February 15, 2009

Tom Friedman disses Mexicans

Tom Friedman, the Malcolm Gladwell of the New York Times, has a brainstorm in "The Open-Door Bailout:"

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.” ...

Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter

Hmmhmmhmm ... "Indians, Chinese, and Koreans..." What's missing from this list of would-be immigrants?

At The American Scene, Dara Lind complains:
The bigger problem is that a lot of Americans really do believe that natives of East and South Asia who come to the United States are uniquely skilled and hardworking in a way that natives of Mexico or Guatemala who come to the United States aren’t. The United States has a long history of distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants ... At the moment, Mexican immigrants appear to be saddled in popular culture with the assumptions that they a) have entered illegally and b) are less intelligent or hardworking than their (particularly Asian) peers. Friedman’s invocation of a “culture” that requires fiscal responsibility helps reinforce the stereotype that an immigrant family from another region wouldn’t work 18 hours a day to pay off a mortgage. His complete omission of Latin America, when Mexico alone sent twice as many legal immigrants to the U.S. as China did from 2005-07, feeds into the assumption that such a family wouldn’t be able to get the mortgage to begin with.

Of course, Friedman actually is right about Mexicans not doing high tech: Mexican immigrants don't make the Top 20 list of source countries of immigrants getting American patents, even though there are far more immigrants from Mexico than any other source.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

84 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's funny. My way involves not bringing people in, but sending tens of millions out.

Man, when I traveled the world, there was nothing more beautiful than the paradise the Indians had made out of India, or what the Chinese had done with China.

Anonymous said...

Sooner or later America will shut its doors again to immigrtion. When that happens it will become a game like musical chairs to see which economic and or ethnic block will win the immigration sweepstakes.

Anonymous said...

"no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here"

Yeah... in India. How about we examine default rates on mortgages taken out by Indian immigrants to the US?

As to the suggestion: DO NOT WANT. The middle class in this country has been undermined enough already.

Anonymous said...

"And we will start new companies to create our own jobs..."

How's that working out in India?

Anonymous said...

Notice that Friedman was careful to preserve deniability. See, he's not suggesting this stuff, that Indian guy is.

Which reminds me: of all the people I've known, East Indians are the ones who are most obsessed with ethnic and racial differences and, more generally, with status. Others' status as well, not just their own.

I'm not bringing this up as a criticism. Race and social class are very important and a strong interest in them is healthy.

I'm thinking that this special emphasis on race and class comes from the legendary racial diversity of India and from the caste system that was the inevitable long-term outgrowth of this diversity.

Our own multi-culti world must be moving in that direction as well now. I hope my descendants end up as brahmins.

Anonymous said...

two million? Hell, no make if four million then we'll stimulate the economy twice as fast!

Seriously, do our elite have any sense or really care about, quality of life. Do they think that every available inch of open land should be developed?

Anonymous said...

Indian advocates a policy which advances his people and culture=brainy
White guy advocates policy which helps his people=racist.

BTW, since Immigration stimulates the economy, why not encourage immigration TO India and Mexico?

Tanstaafl said...

Being a world-class progressivist-globalist economist is simple. There's only one principle to remember. It holds under all circumstances - boom, crash, or in between.

"We need more immigrants."

Of course we need more immigrants like we need more gangs, more shortages, more diseases, more crowding, more deficits, more taxes, more slums, more distrust, and more violence.

We need immigrants like we need more houses and less farmland, woods, marsh, and wildlife. The rationale, such as it is, was described by Sailer in The circular logic of the bubble economy, 2002-2007:

Hire illegal aliens to build new houses in the exurbs for people wanting to get their kids out of school districts overwhelmed by the children of illegal aliens.

Except the circular logic didn't stop in 2007 and it isn't restricted to illegals. It transcends bubbles. It transcends parties. It's hard to imagine anything that would stop it - unless enough people recognize it for what it is: a crime of monstrous proportions.

It's difficult for that to happen because the media aids and abets the crime by downplaying its importance and pathologizing the opposition.

The crime is a pyramid scheme motivated in part by greed and in part by malice. Those who believe in limitless growth, regardless of the costs, are frauds. Those who believe in limitless immigration, regardless of the consequences and over the objections of the natives it is displacing and dispossessing, are genocidal maniacs.

Anonymous said...

Great, Tom Friedman, billionaire husband of a shopping mall heiress, proposes letting in another 2 million people so that we can all be saved by the resulting sprawl. The NYT really got a deep thinker in that man.

Is it just me, or does hot flat and crowded sound like a shopping mall parking lot?

Anonymous said...

Mexican illegal immigrants are less educated than Mexicans in Mexico, while Indian immigrants are much better educated than Indians in India.

Anonymous said...

The 2007 and 2008 international Math Olympiad teams for the United States had, in total:

5 Whites
3 Indians
3 Chinese

Chinese are 1.2 percent of the population

South Asian Indians are 0.9 percent of the population

Mexicans are 9.0% of the population

Blacks are 13.5% of the population

Anonymous said...

While the foreign workers coming in on H-1B are well educated, the supporters of H-1B are nevertheless dumbing down the US. Those politicians who support this visa tend to be the same ones who want massive unskilled guest worker programs and are the nod and winkers to employers who hire illegals.

H-1B is about cheap labor and not about tilting US immigration policy towards educated immigrants.

Anonymous said...

If these H1-B workers are so valuable to American companies, let's auction off the permits like we'd auction off any other valuable public property. Anything else is just theft, as much as giving away a publicly owned coal mine or forest.

Anonymous said...

You know, I've been doing some research into the Indian diaspora and I've found some interesting data.

1.) Indians in South Africa are the descendants of coolie laborers from North-central India. While initially they scored well below the white mean, IQ scores have started to converge as living standards have converged. Present day IQ tests show Indian school children score only slightly below the white mean. Also, if you look at the economic and social stats, Indians vastly outperformed their middle-class "colored" (mixed race) counterparts.

2.) Indo-Fijian immigrants in Australia (decendants of coolie laborers) are one of the highest earning immigrant groups. In Fiji, Indians academically and economically outperform the natives substanially.

3.) Tamil Indian refugees from Sri Lanka have one of the lowest dropout rates in Toronto and a high rate of academic achivement.

4.) The descendants of Tamil Indian coolies economically and educationally perform close to the Chinese mean in Singapore.

5.) Indians in the UK score at 96 IQ and economically/academically outperform whites.

6.) Indians in East Africa arrived as indentured laborers from Gujarat. Again, excellent economic performance.

7.) More select waves of Indian immigration are at the top of game in US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, etc.

I think the evidence is clear. Indians, as a group, are not low IQ.

Anonymous said...

The solution to the H1-B immigration controversy has always seemed pretty obvious to me.

We should allow companies pretty much unlimited H1-Bs, but simply require that all those immigrant workers be paid a minimum of something like $100K/year.

That way, companies that really want to bring in top-quality people can do so quickly and easily and without the need and expense of endless lawyers/consultants/lobbyists/bribes to politicians. On the other hand, companies just trying to lower wages couldn't do so on the sly. I'm pretty sure that companies like Microsoft, Google, Intel, etc. would much prefer this change.

If you don't like the $100K figure, just replace it with some other level.

Anonymous said...

45% of H1-B visas are awarded to Indians. Like it or not, non utilized human capital appears to be more abundant in India than any other region in the world.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous: Which reminds me: of all the people I've known, East Indians are the ones who are most obsessed with ethnic and racial differences and, more generally, with status. Others' status as well, not just their own.

Uhh, yeah, ya' ever heard of this thing called "The Caste System"?

Darwinian nihilo-cynicism is at the very core of their being.

Anonymous said...

Malcolm: two million? Hell, no make if four million then we'll stimulate the economy twice as fast!

Actually, if you're talking about the right kinds of people, then that's true.

Four million intelligent, industrious, sober, responsible, moral people will have provide at least twice the benefit of two million [if not more than twice - I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of non-linear effect in there somewhere].

The problem, of course, is finding the right people [which should have been the focus of our immigration policy for the last forty years, if the GOP hadn't so foolishly - so suicidally! - ceded the entire enterprise to the butcher of Chappaquiddick].

Anonymous said...

Friedman:
On my way from Davos noticed huge Apple iSchmod Ad at Geneva airport, ...got me thinking about the planet and ...topology, boarded new Boeing QuadriPlanar jet, and after short flight (?Editor?) landed in funny little town called Tikrit (Zimbabwe?).
Fully air-conditioned (thank you Samsung) suite in local Hilton was stuffed with glossy brochures from Lancome and vouchers for local BK, looks like our Democracy is winning big time.
Had a walk with Petraus, he looks ashen and under a lot of stress, discussed briefly branding of the next Surge/Campaign, Lincoln vs. Ghengis Khan, etc. I assured him that I won't miss the opening of the first gay theater in Baghdad.
Sadly 'Petro' had other pressing appointments.
Took MB taxi to hotel and off to jacuzzi to relax.

Anonymous said...

"what the Chinese had done with China."

Shanghai looks pretty.

Anonymous said...

McGraw,


Those populations are not all coolie descendants. In East Africa, I've met many owners of hotels and shops. They all trace back to merchants who arrived after the coolies.

In Singapore I understand the Indian population is split. There are the educated Indian immigrants who perform well and the descendants of coolies who don't do as well.

It seems that the coolies are always followed by entrepreneurs. Makes guessing hard.

Anonymous said...

It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.

Only since 1965 has America 'poured' immigrants in from 'every corner of the world' (except Europe, the birthplace of almost all previous immigrants). And in that time we have consumed more than we produce, and settled the outstanding balance through the implicit threat of our overwhelmingly powerful military.

The social/civic effects, as recorded in Bowling Alone, have been destructive as well.

Anonymous said...

http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushtonpdfs/RavensIVb.pdf

An interesting study from 1998 of African, East Indian, and white students at a South African university.

The differences came out as 103, 106, and 117.

Anonymous said...

McGraw sed:
"1.) Indians in South Africa are the descendants of coolie laborers from North-central India."

Eh, now I understand why we refer to them as "coolies".


" While initially they scored well below the white mean, IQ scores have started to converge as living standards have converged. Present day IQ tests show Indian school children score only slightly below the white mean."

Please remember that the top 1.2 mio. out of originally 5.5 mio. whites have left that country due to excessive AA, crime and lack of political perspective. That's the top 20%. Such a brain drain in any western country would constitute a disaster.

The ones that left were the educated and smart ones. In addition, education in South Africa nowadays is all about dumbing down white kids to the levels of the local Africans. So your score compares Indians to the left-over whites (middle to bottom of old pyramid) who are systematically being dumbed down.

Anonymous said...

I recently spent a three week honeymoon in the Seychelles (Indian Ocean) islands, off the coast of East Africa. The native Seychellois are primarily African with some European, Arab, and Asian influences. They are quite friendly.

Unfortunately, they are not particularly bright or industrious. So in recent years the Seychelles government has imported Indian labourers for construction work. The Indians increasingly do all of the important work. In downtown Victoria, the capital of Seychelles, you can see gangs of young Indian men lounging about on the streets, sitting on the curbs, standing around talkling and smoking. A large and gaudy Hindu temple has recently been built for them, directly in the city centre. The Indians are not an approachable group and exhibit a weird mixture of hostility, arrogance, and paranoid fear in the presence of native blacks and Whites.

In talking to dozens of native Seychellois, I discovered that there is a growing resentment and hatred for the Indians. Our black taxi drivers were openly contemptuous of the Indians and more than one said they should be expelled from the country.

Diversity at work, Indian Ocean-style.

Anonymous said...

Sure, Indian merchants immigrated to East Africa. The largest wave of immigration though were workers that came to build railroads, which set off more chain migration from Gujarat. I would also add that many coolies made the transition to merchant within a generation.

You might be interested in reading more about the Punjabi laborers that went to Queensland Australia and ended up becoming decently successful banana farmers, or Punjabi laborers that went to Central Valley California and did pretty much the same thing (with orchards).

Something like 1/3 of Tamil Indians in Singapore are of untouchable origin. So while I don't know the exact caste/social origin breakdown of the Singapore Tamil community, it seems Indo-Singaporeans aren't an especially elite group. Furthermore,

Also, Indian Tamil refugees in Toronto are academically doing quite well and rising quite nicely economically. Not bad when you consider that it was generally the working classes that fled the Sri Lankan civil war.

You make a good point that the descendants of Indian merchants tend to outperform the coolies. However, both groups seem to fairly well in general. There's no way I could place India's IQ at 81 or even 90. Something a little below the Western mean sounds reasonable. India's most pressing issue now is that most of the population is extremely malnourished, underemployed, and uneducated - all IQ depressors. Caste, corruption, and backward social mores must hurt too. Bring Indians to the UK or Singapore and I think you'll see better performance.

Heck, even the descendants of South Asian Pakistani and Bangladeshi villagers (in the UK) only slightly underperform academically relative to whites. As culturally messed up as they seem to be, they don't seem to be IQ deficient.

Anonymous said...

McGraw said: You know, I've been doing some research into the Indian diaspora and I've found some interesting data.

Here's more data from "The Global Bell Curve" by Richard Lynn:

p. 90: The median of the 12 studies of IQs of South Asians in Britain is an IQ of 92. The range is quite large, from 83 to 97. This is shown in the studies in rows 6 and 7 which give non-verbal reasoning IQs of 83 for Asian children resident for fewer than 4 years in Britain and 97 for those resident in Britain for four or more years.

Maybe the immigrant cohorts' caste profile changed for the worse with time? I'm having a hard time crediting better nutrition for a 14 point swing. Germany had appalling nutrition for years and years after WWII. That didn't make it into a third-world country.

On pages 28 and 29 a summary table of IQ studies conducted in Africa shows blacks at 69, coloreds (mullatoes) at 83 and Indians at 86. Most of the results for Indians came from S. Africa. The one result from Tanzania showed an IQ of 91.

A table on p. 206 reports the IQ of Indians in the Netherlands to be 88.

On pages 253-258 there are tables comparing the levels of educational and socioeconomic achievement of Chinese, Malays and Indians in Singapore. On almost every measure the Indians are between the Chinese and the Malays.

McGraw wrote: I think the evidence is clear. Indians, as a group, are not low IQ.

I don't think they're a group. Even they don't think they're a group. The word "India" was dreamed up by Westerners (ancient Greeks or Persians) and meant no more than "everything beyond the Indus river". It's not a native term. For most of its history in the West this term included China.

India has a collection of many groups, some of them very dissimilar to each other. Since the groups don't interbreed, they really are different peoples. In Luigi Cavalli-Sforza's "History and Geography of Human Genes" the number of endogamous Indian groups was estimated to be in the tens of thousands.

Some of these groups undoubtedly have mean IQs above 100. The Parsees may or may not be the smartest ethnic group in the world. An Indian (Vishy Anand) is currently the World Chess Champion.

Just as obviously, other Indian groups have low mean IQs. I've known some Guyanese Indians, who were descended from peasants brought by the British to Guyana to work sugar cane after the British Parliament abolished slavery and the local blacks refused to work for wages, preferring instead to live off the land.

These Indians are hard-working, family-oriented, but not particularly bright. The 85-90 range seems plausible to me. Here in the US their idea of success is not being the chief technology officer at Microsoft, but operating a profitable mom-and-pop shop. This applies to the younger generation as well.

And the Indian social structure does not bottom out with peasants. From what I understand, traditionally it was priests > worriers > merchants > peasants > untouchables > tribals.

Having all of that in mind, I don't have a problem believing that India's overall mean IQ is in the 80s and that it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

B322 said...

The bigger problem is that a lot of Americans really do believe that natives of East and South Asia who come to the United States are uniquely skilled and hardworking in a way that natives of Mexico or Guatemala who come to the United States aren’t.

That's right, Dara, being right is a "problem". A problem for your leftist creeptocracy.

Anonymous said...

Caste, corruption, and backward social mores must hurt too.

I think that their social mores are just fine. Ours, on the other hand, are decadent and depraved. During its heyday the West also had rigid class stratification (no intermarriage between peasants and nobles), sane separation of gender roles, and social ostracism for deviant behaviors. During the West's current decline all of those values have unfortunately taken a hit.

I suspect that the only thing in your list that actually hurts Indians is corruption.

Anonymous said...

Not to be nitpicky, but this spelling mistake is rather amusing

priests > worriers > merchants > peasants > untouchables > tribals

It's true, people who worry a lot do tend to have higher than average IQs :)

Anonymous said...

Isteve had a mega thread on this related topic

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/indian-iq-part-1-diaspora-demographics.html

Anonymous said...

Note: Any studies of IQ of South Asians in Britain wouldn't represent Indians, since Bangladeshis and Pakistanis educational performance is very mediocre, but the Indians performance is slightly above the white mean. This would balance out to give the "South Asian" score.

Indians and Pakistanis, though grouped as South Asians, consist of different ethnic groups.

Even within India, there are different ethnic groups.

Southern Indian states (Dravidian, with darker, shorter residents) like Tamil Nadu have been developing very well and lead the nation in literacy, development, urbanization, and etc. The south is on the whole more developed than the North. You'll also notice that several of the notable academics (Ramanujan, Chandrasekhar, C V Raman) were descended from this ethnic group.

On the other hand, many northern states (Bihar) are horribly mediocre. These states are non-Dravidian and speak Indo-Aryan languages.

If you give an average IQ for India, it is meaningless. There are too many different groups.

In Singapore, the Indians are descended from laborers. In recent times, there have been some professional workers coming in, but they have been balanced by more laborers.

As someone else said, in education and economic performance, they score between Malays and Chinese. Malay IQ was 91. Chinese was 108. So Singaporean Indians are most likely in the middle between that, and they definitely aren't as selected as US Indians. What they are though, is predominantly southern Dravidians. This seems to support my earlier hypothesis. I think the southerners have higher IQ average than the northerners.

Anonymous said...

"...feeds into the assumption that such a family wouldn’t be able to get the mortgage to begin with."

Hysterical. Where the hell has she been? They got mortgages all right!

rec1man said...

Takahata wrote

The south is on the whole more developed than the North. You'll also notice that several of the notable academics (Ramanujan, Chandrasekhar, C V Raman) were descended from this ethnic group.

----

Wrong again
Ramanujam, Chandrasekhar and CV
Raman are Tamil speaking brahmins
not Tamils

CV. Raman was the uncle of Chandrasekhar and distantly related to me

So is Vishwanathan Anand, the world chess champion, a Tamil Speaking brahmin


They were imported from North India 1500 years ago, and given tax free lands by Tamil ( Dravidian ) kings, in exchange
for giving them a fake caste pedigree


Most tamil speaking brahmins can be visually identified from other Tamils, though there has been some amount of miscegenation
One of the loopholes of the caste system is that upper caste men are allowed in certain circumstances to take lower caste wives


There was a DNA study, showing
that Tamils had mostly L lineage on the Y chromosome
whereas the Tamil Brahmins had mostly J2 and R1A1 on their Y chromosome

rec1man said...

Takahata wrote

The 2007 and 2008 international Math Olympiad teams for the United States had, in total:

5 Whites
3 Indians
3 Chinese
---

Correction, Not 3 Indians but 3 brahmins, about 0.1% of the US population

You will not find patels or caribbean hindus in this list

Anonymous said...


Eh, now I understand why we refer to them as "coolies".


Actually, it's Chinese for "bitter and hard," which is spelled kuli in pinyin. Some say it's from Hindi, but the Chinese term makes sense. Chinese often use "ku" (bitter) to describe burdensome toil. They like to say Chinese can "chi ku" (eat bitterness).

rec1man said...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed6.html

Johnny Can't Add
But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can

by Fred Reed

---

Another dumb article on the so called superior Indian education system

--

What Fred Reed ( who went
through the bell labs website
looking for names )
has failed to notice is that

Suresh Venkatasubramanian is a
Tamil speaking Brahmin

Anonymous said...

My strong impression is that for obvious historical and cultural reasons, South Asian Hindus---by and large---tend to be fanatically "racialist," probably more so than any other group anywhere in the world.

Hence, any thread dealing even glancingly with South Asian HBD issues tends to attract a vast amount of heated comment.

Most of these "excited" South Asian commenters tend to endlessly focus on worldwide "IQ hierarchies" and such, and quite a few of them regard Richard Lynn's books as their Holy Scriptures.

...Which always strikes me as somewhat amusing, since according to Lynn, except for Africa, South Asian Hindus have by far the world's lowest IQs...

Unknown said...

@Recman What exactly is the difference between a Pakistani and a Northern Indian? They look and act the same.

Takahata Yuichi said...

As I said before, I don't see the point in considering Hindus as an ethnic group. At the core there is already am ethnic division between Northerner and Southerner, and the heightened economic and social development of the South seems to imply an IQ difference between them.

Anonymous said...

"Mexican illegal immigrants are less educated than Mexicans in Mexico, while Indian immigrants are much better educated than Indians in India."

Excellent observation, and so very true. I worked briefly with a bank team of upper class Indians, and they were the first foreigners I encountered who bad-mouthed their motherland. I had grown used to foreigners, who might tell sad stories about unfortunate things that had happened TO their home countries, but they usually expressed affection for the land itself. However, I found that Indians could not say enough bad stuff about their country, pretty much the kinds of things that tourists say about India. You know, the criticisms that get them labeled Ugly Americans.
-- Victoria

Anonymous said...

Victoria, I think that what you noticed is a product of extreme diversity. The many different constituent parts are so different from each other that no one identifies with the whole. India has many religions, languages, racial types, separate IQ bell curves. The Chinese feel that they're a nation, so they have some loyalty to their state. Not so with Indians. This should affect future geopolitics.

Anonymous said...

Educated Indians are leaving SA too. I've met a few around the West coast. Also, Indian kids are being dumbed down too by the new educational system.

Look at the GCSE educational results from the UK. Indian kids easily outpeform whites, with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis underperforming a little.

Most Indian immigration to UK was chain family migration. So caste profiles haven't changed much most likely. Also, I would say that most Indians in the UK are middle castes. Not Brahmins.

It's interesting you bring up Germany. East Germany substanially underperforms West Germany on IQ tests. The difference? East Germany was a Communist state with a backward economy. It has yet to catch the West even today. I imagine that atrociously third world India must be that much worse in terms of IQ depression.

rec1man, plenty of non-Brahmins are in the Spelling Bee. I also know a lot of Dr. Patels, Dr. Singhs, Dr. Shahs, etc. Believe me, even non-Brahmin IA kids do well.

In the UK, Indian British (2% of population) are 10-12% of the medical school students. Most of these kids are Patels, Shahs, and Punjabi Singhs. In the Toronto, Tamil kids are academically overrepresented as top achievers.

Pakistani and Bangladeshi people practice cousin marriage. So their educational performance is likely retareded by a few points.

In South Africa, a large recent IQ test showed school children of Indian descent score 6 points lower than whites. Previous IQ tests showed a larger gap. Why the change? Well, nutritional standards have been converging. So Indians are gaining relative to whites in IQ in SA. Previous generations of Indians were likely low-IQ laborers with poor nutrition and schooling, but modern Indians are growing under better circumstances.

In South Africa, Indians are economically outdoing the Coloreds substanially. So if we assume 85 IQ for coloreds, 95 IQ seems plausible for Indians.

In Singapore, 1/3 of Indians are of untouchable origin. Their stats suggest a decently high Indian IQ, though probably a bit lower than whites.

Also, caste and IQ don't neccessarily correlate in India. In Japan, low caste Burakamin have converged with the higher hereditary classes. So I wouldn't be surprised if the same occured in India.

If Guyanese Indians focus on mom/pop shops rather than CTO, that'd make them about as ambitious as middle class whites. So 95-100 IQ range seems reasonable, though obviously the coolies are quite a bit lower on g than Indian-American doctors.

If Guyanese Indians were 85-90 IQ, I'd expect they'd perform on par with African-Americans.

If you ask me why Indians are so poor, I'd say:

1.) Poor nutrition and iodine deficiency
2.) Poor schooling and rampant illiteracy
3.) Low sophistication economy
4.) Perhaps smaller standard deviation. So fewer geniuses. So perhaps Guyanese Indians have the IQ to function in a Western society, but not enough geniuses to run their own sophisticated economy.

In the UK, plenty of Indians are from the villages in the Punjab. So I think 110 IQ for upper class Indians and 95 IQ for the rest of the country sounds reasonable. If Indians were in the 80-90 range, they'd be performing absymally.

Anonymous said...

Do you have a link for 10-12%?

"So I think 110 IQ for upper class Indians and 95 IQ for the rest of the country sounds reasonable."

110 is very high. There should be far more achievement (Jewish like). There should be an Indian produced Singapore/HK.

rec1man, please get off this thread. Your copy and pasting will make this page unreadable.

Anonymous said...

"In South Africa, a large recent IQ test showed school children of Indian descent score 6 points lower than whites. Previous IQ tests showed a larger gap. Why the change? Well, nutritional standards have been converging. So Indians are gaining relative to whites in IQ in SA. Previous generations of Indians were likely low-IQ laborers with poor nutrition and schooling, but modern Indians are growing under better circumstances."

Nice try. I told you the top 20% of whites have left the country. If that happened in the US it means that 56 mio. whites were to leave the US. I think some people would notice. They are doctors or work for companies in Germany, Australia, NZ, Britain, Canada and even America. Their kids grow up English or German. I recently met a girl from Afrikaans parents who moved overseas. She is studying music at a top European music school. In the olden days she would have been a student at a South Africa university. Now that high IQ material lives overseas. But I think you know this, you just want to force your high-IQ-Indian point.

That Indians are leaving too may be the case, but not in those numbers. The reason is that Indians are generally beneficiaries of AA in South Africa. Why should they leave if they can get jobs based on the colour of their skin? They are well represented in the governing black racist government. Basically anybody in South Africa benefits from AA unless he is white. Yes “he”, because even white women benefit. Anybody with even half a brain and a dark skin has all the doors open for himself in South Africa.

The tests in South Africa compare middle to lower level whites with the top Africans and Indians. I have contacts with uni professors in South Africa so I know.

Black Sea said...

sj071 has Friedman nailed. Perfectly. But the guy does provide some (pretty much the only) comic relief at the NY Times.

Anonymous said...

Headache:"Please remember that the top 1.2 mio. out of originally 5.5 mio. whites have left that country (South Africa)due to excessive AA, crime and lack of political perspective. That's the top 20%."
You really fancy yourself, don't you, H? The White South Africans who left were the ones who couldn't or wouldn't function without special privileges wrt the rest of the population. It's often forgotten that Apartheid was among other things a welfare scheme for Whites, with job reservation to ensure that every White, however dumb,had a good job. It was quite common for a White "worker" to sit around all day while his Black "assistant" did the job. Apartheid was explicitly presented as a solution to the "poor White" problem; apparently these people were mostly Afrikaner and had a lifestyle similar to that described in "Tobacco Road".
So admitting every White South African who decided they'd rather live in the UK after the fall of Apartheid was really smart; a million workshy racists, just what we need.
I don't think I know enough South African Indians to say anything, but (Gujerati) East African Asians in London definitely give better service in their jobs on the whole than White South Africans who've arrived since 1992.
On another topic, in Eastern Sri Lanka there's a well-educated Tamil population that's been there for ever ("Jaffna Tamils") and also the less educated descendents of Tamil indentured labourers brought by the British to work on tea plantations ("plantation Tamils").

Anonymous said...

Most important question:

At what GDP per capita will India end its rapid ascent?

Anonymous said...

You know here in the MIdwest, a lot of the liberals are - surprisingly - in favor of Mexican illegal immigration.

This despite the fact that they absolutely hate the Western and Southern U.S. and the clout that they've gained as their population has grown. You'd think they'd be against this "cheating" that's allowed this part of the country to disproportionately grow in size.

But the way these Midwestern liberals look at it, they say, "well we could invite a million Mexicans to live in Detroit proper, then it's population would be 2 million again as its peak in 1950! That'll show Dallas, TX whose boss!"

These guys don't realize that even Mexican illegals don't want to live in Detroit, despite the affordable real estate. And I say that as someone whose taking a job in downtown Detroit next year. Kind of like the GOP that thinks its making progress by attracting some Mexicans even though more go over to the Dems, overall the Midwest loses when large numbers of Mexicans come over because most of them settle elsewhere in the country.

Likewise, Indian, Chinese, etc. immigrants are even less likely to want to live in the Northern black ghettos or in the exurban Mexican populated areas in the Sand States that Sailer talks about, suffering from foreclosures.

Anonymous said...

Can someone please elaborate on why Islam depresses IQ.

Anonymous said...

Look at the GCSE educational results from the UK. Indian kids easily outpeform whites

The Lynn book that I quoted said that the median of 12 studies of IQs of South Asians in Britain is 92. The highest of those 12 studies showed 97. Yes, I'm aware that anecdotally Hindus do better than South Asian Muslims, and "South Asian" in the above tests lumps Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indian Muslims together with Hindus. I haven't seen the GCSE results you talked about.

95 IQ Indians could be economically outperforming 100 IQ Whites because modern Western culture is more decadent, less conducive to achievement than traditional cultures, including the old traditional cultures of the West. As someone has noticed on this forum before, Mormons outperform Whites with similar IQs as well.

East Germany substanially underperforms West Germany on IQ tests.

Can you provide a reference for that? By how much? It's widely known that in the 1945-1961 period (before the wall was built) East Germany lost something like 3 or 4 million people (out of 20 million). I've read that a disproportionate number of those were professionals who moved to West Germany to take advantage of the more variable pay scales that a more market-oriented economy leads to. There was a brain drain from East to West. However, the famines in the early years after the war affected all of Germany. There were famines in Russia during the post-war years as well, and yet they sent the first Sputnik into space by 1957, etc.

Until very recently famines were regular occurances in all human societies. For 99% of the time that our species has existed there were no elites and everyone experienced hunger regularly. Our bodies evolved to recover from famines fully and quickly. I have a hard time believing that periods of insufficient nutrition during childhood would permanently depress IQ. Iodine deficiency is a separate matter.

In Japan, low caste Burakamin have converged with the higher hereditary classes.

Do you have a reference for that?

If Guyanese Indians were 85-90 IQ, I'd expect they'd perform on par with African-Americans.

They would still outperform African Americans because they (Caribbean Indians) have a much better work ethic. The IQ thresholds for operating a newsstand, driving a taxi, running a family store are not very high. However, I've heard that in the taxi business here in NYC, for example, a car is used 24 hours a day (two 12-hour shifts). That's an impressive work ethic. That kind of a work ethic threshold would exclude a lot of people, not just African Americans, from that business. And, of course, to run a family store, one first needs to have a functional family.

Anonymous said...

"It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat."

I beg to differ. I think most of our prosperity is cruise control from the first 100-150 years of high trust, ethnic solidarity and a true republic.

Friedman will never explore the relationship between why those people want to come here and how their arrival diminishes those very reasons.

Friedman is the worst of the worst.

Anonymous said...

Anon wrote
--
rec1man, plenty of non-Brahmins are in the Spelling Bee. I also know a lot of Dr. Patels, Dr. Singhs, Dr. Shahs, etc. Believe me, even non-Brahmin IA kids do well.
---

The question is not whether they do well compared to Euros, which they do

(The UK diaspora is a middling diaspora consists of Patels and Jat Sikhs, both on the upper peasant level, and they do better academically than the white natives)


The question is how they perform relative to brahmins esp the southern variant

I have done detailed analysis of the spelling bees and there is a clear brahmin dominance among the finalists

In the recent 2008 finalists
out of the top 12, there were 3 brahmins and 1 merchant caste

I looked at the Indian nuclear team for the 1974 blasts
and 8 out of 12 where southern brahmins
At the extreme high end of the Indian IQ tail, when it comes to handling very complex equations, southern brahmins predominate




15% of the US Indian immigrant pop is brahmin
You will find them over-represented in awards as opposed to Patels, caribbean hindus and Jat Sikhs

If you take out the brahmins( 15%), Khatris (4%) and Jains (1%), the US diaspora will from an IQ stand point look more middling like the UK diaspora, instead of at the Ashkenazi level

The UK diaspora blend is definitely not at the Ashkenazi level, wheras the US diaspora blend
is at the Ashkenazi level

--

Anon wrote

Pakistani and Bangladeshi people practice cousin marriage. So their educational performance is likely retareded by a few points.
--

Cousin marriage retards IQ by 8 points and Pakistan and Bangladesh dont have merchant or brahmin castes

Anonymous said...

Understanding the H1 fraud
---

From 1970 to 1990, thousands of Indians ( 50% brahmin )who scored above 140 IQ on the GRE entered
on the F1- Scholarship
(where tuition was waived and they got a monthly stipend )
and got MS and PhD and when they entered the job market had superior skills

So the public and employers had a high regard for Indian skills
not realising that this was a selected bunch of specific castes
mainly brahmin, Khatri etc

This led to the H1 program being expanded

In the H1 instead of getting a brahmin with MS or PhD
you get often general purpose candidates , often peasant castes,
often affirmative action types with BS

rec1man said...

Intel 2009 science talent search finalists just announced,

out of 40, 8 of Indian origin of which 5 brahmins

Ali said...

Pakistanis at the bottom of the socio-economic heap tend to be descendants of the unskilled, cousin-marrying rural poor from Kashmir. They're mostly located in the north and Midlands. An unfortunate number is assimilating to the worst aspects of ghetto culture.

Pakistanis in Greater London and the south-east tend to have originated from all over the country and been middle-class before they emigrated. They're not up there with the Indians and Chinese but outperform the national average in GCSE attainment (i.e. high school graduation) and college attendance. They only make up about a quarter to a third of Pakistanis in the UK.

Anonymous said...

Can someone please elaborate on why Islam depresses IQ.

I've read that in South Asia most converts to Islam and Christianity came from the lower castes. This is because Islam and Christianity, like Communism and modern PC, lie to people by telling them that they're all equal to each other. Hinduism is a bit more honest on this point - it stands fully behind the caste system. For understandable reasons, the Muslim, and later Christian, message about egalitarianism fell on more welcoming ears among the lower castes than among the upper ones. At least that's what I've read about this.

Obviously, there are exceptions to every such trend. I've never read any of Salman Rushdie's books, but I've seen him interviewed on TV and he's frighteningly smart. The Pakistani elite may be very corrupt, but judging by TV interviews and such, it's not physically stupid.

Anonymous said...

Check out the endemic corruption in New Jersey today. This country has barely succeeded in assimilating the Sicilian population that arrived a century ago. To some extent the Italian immigration has been an abject failure with extreme financial and social repercussions that persist today in places like New Jersey.

We will never assimilate large numbers of Indians and Pakistanis. Ever.

rec1man said...

Anon wrote
Most important question:

At what GDP per capita will India end its rapid ascent?
---

Islamic demographics will send India into civil war by 2050

1. Internal muslims will reach 18%
the threshold at which Cyprus went into civil war

2. Global warming will inundate Bangladesh sending 100 million muslims across the border

3. Pakistan will have taliban rule,
and poverty and desertification ( the Indus is drying up )
sending in another 100 million across the border

I fully expect Northern India to be in the flames of civil war due to increased islamic presence by 2050

rec1man said...

Anon wrote
--
Likewise, Indian, Chinese, etc. immigrants are even less likely to want to live in the Northern black ghettos or in the exurban Mexican populated areas in the Sand States that Sailer talks about, suffering from foreclosures.
---

Actually Indians can live with black crime if thats the way to make a buck

Millions of Indians live in caribbean and Africa and control the economies of the black countries

Sure they would prefer not having to live in a black area with its crime, but thats a tolerable risk

rec1man said...

CMac wrote

We will never assimilate large numbers of Indians and Pakistanis. Ever.

--

In UK, Indians ( hindus and sikhs )
have assimilated, whereas
Pakistanis ( muslims ) have created
Eurabia

Anonymous said...

To some extent the Italian immigration has been an abject failure with extreme financial and social repercussions that persist today in places like New Jersey.

Um, and Chicago. Good thing none of our important leaders are from there.

Pakistan will have taliban rule,
and poverty and desertification ( the Indus is drying up )
sending in another 100 million across the border


Nah, all those Pakistanis and Bangladehis will be coming here in 2050. President-for-Life Malia Obama, entering her second "term" after her father's death at age 84 in a drunken car wreck, will let them in. India won't be expected to take in a soul.

rec1man said...

Mark, you dont understand the greed and PC of non-BJP Indian politicians

The Congress and Commies have already imported 10 million bangladeshi muslims for a vote bank and these illegal aliens
have created mini-Eurabia in the Indian districts bordering Bangladesh

There is defacto a low level civil war between the natives and illegal alien jihadis in these border districts
The alien muslims have already started a jihadi secessionist campaign

The mainstream Indian media being commie and secular ( multi-culturalist and PC ) and anti-hindu
hides these facts

rec1man said...

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003749.html

GSCE Pass
Chinese 74%
Indians ( Patels and Sikhs ) 66%
White 52%
Pakistani 45%
Bangladeshi 48%%
Black African 43%

As you can see IQ is very heavily
religion dependent
Not much genetic difference between Patels and Pakistanis

Anonymous said...

John of London said:
"The White South Africans who left were the ones who couldn't or wouldn't function without special privileges wrt the rest of the population."

Wrong. The ones who left could because they had the qualifications to get proper jobs overseas instead of working for lousy bosses installed via AA. Your drivel is what the ANC spreads around. Except they are the ones who need the AA crutch. White South Africans used to compete against other Commonwealth countries and did well. Do you honestly think an employer in Europe, Australia or the US will give a white South African a job because he is white? Common, you cannot honestly think that. They get those jobs because they are competent and willing to work hard. And those qualifications get them either nothing or little in a racially based caste system which turns competence on its head, which is what the New South Africa has become. Commonwealth whites just need to see the Afrikaners humiliated, that’s all. But don’t worry, it will come sooner to you in Britain than you can imagine.

Anonymous said...

No American leader talks about the implication of allowing millions of immigrants from Mexico, a country with a long record of hostility to the United States. Immigration from Mexico belongs to a category all its own. Mexico's elites dream of converting the southwest into a part of Greater Mexico. The recent soccer game between the US and Mexico shows that NAFTA has failed to bring the two countries closer. No amount of trade treaties and immigration can bridge the irreconcilable gulf between United States and Mexico.

Anonymous said...

No American leader talks about the implication of allowing millions of immigrants from Mexico, a country with a long record of hostility to the United States. Immigration from Mexico belongs to a category all its own. Mexico's elites dream of converting the southwest into a part of Greater Mexico. The recent soccer game between the US and Mexico shows that NAFTA has failed to bring the two countries closer. No amount of trade treaties and immigration can bridge the irreconcilable gulf between United States and Mexico.

Anonymous said...

It's often forgotten that Apartheid was among other things a welfare scheme for Whites

God forbid. Now they have that problem sorted out; there'll be nothing for anyone, eventually.

Anonymous said...

Pakistanis Britons were imported labor.

Indian Britons are different. Many of them are imported doctors.

Pakistan GDP: $909
Indian GDP: $942
(IMF, 2007)

rec1man said...

Anon
Indian UK immigrants were also imported factory labor
Esp the Sikhs
later 40000 Ugandan Patels were let in when Idi Amin kicked them out, since he was not able to get a Patel woman he lusted after

rec1man said...

http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm

1990 South Africa IQ tests
White = 94
Indian = 88
Colored = 80
Black = 63

This was in Apartheid era when the Indians had to face discriminatory laws and bad schools and this diaspora was 80% coolie

rec1man said...

Anonymous, the IQ depression due to islam, goes much beyond low caste converts

Take a look at Bali vs Indonesia

Also look at Pakisan
Once a buddhist area

The Swat valley now taken over by the pushtun islamic taliban was once the site of a huge buddhist civilization
Mahayana Buddhism was founded here
Taxila now under the islamic taliban once had a university at 400BC, where Sanskrit language was codified

This area has definitely seen
a drop in IQ since the advent of islam

rec1man said...

Hindustan Times

India-born US nuclear physicist Shiva Subramanya ( Southern Brahmin ) is dead. He was 76,

Subramanya, who was a space scientist and a management consultant, was twice nominated to the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

Subramanya was the chairman of the military-industry committee, which draws-up the policy, procedures and operations concepts for the US military including USAF Space Command until his retirement in 1998.

He was also the vice-president of Viswa Hindu Parishad (America).

( religious wing of BJP )

Ali said...

rec1man:

You'd need to compare Sikhs to other Punjabis. Punjab was far more developed than Mirpur.

Religion is not as important as region.

Anonymous said...

How do you go about identifying Brahmans? Names? Looks?

rec1man said...

Anon - on identifying brahmins

By looks 40% of the time
By Accent and dialect ( heavily sanskritic ) 60% of the time
By First Name 75% of the time
very long sanskritic names
By Last Name 85% of the time
The Last Name is often the name of the subcaste and often has regional variances

Pandit, Desai, Deshpande, Bhatt, Bhattacharya, Koirala, Dahal, Pant, Shukla, Tiwari, Mishra, Dubey, Chatterji, Bannerji, Mukerji, Pandey, Panda, Iyer, Iyengar, Tripathi, Acharya ( teacher ), Swamy, Joshi ( astrologer ), Purohit (priest),
Dixit, Tandon, Vajpayee, Dwivedi, Trivedi, Chaturvedi, Sharma, Agnihotri ( fire priest ),Upadhyaya, and so on and so forth

Brahmins never have Singh, gupta, saxena, and thousands of other last names ( often subcaste related )


Also to prevent 'passing' by non-brahmins, every brahmin male child is taught the way to introduce himself to unknown brahmins by a special paragraph, which is in sanskrit and several sentences long
So when a new brahmin shows up, in a village, the resident brahmins ask him to recite this paragraph in sanskrit to verify his caste

rec1man said...

Ali, the US has the same immigration filter for all countries and the second generation regresses to the mean,

And followers of islam are absent in the finalists of the US math olympiad team, US spelling bee, US geographic bee, Intel science talent search,

http://www.arthurhu.com/INDEX/overrep.htm

has the SAT scores sorted by Race-religion and Asian Islam comes in dead last, much below Black Unitarian

Anonymous said...

Hmm I doubt anyone is reading this thread anymore, but what about this kid?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/02/11/danneman.kid.math.whiz.WXIX?iref=videosearch

rec1man said...

His name is Pranav
That is a sanskritic name

Sounds like a brahmin name

I looked at his family in the video
They look like south Indian brahmins

His last name is Veera
I suspect it is a shortened Ameicanised form
of Veeraraghavachari
a name common among Iyengars, one of the Tamil brahmin sub-castes


A very large fraction of Indian whiz kids are southern brahmins such

as
Vinodhini Vasudevan
The first and only 12 year old to score a perfect SAT

and
Sriram Hathwar, the youngest spelling bee finalist at age 7

IMHO, there is a 85% probability
that this kid is a southern brahmin

rec1man said...

According to tradition, Padmasambhava was incarnated as an eight-year-old child appearing in a lotus blossom floating in Lake Dhanakosha, in the kingdom of Uddiyana, traditionally identified with the Swat Valley of Ancient India in present-day Pakistan

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

Padmasambhava went onto start Tibetan Buddhism

That was then,
Now is the taliban and islam

Whereas buddhism encouraged free thinking, islam put blinders on
and add to it, the enforced enstupidation of women as compared to buddhism, the enforced multiple children, and cousin marriage and constant brainwashing by mullahs

A formerly high iq place went on to become a hell hole

In 1000AD, this place was conquered by Mohammed Ghazni
Al-Beruni, the muslim historian who accompanied the invaders wrote
'Indian sciences have fled far away from this region to escape the armies of Allah'

Today if you look at Swat, you can ask, 'what science?'

rec1man said...

Anon, that kid is Pranav Veera

Pranav is a sanskritic name
and Veera is a shortened americanised form of
'Veeraraghavachari'

which is a common name among the Iyengar sect of South Indian Tamil speaking brahmins

So that kid is most likely a southern brahmin

rec1man said...

US 2007 census survey, ACS

% with college education
$ median family annual income

White 29%, $54K
Black 17%, $34K
Hispanic 13%, $42K
Chinese 52%, $78K
Korean 53%, $53K
Japanese 47%, $66K
Asian Indian, 68%, $84K
Bangladeshi, 42%, $42K
Pakistani, 57%, $58K

rec1man said...

Forbes

The only direct evidence we have comes from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, in which a basic cognitive test called "digit span" was administered to a sample of newly arrived immigrant children. It is an excellent test for comparing people with disparate language and educational backgrounds, since the test taker need only repeat lengthening sequences of digits read by the examiner. Repeating the digits forward is simply a test of short-term memory, but repeating them backward is much more mentally taxing, hence a rough measure of intelligence.

When statistical adjustments are used to convert the backward digit span results to full-scale IQ scores, Indian Americans place at about 112 on a bell-shaped IQ distribution, with white Americans at 100. 112 is the 79th percentile of the white distribution. For more context, consider that Ashkenazi Jews are a famously intelligent ethnic group, and their mean IQ is somewhere around 110.

Anonymous said...

To the guy comparing the level of malnutrition of pre- World War 2 Germany to modern day India, please get your head out of the book of bigotry and use some common sense. Germany was already an established power prior to Hitlers reign of power in Germany. Germany had the resources and the large educated populace to get their country back to the top, how else can one rise (too) quickly unless the fascist economy had something to do with it. Malnutrition, including Iodine defficiency or IDD,can place one at risk for mental retardation.

Everywhere Indians go, whether it be the lower caste Hindus or the highly superior upper castes, they perform at superior levels than anyone else. The recent IQ scores of Indians is 97 in the UK, those studies of recent immigrants to the UK had lower IQ's but that too will rise to the upper 90's..it is called the Flynn Effect. All we know is that with an IQ of 97, and their ability to overperform, the Hindu populace in the UK must have many high IQ people in the far right of the Bell Curve.