Since the country was traditionally small and poor, the social distance between elites and ordinary people was smaller.

Most of the Ukrainian gentry were not that rich (they often worked their own lands and were basically just free farmers), but they simply found it unacceptable and shameful to mix with people whose ancestors had been enserfed. So they lived in their own villages, or in different parts of the same village, sat in different sections of the church, etc.

To your point, my paternal grandfather himself was of humble origin (peasants and foresters) but had exceptional ability and advanced through the army.

My only non-noble paternal ancestor (at least, going back to the late 1700s beyond which records are scarce) was a Sudeten German who began service in the Austrian military as an enlisted man, and somehow rapidly rose through the ranks during the Napoleonic wars (my aunt discovered that his unit was in some famous battle, perhaps he performed well) to become a captain. Afterwards, he was stationed in Galicia and his kids married local Poles and Ruthenians/Ukrainians. His Polish and Ukrainian descendants were active in politics in the late 19th century on opposing sides, and fought against each other during the Polish-Ukrainian war in 1919 (two of them were very significant historical figures in both nations but I won’t doxx myself by identifying them here).

I suppose because he was a German and an officer, the children’s “commoner” social background was more acceptable.

Similar development in the PRC. Lots of high officials descended from the surviving pre-revolutionary nobility, and now of course the state is controlled by the “princelings”–the red nobility. This includes Xi.

This illustrates why it’s my view that leftist political thought, at least in the sense of outright denying reality, must be eradicated from human consciousness.

Agreed.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/shanghai-1937-chinas-forgotten-stalingrad-16396

Yes, Chiang stupidly wasted most of his excellent German-trained units in the doomed struggle at Shanghai in order to gain international sympathy. If he hadn’t, the war would’ve turned out very differently.

Marcus’ attempt to dismiss the CCP’s effort against the Japanese is ridiculous. It is so based on one sided view and not based on reality.

I didn’t dismiss it, I said that the Hundred Regiments Offensive was an impressive mobilization and successful, but they were crushed by IJA counterattacks afterwards, and consequently did very little. To compare them to the Viet Cong who played as big a role as the NVA before Tet Offensive is insane (though I guess you could say the Hundred Regiments Offensive was to the PLA what the Tet Offensive was to the VC: being their last major battle after which their role diminished). Overall I think 97% of Chinese casualties were NRA and most of the rest were 8th Route Army (which included Communists but was technically part of the NRA)

I thought such mixing was historically rare; your commoner ancestors must have been exceptional in some way.

One of my grandparents is from a peasant family, other three are from untitled gentry families. I have no ancestors of bourgeois origins or other origins. Peasants were all peasants, gentry all gentry, with the exception of one woman five generations back, a German officer’s daughter. I suspect keeping the bloodline so clean in these families was not an exception, but the rule.

I don’t think it was as rare in Sweden as on the continent. Since the country was traditionally small and poor, the social distance between elites and ordinary people was smaller. Sweden also never really had manorialism or feudalism. There was also a strong state and strong army which were both meritocratic, so opportunities for advancement also existed.

Of the four lines traced on my paternal side, they can roughly be divided into:

• Peasants
• Foresters
• Mining & metallurgical bourgeoisie
• Nobility

To your point, my paternal grandfather himself was of humble origin (peasants and foresters) but had exceptional ability and advanced through the army.

On my mother’s side her mother was from the working class and her father from the the petty bourgeoisie.

Unfortunately no one else is likely to see our replies, but getting comments from Mr. Hack and then one of the other Swedish commenters would at this point be useful.

Agreed. The detailed gentry family histories show remarkable similarity in relative income and social standing across continents and regimes. Even under the Soviets, after an initial culling the survivors’ descendants got back to a very comfortable position, very comparable to before if not slightly improved due to the upper strata being wiped out completely. All that suffering and bloodshed was for nothing.

Similar development in the PRC. Lots of high officials descended from the surviving pre-revolutionary nobility, and now of course the state is controlled by the “princelings”–the red nobility. This includes Xi.

This illustrates why it’s my view that leftist political thought, at least in the sense of outright denying reality, must be eradicated from human consciousness.

Interesting article on the phenomenon in pre-Revolutionary Russia:

https://www.academia.edu/12589069/Olga_E._Glagoleva._The_illegitimate_children_of_the_Russian_nobility_in_law_and_practice_1700-1860

Thanks, I’ll look at this.

I have no low status living relatives, but I do have some ancestors from both peasant and proletarian stock.

I thought such mixing was historically rare; your commoner ancestors must have been exceptional in some way.

One of my grandparents is from a peasant family, other three are from untitled gentry families. I have no ancestors of bourgeois origins or other origins. Peasants were all peasants, gentry all gentry, with the exception of one woman five generations back, a German officer’s daughter. I suspect keeping the bloodline so clean in these families was not an exception, but the rule.

Clark’s work is excellent and should be required reading for all people in public policy.

Agreed. The detailed gentry family histories show remarkable similarity in relative income and social standing across continents and regimes. Even under the Soviets, after an initial culling the survivors’ descendants got back to a very comfortable position, very comparable to before if not slightly improved due to the upper strata being wiped out completely. All that suffering and bloodshed was for nothing.

The production of bastards by high status men with servants seems like it peaked in the Victorian era, with the high status men mainly being bourgeois rather than noble. This is just the impression I get from history and literature mind you, as I haven’t seen data on this.

Interesting article on the phenomenon in pre-Revolutionary Russia:

https://www.academia.edu/12589069/Olga_E._Glagoleva._The_illegitimate_children_of_the_Russian_nobility_in_law_and_practice_1700-1860

The KMT was the Chinese government, so to speak. The CCP was the rebel. The Chinese government used to call the CCP “bandits”. All the CCP leaders were on the most wanted listed, and the KMT army had been fighting the CCP’s red army for years and almost annihilated them at one point. But the CCP army escaped and started the famous long march.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March

When the Japanese invaded, the KMT army of course would be on the first line of defense because the KMT ran the government and China. The KMT arm force was the national army force.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/shanghai-1937-chinas-forgotten-stalingrad-16396

Shanghai 1937: This Is China’s Forgotten Stalingrad
In the end, China abandoned Shanghai—and lost its best divisions in a bloddy battle.

by Michael Peck
In the summer of 1937, the “Pearl of the Orient” became a slaughterhouse. A million Chinese and Japanese soldiers engaged in savage urban combat in China’s coastal city of Shanghai.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/35-million-people-under-siege-how-japan-sacked-shanghai-during-world-war-ii-50207

3.5 Million People Under Siege: How Japan Sacked Shanghai During World War II
The bloody fall of Shanghai to the Japanese in 1937 led to the Rape of Nanking and the eventual merger of the Sino-Japanese War into WWII.

I am not arguing that the CCP did more than the KMT in fighting the Japanese. The KMT did a lot more. But the CCP’s guerrilla warfare had been very effective in neutralizing Japanese expansion.

Just look at the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare in the Vietnam War or the war in Afghanistan now. Guerrilla warfare could frustrate and exhaust your enemy.

Marcus’ attempt to dismiss the CCP’s effort against the Japanese is ridiculous. It is so based on one sided view and not based on reality.

The XiAn Incident forced Chiang to work with the CCP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident

Who killed more Japanese troopers? Certainly the KMT. The CCP build up its powerbase but did not provoke the Japanese too much, mostly they just fought Wangs coloborators, who were not used by the Japanese against the KMT. By 1945 the CCP had a lot of power and had Japan not surrendered the CCP could have done a lot of damege had they wanted to. They didnt though. The KMT killed close to a million Japanese and paid with a lot more lives for this, it sacreficed their best troopsand equipment in this war. The CCP killed far fewer Japanese, rather it mostly killed other Chinese.

*Forgot to mention that the Red Army turned over boatloads of captured IJA equipment (and industrial areas) to the PLA after conquering Manchuria, so not surprising to see PLA wearing Jap gear

Yes, when the Japs actually made a concerted effort to fight the PLA after the Hundred Regiments Offensive they decimated it and took about 1/2 of the CCP’s territory. After that the CCP focused on recruitment and expanding territory elsewhere, their guerrilla attacks were minor and they mostly fought against Japanese collaborators, not the IJA. The PLA by the end of the war was 10x its antebellum strength according to Chalmers Johnson, meanwhile the Nationalists had been utterly exhausted, left with only poor quality conscripts.

The guy you are quoting is talking nonsense. First of all, The CCP occupied a huge swath of land. The Japanese surely would like to control it for obvious reasons if they could. Secondly, the Japanese were able to stamp out the guerrillas only when they could find them. They had a hard time to locate the CCP guerrillas. This wasn’t for lack of effort on the Japanese part. They tried and failed. The one thing the Japanese could do was to cut down their food and water source. If they found something, they would burn down whatever they couldn’t take and poison the wells. But that practice seemed to have not much effect on the CCP.

I don’t know if you have heard a guy named “Lin Biao”, who played a huge role in the CCP’s win over the KMT in the civil war. Years prior to the civil war, he was shot and almost killed by one of his own soldiers. He was out of action for years in which he spent in Moscow recuperating. In one of the guerrilla wars he led against the Japanese, his army got a lot of war booty. Exited, he put on one of the Japanese thick coats and picked out a nice looking white horse. As he was riding back to his base, one of the soldiers mistook him as a Japanese officer and shot him from afar. Anyway this kind of small guerrilla wars happened all the time. The CCP hit and ran. They weren’t waiting for the Japanese to get them.

And I can imagine a few answers, such as:

Sweden is neutral. If Israel follows Sweden’s path, Israel might lose some of the massive benefits it gains from being an alleged USA ally.

Israel has a comparative advantage in lobbying.

Aerospace already has too much competition already. The aerospace industry in the EU and USA receives massive implicit and explicit subsidies. For Israel to be competitive, they’d have to subsidize their aerospace industry, too.

I think that’s a good distinction, between good HBD and bad HBD.

Done correctly, HBD can be rather innocuous and mildly informative about likely performance of groups within a very limited time frame, without making insane generalizations across centuries and trying to enshrine current realities as permanent.

There are also certain other negative psychological attitudes that a preoccupation with HBD and an unbalanced sense of its importance seems to promote.

But an HBD limited in importance and modest in its rope, would be a useful minor element in any intellectual toolkit. Even an essential one.

As I said, the IJA wasn’t particularly interested in those territories, so the PLA contented to build up their strength until the war’s end.

Wherever the Japanese were really concerned, it must be noted, they managed to stamp out the guerrillas without undue difficulty; this refers above all to Manchuria, China’s main industrial center.

Laqueur, Walter. Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study.

Do you by any chance have seperate IQ scores for the 3 races that inhabit Singapore?

Yes environment is important, still I doubt that Singapore had an IQ of 110 by 1980.
Chinese and Japanese americans have similar income, despite the fact that most Chinese americans are imigrants.

“The Filipinos have higher household incomes than the Japanese.”

This is a question that has occupied myattention for quiet a while. I did hear that most “Filipino Americans” are actually Chinese from the Filipines, do you know anything about this?

How do you quantiy that? It seems Nobody did much against the American troop in Afghanistan. But Americans aren’t winning in Afghanistan.

The Ccp were controlling a lot of areas. That shows you that what they were doing were pretty effective.

A lot of the IQ stuff are shaped by environment. Singapore has a very good education system, thus their people do pretty well in this kind of test. Foe example, the Malays in Singapore do better than the Malays in Malaysia. Mainland Chinese immigrants have insignificant impact on the national average.

Most Japanese American are born and raised in America, where most Chinese and Koreans aren’t. Native borns tend to have advantages over immigrants. It is not surprising that Japanese have higher household incomes. The Filipinos have higher household incomes than the Japanese. This metric doesn’t alone tell you much about each group.

I have no low status living relatives, but I do have some ancestors from both peasant and proletarian stock.

Clark’s work is excellent and should be required reading for all people in public policy.

The production of bastards by high status men with servants seems like it peaked in the Victorian era, with the high status men mainly being bourgeois rather than noble. This is just the impression I get from history and literature mind you, as I haven’t seen data on this.

They didn’t even fight much in terms of guerrilla warfare

I know about Singapore, I am just thinking, that its current IQ ishigher then it was in 1980, due to migration.

As for Koreans. Their median household income is 58,5 000 vs 69,5 for Chinese and 70,2 for Japanese, Im just wondering why it is significantly lower.

The CCP used guerrilla warfare tactics effectively against the Japanese, as did the Vietnamese against the Americans. I don’t know why you want to dismiss their efforts simply because they avoided fighting conventional battles.

My grandfather decided to produce an ambitious genealogy in his retirement.

These are great relatives to have. I have two, from different branches, who have done this; each produced a book.

Another finding was regional endogamy among lower status Swedes, national endogamy among those of middling status, and partly cosmopolitan marriage patterns among those of the highest status.

Do you have lower status relatives?

Have you seen this book:

There is a section on Sweden showing that surnames predict income over 10 generations (as they do elsewhere).

Meanwhile in European, Chinese, or Japanese society one finds examples in every generation of people marrying outside of their class as well as changing their social class. This was also true in feudal times. Commoners could be ennobled, and nobles could also lose their lands and titles.

It was rare (though not as rare as inter-caste marriages in India). And it may have, if anything, bolstered higher abilities among the upper classes by adding talented commoners and throwing out inferior outliers.

Boris Johnson for instance is reported on Wikipedia to have “5 or 6” children.

They seem to have been with ladies from better families. But in general, if nobles had kids with their servant girls, this would raise abilities among the servants a little bit, producing some equalization.

They did some guerrilla fighting, but even there the large majority was done by NRA. The CCP’s Hundred Regiments Offensive was an impressive mobilization and pretty effective, but it was basically an attack on the Japanese rearguard and the Jap counterattacks severely damaged the PLA. After that they licked their wounds and built their strength up for the civil war. I don’t really fault them for that, since the Japanese weren’t very interested in their territory and more attacks would’ve left the PLA crippled and the CCP irrelevant in the postwar settlement.

The one battle of 1937 and the campaign of 1940 apart, there were no major encounters between the Chinese Communists and the Japanese. The transition to mobile warfare that Mao had demanded did not, in fact, occur until after the war had ended.

– Laqueur, Walter. Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study.

The CPP mostly engaged in guerrilla warfare, and they were pretty effective.

When they had the opportunity, they did go full throttle.

See Battle of Pingxingguan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pingxingguan

You keep repeating that Koreans are doing badly in the US. What metric do you use to come up with that conclusion? There are many Korean high achievers. The college graduation rate among Koreans is one of the highest among all other groups, and Koreans are over represented in West Point and Ivy league schools. Their household income is in the middle of the pack, one above the Irish and one below the German. Not great, but certainly not poor.

As for Singapore, there was almost no migration from China between 1949-1985. Singapore was already highly developed when Lee was having that conversation with Deng.

Please, the CCP had nothing to contribute, also they were content to build up their strength while the Nationalists exhausted themselves.

Only bad HBD is post hoc rationalization of the current state of things.
Good HBD has predictive potential. Jensen did for example predict Koreas and Taiwan’s rise, despite the fact that in the 1960s many countries in Latin America or the middle east were more developed.

HBD is in my opinion about filtering out the noise and finding the inborn factors that distinguish different groups of humans from each other as well as making social predictions based on these distinctions. For example predicting the changes to a country who’s population shifts due to migration. I do think that Mr.Karlin is doing it right in that he is working in this direction.
Sadlymany others just use it to explain their personal preferences.

From where does the productivity needed to support strategic industries usually come from, if not the strategic industry itself?

Carolingian, Macedonian, Ottonian, and Rurikid.

Since then a lot of smart mainlanders migrated to Singapore, its cognitive elitist migration policy did most likly support a net raise in averege IQ after the opening up of China proper.

But I do agree that most old Chinese diasporas (Including Taiwan) were made up of the poorer segments of Chinese society. The fact that they did do so well wherever they went looks promising for Chinese in general. This especially makes it strange why Koreans in the US are so poor.

“originally Chinese were just imported as low cost slaves, although they had at least remembered the old culture of China” – This makes sense.

Part of the contrast was definitely geography.

It was hugely expensive to operate a modernized army in a vast China that was nearly pre-modern. It didn’t have the tax base to pay for a modern army without borrowing huge amounts and repeated deficits. Then it had to be employed in fighting warlords because the country wasn’t economically integrated.

Japan, by contrast, is relatively compact and arguably has the same natural advantages as Britain, where a navy is really all that is needed to maintain stability.

Probably didn’t help being next to the Soviet Union either.

I have been regularly impressed by the ability of Chinese to hold a grudge. I wish it could be emulated by Europeans, but I think it is something innate.

It is certainly true that Operation August Storm was not conducted out of a generous desire to aid China, but none the less it swept up and annihilated the entire Kwantung Army in under two weeks.

The Soviets bypassed the vast bulk of the Kwantung Army. Their plan was to penetrate deep into the wide expanse of Manchuria (e.g. passing through the Greater Khingan mountains), and to capture strategically important cities, as well as to disrupt Japanese supply lines. It was very well planned out, and the Soviets had overwhelming superiority in tactics and equipment. In addition, the Kwantung Army lacked mobility, as much of their equipment, weapons, and supplies had been earlier spent in the Pacific theater. Regardless, the Japanese were still putting up fierce resistance and inflicting large numbers of casualties on the Soviets, right up until the point where they were informed of the surrender order. It’s hard to imagine that this resistance would not have continued if the Soviets had to fight the entire Kwantung Army to the death. As it stands, the Soviet’s main contribution was in hastening the Japanese decision to surrender, which came just 6 days after the Soviet invasion began.

80% (of roughly 3.2 million troops) of japan’s imperial army were bogged down in china when the war started proper in 1937.

Japan maintained roughly 1 million troops in China (not including Manchuria) for the duration of the war, but not at the outset of the war, as total IJA strength back then was much smaller.

For the next hundred year or so, Japan turned the whole country to learn from Tang China.

Japan would take much influence from China throughout the entire Tang dynasty, but not as much in the few decades immediately following the fall of Baekje in 663.

introduced to expansionist European Empires (Portuguese and Spanish) and had copied their modern weapon, the matchlock gun.

Yep. Noel Perrin, in his book Giving up the Gun, claims that by the late 16th century Japan had produced more guns than any single European country.

it basically takes a snapshot of the present (often guided by subjective experiences) and then tries to build an HBD theory based on it. It reduces HBD to post hock rationalizations of the percieved state of things, robbing it of any predictive qualities and hence scientific value.

That is what HBD is.

Meanwhile the method of just looking at the level of development of each country arround the globe today and then invent a genetic explanation for it ispretty much worthless.

It’s worthless as science, but it has a very important role to play in the decline of the West. White people are fated to decline, and they must believe in HBD in order to decline.

From Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs

There is a Youtube video of it in which Lee Kuan Yew talked about his ancestors and recounted his conversation with Deng.

In his memoirs, Lee makes plain his admiration for the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping who led China’s opening up in 1978. Lee recalled his conversations with Deng, including one that year when Deng visited Singapore. Deng was impressed with Singapore’s transformation.

He told Lee: “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly. But I have the whole of China.”

Lee told Deng that the Singapore Chinese were descendants of illiterate landless peasants from Guangdong and Fujian, whereas the scholars, mandarins and literati had stayed and left their progeny in China.

“There was nothing that Singapore had done which China could not do, and do better,” Lee wrote. “He stayed silent then. When I read that he had told the Chinese people to do better than Singapore, I knew he had taken up the challenge I quietly tossed to him that night 14 years earlier.”

Now when it comes to cultural output, firstly its hard to measure and secondly we can just look at Europe to see that IQ and cultural output do not go hand in hand. Till the late 19th century it was France and Italy that had the greatest “soft power” in Europe, while the likes of Germany were dwarfed by them, does this mean the Germans had lower IQs then Italians? Closly related Anglos have developed very different cultures all arround the world with strongly differing “soft power” output. Japanese Americans do score about the same on IQ tests as Japanese in Japan do, arguing against them being non representative, same goes for Han (the Han in Singapore are an exeption, they are unrepresentative due to high human capital concentration).

My main problem with such an aproach to HBD as displayed by Dmitry is that it basically takes a snapshot of the present (often guided by subjective experiences) and then tries to build an HBD theory based on it. It reduces HBD to post hock rationalizations of the percieved state of things, robbing it of any predictive qualities and hence scientific value. One of the mainreasons why I got “converted” to HBD was that In the 1970s, the likes of Rushton or Jensen did make correct predictions, while mainstream economists made worng ones. For example they did predict the rise of South Korea and Taiwan to first world levels, despite the fact that if anything these places were more prolish, materialist and rustic then the modern PRC (a good source are memories of US troopers serving in SK in the 1950s-1980s). Meanwhile mainstream economists did predict the rise of places like Brazil, Peru or even Nigeria more then that of South Korea. This did show to me that the HBDers had a superior model. Meanwhile the method of just looking at the level of development of each country arround the globe today and then invent a genetic explanation for it ispretty much worthless.

Thankfully we do have “control groups” in form of Singapore, HK and Taiwan, as well as oversees Han communities around South east Asia. All of these areas were populated by different groups of southern Han and they are all performing very well. As for Korea and Japan, in most economic fields South Korea has caught up with Japan or is close to catching up. This includes GDP per capita (PPP), scientific output ect, not to mention that it took them far less time to get to such a height then it took Japan. There is no indication at all that Koreans are in any HBD way inferior to Japanese (especially since the only thing that separates them genetically is about 20% native hunter gatherer ancestry in the Japanese gene pool.) Despite many economic problems Taiwan (Republic of China), populated largely by Fujianese lower classes with a bit of native Polynesian ancestry, has a higher GDP per capita then Japan, Singapore is one of the richest places in the world and Malaysian or Indonesian Han have first world living standards despite living in third world countries. Also if one can make judgments about the genetic inferiority of Koreans and Chinese compared to the Japanese based on 19th and 20the century performance, one could do it just as well using earlier history and arrive at the opposite conclusion. Except for one math genius in the Edo period Japan before Meiji didnt make a single invention in the fields of science or technology. Meanwhile both China and Korea have made many such inventions. As for things like hygiene, manners ect, Taiwanese and SP Han are very good in this field, even better then South Koreans, North Koreans meanwhile are worst then the worst of mainlanders, not to mention that much of Europe was very bad in this field a mere 2 centuries ago and that when it comes to things like urban hygiene Japan and China were not different till the 19th century. Such things have much more to do with culture then with IQ in the long run and today even most African Americans in inner cities of the US are far more hygienic then most 18th century Europeans. The problem with the claim that Han Chinese have a lower IQ then other east Asians is that there are just too many control groups spread around the world. Now what is far more interesting is why Koreans in the US are doing so badly.

If it is true that the Japanese invasion of China was doomed from the start, that makes the Japanese invasion of China even dumber.

In any case I do not get that impression, but will readily admit to not being an expert on the Second Sino-Japanese War. I do question the claim based on the fact that the Japanese 1944 offensive in China, Operation Ichigo, was a success.

At the same time in the Pacific the US was busy sending the last remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy to a watery grave and starting the strategic bombing campaign of Japanese cities.

Japanese expansionism was limited by merchant shipping. The entire “Centrifugal Offensive” (a postwar term coined for their 1941-1942 assaults on the Western Powers) was conducted with only eleven divisions and a shortage of shipping.

Invasions of Australia and Hawaii were discussed at Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo and ruled out as a result of this shipping shortage.

It is certainly true that Operation August Storm was not conducted out of a generous desire to aid China, but none the less it swept up and annihilated the entire Kwantung Army in under two weeks.

My personal opinion is that the US made a strategic mistake in choosing to oppose Japan. Japan’s invasion of China was a failure and kept it bogged down in a massive war with no end in sight. At the same time, this war obviously made the unification and modernization of China impossible.

An almost ideal situation for America.

The result of American victory in the Pacific War was that many Japanese industries eclipsed American ones, and now China is set to eclipse America.

Polygamy is more eugenic, since high status men pass on their genes.

Can’t fix genetics yet

Sure you can.

Lifetime monogamy + rule of law + five generations of stable, above-replacement fertility will do the trick.

Unfortunately, no country in the world has all three, so we get dysgenics instead.

But it requires no special technology or resources. Our caveman ancestors did it, and so can we, if we had the will.

80% (of roughly 3.2 million troops) of japan’s imperial army were bogged down in china when the war started proper in 1937. The chinese suffered 35 million casualties, combatants and non-combatants. The japs suffered heavy casualties and had to resort to recruit men from places like taiwan, phillipines and malaya. The empire only set up shop in china between April 1941 to jul 1942 to operate its bombing runs from bases in the southwest but later found out that it was impractical to bomb japan from so far away. For all their involvement in china of 15 months, only an average of 60 planes were employed and it hardly matter to the chinese who were battling the japs on the ground. With or without the atomic bombs, japanese defeat in china was only a matter of time after the KMT and CCP joined forces. Had china thrown in the towel in the early stage of the war; places like australia, new zealand, india and central asia would very likely had been swallowed up by the jap demons. After all, this was their grand plan crafted for the conquest of asia and also to realize the axis fascists’ dream of ruling the world with the nazis taking up the western half of eurasia.

As for the soviet union, stalin’s intention to crush the kwantung army was never to help china. He had his eyes fixed on the north eastern territory and mongolia. True enough, his forces remained in the northeast well after the jap surrender and china had to do some hard persuading to have the red army eventually removed but not before it was arm twisted to grant independence to outer mongolia.

It doesn’t sound like you have heard of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Cool character, probably is the most famous historical figure in Japan. Check him out when you get a chance. There are more than a few movies and books about him.

While we are on the topic of Japan and China, I’ll expand a little bit. China and Japan fought 3 times in Korea.

The first time was in 663. That was during China’s Tang dynasty at its zenith of power. China was so much more powerful and technically advanced than Japan. Its powerful navy smashed hundreds of Japanese little ships. The battle was over in a couple days. For the next hundred year or so, Japan turned the whole country to learn from Tang China. From architecture, metallurgy, to religion to pretty much everything, Japan tried to absorb as much as it could from China just like it did a millennium later from the West.

The second time was Toyotomi Hideyoshie ‘s adventure in Korea(1592–1598). AK already posted the link. It was during China’s Ming dyansty at its last breath. (less 50 years later the Ming was gone, conquered by the Machu) China sent its troop in Korea to fight the Japanese.
.
The third time was the one you mentioned. A decaying “Qing” China vs an industrialized Japan. China lost the war and Korea was colonized. China also paid a heavy price for it – lost Taiwan to Japan, paid a huge amount of war indemnity to Japan which accelerated Japan’s march to modernity , stalled China’s development and pushed China into a century’s humiliation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

Trade war between Japan and South Korea is on the news recently. If you remove history and just talk business, the problem can be resolved in 5 minutes. But people and nations are what they are because they are shaped by their history.

“The Japanese also invaded Korea in 1592-98.”

Worth noting here is the fact that Japan had by then been introduced to expansionist European Empires (Portuguese and Spanish) and had copied their modern weapon, the matchlock gun. Until then the Japanese were known to the mainland Asians as pirates.

Interestingly, the English islanders at the other end of the humongous Eurasian landmass were also notorious for their pirates.

(including that we are descended from four different imperial houses, if one goes back a millennium plus)

Which imperial houses are you specifically descended from?

“If Sweden can do it, why cant’t we?” is what I imagine them asking themselves

IQ is not genetics, it is a test score. Imo, AaronB is 100% correct in his assessment that HBD defeatism will only accelerate the decline of the West if it continues to gain traction.

Also what age was this achievement test given?

Since you are curious, I’m surprised you’ve not actually examined the study (or the JT link), as it is listed as 11 and 14 year olds.

What’s important is not your limits. It’s other people’s limits.
In countries without immigration HBD is an abstract thing. Eastern Europeans can afford caring about culture and institutions first and foremost. In Western Europe and Russia they have minorities that number in tens of millions and constant inflow of low quality human capital from abroad. They have to keep HBD in mind. The US had to keep HBD in mind 50 years ago but now it’s too late for them I guess. No amount of magic dirt and religious vigor can fix half of the population being low IQ goblins. You can always fix culture later. Can’t fix genetics yet, and this whole discussion would be utterly irrelevant if we were able to.

But yes, they are “bustling with commerce.”

According to YouTube, Chinatown in Vancouver is ironically has too little commerce, after materialistic and culturally alienated new Chinese started investing in the city

See from 10:40 in the documentary video – originally Chinese were just imported as low cost slaves, although they had at least remembered the old culture of China.

Sure, diaspora population in America, had also become unrepresentative in terms of region of origin.

But main thing was probably simply overrepresention of illiterate lower classes, even as they were already the majority of the country.

And this creates a dominant culture and self-stereotypes of the immigrants as well, when they arrive in a new country.

–

This is perhaps more cultural than heritable genetic – when Italian Americans were culturally a very proleterian/peasant immigration, and simply retain their old stereotypes about themselves as part of their cultural identity even a century later.

Southern Italians (Calabrians) of today still have plenty of nerd looking people, like in the North.

But stereotypes of American cousins (who still identify as Italian in media) seem generally like they culturally have to be the opposite of nerds.

“you’ll find that they’re very well maintained” – Nonsense. They are dirty and they stink. Take a walk on narrow streets behind the restaurants. But yes, they are “bustling with commerce.”

Italian base population in Italy – usually adequate and normal looking, nerds. (Italian girls especially, always seem to have a high proportion of nerds).

You post a video of urban North Italians, when rather you should post a video of South Italian peasantry.

Between 1900 and 1915, 3 million Italians immigrated to America, which was the largest nationality of “new immigrants.” These immigrants, mostly artisans and peasants, represented all regions of Italy, but mainly came from the mezzogiorno, Southern Italy. Between 1876 and 1930, out of the 5 million immigrants who came to the United States, 4/5 were from the South, representing such regions as Calabria, Campania, Abruzzi, Molise, and Sicily. The majority (2/3 of the immigrant population) were farm laborers or laborers, or contadini. The laborers were mostly agricultural and did not have much experience in industry such as mining and textiles. The laborers who did work in industry had come from textile factories in Piedmont and Tuscany and mines in Umbria and Sicily.

Though the majority of Italian immigrants were laborers, a small population of craftsmen also immigrated to the United States. They comprised less than 20% of all Italian immigrants and enjoyed a higher status than that of the contadini. The majority of craftsmen was from the South and could read and write; they included carpenters, brick layers, masons, tailors, and barbers.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~molna22a/classweb/politics/Italianhistory.html

I guess the UK had a very loose immigration policy with those populations.

Perhaps a similar example: America with Italy – where they had open borders with Italy, but due to configuration of push factors for immigration, the process has likely selected a negatively unrepresentative diaspora.

Italian base population in Italy – usually adequate and normal looking, nerds. (Italian girls especially, always seem to have a high proportion of nerds).

And stereotypes of Italian diaspora in America?

Japanese in London by and large are expatriates, comparable to white executives and bankers in Tokyo (Tokyo of course also has white weebs).

Chinese in Spain, on the other hand, are much like the Chinese who arrived to the New World and Southeast Asia in the 19th century. Over the next fifty years, it is almost certain that their children will earn higher incomes than actual Spaniards.

Chinatowns in America are by and large not inhabited by old, settled Chinese. Most of the population consists of recent immigrants, often illegal. The old Chinese and Japanese Americans both exceeded white income levels by 1965, despite being under severe legal restrictions in California until the end of the 1940s. And in the case of the Japanese their property was confiscated by the state (and apparently sold at knock-down prices to Jewish gangsters according to Ron Unz).

But if you compare these Chinatowns to black ghettos or Mexican barrios, you’ll find that they’re very well maintained and bustling with commerce. The energy and diligence of the Chinese is irrepressible.

I don’t know the quality of Indians in the UK, but presumably they have taken more types of Indians than America has owing to imperial links. I do know there’s a major difference in the type of Pakistanis taken. British Pakis are best known for their grooming gangs, while American Pakistanis are mainly affluent professionals not so different from Indians in America.

performance of all three groups is remarkably similar

Sure, it was an interesting and original discussion point you have made.

But I note their diasporas are not very similar and also it’s not easy to infer about the home population from them because the sample is often unrepresentative.

For example, Japanese in London, are businessmen and engineers, and their wives.

While Chinese in Spain, are the poor people who are cashiers in almost every small convenience shop.

–

1. Diasporas (of East Asian people) are not necessarily similar in different countries.

2. Diasporas are not necessarily representative samples of the home population (Indians in America are one example where highly educated – and therefore often Brahmin – part of the population is selected by the immigration).

Children of these diasporas might regress to the mean, but it will be mean of families who were selected as a probably unrepresentative sample by that immigration process (so not necessarily mean of representative unselected population).

they were first in economic competition with whites in the old American West and in the wild days of Australia. The general consensus was that they were formidable competitors

However, traditional Chinese in San Francisco today (excluding the students or new residents), seem like quite a shabby population, even a century after their arrival. (That was my impression of the Chinatown).

So perhaps old Chinese immigration to America of that epoch, was selecting a lower quality population than in home country.

Indian diasporas elsewhere who have different origins that can be studied.

A lot of Indian immigrants in countries like England, were not really selected by any traits? I guess the UK had a very loose immigration policy with those populations.

Very good food for thought, too.

One difference between the US now & the UK then?
The UK could accept being first among its “equals”. The US, on the other hand, denies ANY equals. It’s is the exceptional, indispensable nation.
(example: even if China agrees to any settlement on trade etc with the US, the US reserves the right to keep ALL sanctions on China until it decides otherwise. This is treating China as it was a dog — the insult is profound)

From 1840 to 1949 (during china’s century of humiliation), no one had china’s back! The chinese owe their existence to NO ONE!

Japan was ousted from China as a consequence of the Pacific War. The US destroyed Japan and the Soviet Union swept up the remnants of the Kwantung Army.

The 1973 oil embargo was more than just rhetoric.

The reason we’re now in this discussion is that I brought up the diasporas of East Asian countries as relevant for demonstrating the similarity of the quality of the nations.

Emigration from China, Korea, and Japan to other countries has been going on since the 19th century. And actually longer in the case of Chinese in the Philippines.

Everywhere they go the performance of all three groups is remarkably similar. With respect to China, performance also appears to be similar for Chinese from different regions.

This has been going on for a long time now, so we are in fact talking about many generations.

We also have writings from Europeans of the past on the characteristics of these peoples, including when they were first in economic competition with whites in the old American West and in the wild days of Australia. The general consensus was that they were formidable competitors.

The situation is therefore unlike that with Indians in America. Not only does India have its caste system, but Indians in America are mostly from India itself or the first generation in America. This makes the selective effects of their immigration more relevant.

There are also Indian diasporas elsewhere who have different origins that can be studied. Under the influence of religious reformed and cack-brained economists, the British abolished negro slavery in the West Indies and were surprised to discover that free blacks refuse to work. The solution was to import Indian coolies. These people are not Brahmins and are much less impressive.

Or look at the current bromance between Israel and the Gulf Arab states, who previously were committed to Israel’s destruction.

they never really committed to anything beyond rhetorics. The relation simply went from unspoken to public. Diplomatic or commercial. I know Israelis have been discretely doing business in the emirates long before this so-called thawing. I wouldn’t be surprised it was the same for Saudi Arabia

You sound bitter.

Those very small countries might do well to link up with Russia, if that can prevent them being drawn into China’s orbit and eventually subjugated.

1) ” ….because Japan succeeded where China failed by investing in the long-term development of institutional knowledge and its own national arms industry.”

“Investing”? Where do you think the japs get the money and resources from? They were a dirt poor country even after Perry landed his “black ships” to “force” its opening in 1854. They launched the naval war in Oct 1894 in the Bohai sea and destroyed the entire chinese fleet. Then they forced the corrupt and inept qing government to pay 220 million taels (1 tael = 1.333 oz) of silver in reparation. At current rate, this amounts to almost USD 5 billion. In addition to the silver loot, they also forced the qing court to hand over taiwan and liaodong peninsula. All these was documented in the treaty of shimonoseki in 1895 – a la the british Nanjing Treaty.

From then on, the japs knew china was ripe for the milking. In 1931, they false flagged the railroad incident in shenyang (known as “mukden” then) to occupy and eventually plunder the northeast’s vast mineral resources. Millions of tons of coal, iron ore, petroleum and others were shipped to japan to fuel its military industrial complex for the full scale conquest of china by 1937 and south east asia.

2) ” Think about the Vietnamese in their war with the US. There were individual towns in Vietnam that were hit with more firepower by the US Air Force in a day than every British gunboat could have brought to the shores of China in a year. But the Vietnamese persevered through it, year after year, until the Americans got fed up and went home.”

“Preservered”? Someone had their backs. Against much criticisms from his colleagues in view of the dire circumstances china was in at the time, Mao decided to provide the full monty of logistical, equipment and expert advise on guerilla war tactics to Ho Chi Minh’s vietminh army. This support, together with the soviet union’s, enabled the dongs to fight the french from 1945 right up to the empire scuttling away in a helicopter on the rooftop of their embassy in april 1975. Between 1950 and 1954, Mao shipped more than 4,000 tons of equipment per MONTH to the vietminh. He also provided hundreds of military advisers including his best guerilla war strategist, General Chen Geng to help the dongs planned and executed the war against the french which ultimately resulted in their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Later, Vo Nguyen Giap (lionised by the fake media as the general who defeated the french and the empire) admitted to a hungarian diplomat that Dien Bien Phu was the “last desperate exertion of the vietminh army”.

The support and assistance continued when the empire took up the fight from the french after 1954 all through 1975. Mao even ordered one of their medical labs to develop a vaccine against malaria as the dongs were dying in scores from the disease upon an appeal from Ho chi minh. The drug is now known as artemisinin and its creator, prof Tu youyou was recently awarded a nobel prize, albeit much belatedly.

3) The Chinese of this time were not. China lost the Opium War because China as a nation never had its heart set on winning it. They took a few punches to the chin and threw in the towel in the third round. “Oh well, we tried.”

“Took a few punches?” China took more than a few punches. The military and industrial might of the empire, britain, russia, japan, france, germany and austria-hungary were forced upon a decrepit and crumbling qing government, starting with the opium war of course. ( Hyenas often hunt in packs)

The general population of china at the time was so emasculated; they were poor, illiterate, hungry, hooked on opium and dispirited that many even assisted the 8 nation alliance armies to try to oust the corrupt, inept and abusive qing government in the summer of 1900. After their victory, these foreign aggressors went on a rampage to loot and burnt beijing. On this score, the brits did a marvellous job of decimating an entire population with opium 60+ years earlier. The act of pushing a highly addictive and potentially fatal narcotic was knowingly approved by the british parliament at the time. What happened to “rules based order”?

Chinese began to “preservere” after the May 4th movement in 1919 when university students started massive demonstrations that fired up nationalism to force the new republican government to stand up against more western and jap aggressions – after the versailles treaty allowed the japs to retain shandong province. That was when the entire chinese polity began to fragment and boil with more warlords, KMT dissensions, formation of the CCP, etc, that culminated in the CCP being victorious in 1949.

From 1840 to 1949 (during china’s century of humiliation), no one had china’s back! The chinese owe their existence to NO ONE!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wokou

if their own IQ is lower than that of their family across several generation. Same with white parents.

Oops a wrong word here –

It should write:

“if their own IQ is higher than that of their family across several generation. Same with white parents”

^ Text written in an early morning rush before needing to do some work….

If you and your wife have IQ is 110, while your nationality’s IQ is 100. Then if you know further information,

Also missing word here

“If you and your wife have IQ is 110, while your nationality’s IQ is 100. Then if you don’t know further information, you might assume your children’s IQ will more likely regress to the mean of your nationality. In other words, the regression will be downwards.”

extended family of

Relevant family, is person’s family – between generations, which we assumed is selected. Regression in children will be towards family mean across generations.

The fact there is some stupid guy in your hometown, is relevant to the extent you might not have further information, from which to estimate the genetic mean in your own family, and therefore we need to use the control population.

In reality, he might not have the heritable genetic basis for intelligence which you may or may not have within your family, so whatever his family mean is, could be causally irrelevant to you.

–

If you want to understand regression to mean – it’s statistical statement about luck, in which they try to filter out which component is random, and therefore heritable component should match what is averaged across generations.

It’s purely epistemic. There is no “ontological regression to mean” – rather, the mean is just statistical tool to predict what heritable traits are in the person from limited information.

Understand – all this is only because of limited information.

If less specific information is available about what genes you might have inherited, or had specifically selected for from a population, then it is useful to compare you with the traits in the population to produce the estimate.

l. A black couple with a mean IQ of 120 has, on average, less intelligent children than a white couple with a 120 IQ.

Black parents with IQ of 120, will on average have children with lower IQ than they have, to the extent the trait is inheritably genetic – if their own IQ is lower than that of their family across several generation. Same with white parents.

You have to understand assumption of this is that the mean across generations will correspond with the inherited degree of the trait.

So if a family of Brahmins, have selected genes for intelligence in their family- then this will be expressed in higher mean in their family, than the general population.

Set of Brahmins themselves, might have a higher ratio of people selected with genes for intelligence.

But if you can find a family of Dalits who have a mean IQ of 120 across several generations. This is the mean that we will assume the next generation in this family will regress towards. I.e. let’s say the next generation has an IQ of 100. Then we’ll expect this is bad luck, as it is below the intergenerational mean.

Mean IQ of Dalits in general might be 80, but this is only relevant for predicting the IQ of the next generation in this particular Dalit family, if we have incomplete information, and didn’t realize they have a family mean of 120.

endogamy in Indian society has been the rule since before the birth of Christ.

It might explain strange features of Indian culture, but is irrelevant to discussing differences between already selected populations.

If you and your wife have IQ is 110, while your nationality’s IQ is 100. Then if you know further information, you might assume your children’s IQ will more likely regress to the mean of your nationality. In other words, the regression will be downwards.

However, if you discover that you and your wife’s ancestors were quantum physicists with IQ 180. Then which mean will be the more accurate predictor of what your children will regress to? The IQ of your nationality, or the IQ of your ancestors?

Of course, the more accurate prediction, will be using the mean based on more specific information. In this case, your children will likely regress upwards (i.e. be more intelligent than you and your wife, not less intelligent as would be predicted by the population mean).

I am suggesting that dissolving the Ottoman Empire by Russian force would not necessarily result in a real victory for Russia.

Look at the war of 1877-1878, it was costly for Russia, helped establish/expand new states who were not of much use for Russia and created opportunities for Russia’s great power rivals to expand in the Ottoman Empire.

Breaking the Ottoman Empire in the 1840’s while it was fighting Muhammad Ali Pasha, is with hindsight, clearly something that would’ve been desirable and advisable for Russia since it would reduce the problems Russia would have with the Turks in later decades. The same thing applies to the Habsburg Empire in 1848. Instead of decisively intervening to save the Habsburgs in 1848, Russia could’ve broken or severely weakened them in the 1840’s and solved the problems they would face with them later. In one decade from 1840-1850, Russia had 2 opportunities to decisively break or weaken the 2 artificial empires that would decisively turn against it later and cause major problems for Russia. Russia missed and squandered both of these opportunities to break the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires with crucial consequences for its future.

Russia fought several wars against the Ottomans with good reason. Until the 19th century, the Ottomans posed an existential threat to Russia and effectively blocked Russia from accessing the Black Sea. In the 19th century, the Ottomans blocked Russia from accessing the Mediterranean. Russia could access the Mediterranean through either Balkan states or through the Bosporus Strait. There was also the importance of securing a strategic position in the Caucuses for Russia as well. The prospect of Russia accessing the Mediterranean through either the Bosporus or a Balkan state, especially after the Suez canal was built, terrified Britain and other West European powers. They became pathologically obsessed with denying Russia access to the Mediterranean regardless of the cost, because Russian access to the Mediterranean meant that Russia could cut off West Europeans from all their holdings in Asia. Considering what’s commonly known as “The Great Game” was being played between Russia and Britain in the 19th century, Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean would have given Russia an important geo-political tool of leverage over Britain.

You are wrong about the Russo Turkish War of 1877-1878. That war in 1878 was an effective Russian success. Just look at the battles of Plevna and Shipka Pass. The Treaty of San Stefano was also a massive success and an effective victory for Russia, where through Bulgaria, it would get access to the Mediterranean. Russia only lost at the Berlin Congress in 1878 where West Europe intervened against Russia and the Balkan states in order to sabotage their victory and hard-won territorial gains. Also, the Ottoman Empire was not actually dissolved by force in 1878 and it was artificially preserved by the Berlin Congress of 1878. The Ottoman Empire would only be dissolved by force from the 1st Balkan War in 1912 through to WW1 and the post WW1 era.

I’m sure you believe the inhabitants of North America before Whitey showed up were noble savages too.

I’m sure you think the Rape of Nanking is really Murica’s fault too (so Japan doesn’t need to apologize).

That comment was a work of art

The British did invest directly in Japanese ship building. The Japan Steel Company of Hokkaido was set up by Vickers to supply large forgings for Japanese ship building – propellor shafts. Hitachi is now a front runner in the UK nuclear reactor stakes (large PWRs). because it now owns the Japan Steel Company which now handles the worlds largest forgings, alongside Sheffield Forgemasters of the UK. It has more capacity than Sheffield forgemasters.

Russia needed to buy UK forgings to repair the generators for the hydrodam in Siberia. So building forging capacity has been a priority. Russian capability has recently shifted from 50 to 60 tonnes. Still not world class but progress. At the moment they are celebrating that they can now compete with Siemens on turbines. Siemens once tried to buy Power Machines of St Petersburg but … strategic industry. Having strategic industries imposes a lot of costs on the economy. You need productivity elsewhere to afford them. Russia has 42 strategic industries. Thats a big cost burden.

Japan and South Korea are impotent puppet states that refuse to get babies.

That would have been quite difficult and risky.

E. Michael Jones, who has been referenced by commenters here, has the idea that what separates Africa and Europe is 1000 years of the Catholic Church. Undoubtedly, a crazy idea, but withal amusing, like Taleb’s idea of “Meds”, a term being inclusive of North Africans, as the world’s super men.

Even if it is silly, it is an interesting scenario to think about. Would it have caused gene-cultural coevolution? And to what degree? It doesn’t seem to be taking there now in the population as a whole, but there are probably opportunity costs for a more modern arrival vs. an older one. Ethiopia seems to be more advanced than other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, even when it comes to non-Christian related groups like the Somalis. Is that just the geography, Eurasian influx, or something else?

Might have been a harder sell in China vs. Europe due to varying political natures of the two regions. The Chinese with stronger central authority might have considered it redundant. Still, it is interesting to consider what effects it might have had.

How does it feel to be wrong Thorfinnson 🙂

You are in great danger of becoming a wrongist .

Oh Lord, have mercy on this poor wrongist, and nip his wrongism in the bud!

The extended family of a Japanese is the entire Japanese nation.

The same is not true for an Indian–his extended family is limited to his caste, and actually quite a bit more restricted than that as there are also thousands of subcastes which are likewise fully endogamous. If you register for an Indian online dating website, there are literally thousands of options for this.

I have personal history with this sort of genealogy. My grandfather decided to produce an ambitious genealogy in his retirement. While he found many interesting ancestors (including that we are descended from four different imperial houses, if one goes back a millennium plus), his most important discovery was ultimately that all Swedes are related. Another finding was regional endogamy among lower status Swedes, national endogamy among those of middling status, and partly cosmopolitan marriage patterns among those of the highest status.

Regression to different means is known from American racial statistics as well. A black couple with a mean IQ of 120 has, on average, less intelligent children than a white couple with a 120 IQ. This shows up in statistics on the disappointing educational attainment, adult income, and criminal behavior of the children of America’s black bourgeoisie (naturally normally attributed to racism, of course).

So when we speak of Brahmins, they are always regressing to a genotypic IQ of perhaps 110. They do not share any traceable common ancestors with non-Brahmins, because extremely strict endogamy in Indian society has been the rule since before the birth of Christ.

Meanwhile in European, Chinese, or Japanese society one finds examples in every generation of people marrying outside of their class as well as changing their social class. This was also true in feudal times. Commoners could be ennobled, and nobles could also lose their lands and titles.

Production of bastards with mistresses was also common for high status men in the past, and even today to some extent. Boris Johnson for instance is reported on Wikipedia to have “5 or 6” children.

Even better, Christian Chinese preventing Manchu rule altogether and becoming the top Christian country.

Ah, I see 🙂

This was wholehearted agreement.

On a slight tangent, I think one of the major flaws of Christianity is that it doesn’t incorporate ancestor worship. But for the resistance of the Church to the idea, China might have become a Christian country. At any rate, a state-endorsed fusion of Christianity and ancestor worship may have been an effective check to the egalitarian radicals responsible for the Taiping Rebellion and the Communist Revolution.

Nahh, you used to like and agree with lots of my anti-Jewish posts back when I was anti-Jewish.

But now that I’m Jewish again you’ll just have to agree with my anti-HBD posts 🙂

Having a woman in charge of things in China for so many years probably didn’t help. How much money was spent reconstructing the Summer Palace?

There was probably a certain built-in instability in China before it industrialized. Densely populated, probably more prone to flooding than Japan. More economically and politically heterogeneous, due to large distances separating population centers with varying economic interests. All this led to consequences, like the giant indemnity from the Boxer Rebellion, not paid off until 1940.

Are the Chinese that different from the Japanese, or is it mainly a question of geography? The Chinese knew what happened to Poland and Turkey, but they had various difficulties. Some of their stronger leaders were busy suppressing the Muslim SW. Still, I guess it is pretty embarrassing that most of their railroads were effectively built by foreign nations, to further their own economic interests. Almost like Africa.

IQ would have been relatively less important for success in 19th century Japan than in 20th century Japan. So 19th century Japanese immigrants would probably have been more representative of the general population than peasant migration is today.

The attack on Korea happened decades after Japan was forcibly “opened” by the US. I think Carlton Meyer’s point stands.

Well, well, an AaaronB post I can agree wholeheartedly with. Never thought I’d see the day.

Would have made a lot of sense if they’d been able to break out on the export market with it and recouped the costs of development.

Thanks for the interesting reply.

If these scores are properly weighted and corrected, then Okinawa (lowest) moves to 100, Fukui (highest) is 109, and 90% of the rest fall between 104.5-107.5 (with the most populous regions being between 104-105.5).

Ok, so it might be wrong to infer international comparisons (and I’m sure even Okinawa will probably be higher than Spain).

But it won’t change the orientation of the regional differences, which is the more interesting point in the map (not the particular scores which are assigned).

Not actual IQ scores, but scores converted from an achievement test.

There could be an incompetent conversion. But the basis of the study itself – how is that different than using e.g. PISA scores for constructing the IQ scores from?

PISA really does seem quite arbitrary when you look at the test – would the Japanese test be a worse proxy for IQ test, than PISA?

Also what age was this achievement test given? (PISA, for example, is using only 15 year olds).

And this is before taking into account the fact that the achievement test score gap between the lowest scoring prefectures and the national average have declined over the last few years since this study was published.

This is an issue also with using e.g. PISA.
Academic scores vary with environment factors.

The problem with these arguments is that they claim a wholly unwarranted moral innocence for the group in question, in this case the Japanese. “Why, the Japanese were not the sort of people who’d have ever dreamed of hurting anyone else – until the big bad USA taught them how to.” It’s just too stupid for words.

They will regress to mean of their own extended family, and of the family of whoever the immigrants marry (for example, mean in genetics – and also culture which follows the same process – for academic skills).

If diaspora is unrepresentative sample of the population of the country in these traits, then they shouldn’t regress to mean of the population of that country.

On the other hand, if diaspora is representative sample of the population of the country, then they should (just statistically).

Caste is not relevant, because unrepresentative castes in the diaspora population is collateral effect of having unrepresentative immigration in things like education levels (Indians usually need certain skills to get the visa to work in America, and that just results in having immigrants from the more educated groups in India).

a population of under 5 million, which is the minimum population amount required to be even theoretically capable of national sovereignty in the 21st century

I guess it’s curtains for Serbia then. Check out 21st century population projections some time.

I am suggesting that dissolving the Ottoman Empire by Russian force would not necessarily result in a real victory for Russia.

Look at the war of 1877-1878, it was costly for Russia, helped establish/expand new states who were not of much use for Russia and created opportunities for Russia’s great power rivals to expand in the Ottoman Empire.

This may be one reason why Japan has done so well in some areas and so badly in others. Consensus can be reached more quickly than in most other societies. In the case of modernization, there was a consensus, even before the Meiji period, that the country should borrow Western science while protecting Japanese culture, and the Japanese acted on that consensus in a very systematic and thorough manner.

I haven’t read the book, but here is Tanner Greer’s short summary of Kenneth Pyle’s “Japan Rising”.

For our purposes it is enough to say that Japan Rising traces the history of Japanese foreign policy from the time of the Meiji Restoration to the present day, searching for consistent patterns and themes that recur across the modern era. Pyle disagrees with the many commenters that emphasize the liberal, pacifist ethos of contemporary Japanese culture and who suggest that this will mark Japan’s approach to international crises in the future. He also argues against those that characterize Japanese society as inherently irrational and unpredictable, defined by random vacillations from one extreme to another. In Dr. Pyle’s eyes the last 200 years of Japanese history have actually shown a remarkable consistency. He describes Japanese statecraft as the product of a conservative and hyper-realist political culture that puts the demands of foreign politics above domestic concerns and takes an unabashedly opportunist approach to improving Japan’s position in the international system. The statesmen who practice this art are acutely aware of which way international winds are blowing. Their actions do not stem from any deap-seated values or ideological constructs except a Machiavellian impulse to adapt to the world as it is instead of trying to forge a new world in their own image. Thus the Japanese leadership stands ready to abandon anything—ideologies, alliances, the entire political order their society is built upon, if necessary—that might stop them from adapting to a changing world and attaining a promised place in a new global order

.
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-road-to-beijing-runs-through-tokyo.html

Even Japan seems to have significant regional variations (without saying whether these are cultural or genetic results).

In Okinawa in the Southern tip of Japan, their IQ is the same as Spain only. While in Northern Japan, it is higher than anywhere in Europe.

The Kenya Kura study that this comes from is sloppy and it has numerous problems, to say the least. For one thing, no IQ test is involved, as it is based on a yearly achievement test. The average score is not weighted by prefecture population, as nearly 80% of Japan’s population would fall below the unweighted average. The average score is automatically set to be equal to an IQ of 104 (instead of usual 105), and the SD is set to 15 (in reality, it may be lower in Japan’s case). If these scores are properly weighted and corrected, then Okinawa (lowest) moves to 100, Fukui (highest) is 109, and 90% of the rest fall between 104.5-107.5 (with the most populous regions being between 104-105.5).

Again, not actual IQ scores, but scores converted from an achievement test. And this is before taking into account the fact that the achievement test score gap between the lowest scoring prefectures and the national average have declined over the last few years since this study was published.

But the ministry said the gap between the national average and the scores of the prefectures ranked at the bottom have narrowed in recent years, thanks to efforts to make improvements in the low-ranking prefectures.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/08/28/reference/japans-annual-student-achievement-test-worth-cost/

It’s not that India’s caste system caused its diaspora to be representative or unrepresentative of the Indian population as a whole. It’s that the Brahmins in America regress to the Brahmin mean rather than the Indian mean.

Japanese and Chinese diasporas, on the other hand, regress to the national means.

Do you tell the pickers that they shouldn’t forget shoveling is important?

Yes, that’s what AaronB does, because he doesn’t want coal production to increase.