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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34452 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Is there a good way to describe a group like this?

"Market-dominant Minority"

Note that Jewish people in the United States are not listed as an example of a "market dominant minority." The original article is here and it says:

In First World countries, markets have tended to reinforce the economic dominance of a perceived ethnic majority over those countries' most salient ethnic minorities-hence the controversial calls for (and backlash against) market-" correcting" affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics in the United States." In the developing world, the ethnoeconomic dynamic tends to be just the reverse: Markets often reinforce the economic dominance of certain ethnic minorities. In the First World, democracy poses no radical challenge to economically dominant ethnic groups. 2 By contrast, in the developing world, democracy characteristically pits a politically powerful but impoverished "indigenous" majority" against an economically dominant ethnic minority

So, she clearly sees this as a non-First World phenomenon. And note this discussion in which she defines "market dominant minority as "an ethnic minority, or ethnic minorities, who, along with foreign investors, can be expected to economically dominate the poor, indigenous majorities around them, at least in the near to mid-term future."

Again, she is talking about something more than a particular group being overrepresented in a particular sector. So, Jewish people in the US do not seem to be an example of what she is discussing.

I mean, Koreans and Indians are clearly market dominant minorities in poor urban regions, and Cajuns and Afrikaner’s fill similar roles in parts of the rural south.

These areas might be poor by American standards, but they’re globally very very wealthy, so the concept clearly applies regardless of what academic theories about race say.

I agree that Jews aren’t one, by the way, because they’re usually not owning capital.

Korean and Indians in poor urban regions often serve as middleman minorities, but I think that is a different concept.

TBQH, it seems like the distinction is one that only exists to claim that US whites are systemically advantaged over everyone else, no exceptions.

That would be a strange claim to be made by Thomas Sowell, who has written a fair amount about middleman minorities. As for market dominant minorities, as noted in the original link, Chua's concept is about such places as 'the Philippines, [where] Chua notes that the Chinese community comprise one percent of the population but control 60 percent of the private economy, with the result being resentment on the part of the Filipino majority against the Chinese minority creating an ethnic conflict. Similarly, in Indonesia the Chinese Indonesian community make up three percent of the population but control 75 percent of the economy. Similar patterns occur throughout other Southeast Asian economies." Clearly a different concept than middleman minorities, and neither has anything to do with US whites; not everything on the planet is about the current culture war.

Chua’s concept seems too narrow. If you divide into different ethnic groups (not just white but British, German, etc) there is no dominant group in the US in part because the economy is so massive unlike the Philippines.

It is true that Jews disproportionately own a lot of wealth in the US. It is also true that probably inspires jealous.

Too narrow for what? As an excuse to criticize some group one doesn't like, perhaps. But not as a means of understanding the world; it is specifically about a phenomenon which takes place in relatively low-income countries. Broadening it risks rendering it both meaningless and useless

I think you have this backwards. I’m not here to bury the Jews but to praise them.

I also think Jewish success in wealth explains in part why we are so worried about antisemitism. When you have a dominant market minority jealousy often occurs which leads to ugly acts. So we have a norm of trying to police that jealousy.

In my mind, a dominant market minority doesn’t mean that they have to own a majority of the wealth. In my mind, that minority group has to have a very disproportionately large share of the wealth — enough to create jealousy.

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