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The whole premise of this is stupid. The Caste system is silly. Officially it's illegal or something along those lines per Indian law but culturally it's still

The whole premise of this is stupid. The Caste system is silly. Officially it's illegal or something along those lines per Indian law but culturally it's still very much relevant. But it's old, archaic, outdated, not useful...

phone8675309 5y ago
> not useful... Its usefulness, like most things, depends where you fall along it. I'm sure those at the top find it very useful to get the things they want.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  Ain't that the truth with things that artificially reward folks with power and status by just being born in the right place or to the right people.
roywiggins 5y ago
America's race system is stupid too, but it persists anyway. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898574852/its-more-than-racism-isabel-wilkerson-explains-america-s-caste-system https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898574852/its-more-than-racis...
- gigatexal 5y ago
  Not an apples to apples comparison because in your example a black person say could not marry a non-black person (just change low caste for black and higher caste for white or the other way around it still works) in the US when that's not been the case for years and years. Sure, that's true for some families and some people do think like that but on the whole culturally mixed race unions are commonplace -- now try the same with mixed caste folks in India...
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    I didn't say it was the same, just that it's equally stupid and persists anyway. It's easy for Americans to look at caste systems in other cultures and see them as transparently silly, even though our own racial hierarchies can seem self-evidently real and serious to us.
    - lsiebert 5y ago
      One of the ways racial hierarchies persist in the US in the culture are taught they are normal, natural, deserved when they are instead being perpetuated by culture and institutions and those who benefit from them. The effects of discrimination serve to justify and/or perpetuate the discrimination. My take away from this is that there is nothing natural about one caste having an advantage in business, that success in any field has much more to do with who has financial and social capital than with what caste someone is.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    There have been no inter caste marriage restrictions in India either since 1954. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Marriage_Act,_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Marriage_Act,_1954 Obviously, just like mixed race marriage took a while to be culturally accepted in the US, it is a similar situation in India. More importantly, it almost always comes down to socioeconomic class rather than caste or race. The upper socioeconomic “castes” or “tribes” or whatever you want to call them have been inter marrying forever, and no one cares. I would easily bet if a Brahmin kid brought home a significant other worth a billion dollars, their parents would not give a crap if the SO was a lower caste person. By definition, just being worth a billion dollars would somehow elevate them out of their caste. Same with white and black and Asian and Latin American or any other tribal designation.
roenxi 5y ago
Yes and no, there is a bit of nuance to deal with. Any society will have subcultures with different specialities and talents. Recognising that isn't silly, codifying it as a matter of practice is. Work should be done by the best worker, not the person statistically likely to be the best worker or who comes from the family that works the hardest. But it makes a lot of sense that a family with centuries of experience in commerce is more likely produce leading businesses. It would be foolish not to factor that in to decision making as a signal.
- throwuxiytayq 5y ago
  There is no nuance. The society where anyone can become the best worker will produce better workers, and more of them. Cast systems aren't for quality signaling, they're for limiting what any given person can achieve. It would be foolish to factor them in to anything, unless your aim is precisely to surpress others.
thriftwy 5y ago
The indian CEOs who routinely give lip service to diversity and shun privilege, probably do not have any caste diversity in mind and are happy to have privilege, so I have heard: brahmins make effort to know the interviewee's caste status to weed out folk from unprivileged ones.
- gautamdivgi 5y ago
  Do you have any data to substantiate your claims. Your statement is just plain bigotry and unsubstantiated accusation.
  - lmz 5y ago
    Last sentence of the article mentions a caste discrimination lawsuit.
    - gautamdivgi 5y ago
      So basically less than 5 Indians in a lawsuit is a representative sample of the more than 4 million in the US. That's basically the reason I called out the bigotry.
  - SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
    The article presents some numbers stating that the upper castes are overrepresented in the highest echelons of the business world, there must be some mechanism in place that causes this. At some stage, filtering is happening.
    - rajup 5y ago
      You are just assuming some kind of malicious filtering happening purportedly in interviews and the like. A perfectly plausible and likely the only explanation is that historically, yes the caste system led to the lower castes being denied economic opportunities that translates to them being less likely to have the resources to attain higher education abroad. The above explanation does not require the mental gymnastics of some sort of coordinated effort by upper caste interviewers to filter out lower caste people.
gautamdivgi 5y ago
Its silly and I'm unsure how many people pay attention to it in urban areas. I don't think a whole lot. Fwiw - India's prime minister belongs to what is traditionally lower caste, the president is lower caste and the vice-president is a muslim. The home minister is Jain (not Hindu). The caste system will die as India urbanizes and good riddance to it. Apparently the economist thinks it's relevant because they have nothing else to talk about.
- ashayh 5y ago
  Yup and India had a female PM therefore there is no misogyny in India, and the US had a black President therefore there is no racism in the US.
- aldebran 5y ago
  Not true. Respectfully I say the following - You may come from an upper caste and so a place of privilege where you weren’t subjected to unfair actions. I’m not upper caste and I’ve experienced it all. My skin, eye color and mannerisms defy the backward caste stereotype. People assume I’m a Brahmin. When they discover I’m not things change. How did they discover this? My colleges thought it was a great idea to post the caste next to exam seat numbers. Yeah… this was in a metro, not a small town. Here in the US, some narrow minded people straight up ask about caste. Some are “smarter” and ask about how you celebrate specific festivals as a way of inferring your caste. It’s deeply systemic in India much like the systemic racism in the US. Only a privileged person can say it’s gone since no one treats anyone as untouchable anymore. There are many more subtle ways. People don’t get jobs because of their last names. Promotions will be denied or you might be the first to be laid off. Nepotism is rife. My wife is upper caste and her life experience in India is diametrically opposite of mine. She acknowledges my experience but still doesn’t fully comprehend it. Heck my in law still cling to stereotypes and how I’m one of the good ones (cue similarity to racism in America) If you really look carefully you’ll start to notice it everywhere.
  - gautamdivgi 5y ago
    This may not mean much, but I am truly sorry for all the misery you have had to endure. My hope was that caste should die when we immigrate. But that was too optimistic. The light on the horizon is that it will die with the second generation Indian-Americans.
wombatmobile 5y ago
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  Indeed, literal thousands of years of ingrained social privilege and brutal repression of under-castes would tend to have produced nice social benefits for Brahmins. It's stupid, silly, old and outdated.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Uh, it is. The article lists 7 CEOs. That's hardly statistically significant out of all CEOs in the West, compared with both the number of all ethnicities that are CEOs of Western companies, and potentially also not significant compared with the number of Indian CEOs of Western companies (it gives no data there). And when you consider it's the caste with the most opportunity, well...you're basically saying that gains by those who had greater opportunity somehow justifies the system that gives them those opportunities. That logic would also support any oligarchy, aristocracy, etc, so long as those in power successfully remained in power.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    Seems like the skills are optimized for corporate ladder climbing as well.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      I mean, I'll grant even that it could be something hereditary. I mean, CEOs have a notably higher incidence of psychopathy than average. Not sure that's something we should be building into our societies.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  Yes that is a very level playing field they competed on. Imagine how much even better top talent we'd have for late leadership at aging tech companies if the talent pool was broader.
- deleted 5y ago
freetinker 5y ago
While what you say is true, the caste system has generation-spanning impact. I’m not drawing parallels here, but as an example – not too dissimilar from the generation-spanning impacts of slavery. This is a sloppy article, and I do find the article’s assertion tenuous. There is an ecosystem of educated Indian elite[1]. Perhaps Brahmin’s are overrepresented as a group in that, but I’m not so sure. There are certainly some underrepresented groups, but the caste system isn’t binary. It’d be interesting to see some unbiased data. [1] Relatively speaking. While more privileged than a large majority of Indians, a lot of them come from modest middle-class backgrounds (by Indian standards, back in 70s, 80s pre-liberalization India), leveraged their privilege of education through sheer grit and work.
- praptak 5y ago
  See also how Google got criticised for publishing historical maps of Japan. The reason? Locations where burakumin (untouchables) had lived were visible on those maps. This caused fears that these "bad addresses" would contribute to discrimination against inhabitants. These things really do span generations.
magpi3 5y ago
Tribalism is old, archaic, outdated, and not useful (from a global perspective at least)... and yet it's everywhere. We're human, and for better or worse this seems to be a condition that we can't escape. EDIT: I really shouldn't say tribalism is not useful. We wouldn't be so tribal if it didn't have its benefits (evolutionarily speaking). But now that we live in a global world it is increasingly becoming a net negative.
- rajin444 5y ago
  I think it remains to be seen if the global world or the tribalism is a net negative.
  - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
    Let's see, the global world has brought us international commerce, free exchange of information (95% of a CS curriculum is based on things created in the West), the possibility(limited but existent) of studying and working in a different society, international agreements, standards and organizations. Tribalism has brought us, wars, petty disputes, populist politicians and bigotry. I know which one I would choose in a heartbeat.
    - jaldhar 5y ago
      Why is it either/or? Immigrants often get a leg up in "working in a different society" by taking advantage of kinship based support networks. The have nots of global society try to attain social justice through tribalist notions of identity. And so on. I would say most people all over the world maintain a weak form of particularist identity and a weak notion of global identity and simply don't think about the contradictions.
      - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
        That all is true, but I was not the one who created the dilemma, the original parent did. Tribalism like nationalism is good just in very small doses.

phone8675309 5y ago

> not useful... Its usefulness, like most things, depends where you fall along it. I'm sure those at the top find it very useful to get the things they want.

gigatexal 5y ago
Ain't that the truth with things that artificially reward folks with power and status by just being born in the right place or to the right people.

roywiggins 5y ago

America's race system is stupid too, but it persists anyway. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898574852/its-more-than-racism-isabel-wilkerson-explains-america-s-caste-system https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898574852/its-more-than-racis...

gigatexal 5y ago
Not an apples to apples comparison because in your example a black person say could not marry a non-black person (just change low caste for black and higher caste for white or the other way around it still works) in the US when that's not been the case for years and years. Sure, that's true for some families and some people do think like that but on the whole culturally mixed race unions are commonplace -- now try the same with mixed caste folks in India...
- roywiggins 5y ago
  I didn't say it was the same, just that it's equally stupid and persists anyway. It's easy for Americans to look at caste systems in other cultures and see them as transparently silly, even though our own racial hierarchies can seem self-evidently real and serious to us.
  - lsiebert 5y ago
    One of the ways racial hierarchies persist in the US in the culture are taught they are normal, natural, deserved when they are instead being perpetuated by culture and institutions and those who benefit from them. The effects of discrimination serve to justify and/or perpetuate the discrimination. My take away from this is that there is nothing natural about one caste having an advantage in business, that success in any field has much more to do with who has financial and social capital than with what caste someone is.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  There have been no inter caste marriage restrictions in India either since 1954. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Marriage_Act,_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Marriage_Act,_1954 Obviously, just like mixed race marriage took a while to be culturally accepted in the US, it is a similar situation in India. More importantly, it almost always comes down to socioeconomic class rather than caste or race. The upper socioeconomic “castes” or “tribes” or whatever you want to call them have been inter marrying forever, and no one cares. I would easily bet if a Brahmin kid brought home a significant other worth a billion dollars, their parents would not give a crap if the SO was a lower caste person. By definition, just being worth a billion dollars would somehow elevate them out of their caste. Same with white and black and Asian and Latin American or any other tribal designation.

roenxi 5y ago

Yes and no, there is a bit of nuance to deal with. Any society will have subcultures with different specialities and talents. Recognising that isn't silly, codifying it as a matter of practice is. Work should be done by the best worker, not the person statistically likely to be the best worker or who comes from the family that works the hardest. But it makes a lot of sense that a family with centuries of experience in commerce is more likely produce leading businesses. It would be foolish not to factor that in to decision making as a signal.

throwuxiytayq 5y ago
There is no nuance. The society where anyone can become the best worker will produce better workers, and more of them. Cast systems aren't for quality signaling, they're for limiting what any given person can achieve. It would be foolish to factor them in to anything, unless your aim is precisely to surpress others.

thriftwy 5y ago

The indian CEOs who routinely give lip service to diversity and shun privilege, probably do not have any caste diversity in mind and are happy to have privilege, so I have heard: brahmins make effort to know the interviewee's caste status to weed out folk from unprivileged ones.

gautamdivgi 5y ago
Do you have any data to substantiate your claims. Your statement is just plain bigotry and unsubstantiated accusation.
- lmz 5y ago
  Last sentence of the article mentions a caste discrimination lawsuit.
  - gautamdivgi 5y ago
    So basically less than 5 Indians in a lawsuit is a representative sample of the more than 4 million in the US. That's basically the reason I called out the bigotry.
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
  The article presents some numbers stating that the upper castes are overrepresented in the highest echelons of the business world, there must be some mechanism in place that causes this. At some stage, filtering is happening.
  - rajup 5y ago
    You are just assuming some kind of malicious filtering happening purportedly in interviews and the like. A perfectly plausible and likely the only explanation is that historically, yes the caste system led to the lower castes being denied economic opportunities that translates to them being less likely to have the resources to attain higher education abroad. The above explanation does not require the mental gymnastics of some sort of coordinated effort by upper caste interviewers to filter out lower caste people.

gautamdivgi 5y ago

Its silly and I'm unsure how many people pay attention to it in urban areas. I don't think a whole lot. Fwiw - India's prime minister belongs to what is traditionally lower caste, the president is lower caste and the vice-president is a muslim. The home minister is Jain (not Hindu). The caste system will die as India urbanizes and good riddance to it. Apparently the economist thinks it's relevant because they have nothing else to talk about.

ashayh 5y ago
Yup and India had a female PM therefore there is no misogyny in India, and the US had a black President therefore there is no racism in the US.
aldebran 5y ago
Not true. Respectfully I say the following - You may come from an upper caste and so a place of privilege where you weren’t subjected to unfair actions. I’m not upper caste and I’ve experienced it all. My skin, eye color and mannerisms defy the backward caste stereotype. People assume I’m a Brahmin. When they discover I’m not things change. How did they discover this? My colleges thought it was a great idea to post the caste next to exam seat numbers. Yeah… this was in a metro, not a small town. Here in the US, some narrow minded people straight up ask about caste. Some are “smarter” and ask about how you celebrate specific festivals as a way of inferring your caste. It’s deeply systemic in India much like the systemic racism in the US. Only a privileged person can say it’s gone since no one treats anyone as untouchable anymore. There are many more subtle ways. People don’t get jobs because of their last names. Promotions will be denied or you might be the first to be laid off. Nepotism is rife. My wife is upper caste and her life experience in India is diametrically opposite of mine. She acknowledges my experience but still doesn’t fully comprehend it. Heck my in law still cling to stereotypes and how I’m one of the good ones (cue similarity to racism in America) If you really look carefully you’ll start to notice it everywhere.
- gautamdivgi 5y ago
  This may not mean much, but I am truly sorry for all the misery you have had to endure. My hope was that caste should die when we immigrate. But that was too optimistic. The light on the horizon is that it will die with the second generation Indian-Americans.

wombatmobile 5y ago

ferdowsi 5y ago
Indeed, literal thousands of years of ingrained social privilege and brutal repression of under-castes would tend to have produced nice social benefits for Brahmins. It's stupid, silly, old and outdated.
lostcolony 5y ago
Uh, it is. The article lists 7 CEOs. That's hardly statistically significant out of all CEOs in the West, compared with both the number of all ethnicities that are CEOs of Western companies, and potentially also not significant compared with the number of Indian CEOs of Western companies (it gives no data there). And when you consider it's the caste with the most opportunity, well...you're basically saying that gains by those who had greater opportunity somehow justifies the system that gives them those opportunities. That logic would also support any oligarchy, aristocracy, etc, so long as those in power successfully remained in power.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  Seems like the skills are optimized for corporate ladder climbing as well.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    I mean, I'll grant even that it could be something hereditary. I mean, CEOs have a notably higher incidence of psychopathy than average. Not sure that's something we should be building into our societies.
VectorLock 5y ago
Yes that is a very level playing field they competed on. Imagine how much even better top talent we'd have for late leadership at aging tech companies if the talent pool was broader.
deleted 5y ago

freetinker 5y ago

While what you say is true, the caste system has generation-spanning impact. I’m not drawing parallels here, but as an example – not too dissimilar from the generation-spanning impacts of slavery. This is a sloppy article, and I do find the article’s assertion tenuous. There is an ecosystem of educated Indian elite[1]. Perhaps Brahmin’s are overrepresented as a group in that, but I’m not so sure. There are certainly some underrepresented groups, but the caste system isn’t binary. It’d be interesting to see some unbiased data. [1] Relatively speaking. While more privileged than a large majority of Indians, a lot of them come from modest middle-class backgrounds (by Indian standards, back in 70s, 80s pre-liberalization India), leveraged their privilege of education through sheer grit and work.

praptak 5y ago
See also how Google got criticised for publishing historical maps of Japan. The reason? Locations where burakumin (untouchables) had lived were visible on those maps. This caused fears that these "bad addresses" would contribute to discrimination against inhabitants. These things really do span generations.

magpi3 5y ago

Tribalism is old, archaic, outdated, and not useful (from a global perspective at least)... and yet it's everywhere. We're human, and for better or worse this seems to be a condition that we can't escape. EDIT: I really shouldn't say tribalism is not useful. We wouldn't be so tribal if it didn't have its benefits (evolutionarily speaking). But now that we live in a global world it is increasingly becoming a net negative.

rajin444 5y ago
I think it remains to be seen if the global world or the tribalism is a net negative.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  Let's see, the global world has brought us international commerce, free exchange of information (95% of a CS curriculum is based on things created in the West), the possibility(limited but existent) of studying and working in a different society, international agreements, standards and organizations. Tribalism has brought us, wars, petty disputes, populist politicians and bigotry. I know which one I would choose in a heartbeat.
  - jaldhar 5y ago
    Why is it either/or? Immigrants often get a leg up in "working in a different society" by taking advantage of kinship based support networks. The have nots of global society try to attain social justice through tribalist notions of identity. And so on. I would say most people all over the world maintain a weak form of particularist identity and a weak notion of global identity and simply don't think about the contradictions.
    - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
      That all is true, but I was not the one who created the dilemma, the original parent did. Tribalism like nationalism is good just in very small doses.