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0 pointsrayiner3mo ago0 comments

High skill immigration still brings cultural change. My parents came here from Bangladesh, and while they superficially assimilated, they’re still culturally Bangladeshi. They, like virtually all the Bangladeshis and Indians I know, still overvalue formal education, undervalue risk taking, elevate familial over civic obligation, don’t value economic modesty, believe elites should rule over “the common people,” etc. And this was despite spending 35 years almost completely isolated from other Bangladeshis. Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.

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disgruntledphd23mo ago

> Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

This seems somewhat incorrect to me, as people change jobs and with it, culture, basically all of the time.

rayinerOP3mo ago

The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).

You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).

disgruntledphd23mo ago

> You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.

However, what's going on in this chart?

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru...

I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).

However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results).

> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?

In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation.

Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.

> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?

> You can see this just by going around the country

I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

rayinerOP3mo ago

> However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust

Ireland is culturally distinct from the U.K. For example, the U.K. is historically predominantly Protestant, while Ireland is historically strongly Catholic. That manifests in many ways. For example, the Anglosphere tends to have the latest gestational limits on abortion among European and European-derived countries. By contrast, abortion was illegal altogether in Ireland until recently (2018).

There is also the fact that the Irish were brutally colonized by England and Irish society developed a strong cohesiveness from that external pressure. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million people out of a population of about 60 million. The Irish Famine, by contrast, killed 1 million people out of a population of only about 8 million. Indeed, the Irish population peaked in 1841, a few years before the start of the Great Famine and never returned to that peak.

> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

Europeans are culturally quite different from each other! For example, the Swedish practice of not feeding guests (https://www.the-independent.com/voices/swedengate-sweden-din...) would be mortifying to Americans in the southern U.S.

eudamoniac3mo ago

Not OP, but UK has experienced massive amounts of foreign culture immigration recently that Ireland has not.

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disgruntledphd23mo ago

> Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

This seems somewhat incorrect to me, as people change jobs and with it, culture, basically all of the time.

rayinerOP3mo ago

The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

disgruntledphd23mo ago

OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.

However, what's going on in this chart?

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru...

I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).

> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?

Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.

> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?

> You can see this just by going around the country

I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

rayinerOP3mo ago

> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

eudamoniac3mo ago

Not OP, but UK has experienced massive amounts of foreign culture immigration recently that Ireland has not.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse