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The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed co
by zozbot234 7mo ago
The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!
- EnPissant 7mo agoAnd yet when you look at corruption perception indexes, they largely track the Hajnal line. As do so many other graphs.
- zozbot234 7mo agoIreland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.
- pipes 7mo agoWhich other developed countries do you mean? The only ones I can think of, have westernised on purpose. E.g. Singapore and Japan.
- zozbot234 7mo agoWhat you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.
- pipes 7mo agoThat is sort of my point, I can't think of a developed country that hasn't westernised to some extent.