically, farming and other rural pursuits are reality based, whereas the urban masses are perpetually fiddling with their cell phones, email and video games, which naturally enough makes them adept at doing reality unrelated tests of symbol manipulation that provide, supposedly and quite improbably, a scale suitable for comparing the intelligence of Isaac Newton with a gamma minus moron.
But I see I have casually and without any research come to approximately the conclusion that Ron Unz reached on the basis of careful investigation, so yes, inter-country differences of a few points in mean IQ are basically meaningless if only because of differences in urbanization. And most likely the are made meaningless by just about any other factor you’d care to consider, e.g., diet (a mere spoonful of glutamate will raise your IQ by five to 25 points according to the late great Linus Pauling), or school curriculum (how can today’s PC school system fail to hobble the intelligence of all but the most ineducable student).
One of the speculations about the goals of ubermasters for their plantation in this solar system is the establishment of a scientific dictatorship after the current episode of theatre-as-history. (Huxley even wrote a book about it.)
A pseudo-objective measure of ordering the subject humans would in come in handy. We already see some aspects of this approach today. For example, if some poor schlep scatches his head as to why the United States seems to be operated by (hush) Jews — a tiny minority — the answer is obvious: they have higher IQs, that is why.
Just speculation, of course.
So Israeli Ashkenazis are of the dumber sort, as Ashkenazis go, but smarter than other Israelis.
And
the smart fraction comprising those dumber sort of Ashkenazis with a mean IQ barely higher than an average American and lower than the average resident of Moscow.
Nah, population IQ differences explain essentially nuthin’, although some people may not like to discuss the alternative, i.e., what is it about this or that culture that makes this or that group so successful at getting most of the money,creating the most high-tech startups, or whatever.
The Chinese were familiar with Taiwan and its aboriginal inhabitants. They didn’t colonize it. The Ryukyu Islands, which are now part of Japan, neighbor Taiwan further to the east from China. They were the an independent kingdom that had tributary relations with China in the 14th century. China never colonized the Ryukyu Kingdom, although many Chinese were invited by the kingdom to help manage government affairs.
I don’t know if idle curiosity explains the period of Western exploration and colonization. It seems to be invoked out of a desire to posit something more than mere economic reasons and motivations. The economic motives can’t be denied. The Western explorers wanted to break the monopoly that the Italian city-states and the Muslims had on trade with the East, and they were seeking new direct trade routes to the East. Perhaps restlessness and desire for glory may be better additional explanations.
That might be true if Japan were self-sufficient with regard to energy and food.
There’s ultimately only two ways to deal with debt: (1) create value through production or lending; (2) realize loss of value through dissipation of money.
Japan’s debt is internal, so it could theoretically realize its loss of value without too much pain except that it doesn’t produce enough nutrition and energy domestically.
NIIP is a mitigating factor, as is the state of the world’s other moneys, but these are kind of working against each other.
Are there a lot of Japanese mixing at high levels in world finance? I don’t know, but my impression is not, and I would guess it’s a reflection of the fact that the Japanese are, in general, poor at fixing value accurately, related to the “deep but not broad” tendencies in their culture/psychology and their hyper-risk-aversion. Maybe this doesn’t bode well for them.
There’s been tremendous brain drain out of rural America over the past couple generations. Not just brain drain, but wholesale population drain of many rural American communities.
There’s no reason for a state to actively colonize as long as it’s getting what it wants.
The Emperor of China was receiving money and recognition from its tributary relations. What motivation was there for a pre-modern Emperor to go further?
By contrast, the Japanese statesmen of the 20th century needed a variety of things that could not be provided by tributary relations with Ryukyu or Formosa, including trade security and the psychological need to meet the historical precedent of colonies set by the Europeans.
European colonies were the result of states entering into cooperative arrangements with private entities. Like the Chinese Emperor, they received the wealth they wanted, but private entrepreneurs don’t collect tribute, resulting in building of enriching structures.
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I’ve noticed while lurking here for the past week that the topic of IQ is a key theme of this blog. The subject matter has never interested me and so I have not read in this topic.
That said, it seems to me that the IQ measure is assumed to be a leading/primary indicator. I would like to challenge that assumption and propse that IQ is a lagging/secondary indicator. It seems to me, based on personal reflection and self examination, that my intellectual performance is subject to my overall sense of ‘wellness’.
Has there ever been studies of IQ over the entire adult life cycle of individuals? Does the IQ change? What is the relationship between psychological health and performance in an IQ test?
Has there ever been studies of IQ where the subjects were placed in high performing and low performing cultural groups? Did the IQ measures change?
I suggest to you that culture is a far more informative indicator of relative success of collectives and nations.
And speaking of glutamate and intelligence, soy sauce contains more than 1% glutamate thus explaining the superior IQ of south east Asians. Americans need to eat more KFC, which is loaded with MSG (mono sodium glutamate).
Yes, its a problem for the West. We’ve run out of reality-based country folk to shore up the intelligence of the urban population.
What I mean is that because of the preference for boys, under China’s one child policy parents whose first born is a son will most likely stop having more child but parents whose first born is a girl will very often defy the government policy and have a second child, or sometimes a third child if the second child is still a girl.
That’s why the China’s one child policy produces a gender imbalance of more women than men, contrary to the popular myth. And that is why China has the social phenomenon of ‘left over women’ of the one child policy era.
The US and Japan can’t compete with Germany in ballbearings either.
You’re an idiot.
Nima Arkani-Hamed – better known for ravening hunger for “asparagus” than anything else
Maryam Mirzakhani – certainly owes Fields medal to being of female sex
The whole procedure is circular. Jews are smart. Why? Because they have more than their share of good jobs. Jews have more than their share of good jobs. Why? Because they’re smart.
http://www.meh.ro/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/meh.ro12181.png
The only difference is that ethnic Chinese actually hew coal, plough fields, lay bricks, pour concrete etc etc etc.
Yes but do you want to design 100 variations of that ??
Since Ashkenazi Jews in Israel innovate a lot but supposedly have an IQ of 103, does that mean Ashkenazi Jewish hyper-curiosity results in an effective IQ of 115+?
Really would like to hear your take on how much of Ashkenazi achievement is based on superior IQ and how much can be attributed to their very high levels of curiosity.
This is one of the stupidest things I’ve read in a long time but that’s not surprising for someone from a country that lost the geopolitical game and now enjoys the male life expectancy of Rwanda. Europeans have been around for a while and accomplished almost nothing in the first few thousand years of recorded global history. The excuse is that you lacked population density, but population density is a good proxy for creativity, humanity and intelligence since you need proper social organization, technology and discipline to create that population density in the first place. Pretty sad considering Europe is the most fertile and climatically agreeable continent, by far, with the most extensive coastlines to boot. Not only that but you had two whole continents handed to you by that sheer geographical luck that yielded massive capital windfalls, without which you would have been caught in the same Malthusian trap the rest of the world was.
In the end, Nobels mean nothing compared to the survival and propagation of the tribe. The Jews, despite their high Nobels per capita, have been miserable failures on that part. Europe isn’t doing so well either, considering their ruling classes are raping their nations into collapse much like Rome did (this time via multiculturalism).
I think this entire conversation will be put in comedic context 20, 30 years down the line when China is rich and powerful (and commensurately scientifically productive) and Israel is occupied by Arab neighbors, along with Europe. Don’t get beheaded in the meantime, I’d like to revisit all of this when that time comes.
Jews are so smart and creative that they are penned up on a tiny slice of desert, and have historically been underdogs on the brink of extermination, surrounded as they are by people that hate them while rapidly becoming more powerful.
Yeah, because we know how sexually prolific the Newtons, Wozniaks, Einsteins etc are. I guess a hood rat with 15 baby daddys is the most likely candidate for the next Nobel in Chemistry.
And so far as those “mind-boggling numbers” go, “in terms of PPP-adjusted GDP”, China has been ahead of the US for a while now:
World Bank tables for 2015 (millions of US $):
– China: 19,524,348 Million (i.e., 19,524,348,000,000]
– U. S. : 17,946,996 Million
IMF Estimates for 2016:
– China: 20,853,331
– U. S. : 18,558,129
(http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD)
In other words, according to the IMF, this year, China is expected to be “richer” than the US by over $2,3 million billion.
You’re correct, therefore: such numbers are as mind-boggling as they are meaningless…
Rwanda is not a good comparator for what you want to achieve: it’s one of the few African countries where people live rather long, and relatively well: in addition to food self-sufficiency – and a good, healthy climate due to altitude – each of its 12 million people has a mini-health insurance coverage scheme, for which they pay just a few dollars per year – sufficient to cover basic medical care for all.
Likely that China will ossify again if the West falls: their “progress” now is due to being pragmatic enough to steal from more creative peoples, presumably due to the eradication of traditional values that kept them from learning anything from European travelers in the in the early modern era.
Good points.
Likely? Presumably? Sounds like second-hand information.
There are plenty of inventive and ambitious Chinese people. And only now is there a big enough urban middle class, and freedom of economic action, to take advantage of that.
remember the demographics time bomb that will explode in china? all the experts are talking about? china will stop the explosion with millions and millions of robots for their factories.
their entire society is based on ambition. If you are not constantly looking to get ahead, they consider you to be stupid.
I have to hand it to them, this does take a very active imagination
http://www.businessinsider.com/hilariously-bad-chinese-knock-offs-of-famous-american-and-european-brands-2012-8?op=1
by $2.3 thousand billion
This argument is akin to arguing the US can’t have a high per capita GDP because of the sorry state of affairs on Indian reservations.
China overtook Murica as the world’s biggest economy awhile back already. If there weren’t for propagandist staticstics and outright lies of Murican government, you would have see it officially years ago. China has in 3 yrs (from 2011 -2014) used more cement than Murica did in all previous century. That tells you all you need to know about the real GDP (not that GDP by itself means anything, as a metric it is meaningless). Financial engeneering makes the biggest, a major, part of Murican GDP. Once dollar goes away as reserve currency, that GDP will be halved at least. At least. Will probably end under 6 trillion with all that deficits and debt… wooo. And no more printing worthless paper to pay for imports. No. Your parasitism is coming to an end Muricans. It’s been a great ride for you and your parasitic negroes on whom you have spent 22 tn since 1968 in the name of “great society,” but now, at long last, all that is ending. No creadit for you anymore. You are bunkrupt, have been for quite some time.
Jim Rogers started talking about investing in Rwanda recently: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-27/jim-rogers-explains-what-he-doing-next-time-world-comes-end
I am an uneasy sceptic when it comes to IQ as the prime determinant of achievement, although it should be a decent enough indicator of ability in cognitive fields.
Question for anyone here: This supposed 115 average IQ for “NA Ashkenazies” is also apparently matched by “Indian Brahmins” [I recall reading it a few years back, but cannot find any reliable source].
Have you any idea regarding the comparative performances of these two groups in the USA? Perhaps interesting, since social influences are arguably controlled for?
The Chinese, or any other Asian people, are not capable of bringing the singularity or any other civilization-changing techs.
There is no creativity in China at all. They can mimic things very well but they will never exceed the west.
Latin America and the Middle East have an average IQ of roughly 85. I’m not surprised that vapid K-Pop is popular there, but that doesn’t make me especially impressed with South Korea’s power of creativity.
Popular music in the west is equally vapid, but that’s because it’s now targeting the lowest common denominator as an audience. Interesting music still manifests itself in niche genres like Synthwave but isn’t marketed to the masses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4WLX8hfpJw Western pop music was better when its audience was more exclusive and less global: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZyGDiUnta4
I have to ask: What Chinese achievements are you referring to?
Recently I heard on the news that just in 2015 alone intellectual-property theft by China was equal to $370-billion. (Yes, I know, every society has engaged in a certain amount of intellectual property theft). If China is so great then why do they feel the need to engage in such blatant theft? I will never be impressed by anything that China accomplishes because it will have been based on massive (and recent) theft.
Here’s an example.
Very thoughtful sophisticated designed experiments from the UK, written in English, enlighten millions of people around the globe, well read by 7 billions people,
shows that Fist hand is better than handshake to prevent gem spreading.
http://www.apic.org/Resource_/TinyMceFileManager/Fist_bump_article_AJIC_August_2014.pdf
Such a Significant finding can only be from the UK
Not only does it prevent the UK scientists to go further and explore, it even speeds up their absolute number of “Publications”
Look at another one,
Smelling your own farts can prevent cancer
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/farts-can-fight-strokes-heart-6793616
Well designed, well written, well thought-out experiments 7 billion people need to read.
In terms of Quality Vs Quantity,
I’d say Both are declining in the UK. Those BS royals are basking in the glory of the past.
In terms of Quality Vs Quantity, the US is no doubt still leading.
China is catching up with quantity first. Quality, we’d just need to wait and see.
So why was Europe an underachieving cesspool for almost 45,000 years? The West only advanced because it got really lucky and stole a bunch of Chinese inventions. Otherwise, it’d still be a cesspool.
Whites are not creative. You have produced precious little with nearly all the world’s resources. Take the counterfactual: if China had 30x as much existing scientific and educational infrastructure as they do now (like Europe does), they would out-produce Europeans by a factor of 4-8. The papers and patents East Asia puts out is just a tiny proportion of their potential.
You’re right. Chinese began wiping their ass with toilet paper, but you still wiping your ass with a communal brush. Creativity abounds in the west.
If and only if China patented their inventions and discoveries in the past, West will be paying humungous amount of debt to the Chinese.
But China didn’t. I’d say this is the mistake China had to pay for hundreds of years in making history.
The Europeans, esp British, saw that coming and began patenting their discoveries and shit happens.
Eratosthenes produced a nearly accurate calculation of the Earth’s circumference in 250 B.C., whereas it wasn’t until the late 16th century that European travelers convinced the Chinee that the Earth wasn’t square, pathetic.
An excellent analogy. Meteors appear out of nowhere, move fast, lighten up the sky with brilliant light and then crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_Europe
At any rate, it’s not clear why they would have had any incentive to “contribute to civilization” until they faced one in combat. There wasn’t any obvious reason at the time why living in permanent settlements with intensive agriculture was superior to the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistance. Hunter-gatherers had better health, longer lives and worked less than agrarian peoples. Early agrarianism also required slavery, which hunter-gatherers didn’t. Personally, I would have rather lived among some loose-knit tribe in Scandinavia than in some crowded unsanitary Babylonian city, where you could receive some sort of brutal execution for not showing proper deference to a member of the aristocracy. The main advantage that agrarian societies had was military – hunter-gatherers couldn’t defend themselves against against the more regimented military of an organized state, and for that reason, they weren’t sustainable in the long run. But if your argument is basically, “DURR HURR, Europeans were stoopid because they didn’t have cities like the Babylonians or Indians”, you need to first establish that the latter mode of subsistance actually offered a higher quality of life to its residents. All evidence I’ve seen indicates that the opposite is the case.
Eratosthenes found the earth was round, Ancient Greece collapsed into a shit-pile anyways. Meanwhile, China’s great thinkers were dealing with more important things like not collapsing or becoming a failed state like Ancient Greece or Rome.
Gunpowder, for example, probably came to Europe via Turkish khanates, not the Chinese, and Europeans were producing better firearms than the latter two by the 15th century (the huge cannon used by Mehmet II to breach Constantinople’s walls were built by a Hungarian) hence the Chinee flirtation with gunpowder was not very important in the history of ordinance.
“you need to first establish that this actually offered a higher quality of life to its residents. All evidence I’ve seen indicates that the opposite is the case.”
I take it you subscribe to Diamondian notions that Kalahari bushmen were superior to their 18th century European counterparts, then. The only reason why hunter-gatherers were “better off” is because there were so few of them relative to the resources that were available. Civilized life is certainly more comfortable especially early civilization and early Babylonian cities were not that unsanitary. Being so “creative” that you fail to adapt along the natural hierarchy of human accomplishment implies mental impairment. All of it started anyway with the creative and intelligent impulse to get more calories out of what land was available. Europeans are the only ones that never managed that step.
They’d still be hunter-gatherers without foreign contact.
You must be mentally challenged. Europe would never have discovered gunpowder on its own.
China collapsed both internally and to invaders plenty of times, but you are right that their resilience has been stronger than Western societies, maybe because they never fully adopted Buddhism like the West did Christianity. WW2 GI’s that I’ve talked to definitely admired the tenacity of the Chinese resistance compared to most occupied Europeans.
History has different means of stealing and improving.
Every part of the world has contributed to the human civilization we see today. But in terms of the progress and achievement, there have been different waves of human inventions from each part of the world. Granted, bigger waves came from the Europe during last hundreds years or so.
But we can’t go back to 100BC and claim that China contribution at the time was minimal compared to the European contribution these days.
Wheel invention was significant on its own merit, but it would be laughable these days talking about how remarkable the invention was.
The same can be said for the paper invention as well.
I’m not glorifying Chinese inventions in the past and trashing all Europeans inventions. I’m pointing out the fact that Inventions are in fact gradual evolution of tools we use today. At some point in history, they were significant. But after 400 years down the road, those become landmarks rather than significance.
Now all inventions made in the US are remarkable. Hands down, that’s why people all over the world are swooning over the American products. Now we can also see most of the inventions in the US are not solely due to White Europeans contributions. They become mixed with immigrants all over the world.
Go 400 years back, the highest time of the British Empire, no country can beat the shit out of the British inventions. But the US now beat the UK in terms of inventions, creativity, quality, quantity, any measurable criteria we use.
Yes, one has seen the CIA propaganda about paradise Rwanda and its beloved leader Kagame before you regurgitated it.
The clear answer is that Jewish Wall Street has diverted money from long-term research to short-term investor profits.
Money grubbing Jew greed has robbed America of our long term industrial future.
There is NO reason that America should not be #1 in robots. It is only a lack of investment that holds us back.
There is a giant sucking sound of America’s future into Jew pockets.
Art
I’m not talking about Africans with their average IQ of 80. I’m talking about Europeans.
It’s better now, post-industrial revolution. It wasn’t better during its early stages.
What the hell are you talking about? Obviously, you don’t really mean “never”, right? The Minoans were farming at 3650. Agriculture in the British Isles dates back to 5000 BC. What time frame are you speaking of?
At any rate, the impulse to get more calories out of available land would be driven by necessity. The necessity wouldn’t have necessarily been there in sparsely populated Arctic or subarctic regions, where you’d have a plentiful supply of fish and game relative to the population.
Agriculture and the construction of cities is also just one form of innovation. You ignore the development of weapons and tools, which doesn’t require permanent settlements. Metalurgy had its genesis in Central Asia (among peoples who are closely-related genetically to Europeans), and spread to Europe prior to most other regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age#/media/File:Metallurgical_diffusion.png Europeans were ahead of the curve with respect to metal working, but I guess you consider this contribution to be irrelevant because it doesn’t involve building a walled city.
Hey rofl,
Not sure about that – they did invent Greek fire. Though not the same, it is a parallel use of an incendiary weapon.
But hey, the Chinese and others were nice enough to share, so why reinvent the wheel, eh?
Peace.
No it is arguing against the idea that everybody in China will eventually live a first world lifestyle. Read all the posts in the thread the next time before you post something irrelevant.
A lot of Chinese inventions died out a long time ago such that there was nothing for the west to copy. The same thing can be said for a lot of ancient civilizations as writing, general literacy, and record keeping were primitive.
The idea that we should recognize the Chinese as inventors of this or that simply because something was found in a tomb for a ruler of a dynasty that died out 1000 years ago and was never seen in China again is ridiculous.
It’s ridiculous for sure. No sane person will keep glorifying the paper invention.
And no sane person will keep touting Newton law of If there’s an action, there is a reaction mantra.
And no sane person will keep saying “There always will be Ying and Yang for everything.
But the very idea of those concepts has paved the way for human development in history for further improvement.
We’re not immediately coming from the stone age to suddenly come up with an idea of E=mc2. Now we’re going to string theory which will defy the Einstein theory which is only true to certain extent in physical world.
American prominence in every aspect of the science has deeply rooted in its history of stealing and transferring technology from the Europe, the continent which is now pretty occupied with dysgenic trend.
My point is that by the time things like firearms or the printing press (not sure if that was developed independently) reached the West they bore little resemblance to what the Chinese had flirted with, and Chinese impact on their subsequent development was basically nil. Traders introduced modern firearms and printing presses to China in subsequent centuries
I think the history of Chinese technology is fairly impressive overall. They do have a certain visual ingenuity.
If technology is defined in terms of progress towards some ultimate telos of the Singularity, in which technology itself is not a mere tool but an agent itself which subsumes everything else, it may be that Western technology is qualitatively different in a fundamental sense. That is, Western and Chinese technological artifacts that appear to be the same or similar in a material sense, are fundamentally different in some sense technologically.
In Frank Herbert’s Dune, advanced computers and AI have been banned so there is no Singularity, but there is technology which presumably is fundamentally different from the technology of a world in which the Singularity occurs.
Neil Postman outlined this demarcation well in his book “Technopoly”:
“It is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”
https://www.amazon.com/Technopoly-Surrender-Technology-Neil-Postman/dp/0679745408
It may well be that the Chinese do not want to surrender their tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion – as that might be surrendering their humanity itself. The Dune universe (with its existence of human super-computers) is a very apt example.
Peace.
Ancient Central Asians prior to the Indo-European expansion were Uralic or Altaic. Minoans simply aped Middle Eastern agriculture. Europeans proper had nothing resembling the foundations of civilization until they were imported or copied.
“The idea that we should recognize the Chinese as inventors of this or that simply because something was found in a tomb for a ruler of a dynasty that died out 1000 years ago and was never seen in China again is ridiculous.”
Yeah, we shouldn’t recognize the inventors of the car or aeroplane either because no one handles biplanes or model Ts anymore. Hey, the Japanese make better cars, so lets claim they invented them!
Typical whites.
The first person to ever catalog all the Chinese tech was Joe Needham.
No Chinese was inclined to categorize and improve on all the tech accomplishment of the Chinese before Neeham.
“he answer is obvious: they have higher IQs, that is why.” – I think this might be the real reason this pseudo-science gets some traction and is tolerated.
“the United States seems to be operated by (hush) Jews — a tiny minority” – The numbers still do not ad up. When Gaussian distributions are assumed there is still a significant overrepresentation of Jews, so our pseudo-scientists came up with hypothesis that the smart fraction wing of the Jewish IQ distribution must be fatter, i.e., non-Gaussian.
I like the notion of “scientific dictatorship”. It was tried in the communist block when children in schools were indoctrinated that it was scientifically proven that communism is (1) inevitable and (2) superior. What kids were suppose to take from this indoctrination was that any resistance to communism was futile.
They were categorized in Chinese, idiot.
A couple of scholars made half-hearted attempts, once in the Sung by Shen Kuo, “Dream Torrent Essays”, and later in The Exploitation of Works of Nature by Song Ing-hsing, on 1637, a few years before Ming collapsed. (And that book was not interesting to the Chinese – the only extent copies are from Japan). However their catalogues were far from complete with no systematic categorizations. Needham was the first ever to compile them in a scholarly form.
About Losev, it says he died of starvation. Apparently the commisars fed the useless babushukas, while neglecting valuable people like him.
One good thing in Asian cultures is that in bad famines, men are fed before women, adults are fed before children, etc.
some yrs back i was reading a report on china’s rail way progress on the huffpost.
in the same page what do u find ?
pentagon had another new ‘toy’, a much more accurate sniper rifle !
‘u dont need to be a marksman to take out a ‘target’ [sic] xxxx km away !*, the reporter babbled on proudly.
a yank offered this comment,
fast rail for the chinese,
more ways to kill humans for us,
way to go murrikka !
i concede, when it comes to weapons of mass destruction,
murkka wins handdown, no contest !
its the very culture itself damn it !
What, really? Reading the Harvard University Press History of Imperial China series, one of the main killers of Chinese innovation was the post-Yuan despotism. Before, with the codominiums of Emperor and intelligentsia, the intelligentsia had a relatively free hand to press forward intellectual and scientific endeavor. The Yuan changed things; there was only one fully Chinese dynasty afterwards and it adopted the nomadic political pattern of an unlimited Emperor that the scholar-gentry was almost completely unable to curb.
Before then, however… ever heard of the Song Enlightenment? The Southern Song was, in many ways, a complete precursor to Western modernity, with technological innovation, the adoption of coal, fiat currency, the challenge to traditional notions, joint stock companies, and so on. Its big mistake was thinking it could manipulate first the Jurchens to defeat its Khitan rivals in the north, then use the Mongols to destroy the Jurchens. In both cases, the Song was successful, but the end result was that the Jurchens conquered the Northen Song capital and the Mongols destroyed the Southern Song. Otherwise, we might have had true modernity in the 1600s.
One thing to note, though, is that the cultural essentialism ignores the Cultural Revolution. The modern Chinese of the Communist mainland can be said to be considerably divorced from their Confucian forebearers; almost-genetic memory crops up once in a whire, but Mao spent a lot of time destroying the traditional culture. South Koreans in China, for instance, prefer Korean-Chinese workers because the destruction of Confucianism in China resulted in a transformation of hierarchical relations. Korean-Chinese underlings are more kiss-up and thus more to the tastes of South Korean bosses.
It’s absurd to assume the Chinese are incapable of blue-sky innovation if the situation warrants it; as it has been rightly said, at this stage of development, it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. It is cheaper and more productive to buy or steal technology until the baseline technology level benefits from original research.
That makes no sense. If the historical experience of the Cultural Revolution destroyed deference among Chinese, it would have had exactly the same effect on Korean-Chinese who went through it as well. Furthermore, Korean-Chinese are not nearly numerous or geographically widespread enough to be a significant part of the workforce of Korean companies in China, nor would the Chinese government allow Korean employers to reserve most jobs for their own co-ethnics.
Right, there may be a fundamentally different conception of and relationship to technology in the Sinosphere:
https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/online-publications/chapter-1-of-literacy-and-script-reform-in-occupation-japan/
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/noel-perrin-3/giving-up-the-gun-japans-reversion-to-the-sword/
So the identical artefact must be evaluated differently depending on whether or not, according to your arbitrary classification, it is touched with the Holy Spirit of Singularity? You certainly have a strong faith in this Singularity gutter religion.
Problem is the Minoans were mostly descendants of the first farmers, who were from a bunch of places in the Middle East Turkey, pretty close to Crete. Their ancestors moved to Crete. The first farmers in the West also being people who moved to agriculture prior to any East Asian group.
It doesn’t really make sense to think of “Europeans” generally as separate from the “invention” of agriculture, as they are largely descended from the original farmers, with additions of ancestry from the local hunting and gathering people (usually quite small, but quite large by the time we get to Northern Europe). Diamond’s whole thing about “Ah, the Europeans copied the invention of agriculture”, sort of presumes that agriculture did not move into Europe mostly by migration. (Which some Northern European nationalists would prefer, but isn’t true).
Agriculture happens about 7000-6000 years before anything like civilization, and some of the first people to become civilized (e.g. Egypt and Indus Valley) were often quite late to be agricultural, and often, even before that quite smaller scale than cultures of the late Neolithic cultures of Europe (e.g. Danube Valley cultures).
I have sympathy with the Chinese, though you are right that in a sense it is ridiculous, because most inventions (printing press, etc.) were independently innovated (because they make technological sense), so it’s not really “If China hadn’t done this, we would not have X” as such.
If anything, the Chinese history of invention, kind of really shows how much unproductive that vaunted social system and civilization must’ve been for invention for a long time, since so much of it was rapidly recreated independently with perhaps only stories and finished products at most, by West Europeans between 1700-1900.
Very, very interesting! In ‘Technopoly’, Postman makes it clear that language (especially its written form) is a tool/technological innovation. And I had heard of the Japanese ban on firearms in a lecture so thanks so much for the citation. I can think of only two other equivalents; South Africa giving up the nuclear bomb (a tremendous feat of humanity overcoming utilitarian machine logic) and the medieval papal edict against the crossbow as a weapon of unwarranted destruction. European Civilization certainly has it within her to turn back the clock, but not if she keeps going down the road of utilitarian progress at breakneck speed.
Peace.
And Chinà would have discovered trains, planes and computers on its own?
Rabelais, 1500, based an entire ribald story on creative means and methods of fffwiping one’ s butt. You are referring to the customs of the ancient Roman baths an otherwise high tech achievement. When the argument novea to the lq1qavatory ita always indicates desperation.
Well you could start by making some sense.
If some technology dies out before its use anywhere else, it is irrelevant to human development. It only means something if that invention stays around or is developed further by succeeding generations.
The car is still in use. Those Chinese inventions you want to take credit for died out in China long before they had any effect on the world.
Sorry. You can do math even worse than me. Imagine 100 families. 50 have boys and stop. 50 have a girl and then another child, a boy. That produces a gender imbalance of 2:1 for boys. If 25 have 2 girls instead of 1 before a boy, that’s a gender inbalance of 1.5:1 in favor of boys.
The reality of the gender balance in favor of boys explains the fact that Chinese girls are loose sluts. They are in high demand, so they can afford to screw around as long as they get married before they’re too old.
Yes, given that they’re considerably more intelligent and creative than Europeans. Europe failed to create several “simple” inventions that the Chinese beat them to for thousands of years despite drawing the easiest lot in history when it comes to pre-modern natural resource requirements. After China got through its Malthusian hump, it would catch up quickly to the null timeline just as it has today.
Gunpowder, paper, pound locks, fiat currency, blast furnaces, row-planting, seed drills, are all direct descendants from the original Chinese inventions and discoveries, for one. Europe never independently invented or discovered any of these technologies or methods.
Chinese females have the fewest lifetime sexual partners of any interviewed/researched demographic, try again. The very few who are loose sluts tend to gravitate toward foreigners for easy cash.
You could also re-examine your brain to start making sense.
It’s getting more and more ridiculous when it comes to talking about this invention and that inventions.
If you want to take all inventions are largely due to Europeans, hey fine by me. It’s your own opinion. I never said European inventions are craps. I said there are waves of inventions from each part of the world, and we see prominent waves from Europe and Asia (esp China).
It’s laughable. You’re shooting your own foot, my dear.
Then pay the immense amount of gratitude to the Chinese for their paper invention then!!
It’s been for how long? Jesus Fucking Christ for anywhere. Currency, your wiping ass, anywhere!!!
But you don’t consider that as a significant invention because it’s been heard so many times and it annoys the fuck out of you anytime you want to talk about Inventions from the Europe.
But since most of the Chinese inventions have been improved and some became totally obsolete, then you jumped in and talked about If the invention dies out, it’s irrelevant to human development.
Such a marvelous stroke of stupidity.
I can also say that since Newton law has been surpassed by Einstein theory, fuck that Newton’s idea. Einstein is also Jewish, so fuck that British invention.
Or I’d say Screw that British guy who grew up in India and saw a correlation between so many mosquitoes and malaria, deduced the hypothesis that mosquitoes causes malaria and won the Nobel Prize. It’s just a stroke of luck, rather than genius display.
I can only imagine after 500 years down the road, we’d see more Asian names in inventions and discoveries, patents, and your grand-grand-grand-grand son will look around and say “Our inventions are so old, look at the Asian inventions” and wonder what his grand-grand-grand-grand father was doing back in the days.
I’d tap into his shoulder and gently whispered “Your grand-grand-grand-grand father was arguing some nonsense in unz and become a SJW while those Asians are working their assess off and producing more data.”
Your father might as well publish these two papers while Chinese are building double-deck straddling cars.
Fist hand is better than handshake to prevent gem spreading.
http://www.apic.org/Resource_/TinyMceFileManager/Fist_bump_article_AJIC_August_2014.pdf
Smelling your own farts can prevent cancer
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/farts-can-fight-strokes-heart-6793616
“I suspect this was a result of self-selection. The hardcore Zionists went to Israel to toil on the soil and fight the Arabs.”
Not many Jews wanted to move to Israel because it was a new country and had barely even developed or been built yet. Jews only settled there because they had no other choice after being rejected by western countries. The 103 IQ of Israeli Ashkenazim is from Lynn, who also estimates American Askenazi IQ to be 107.
There was selection with Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews though. The poorer one’s did indeed move to Israel, and the better off one’s moved to the west. I highly doubt the overall Sephardic IQ is 95 when they’ve achieved 13 Nobel Prizes (including Niels Bohr) and countless billionaires, industrialists, scientists, philosophers and other notable people (David Ricardo, Jacques Derrida, the Sassoon family, etc).
Hey Rdm,
That sounds pretty solid, I mean you don’t see anything out of Eskimos or Sub-Saharan Africans, etc. that meets with anybody else’s needs, but the major empires/civilizations definitely had their days under the sun; aqueducts, metallurgy, etc. that we still benefit from. The Europeans definitely had a great run for a few centuries irrespective of whether they take a back seat for a while.
By the way, that double-decker bus concept is awesome. It can use already existing roadways so no need for a massive re-haul of infrastructure. And looks far more safe. Hats off to them for that one – hopefully it catches on elsewhere.
Peace.
[By the way, that double-decker bus concept is awesome. It can use already existing roadways so no need for a massive re-haul of infrastructure. And looks far more safe. Hats off to them for that one – hopefully it catches on elsewhere.]
Hey Talha
Exciting times ahead. Now this one I want in NYC!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbender/2016/08/31/self-driving-taxis-get-a-test-drive-in-singapore/#4d93b8361b63.
I hear Pittsburgh beats both coasts as the 1st U.S tryout.
Niels Bohr had nothing “Sephardic” about him. His father had no Jewish ancestors, his mother’s surname was Adler.
Wikipedia lists Indians as the wealthiest ethnic group in the US measured by household income, but ranks them 9th in per capita income. Absurdly, however, it gives not data for Jews in either list.
The role of IQ in determining income measured one way or another is, however, rather small. According to Richard Lynn the correlation between income and IQ of 39 US racial groups is 0.35, meaning that 12% of the variation in income is attributable to variation in IQ.
And in fact the influence of IQ may be essentially non-causal, since in America IQ is rated so important that there must be a significant “IQ privilege” effect, e.g., in entry to top schools.
Hey Sam,
Doh! All the Uber drivers will be out with their pitchforks and in league (gasp!) with taxi drivers!
But yes, exciting time to be alive!
Peace.
[ According to Richard Lynn the correlation between income and IQ of 39 US racial groups is 0.35, meaning that 12% of the variation in income is attributable to variation in IQ.]
I should probably read Lynn [I see him quoted around here with regularity; but it’ll have to wait the completion of far more interesting history titles]. So this is the average correlation and not group separated.
In any case I am certainly inclined to agree with you that it is none too indicative of causality one way or the other. My view on the appropriateness of SAT for college entry is a bit different though.
thanks for the reply
Seriously, I wonder which part of the labour market these disruptions are going to totally screw up next. Ubers are causing the cabbies heartburn, and soon enough both are on the block. I expect social surplus generated will somehow keep the unemployed in a state of tolerable funk as baristas and video gamers, but the direction seems inexorable.
Until the machines take over my thoughts, that is.
And now watch 5371 beat me on the head 🙂
You’re incurable on this score, Sam. Beating you on the head would serve no purpose))
[Absurdly, however, it gives not data for Jews in either list.]
It can’t, because this is Census data and they don’t collect information on religion.
It is well documented that Niels Bohr’s mother was from a Sephardic banking family. Many Sephardic Jews that moved to Denmark, Britain or the Netherlands changed their surnames to fit in, as did many Ashkenazi Jews that moved to the United States.
Hi Talha,
We need this in L.A. very badly. 2 hours in traffic daily is tough. Los Angeles is populated by driving zombies.
What if an Uber driver bought a driverless car and shared it like with AirBnB? The car should pay itself back at least, plus he’s freed himself to work as a barista. Sounds like a win.
You’re going to have to provide some credible source for such improbable assertions, if you want them to be believed. Many “Sephardi” dumped their names for “Ashkenazi” ones, in countries where “Sephardi” were more prestigious than “Ashkenazi”? Come off it.
{ Those Chinese inventions you want to take credit for died out in China long before they had any effect on the world.}
What about gunpowder?
Hey Hacienda,
Tell me about it – I remember my commute (before moving to Chicago-land) from Fullerton to Westlake Village; pick your poison – go through downtown or the Sepulveda pass. Two hours a day for me would only be on days when God was being very, very generous to me regarding time.
Peace.
Dear Sam,
It certainly does in the West and the Far East, but sometimes I wonder if there is a breaking point where enough people are tired of the machines. I mean Trump’s popularity is due partly to the revolt against open flow of capital and outsourcing of labor. Will people be satisfied if their jobs are taken by a machine named B.O.B instead of some guy named Aung Thet Mann?
It’s weird, maybe I’m getting too old, but I’m already reaching a threshold for machines and automation that I am comfortable with. And people walking around with their faces glued to a screen at every moment.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a flickering glare reflecting on a human face — forever.”
Peace.
Fine, but that is not what I said.
Musians, painters, architects, you name it, repeat variations on a (successful/pet) theme. It is not unique to engineering. And both require serious repetitive work to gain mastery (engineering or art).
Engineering is, imo, systemic and repeatable art. I would like to see a single reference to a top engineer that was not a creative individual.
No, but it made more sense than what you said.
That’s interesting.
Does it mean that Jews have no ethnicity or that they are of multiple ethnicities. If the latter, are the Askenazi, the Sephardi, etc., Jewish ethnicities? If so, it would be interesting to know why the Census not provide data for these specifically Jewish ethnicities?
I am sorry to break your Bubbles.
We Chinese invented Bureaucracy and Red Tape. And you are doomed to live with them.
You are welcome!
Early European Farmer came from Levant.
Developed quite advanced culture including one of world’s first Bronze Cultures in the Balkans.
Then came the nomadic Indo-Europeans swept down from the steppes who pretty much killed and raped across whole Europe, totally destroyed the Bronze Age civilization of early farmers.
This has been pretty much verified by Modern Genetics.
So, NOPE, you are NOT largely descended from the original farmers. You do have SOME EEF genes. But if you are a Northern European, then the steppe gene is strong in you, my friend.
Of all the classical empires pre-Industrial Revolution, ONLY China developed the civil exam system for state bureaucracy. It could be argued the Roman empire fall apart but Europe was never put back together again is because unlike China, Roman mode of governance is rather shallow and rudimentary.
Anyway, Chinese imperial exam system was copied by the British and adopted for its own civil service, and other European countries followed suit.
Yes, We Chinese invented Modern Bureaucracy. You are doom to live with it for the rest of your natural life.
For that , you have my sympathies.
Adler is not an Ashkenazi surname. It is a common Germanic surname which Ashkenazi Jews sometimes use. It wouldn’t be strange for Sephardi Jews in places like Denmark to have such a surname, just as it’s not strange to find Ashkenazi Jews in North America with surnames like Walters and Smith.
Check this book on page 33: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=U1FEAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false
Nature 2015 Top Science Ranking
http://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/ten-institutions-that-dominated-science-in-twentyfifteen
Top Institutions
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China
2 Harvard University, United States of America (USA)
3 French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France
4 Max Planck Society, Germany
5 Stanford University, United States of America (USA)
Top Countries
1 United States of America (USA)
2 China
3 Germany
4 United Kingdom (UK)
5 Japan
Top Academic Institutions
1 Harvard University, United States of America (USA)
2 Stanford University, United States of America (USA)
3 The University of Tokyo (UTokyo), Japan
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States of America (USA)
5 University of Oxford, United Kingdom (UK)
Top Chemistry Institutions
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China
2 French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France
3 Max Planck Society, Germany
4 Peking University (PKU), China
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States of America (USA)
Top Earth Science Institutions
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China
2 Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Germany
3 French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France
4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States of America (USA)
5 University of Washington (UW), United States of America (USA)
Top Life Science Institutions
1 Harvard University, United States of America (USA)
2 National Institutes of Health (NIH), United States of America (USA)
3 Stanford University, United States of America (USA)
4 Max Planck Society, Germany
5 Yale University, United States of America (USA)
Top Physical Science Institutions
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China
2 French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France
3 Max Planck Society, Germany
4 The University of Tokyo (UTokyo), Japan
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States of America (USA)
Ashkenazi=German
As you can tell, that book gives no source for the improbable statement.
A “Sephardi” Jew who wanted to fit in with Danes might call himself Hansen or Eriksen. Not Adler.
The US Census Bureau gives them, like everyone else, only the choice of white, black, Asian etc. (race), Hispanic or not (ethnicity) and American, English, Russian, Moroccan, Israeli etc. (ancestry).
China has been very innovative in the past:
http://east_west_dialogue.tripod.com/id1.html
The Science & Technology Ancient China Taught the West
“What began as a proposal to write a single volume with Cambridge University Press at
mid-century turned shortly thereafter into a seven-volume plan. ”
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/martahanson/Content/Hanson_ESM_2007.pdf
Review Essay
Needham’s Heavenly Volumes and Earthly Tomes
http://web.nchu.edu.tw/pweb/users/hbhsu/lesson/8252.pdf
Why the Scientific Revolution
Did Not Take Place in China
—or Didn’t It?
https://www.princeton.edu/~elman/documents/China_and_the_World_History_of_Science.pdf
CHINA AND THE WORLD HISTORY OF SCIENCE,
1450–1770
By the way, you can see many examples online of Chinese farmers today creating robots and other things for their own pleasure or work(like a working submarine)
For those that are still dreaming about past glory, a wake up call.
http://www.natureindex.com/supplements/nature-index-2016-rising-stars/tables/institutions
The rising star wrt WFC2015-WFC2012
1|Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China|245.02
2|Peking University (PKU), China|88.32
3|Nanjing University (NJU), China|84.48
4|University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China|82.35
5|Nankai University (NKU), China|65.04
6|Zhejiang University (ZJU), China|61.27
7|Fudan University, China|56.12
8|Tsinghua University (TH), China|52.74
9|Soochow University, China|52.43
10|University of Oxford, United Kingdom (UK)|52.25
11|Institute for Basic Science (IBS), South Korea|49.27
12|Stanford University, United States of America (USA)|48.84
The top 9 are all in China. If the trend continues for another 3 years,
Peking Uni (+88.32/3) might be ahead of Cambridge Uni (-15.79) and
Uni of Cal Berkeley (-9.19), and Nanjing Uni (+84.48/3) might be ahead
of Yale Uni (-6.23), Columbia Uni (+10.2) and UCLA (+7.33).
It seems that UK is pouring the resources into Oxford (+40.32) at the
expense of Cambridge (-15.79) so as to have a foothold in the top
10 institutions.
The setting star wrt WFC2015-WFC2014
2|Harvard University, United States of America (USA)|-85.72
3|French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France|-53.92
30|The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), United States of America (USA)|-43.86
48|The University of Chicago (UChicago), United States of America (USA)|-43.48
38|Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain|-40.29
90|Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (RU), United States of America (USA)|-39.37
67|University of California Davis (UC Davis), United States of America (USA)|-39.07
14|University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), United States of America (USA)|-30.37
68|Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea|-29.75
156|Emory University, United States of America (USA)|-29.25
125|Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), United States of America (USA)|-27.29
13|Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), Switzerland|-26.33
Haha, don’t worry, you’re not to blame. The Chinese bureaucratic system was pretty rudimentary compared to the full on Kafka-esque systems of modernity – not many offices, not many appointees, not much money in the bureaucratic system.
@Cao, for your typical Northern European (British, German, Polish) it’s probably around 40% of from the early farmers from Anatolia, 20-30% of early farmers from the Caucasus (who the Indo-Europeans were about 50% to 40% descended from). Then the rest (30-40%) is from the European hunter gatherers (Eastern and Western group).
Way too high to talk about Europeans copying farming or anything (if they were 80% local hunters and 20% migrating farmers or something, then I could understand).
Though you can talk about lots of the European’s ancestors being local hunters (mainly from Eastern Europe) who mixed into the communities of the early farmers I guess. They didn’t copy farming or anything though, but learned it from their ancestors, the first farmers (in the world).
Thanks for the info. But one wonders why the Census does not allow Jews to identify as of Jewish ancestry, or of Jewish race, which amounts to the same thing if, as I heard a Rabbi speaking on a CBC radio program say, all Jews are descendants of Sarah and Abraham?
so people like steve sailer and derbyshire will finally stop complaining about chinese students taking up student spots at our top universities.
they wouldn’t need or want to after 5 more years.
Btw, Anatoly, one fact which I think is underrated to bear in mind here is that we often tend to project back on China’s historic accomplishment the unfair understanding that it should have produced more than contemporary Europeans, because it had a much larger population.
But if we look at the population figures a much larger population for China than Western Europe is actually a fairly recent phenomenon:
http://www.wrsc.org/sites/default/files/images/2012/population_growth_over_last_500_years.jpg
Western Europe alone tends to around 50-70% of China’s population until around 1700, when Chinese growth outstrips it, until 1800, then China and Western Europe converge back to Western Europe as 70% of China by 1900, and China enters an unprecedented second boom of growth (probably Norman Borlaugh assisted) to outstrip Western Europe to around 3:1.
If you include Eastern Europe+Russia, it’s likely that China:Europe (as a whole) tended to be in around 1.25:1 population size, and the modern day 2:1 is pretty unprecedented (as are its future implications for Chinese dominance in the field of technology).
We tend to talk as if China was always a vastly teeming nation full of people, making it harder to understand why it didn’t have many more geniuses than the West, combined with its high IQ, but that’s not really always been the case. The relatively large population of China and India today is that’s more due to Western and Eastern Europeans and Americans getting so rich that they started deferring children for more education and a good lifestyle, and recent Western assistance to undeveloped Asian countries with agricultural technology.
It is all quite amusing to read self-glorifying tributes on how your own race of people have higher intellectual quotients than other more “inferior” races. Must feel great to be you, right!
Now, given that for most peoples of the world, some form of spirituality still holds importance, I would like to raise the concept of Spiritual IQ.
Lets consider the spiritual beliefs of people who have achieved, anywhere from extreme, to some success in the modern world;
The Jews: This group claims to be strictly monotheist, which is a good start. But, they have all these strict rules and traditions, but unable to live by them, have devised solutions to circumvent them. What exactly do they truly believe in?
The Orientals (Chinese, Koreans and Japanese): Does this group even have a proper spiritual belief system? For one, worshipping ancestors, who quite possibly were a-holes in actual life, is not a religion. For another group which professes to following a man who had supposedly abandoned all forms of violence, how well have they adhered to that fundamental belief? Belief in words only, just like group 1 above.
The Hindu Brahmins: A million gods, some more powerful than others … “Gods” with heads of elephants, monkeys, lions … Worship of the phallus, and its womanly counterpart … A mythology littered with examples of gods with limitations; unable to vanquish enemies, thus resorting to disguise rape, suspecting supposedly chaste wifes … A mythology which reads more as a very intense human drama, than anything else.
So, all in all, you see that the more Successful you are in this life, it appears you turn out to be even bigger Spiritual Losers.
What is glory which you get to experience only for an eye blink in cosmic time?
I’m aware of this, thanks.
China was technologically head and shoulders above Europe from around 600 to well into the 17th century. The lead in pure science was far more modest (in some spheres like astronomy, non-existent) and was probably lost as early as the 16th century.
I suspect (as per AA theory) that a crucial and little-mentioned consideration is the issue of literacy rates, in particular, the vast difficulty (relative to the resources of a Malthusian preindustrial society) of teaching general literacy with a character based system.
Coupled with population size being similar, as you correctly point out, and you had a Europe with far more people capable of doing science and technology remarkably early on.
Thanks. Those are some pretty fascinating figures.
A good summary of it is the countries page: http://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2016/country/all
Nature has some of the strongest peer review around, and tons of global prestige, so this is a good proxy for national strength in terms of elite-level science. Of course as an English-language journal it will somewhat favor the Anglo countries, but this is an unavoidable feature of modern science.
China remains a distant second to the US, in particular by dint of its unremarkable performance in the life sciences, but is already at 80% of the US level in chemistry.
The scientific output of the non-Chinese BRICS is negligible.
Within 100 years, most Islamic countries will go straight back to stone age in a blink when no one wants their oil anymore.
Technology, yes, it may have been up to 1700AD. Particularly China would have helped by big state projects (the Grand Canal, Zheng He’s voyages for the most obvious examples) enhanced by the state bureaucracy that the individualised governments of Europe would not have been so capable of (even if that bureaucracy was fairly minimal compared to anything modern and a thin layer fairly unobtrusive on the ground to the average Chinese). Big projects (moonshots) would’ve been less possible for Europe, with a less unitary state.
Just as Europe overtook in urbanization rate by probably around 1350-1400(http://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/voth%20fig%201.JPG), regaining the lead in that which was held back in late Antiquity and transitioning away from the agrarian model, but didn’t have the huge cities comparable to China (many more smaller cities divided between the regional powers, not as many big imperial capitals, because Europe was not one big empire).
The per capita income estimates are also pretty convergent between Europe (at least Western Europe) and China long before 1700AD (probably again by 1500 AD – http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IgCl8QLtioI/UxbMxVcz27I/AAAAAAAAFEw/q8_lvJlx9dU/s1600/Per+Capita+GDP+Asian+Countries+History+Maddison.jpg). Though these are difficult to compare given how agrarian the economies are and the vastly different crops available in China and products they enabled.
Those are elements that might add with the population size and perhaps the literacy rate differences you talk about.
Relatively close populations sizes, probably equal overall urban populations (or more in Europe), possibly slightly more economic activity per head in Europe, maybe a bit more in the way of average literacy and consumption of books in Europe, maybe all by around 1500AD or at least 1700AD.
One wonders indeed. Jews are notoriously loathe to let the authorities know who they are (even if those authorities are largely in their pockets), and of course pretend to be White when it suits them (i.e. when they are caught in some financial scam) while milking their victim status at the same time.
Here are data of income by religion including Jewish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/income-distribution-within-us-religious-groups/
Are historians going to be fascists again, after a while?
I mean, if they won’t identity as the most important trend of the century Europe’s compliance to Muslim wishes and customs, the USA’s open borders and No Child Left Behind program, adoption rights given to homosexual couples, what historians will they be?
Thanks. Good reasons there for not being a Jehovah’s Witness or a Muslim, I guess.
You’re right in that Italy’s IQ is very inhomogeneous between the lower and upper half, but this applies to Japan too.
I think that France, UK, the Netherlands and a few other countries are below 100 in average IQ due to a relatively high % of immigrants.
Measured for non-immigrants, their IQ would be >100.
That may be due to the fact that the Chinese were treated by Japanese troops in a way similar to how Japanese peasants were dealt with by the samurai class. The summary execution of a Chinese civilian at the hands of a Japanese soldier incurred no penalty from his superiors. That is how numerous massacres occurred everywhere Imperial Japan held sway, including of white POW’s. It is also why many WWII veterans who fought in the Pacific Theater hated the Japanese with a vehemence that few European Theater vets had for their German counterparts.
Let’s also not to confuse ancestry with cultural transmission.
Indo-European invasion wiped out Bronze Age civilization of Early European Farmers.
Esp in Northern Europe, previous agriculture sites have completely disappeared to be replaced by nomadism.
Early European Farmers’ Daughter, raped and made to milk cows, does not mean survival of her civilization, rather the complete and utter destruction of it.
This coincides with massive dying off of Early European Farmers’ male Y-Chromosome line. With G now only found in mountains in Sardinia. What Indo-European warriors did to Early European Farmers population would make Islamic State seem truly moderate.
As for Indo-European’s Caucasian farmer heritage, again nomadic raiders raiding Caucasus farming villages and carrying off Southern Women do NOT mean transmission of farming culture to Yamnaya. They too were raped and made to milk cows for Indo-European warriors.
Later destruction of Rome is much fainter echo of the Bronze Age Europe civilizational collapse. yet it took Europe fully 1000 years well into 1500s to recover to Roman level of civilization.
The point is, yes, Europe had some ancient civilizational history, but it was subjected to repeat destruction and long interruptions of collapse and rebirth.
Not so much in Chinese case.
Han empire also collapsed as did Rome, but China was able to coalesce again in 6th century first under Sui and subsequently under Tang dynasty. Ever afterwards, age of fragmentation grew shorter and shorter, period of unification and general peace grew longer and longer. And China was able to be pulled together was precisely because it had better state institution than Europe.
You got it backwards. Chinese state institution didn’t become better because Chinese empires were larger, rather it was because Chinese state institutions were WAY more robust than Roman ones, that China was able to be unified whereas Europe never was (notwithstanding brief period under Charlemagne)
Actually Japanese officers would later write about tenacity of Chinese soldiers in the Battle of Shanghai, well before later massacres.
And because of fierce resistance Imperial Japanese Army encountered in the Battle of Shanghai, that when they finally break thru to Chinese capital of Nanking, they deliberately took revenge on Chinese civilians trapped in the capital in what later became know as Nanking Massacre.
Well, the EEF didn’t have any “civilization”. They just had settled farmer cultures that fell way short of anything we could call civilization (though some in the Balkans were quite large scale for proto-civilization).
But assuredly they transmitted some of their knowledge to the post-Indo European migration cultures, which in any case though heavily pastoralist weren’t exactly nomadic in the Mongol sense, either at the beginning of Indo-European expansions and certainly not after they moved to Europe (the proto-Indo Europeans from the reconstructed language had words for grain and farming, because they practiced it).
I don’t know about rape, nothing’s too pretty in the Bronze Age. I imagine the patriarchs and warlords of ancient Chinese agriculture did a fair amount of that in their expansions though, since there are these large expansions of particular male lineages in China – looks like lots of polygyny and probably some degree of rape going with it.
I don’t know too much about the relative robusticity of Chinese institutions of late Antiquity vs Rome. I would be surprised if the critical consensus of scholars was much like your opinion though since it seems quite nationalistic in bias towards China. I think the collapses and recoveries of each system might be more to do with less ethnic and religious fragmentation (no real Volkwanderung during collapses of Chinese dynasties) and the like, as China was a relatively more isolated and sheltered civilization at that time, rather than any inherent strength of their cultural institutions at that time.
I’m not saying Chinese state institutions were better because China was a larger state. I’m pretty agnostic that the institutions were better necessarily, though they may have been. Just that through history, having a larger tax and manpower base that can be pooled allows larger technological projects (a factor that can’t be ignored when reeling off large technological projects of nations as evidence of their technological advancement).
For an illustrative example, you could say the USA was more advanced than Sweden, because of the Apollo project, but if Sweden had the population of the US, and the territory, would it really have a harder time pulling off a project like Apollo? Is Sweden’s smaller extent than the US because it has weaker institutions, or because of the nature of ethnic states in Europe? It’s the same comparing a lot of the heights of Chinese and government technology through history to smaller states.
I don’t fault you for lacking understanding of basic Chinese history.
It’s not my inclination nor intent to teach you about the Age of Fragmentation in Chinese history.
And no matter I say, you will dismiss as Chinese Nationalist revisionism, simply by the virtues of me being a Chinese person.
So I give something that an American knowlegdeable in Chinese history have wrote about on this subject, specifically why Rome collapsed and Europe was never put back together whereas China was unified time and time again:
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/07/china-was-never-empire-of-mind.html
About rape and population replacement,
Winston Churchill wrote in The Birth of Britain about Saxon invasion:
“.. we may cherish the hope that somewhere a maiden’s cry for pity, the appear of beauty in distress, the lustful needs of an invading force,would create some bond between victor and vanquished. Thus the blood would be preserved, thus the rigours of subjugation would fade as generations passed away. The complete obliteration of an entire race is repulsive to the human mind. There should at least have been, in default of pity, a hearing for practical advantage or the natural temptations of sex.”
Your response really seems needlessly hostile.
T Greer is an intelligent guy, though I don’t think there’s really a contradiction here; China certainly persisted because of the idea persisted, and because the tools to govern did, which is effectively what he says. He’s not indicating exactly that he thought China had a superior set of institutions in the manner you are describing though, and that this is why Rome fell though while China persisted through a period of post-6th century fragmentation (if you think otherwise and want to keep playing at this game though, feel free to quote where he does) .
You seem to be a very intelligent person, and I don’t think you should consider it hostile that I am merely pointing out you are rather ignorant when it comes to Chinese history or Chinese bureaucratization
Apologies for making you read the T Greer paper, because I actually had another paper in mind:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/110702.pdf
On the explicit comparison of Rome and China
From the ‘Great Convergence’ to the ‘First Great Divergence’:
Roman and Qin-Han state formation and its aftermath
By another White guy, so presumably free from Chinese Nationalist slant that I am apparently afflicted with, because you know, I am Chinese.
Enjoy
It is interesting to look at the country data
where d15_12 is the difference btw wfc2015
and wfc2012.
d15_12|d15_14|d14_13|d13_12|Country
-1525.71|-803.37|-604.15|-118.19|United States of America (USA)
-389.81|-168.09|-146.47|-75.25|Japan
-203.75|-109.71|0.66|-94.7|France
-177.85|-72.45|-53.93|-51.47|Taiwan
-140.1|-44.18|-78.34|-17.58|Spain
72.11|-2.34|28.1|46.35|Russia
87.79|-16.33|24.06|80.06|Australia
116.81|81.33|7.89|27.59|United Kingdom (UK)
168.53|-35.05|85.57|118.01|India
1967.06|294.98|977.77|694.31|China
Assuming the trend continue, China will
be able to catch up with USA in 9.21 years
or less as the USA rate of dropping is
accelerating. Three of the BRICS are in
the top 5 rising stars based on d15_12.
Brazil and South Africa also have reasonable
positive showings.
25.05|0.48|0.05|24.52|South Africa
37.54|-0.99|3.71|34.82|Brazil
The changes seem to be multi-polarized suggesting
that it is most probably due to the movement
of senior researchers as new researchers will
have a hard time to have papers accepted if
not co-authoring with senior researchers.
A non-conclusive but interesting hint is
that the sum of the top 5 country loses
(-2437.22) is roughly equal to the sum of
top 5 gains (2412.3). There is no other
simpler reasons for that.
Interestingly there was a report that China
was able to repatriate more than 3000 high
caliber researchers from other countries in
5 years.
https://unchronicle.un.org/article/chinas-return-migration-and-its-impact-home-development
Because of the political environment in USA,
there were also increasing returning scientists
to India and Russia. India also has an active
program to recruit returning scientists.
UK also might have attracted USA scientists
interested in participating in large scale
EU research projects. Next years result
might show the effect of Brexit.
It is unlikely that Harvard Uni had problem
with research grants as it has so much
financial endowments that some have said
that it is a commercial hedge fund in disguise
as an ivory league university. Thus is it
most probable that it was lost of senior
researchers and drop in the quality of
incoming graduate students?
Here is another piece of data that shows average Russian IQ score should be higher than the Chinese.
http://www.javaworld.com/article/3114124/careers/us-developers-have-the-numbers-but-china-and-russia-have-the-skills.html?google_editors_picks=true
Same as in IMO, Russia scores is almost the same as that of the Chinese even though it has a population one tenth of China.
Terminator covered it pretty comprehensively, if in a rather primitive manner.
Even Scheidel, though, does emphasise convergence in capacity and raises as a point of divergence the 6th century and later developments.
As soon as an impetus for reform had been provided by the military and political crisis of the mid-third century century CE, Roman state institutions rapidly converged with those of the Han state: a strong numerical expansion of the bureaucracy, homogenization of registration and taxation, the separation of military and civilian administration, the creation of formal hierarchies and spheres of competence in administration, and the severing of traditional ties between the ruler and his court on the one hand and the capital and its hinterland on the other.
(He does agree that the early Roman state was not as subject to intense competition as Qin, and so did not bureaucratise, re-orient for high military mobilisation in the same way, but this is different from comparing the later empires prior to collapse).
Also, on the question of why the divergence (recovery and reconsolidation of China and no parallel in Rome) for instance, before he even gets into the ideological or institutional considerations:
Why did this happen? In principle, a whole variety of factors may have been relevant. For instance, the larger size of the western ecumene was more conducive to fragmentation: China lacked state-level competitors of the caliber of the Persians and Arabs. Climatic change in the second half of the first millennium CE may have benefited northern China more than Europe. The Sino-‘barbarian’ successor states were more adept at containing movement in the steppe, whereas European regimes were vulnerable to Avars, Slavs, Bulgarians, Magyars, and Vikings. China was spared the 200 years of recurrent plague that ravaged the early medieval West
His closing statement likewise is: This raises the question of why the foreign conquest elites succeeded in shoring up state capabilities where their western counterparts failed. The nature of antecedent governmental institutions and differences in the compensation of military forces (most notably allocation of goods versus assignment of land) and their organization (a predominance of cavalry or infantry) may all have played a critical role.
That’s hardly a resoundingly strong statement in favour of stronger institutions of government
being the cause of the eventual resurrection of the former Han state.
It’s not crazy to suggest that there might have been some institutional factor that allowed ancient China to survive where Rome fell. Scheidel (though he gives it shrift to the idea that ideological Confucian elites mattered), and generally scholarly opinion, does not seem to emphasis strongly this theory.
Still less that “the resilient polycentrism of the medieval and modern European state system” was a feature of weakness (compared to many relatively effective competitors and other factors).
Also, may be of interest to you, particular comments that may be noteworthy of consideration are:
The common notion that early imperial China was considerably more bureaucratized than the Roman empire inflates actual differences. First of all, the number of senior positions was essentially the same in both states, a few hundred in each case. Second, even before the reforms in late antiquity did Roman governors draw on the services of thousands of seconded soldiers as well as their own slaves and freedmen while the familia Caesaris, the patrimonial staff of the emperors, must have contained thousands of slaves and ex-slaves.
It would be unwise to overestimate the meritocratic dimension of early Chinese officialdom: most Han state agents obtained office via recommendation, i.e. through straightforward patronage, just as in Rome; others bought offices, as in the later Roman empire. In quantitative terms, Han entry examinations were a fringe phenomenon, producing only a relatively small number of graduates each year, and even in Rome, where formal credentialing remained unknown, certain kinds of officials came to benefit from having studied law
(Do I detect crocodile tears and a little passive aggression that I am unfairly charging you with a little ethnocentricism? You can’t really be that thin skinned about such a charge, can you?).
For computer programming, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest,
https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results
The Harvard team https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results
The MIT team https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/mit-team-wins-icpc-world-programming-gold
On per capita basis Poland would be top.
http://blog.hackerrank.com/which-country-would-win-in-the-programming-olympics/
According to this analysis if programming was a Olympic sport China has the best hackers
http://blog.hackerrank.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-23-at-8.42.39-AM.png
those statistics obviously reflect some kind of selection mechanisms within countries rather than differences between countries. Anyway India is doing surprisingly bad.
off topic: regarding your user name “Hbd Investor”. That´s an idea I have had, too. When Investment banking is all about looking for that one bit of information which is not yet prized in it could be a really good idea to look for market relevant information which is ignored because of political correctness.
Yet they produced more in any of the last six centuries than China has in her entire history. It really is interesting that 1.2 billion Han, with their mean IQ of somewhere between 100 and 105, have produced so little, down through the ages. Especially given the age of their civilization.
Europeans pretty much are recorded global history, especially as it approaches the present.
If that was true, China’s output throughout history would be many times what it is. Like at least 100x.
What good would coastlines have done China? She never managed to colonize Taiwan, FFS. It took the Dutch (IIRC), from literally the other side of the planet, to do that. As for Europe being the most hospitable environment in the world, I disagree. A place where you can grow crops year-round is preferred. Winters in Europe can be a real bitch.
China couldn’t even exploit the “luck” of Taiwan. Europeans explored and charted the whole planet while the Chinese studied their navels, despite their long head start in establishing civilization and agriculture.
Look, I think China’s done a good job of finally catching up, after many years of basketcasery and navel-gazing. Good on them. And I think they’ll manage to join the first world just fine, assuming they can keep such a massive (in population terms) country united. Eventually, they’ll come to form the bulk of it, what with there being a billion plus of the lil buggers. That’s to be expected, really. But there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the more high-flying rhetoric about China’s future, too. Chinese have historical output that lags far behind what an IQ-fetishist would expect. It’s reasonable to suppose that HBD has a lot to do with the disparity. Pointing and sputtering “you wuz in caves painted in woad” won’t change that.
Chinese might not’ve “shared” gunpowder, if they’d had the intelligence or creativity to know what the Hell to do with it. Silkworms, now, silkworms they guarded fanatically. How the Byzantine Empire finally stole them makes for an interesting read.
Engrish-speaking fellow said:
Rome alone exceeded China’s entire historical output.
White Devil stole it all with his devious tricknology.
We wuz kangs!
Here, you have a semblance of a point; China’s miserable record vs. supposed potential may owe a lot to their efforts to keep such a giant country intact. Europeans would point to the results and ask why keeping such a giant country intact is the priority, but hey, that’s just us.
They probably knew about it, but couldn’t be bothered to settle it. But yeah, Chinese are big on investigation, exploration, etc.
That would make the Chinese way down near the bottom in the curiosity department. Not sure I’d go that far with it.
When you find yourself implying some big distinction between curiosity and restlessness, just stop.
If you were facing occupation by the Japanese, you’d fight harder, too.
White man more curious about Chinese than the Chinese, news at 11.
It’s not just average IQ that matters, but distribution of variation from the average.
For example, it’s well established that while men and women have basically equal average IQ’s, men are greatly over-represented at both ends of the bell curve: There are both more male idiots and male geniuses. Perhaps a similar phenomenon exists with respect to Russians and Chinese (or more generally, whites and East Asians).
Since you are still unconvinced and seem to have no understanding of the work being done in modern times
China has recently claimed/demonstrated two new inventions that the white man is unable to replicate
China has launched a quantum satellite the first quantum satellite in the world
http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-satellite-is-one-giant-step-for-the-quantum-internet-1.20329
China has created a quantum radar and tested it successfully
http://www.techworm.net/2016/09/china-can-now-detect-stealth-aircrafts-first-quantum-radar.html
This is on top of all other chinese achievements such as the supercomputer mentioned above and as well as being the largest producer of graphene and carbon nanotubes
I actually consider machine tool production as a serious metric of industrial capability. Not only is it the only field that reproduces itself and makes all other manufacturing possible. It demonstrates precision manufacturing capability because precision machine tools are actually quite difficult to make. They also require metallurgy that is also difficult to do, specialized alloys and the like. A country that can dominate in the production of high quality machine tools is an industrial power as far as I’m concerned.
When I was involved in a manufacturing business in Malaysia in the late 90’s, it was recognized that the Japanese and Germans made the best machine tools, followed by a South Korea that striving mightily to catch up to the Japanese, then Taiwan, which was considered the bargain basement. Their tools were not so good. Mainland China was not even on the map at that time. Obviously things have changed since this time.
I think the Chinese will rapidly catch up and surpass the U.S. in bio-engineering/synthetic biology in the next 10 years.
It is true that China has a huge financial bubble that is waiting to break. However, the U.S. had one in 1929, resulting in the depression of the 1930’s, and yet it still did not prevent us from being the dominant power on the planet by 1970.
China will have its depression, then overcome it and continue to grow.
As Jim Rogers put it once, the U.S. had massive corruption, lack of objective rule of law in many areas, 7 depressions with a “D”, all during the 19th century, and we still became the dominant power by the mid-late 20th century. I see no reason why China could not follow a similar progression
The US was the dominant economic power already by the end of the 19th century.
Perhaps the question we should be asking is why the Chinese did not have the industrial revolution like Europe did. My understanding is that the Chinese were under the domination of a single bureaucracy. The Europeans were divided into competing countries. Competition is always better than monopoly for driving innovation and productivity.
Today’s Soldiers Are Becoming Fading Dinosaurs
Modern technology has transformed weapons and the battlefield and made fuzzy the concept of the combatant. Global terrorists, non-professional combatants, and non-state organizations are a growing threat to sovereign states. Faced with these threats, the professional solider of today resembles the great, powerful but poorly adapted dinosaur.
http://fas.org/nuke/guide/china/doctrine/unresw1.htm
All that is left of the dinosaurs are the birds and war is for the birds.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dinosaurs-shrank-and-became-birds/
Brill:
In guerrilla warfare they taught us to use our weaknesses as strengths.
Robert Clayton Dean:
Such as?
Brill:
If they’re big and your little, then you’re fast and they’re slow. You’re hidden and they’re exposed. You fight only the battles you know you can win.
AK, nigga are you ok? No new posts for 16 days now.
We can’t really take China’s publications numbers as a direct apples-to-apples comparison to the US. More of their publications are in low tier journals, which are easier to get published. Less expert review. More fraud and cheating goes on amongst the Chinese- in fact, there have been Chinese “publications” where they copied verbatim or nearly verbatim from an American publication, put their own name on it, and published it in a Chinese journal!
It would be analogous to saying a 3rd rate agricultural college that churns out slightly more bachelor’s students than Harvard, is out-competing Harvard as a college.
Tons of pride and prejudice in the comment section. It is really hard to keep an objective attitude towards something people don’t like, huh? Would be interesting if we examine these comments 15 or 20 years later.