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I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:
I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.
I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.
I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.
But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.
Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.
This is a question I ask myself almost every day.
For now, I want to push back slightly on the wealth/GDP comparison. I've posted before about my struggles in thinking about it. The numbers show Americans are at median higher in per capita wealth and GDP, but it is difficult for me to square that with my personal experience actually living in the US vs East Asia. In a phrase, it feels like when I'm in the US I'm always paying more for less. Food tastes worse, interactions with a service workers feel worse, I'm shaken down for tips even on take-out, public spaces are covered in literal piss and shit, public transit is garbage, there's lower trust, principal-agent problems seem to play out with a high rate of defections, etc.
If GDP is the sum total of all money flows, how should I feel about getting paid >3x while I'm also having to shell out >2x for everything but it's all worse. PPP is supposed to account for this, but I don't think it quite captures the full picture, particularly the part where everything is lower quality. Every transaction in the US will nickel and dime you to death. In comparison, I generally feel a much greater utility surplus in places like Japan.
When Japanese waiters just do their job because it's culturally expected while American waiters drag their feet and still whine about 20% tips not being 25%, that's not captured by GDP.
When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues and still put full effort into quality just out of pride in their work while American restaurants are tacking on random surcharges and skimping on ingredients, that's not fully captured by GDP.
When the city can just delete most of its trash cans and citizens will still largely refrain from littering while Americans are paying several full time salaries to pick up dog feces, that's not fully captured by GDP.
When restaurants don't have to pay for security guards because crime rates are low, that's not fully captured by GDP.
In the thread I linked above, someone gave the example that his wife could increase national GDP by getting a job and paying a nanny and a housekeeper, etc. instead of being a stay-at-home mom. The sense I get is that similar things are at play in every aspect of society and the US culture is one that lies on the former extreme in almost all of them.
Edit: It was pointed out that I went a bit off on a tangent. To get back to your question, my main thoughts comparing US and East Asia are that 1.) The productivity gap isn't as high as the GDP numbers would suggest and 2.) The advantages and disadvantages largely emerge from cultural differences rather than systemic ones. If I were to reduce it to a principal component, I'd put it along a "trust" axis, with East Asian inefficiencies arising from cultural rituals that may or may not be needed to maintain this trust while American inefficiencies arise from the constant defections in the setting of low trust. Given how difficult culture is to change I don't see much opportunity for a Hegelian sublation between the two but if there is one, I'd wager it'd be easier for East Asia than the US, simply because trust is far easier to maintain than it is to build.
People in the United States have more wealth in other measurable things, though (cars, firearms, computers, square footage of living space, etc.)
I think that the United States is a very big and very varied society, and ultimately on the whole it's not as high trust as e.g. Japan, but it is higher variance. And higher variance arguably means more wealth, since innovations that improve QOL and increase wealth are unusual.
The other thing, though, is that the United States basically got unrestricted access to an entire continent and rode out essentially unscathed a very formative moment in industrial history that saw much of the rest of the world absolutely obliterated (including Japan) and so it got a significant head start in a lot of ways that matter.
True, the geography has helped a lot, but the fact that the US rode out the troubles of the first half of the 20th century almost unscathed and Japan didn't is not necessarily a variable that is independent from the differences between US and Japanese culture. It is possible that had Japan had a more US-like culture in the 1930s, it would never have become dominated by delusional imperialists who then got the country flattened in a war. Indeed, such a Japan would probably have never become isolationist and fallen behind the West to begin with.
Similarly, it is hard for me to imagine that a China with a more US-like culture would have stagnated under a Qing dynasty for centuries and fallen enormously behind the West in technology, then after a brief period of civil war replaced the Qing dynasty with communists who mismanaged the economy to the point that millions of people died as a result.
Of course this is all highly speculative, the reality is that there is no way to tell for sure one way or another.
Japan’s culture was more similar to that of, say, Theodore Roosevelt than you think. Like America, they had a sense of Manifest Destiny: that they were a uniquely blessed people with a uniquely excellent culture (which compared to the rest of Asia at the time they really were) and that it was their destiny to civilise their neighbours and then the world.
Two big (relevant) differences are:
In short, I think that a big part of why Imperial Japan didn’t survive the 20th century and America did was out of geopolitics rather than cultural differences.
(Obviously other cultural differences existed, I am not saying that America had its own rape of Nanking or anything silly like that).
The United States was taking "soft" diplomatic action against Japan before they attacked Pearl, both in terms of an oil embargo and in terms of sending mercenaries and weapons (the "Flying Tigers") to China to fight against them. I think that by 1941 they
I am not an expert into Japanese thought, so perhaps there was much more than this. But that seems sufficient to me, if that makes sense. [Edit to add: the Flying Tigers arrived in China before Pearl Harbor but did not see combat until after. It's unclear to me how secret this was/if this played any part in Japan's thinking, but the oil embargo was, of course, no secret.]
Japan also never believed they could outright defeat the US. The idea was that Pearl Harbor would give them 6-12 months to build an empire and defensive perimeter around the Japanese home islands, coupled with a mistaken assumption that the US would be willing to negotiate peace with them after seeing how much work it would take to defeat them.
Well, I know Japan had a plan to defeat the US navy in a decisive battle, but I agree that's different from the outright defeat of the sort they ended up receiving.
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