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The Economist doesn't seem to know economics.
I was presented this article by Reddit as an ad. Though the ad used the subtitle about Trump as the title. This article packs more "wrong" in a coherently-written article than I've seen in a long time. The actual title is "America’s huge mortgage market is slowly dying".
Right out of the gate, we're told mortgage debt has dropped over 30 points as a percentage of the GDP since the housing crisis, and now is at its lowest level since 1999, before the bubble. Wait a minute? Isn't that a good thing? We've finally returned to normalcy after the bubble? In fact, the graph appears to show just that. Mortgage debt is still higher as a percent of GDP than any time other than the bubble.
We're then told "mortgage debt has shrunk to just 27% of the value of American household property—a 65-year low". Uh, yes, but those of us who are paying attention realize that this isn't because mortgage debt has shrunk, it's because the value of American property has increased. Which doesn't have much to do with any dying of the mortgage market.
Then we get this howler:
Uh, how exactly is lenders' appetite for risk a measure of mortgage availability?
The article then goes on to call this a "collapse in credit", because in 2003 (peak bubble), 35% of American mortgages went to people with credit scores below 720, whereas now that number is 22%. But the attached chart shows total originations are fairly close to immediately pre-COVID numbers. There's no real drying up in credit since the end of the bubble, just extension of the same credit to more creditworthy borrowers. Note that more than half of Americans with a credit score have one over 720. American's credit scores have increased, and lending less to people who are higher risk just makes sense. The bubble lending DIDN'T make sense, that's how we got the bubble!
Did I call the previous one a howler? No, that wasn't a howler. THIS is a howler:
Uh, bitch, prices are high. Time on market is low. There's LOTS of buyers. It's a seller's market. If developers aren't building (and indeed they aren't) it's not a lack of prospective buyers causing it.
This is heart of the problem with the article: if there is indeed a mortgage drought preventing people from buying houses, house prices should be falling, not rising. Basic Econ 101 stuff. The article completely ignores this right up until the very end, when it notes
I don't know what G-S means by that, but "any policies meant to make mortgages more widely available will only push house prices higher" makes more sense than anything else in the article, and it contradicts the whole thesis of the article.
The housing market has plenty of problems. Unavailability of credit is definitely not one of them.
Reminds me of this viral Substack series: Part 1, Part 2..
...
The median age of first time homebuying has gone up from 28 in the 1990s to 40. First-time buyers now comprise just 21% of all home purchases.
Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.
Ok, but then who are the elderly selling to? People in their 40s able and willing to get into tons of debt. OK, but who buys when you exhaust that group? Property investment firms who are able to rent the houses out. Can that go on forever? Well, if they're buying houses at a certain price, they're hoping the rent will be more than the mortgage over the length of the life of the home. This happens when rents increase over time. Will we always have more people looking for homes than there are available?
To put a finer point on it, it seems like the system requires that there be perpetually fewer homes than desired, but this is not really desirable as a society because we like when everyone has a home and punish people who do not have a residence. And, regardless of what's good or bad or anyone's wishes, eventually the population will decrease as the boomers die off.
Home prices have to fall, right? And I wouldn't even be mad about it, though I'd be one of those holding the bag. I'd like for my kids to afford a home. I'd put me in a precarious financial position until the bulk of the principle is payed off. But I will pay the monthly amount I agreed to pay because I'm an adult, and I'll be happy to see my kids in a better position than me because I'm a normal human being.
But anyone who was hoping to trade their $800,000 home for 8 months in hospice care might be in for a rude awakening.
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Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this one being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good news is that I'll be using a
real, livevery online person that we can all directly reference instead of an example from my own life.And that person is Shagbark.
Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.
Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:
Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.
In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.
The Culture War Angle
Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of
pseudointellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around, nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug through the dirt and mud and found gold.Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.
Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.
Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?
I have met him and his wife a few times. I have bought a few properties in the rust belt area he lives in and we're both from the same area elsewhere. Very good guy.
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It’s entirely possible to rescue failing cities by boosting particular neighborhoods(there’s a word for it- gentrification). IIRC shagbark wanted to do this in rust belt New York.
Unfortunately, he wanted to combine this with Luddism(lol), trad-Catholicism(minus the guilt), and ideological commitment. Alas he found no takers; most people don’t want to live a third world poor lifestyle, they would rather have jobs.
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Which parts? It isn't that big, and the only parts of it that I would consider remotely bad are the parts of the island where it's all drug addicts. But he isn't likely to live on the island if he doesn't want to have a car. Parts of it are dumpy for sure, but most of it is completely safe, and it isn't really blighted. If he's looking for actual hellscapes that aren't inside big cities, parts of the Mon Valley are much worse.
Was 100% thinking of the island.
Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam
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Last week's discussion of a $100k salary in 1959 versus 2025 got me thinking about an age-old question: Of the money we earn and purchases we make, how much is devoted to improving the way we relate to other people (e.g. to enhance our social status, to buy exclusive experiences, etc.)? Or to put the question another way, how much money do I spend on things which, if they were affordable to everyone, would be kinda pointless?
So for example, as a fairly wealthy person, I paid a lot for a house in a "nice neighborhood," which in practice means a neighborhood that is sufficiently expensive so as to exclude poor people.
I think that the prospect of an AI revolution makes this issue especially salient. If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?
I see this as a culture war issue because my sense is that people on the Left tend to be dismissive of this problem. For example, they seem to think it would be a great idea if public policy opened the doors of "good schools" to the "disadvantaged." Or if everyone went to college.
Perhaps a better example is the numerous YouTube videos I have seen of the "urbanist" genre. Which basically slam car-oriented suburbs and push for policies promoting walkable neighborhoods. They seem to ignore the point that the inconvenience of suburban living is not a bug but rather a feature. That kinda the point is to keep out, well, riff-raff for lack of a better word.
In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?
Outside of the other residents of the neighborhood, and barring large scale terraforming/geoengineering/landscaping, quality real estate remains scarce even with fully automated extraction and production of material goods. By that, I mean quality of the plot of land, beauty of the views from the plot of land, climate, likelihood of natural disasters, distance from other desirable land (beaches, forests, etc...).
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I was just this weekend reflecting on the extent to which we already live in this future. Specifically, I was purchasing over-the-counter medicine for a family member's lingering cough, and thinking about the mass produced medicinal miracles of modern chemistry. With the cost of open-market health insurance premiums set to rise next year, there is a lot of public discourse on the state of modern medicine (and how it gets funded). But for the vast, overwhelming majority of health concerns we have today, we live in an age of remarkable abundance and shocking affordability. Furthermore, we live in an age where there is very little difference in the treatments and medicines available to the rich versus the poor.
Now, don't misunderstand--I am absolutely aware of the eye-watering costs of some treatments, particularly experimental or end-of-life treatments, and the relatively better care available to people with money. But the kind of care that costs serious "rich person" cash is also the kind of care very few people would benefit from receiving. The vast majority of medical maladies you will face in your life are treatable by a nurse practitioner with medicine you can buy for less than an hour's wages, and a billionaire in your place would receive the very same prescription at the very same price.
Furthermore, though not everyone benefits in the same way or at the same level, most Americans do have some kind of health insurance that genuinely protects them from bankruptcy while providing them with treatments they could otherwise not possibly afford. Countries with socialized health care are arguably more efficient in how they structure the financing of all this, but either way the risk pooling that modern industrialized nations do with health care costs seems to work pretty well to everyone's absolute benefit, despite the persistence of individual disparities in particular cases.
Your mention of "if everyone went to college" is particularly noteworthy given that anyone who genuinely wants to learn something, today, is far better situated to make that happen than they would have been even twenty years ago. The existence of online college and satellite internet means you never even have to leave your house to get an education, often of a quality much higher than you could get at a top tier university a century ago. We have more knowledge, we disseminate it more smoothly, the costs are minimal and almost always subsidized. I have more books stored in my cell phone than I could physically fit in my house and office--combined. Someone with a loose attitude toward copyright infringement could very easily download several PhD's worth of knowledge for actual pennies (or, at their local library, possibly gratis).
Of course, credentials are a different story, but that's evidence of a society with so much abundance that it actively works to rate limit expertise. America's physician shortage (which is much less than the physician shortage in many other places) is driven in substantial measure by the profession's reluctance to increase the availability of training. This has resulted in a proliferation of paraprofessionals (who often think they are professionals)--but I digress. The point is that we have so much abundance, actually, many of our current sociocultural systems are kind of choking on it.
I sometimes wonder if this is why we are seeing a rise in political movements that, on my view, promise to function by ending abundance. On my view, trade is the lifeblood of prosperity; interfering with trade reduces abundance. On my view, free discourse generates a bounty of ideas; restricting discourse reduces abundance. Asceticism is often a kind of allergic reaction to abundance. Probably someone reading this comment is thinking of Universe 25 and wondering how it relates! Yes: possibly we are poorly evolved to thrive in an environment of abundance.
But I feel like the alternative is strictly worse. Better to wrangle with (and perhaps evolve beyond) our pyschological hangups in an environment of peace and plenty, I think, than to RETVRN to 50% infant mortality rates on grounds that this better reflects the ancestral environment. To answer the question directly, I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways (I would like to live much, much longer then 100 years, for example!) but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms.
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Plenty of urban environments do this as well. To the extent American cities aren't doing this is a *choice*.
There are plenty of other reasons to prefer urban, suburban or rural living but keeping away the riffraff isn't an inherent issue for any of them. Just like many of the "urbanist" complaints about soulless suburbs aren't inherent problems with suburbs just things that are most notable in some American suburbs.
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I think there's two separate questions here. There's things rich people do because they're genuinely pleasant, but which overcrowding would ruin; and there's things rich people do purely as a status symbol because few people can afford them. I think the world genuinely gets better if no one is buying gratuitously expensive brands anymore, and people instead focus on buying clothes, accessories, etc. that they actually like for their own sake. Whereas it would genuinely be a shame if vacation spots became so popular that there was no way to enjoy mostly-empty nature anymore.
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The same thing they currently do to show off within the same income bracket - invent taste and have more of it than others.
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I mean, you don’t have to delve into the tribes being dismissive of the problem to understand the differences- measured by consumption, Mississippi is far richer than NYC. Measured any other way, lol no it isn’t.
This shapes a lot of attitudes on the question- from teacher pay to the rise of ‘socialism’(these people aren’t Marxists, they just want free shit- because they insist on lifestyles that are unaffordable if it isn’t free. Literally, NYC/San Fran apartments have a high percentage that are subsidized, but if it isn’t subsidized it’s a huge stretch even for the high incomes in these places) to ongoing tribal divergence(I wonder how much of the blue tribe hatred of red is just that we don’t care about how much their trendy apartments cost to rent- they should accept less desirable neighborhoods/avocado toast/international travel).
Suburbs are sometimes exclusivist, but theres also plenty of suburbs that are affordable to the lower working class- I live in one. They’re simply a practical solution to ‘everyone gets a single family home with a yard’ in a rich country where you have to be quite poor not to have a car. Most of my neighbors, if offered the choice, would not move to a walkable safe neighborhood, because they want a single family home with a yard.
In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes, because the anti-growth mindset has won. For instance, there's lots of space in Western Maryland to build such things, but the Maryland Master Plan says no, that's gotta be preserved. This has been a sore point for people living in those counties who DO want the growth for well over a decade. Blue Tribe has been causing the housing price increases itself.
You can't build new urban places either - the City that Builds in 2025 is Austin, TX. The dynamic isn't urbanists vs suburbanites, it's builders vs blockers. And it is, unusually, Red State (builder) vs Blue State (blocker) political culture, not Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers. As far as I can see, Blue Tribers in Austin are making sure the new building happens in a Blue way, not trying to block it.
This is because in Blue States, the choices are between pods and nothing. In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.
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A post-scarcity world will make life wildly better for those actually affected by scarcity. Yeah, it'll be harder for the currently wealthy to exclude people, but whether you consider that a worthwhile sacrifice so that almost no one has to die of hunger or exposure is up to you.
If money and economic productivity becomes a non-factor, prestige can always shift to how we spend our last limited resource (time). We still find things instinctually impressive even when they aren't productive: running marathons, bench pressing big numbers, speaking 12 languages, just being a charming/interesting conversationalist, etc.
Isn't most of the West essentially there already? By the time you're dying of hunger or exposure in the vast majority of cases in the Affluent West it's probably down to your own choices and anti-sociability than because anybody is explicitly depriving you of food and shelter simply due to you existing.
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In America today it is already the case that basically no one has to die of hunger or scarcity. But there are still fent zombies, crazy people, and wildly anti-social cohorts which one might want to keep away from ones home.
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I’m ‘stolen valoring’ a post from the Sunday thread and reposting it here for higher exposure (ht @odd_primes):
Recently there was a viral explosion on Kiwifarms > Twitter about a nebulous low trust Indian cultural behavioural trait. This honor culture trait isn’t something that is unique to India. There has however been a huge influx of Indians into the West both through immigration and through internet presence that has left cultural ripples. The memetic word is called ‘Izzat’ even though this is an Urdu word that only vaguely venn diagrams against the concept.
I’m beating around the bush, but I’m pretty much talking about scam culture, being the winner, getting one up on the people that are outsiders to ‘my group’, and getting status points for exploiting my outgroup.
I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t an Indian only issue, but it’s a culture clash between high and low trust cultures and is worthy of discussion.
Edit: Don't drunkpost. This is a culture war issue that should have been given better care in an OP.
2nd edit: Actually quoted the post.
I continually wonder how anywhere developed a high trust society in the first place. All I see, everywhere around me, is low trust behavior destroying all the traditions and institutions that made high trust Europe great. I can scarcely imagine how the opposite process could have ever occurred. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world it even exists. I'm not aware of any other historical cultures one would describe as "high trust". Which is not to say there aren't any, I am just literally professing my ignorance. The existence of high trust societies has become something of a mystery to me, in light of everything I see around me.
It's increasingly difficult for me to even lay out in objective terms what I would define as a "high trust" society. Maybe a measure of how much state capacity bleeds off to corruption? Maybe the likelihood that any good or service you try to procure isn't fraudulent? The chance that any given person you meet isn't lying about who they are and what their capabilities are? An understanding of natural rights that are pro-social? Like respect for private or public property, or other people's time and effort.
But maybe that's a result of having grown up in a post-Demoralized society. You read about the billions of dollars of welfare fraud the Somali community has been doing in plain sight, and Tim Walz's administrations utter spinelessness and/or complicitness in it, and it's hard to see anything other than a civilization that has decided stopping crime is too mean. That taking any measures, no matter how one inarguably just, to secure it's continued existence, is just too cruel.
Perhaps by centuries of punishing even the most minor offenses by death?
Japan comes to mind, but I'm no expert.
This seems likely to be the largest effect.
Social selection effects 'alone' seem insufficient. Gotta actually remove/filter the least cooperative/most dangerous defectors out of the gene pool for a few generations, allowing the cooperators to proliferate.
The other factor is probably there being even higher-trust subpopulations that were either allowed to live in isolation, or those subpopulations leave to a new land and form a society where everyone is extremely high trust (and defectors get burned to death or killed off by the elements). Then norms these cultures produce probably rubbed off on others they came into contact with.
Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."
Then of course winter itself forcing people to live in close proximity and anyone who was intolerable to be around would likely be kicked out of the house and would more than likely die.
A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.
I recently was reminded of the series they have over there where literal toddlers are sent on errands that require them to operate very independently and overcome some obstacles independently, and navigate the risks of the local environment.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z5GB-uiX4f4?si=7rg1ZGv38B4Ue86c
And nobody finds this odd, every single person does their best to assist without overly coddling the kid, and generally you get the sense the entire social structure of this community is designed for the safety of their children.
That's the dream, imho.
The Inuit have had some weird trust building exercises, but today, their culture is dominated by severe alcoholism, and there are probably as many living in slums in the cities of their ancestral lands receiving welfare as there are in the ancestral environment.
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Inuit cultures might not be a useful example, though they don't invalidate your guess either. They didn't grow crops, so the whole food supply thing didn't apply as much. Their survival is an amazing adaptation of opportunistic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to an extreme environment, but they could not sustain a large, growing civilization as we understand it that way. As for current, their population are still low, and any anthropoclimatologic (I'm proud I've actually legit used this word now) study of them, at least here in Quebec, is hopelessly tainted by their interaction with europeans and their descendants.
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But this theory has to contend with Russia, which has been low-trust (by European standards, anyway) for long before Communism.
I'm actually unfamiliar with the criminal justice practices of Tsarist Russia, was the death penalty meted out with regularity?
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According to that article, relatively few people were actually sentenced to death under the Bloody Code.
They were instead sentenced to a fate worse than death. To whit, Australia.
It seems the Bloody Code was only the tail end of it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13rojx5/henry_viii_executed_nearly_70k_people_maybe_more/
Compare with modern-day Oklahoma, which tops the US rankings with 3.101 executions / 100,000 / 48 years, roughly 1/300 of Henry VIII's score.
I don't know how this compares to other parts of the world around the same time, but the other aspect of this is that executions will only bring about an improvement in social trust if they're administered in a somewhat "orderly" fashion, as punishments for crimes of which the accused is more-likely-than-not to be guilty. (A comparable death rate brought about by indiscriminate mass killing will not have the same effect.) In England I'd guess the legal execution regime prevailed at least 600-700 years, starting from the time of Henry II if not earlier.
Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.
I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.
But then on the flip side you have Russia, again, where the frontier was where they sent malefactors for centuries, and things got worse.
And, you know, the US’s cartoonishly high violent crime rates.
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You know, I probably should have thought of Japan. Especially with how much right wing twitter is idolizing them these days.
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I've had a similar idea to this post floating around in my head for a few months now - just observing bits of the phenomenon without having a word for it. I think China has a pretty similar version, or at least, that's what shows up in their translated fiction.
Perhaps the common cause is a long standing, fully settled culture. If there's no "frontier", if there's no concept of "making money" in a Randian sense of creating wealth by the alchemy of effort and ingenuity, then wouldn't a fiercely zero-sum culture make perfect sense? If the only way to benefit is for someone else to lose, then wouldn't that explain a culture of scammers? The way visiting vtubers talk about sliding into a hatefully defensive mindset in a week because every cabbie and street vendor "accidentally" adds an extra digit to the charge? Or the prank videos where someone records "finding" a bill on the floor of an Indian-owned shop, and the counter-minder immediately goes all on on a bluff check, insisting that they money was theirs and they dropped it and "If you are a good person, you'll give it to me."
What would happen after a hundred generations of that?
And getting caught up on the murder rate thing is an error. China doesn't have a high murder rate for the sake of face... but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great. Doesn't India have a history of mass famines? How many of them were made worse by aristocrats refusing to acknowledge the problem because it would lose them points in intra-elite status games?
What would happen after a hundred generations of that?
One of the things I see people talk about regarding India is this superposition of hateful gloating blended with crying supplication, like code switching back and forth to whichever seems most advantageous.
Ironically, I see the same thing in black thug culture. A guy will act like the toughest motherfucker in the world... until he gets pinched. Then he flips a switch and turns into a crybaby bitch, begging for a mercy he never showed anyone else. Seems kinda dishonorable for an "honor culture", but maybe that's just an optimization for a matriarchal/matrilinear subculture. If there's no name to pass down to your sons, why not trade that honor/face for a shot at an undeserved mercy? Or at least a police brutality payout?
That's another culture that openly celebrates "hustlers". Have you ever been hustled? I have, in my quokka days. It took more than a half dozen times, feeling like a fool for offering help and charity, before I internalized the rule "If a black guy asks you for help that even touches on the concept of money, he is a piece of shit scammer. Fuck him, fuck his "sick" mother and fuck his whole sick culture."
Not since the end of the Raj.
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As a Chinese, I think this isn't true at all. China has toyed with the idea of meritocacy since ancient times, and despite the fact that communism was a stain on its history, it was reversed quickly. To the extent that blood feuds exist, which isn't that much, they must be repaid in blood and aren't some silly status game about humiliation.
Chinese will certainly lie, cheat, and steal, but not more than people from any other western country. Meanwhile Indian scam farms celebrate and party every time they ruin someone's life, and they love it.
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I'm reminded of one of Bryan Caplan's multi chapter reviews of the Malcolm X autobiography.
Basically this "hustle" culture seems equivalent to "Izzat". Caplan also goes on to point out how Malcolm has a lot of self destructive behaviors:
I think the idea of a sober Malcolm X sticking to victimless crime and conservatively investing his money is nonsensical. You are what you do. And Malcolm did petty crime so he also did all the petty criminal things. If you want to not do petty criminal things you need to not be a petty criminal. Malcolm instead became a religious leader and started doing all the religious leader things, which included a lot of righteousness and puritanical beliefs.
He sort of invented the role of black muslim religious leader. There was a great deal of flexibility in what he could have chosen for that role to become in society. It seems he made it more of an "anti-peti-criminal" role than anything else. Instead of no morals about anything, he had all the morals about everything. Instead of a life of debauchery and drugs, he chose a life of puritanism and sobriety.
Anyways, I think this "Izzat" culture is likely screwing itself over as well. Being a scammer would be a shitty life. Everything and everyone would feel fake all the time. You'd probably end up viewing all the victims of yours scams as pieces of crap that deserved it, and it would make you absolutely paranoid about being scammed yourself (so that you are not also a piece of crap that deserved to be scammed). You'll view many things that could be mutually beneficial exchanges as instead just scams waiting to happen.
If "Izzat" culture at all looks appealing its because they are running a scam on scammers. Probably recruiting for some sort of pyramid scheme. Think of it like a recruiting message for a company where the top salesman shows off his cool company car and brags about his company vacation. Meanwhile at that company most of the sales people joining are just doing cold calls and feeding that salesperson at the top promising leads, and then earning close to nothing on the commissions.
This happens a lot, where something that is basically a hyped up recruiting message gets translated by outside people as "this is how things really are". I remember a while back Stephen Colbert did some kind of expose on trailer park landlords and found this video about a guy bragging about how you could ruthlessly exploit trailer park renters. He claimed you could rent it out, immediately jack up the prices and they'd be screwed and have to pay cuz they'd have no where to move. The obvious thing that Colbert missed is that the guy saying this was selling trailers to trailer parks. The advertisement was trying to scam the scammers. Every point the guy made in the advertisement clashed with reality. The writers of the Colbert show didn't care though, they found this perfect little snippet of a guy being the most scumbag landlord you could imagine.
So yeah we need a category of things for "Advertisements between scammers getting mistaken for reality", and then we can hopefully avoid making this mistake again and again.
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Lack of izzat is a massive problem among westerners if you ask me. The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?". Same with how westerners send their own flesh and blood parents off to a care home when they start becoming too much of a burden on them. The lack of respect here is galling: your parents took care of you when you were nothing more than a little shit machine and this is how you repay them???
The kiwifarms post is a half truth (well actually more like a quarter truth), which makes it worse than a total lie. Some elements of it are correct, but others (like how you can rape and murder with impunity if you have enough izzat) are totally 100% false (rape and murder are the number 1 way you an destroy your whole extended family's izzat in a very short space of time for generations).
God in Heaven, the discourse is actually "oh rly? yur low class shitbags are scummy too, my low class shitbags aren't even that bad, lol".
I don't mean to pick on you BurdensomeCount. Many other posts in this thread are as bad or worse from the other direction. I'm not Indian (dot or feather), this thread is the first I've heard of this izzat concept. The gist I get is that it is an extremely broad and nebulous concept akin to prowess / craft / vigor / doing the needful. Indians being asked to comment on izzat as though their opinion means anything would be like me trying to provide an accurate, non-controversial definition of rizz.
To answer your rhetorical inner voice: no, of course their parents didn't teach them better, they are low class shitbags. Often their parents were also not taught better. Many such examples in every culture through every period of every time on every corner of this earth. Encountering a low class shitbag should produce zero units of Surprise. Low class shitbag is the human default, you should only be amazed that there exists anything better.
If I may now be part of the Problem, this entire line of inquiry is based around the lived experience of the individuals sharing their opinions. If I'm not mistaken, you are an Indian immigrant to the UK? It's possible that you are treated extra poorly across the spectrum, but especially by the low class shitbags, because many people in the UK sincerely believe that you - personally - are part of a serious problem straining their society. (If you began thinking of reasons they are wrong, please stop. You are only sabotaging yourself This is not a factual question. The actions of a human being are rooted in their beliefs, not something as abstract and fake as a "fact".)
I can only answer for my own experience and cultural milieu. Coming from a conservative part of the Southern United States, though born in the mid 80s and therefore only getting a watered down version by that time, I can tell you the expected response my culture would have for an individual encountering you in the context of your presence being part of a phenomenon widely believed to be harming my community's culture / prospects / lives / etc: to treat you poorly. That is what would be expected of someone raised correctly and making their parents proud.
Perhaps some of what you're encountering is good behavior within a society / context / culture / folkway of which you are not a member.
Edit: To clarify, I've heard my grandfather ask aloud your "but where were their parents?" question about people in his community who are kind and welcoming towards Yankees. The same behavior can be a signifier of low class, high class, or even completely class neutral contextually.
Thats the greatest insult you could have given him, he's Pakistani
My apologies. That is a significant difference; unspeakable pains have been inflicted, huge numbers of human lives have been cut short based around those identities. It is a legitimate horror that such things occur.
The great news is that for the mindset I'm describing those differences are washed away. These people, assuming they were raised right, will not piss on the Pakistani or Indian immigrant alike to put them out if they were on fire and they'd make absolutely sure the immigrant in question knew it. There is no Us without a Them and the details of whatever makes one of them Them are only meaningful to better craft insults. To do otherwise is trashy.
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As in their lack of immediate obsequious submission for the better person (for he has money for he gets to armwrestle in the zero-sum Finance fields, unlike those peasants)? I wouldn't consider Indian culture especially defined by inter-class respect, at least going downwards, but if the Western culture didn't have a peculiar glitch in which lower classes were afforded a minimum of respect and voice and given an opportunity it'd be hard to imagine modern immigration existing as it does.
I do agree with the parenting thing, but I'd argue a confluence of factors (Small family sizes, Westerners tend to be more mobile both for work and for Florida in their dotage, housing is brutally expensive, modern medicine allows for stupefyingly long armwrestles against mortality by people with massive care requirements) means that the equation's a bit different than in a more-settled setting where labor is absurdly cheap and families are large.
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The reason I'm willing to believe that post is hitting on truth is simply interacting with the Indians in my local community over the course of years now.
And the tendency to try and 'get one over' on others, even when it is detrimental to the relationship is nigh-universal. Sometimes this is benign. But I'd be reluctant to put anything meaningful at risk in a deal that might go sour because of this factor.
I had a potential client with a 2.5 million dollar net worth (if I assume he was honest on this point) balk at paying me $1200 to fix a problem for him. This was already steeply discounted! I also noticed that its about 50-50 that any given Indian-American potential client I actually work with will follow through on actually finalizing their work, since, I suspect, that would mean handing money over. And I get the sense that the act of handing over money is seen as somewhat of a 'defeat' unless the amount you hand over is much less than the amount that was agreed to.
I'll still work with them, of course, but it has colored my expectations across the board. I would NOT take one on as a business partner unless I had a pre-existing extensive relationship with them.
And these are all otherwise decently smart, well-presenting, well-off individuals.
My conclusion is basically one of two things.
#1 Either the Indians who actually make it over here are 'the best of the best' to some degree, and in theory the best-suited to adapt to Western Cultural norms, and even they are acting on this 'defection-based' cultural baseline... which indicates such culture is endemic in their home country...
OR
#2 The Indians who make it over here achieved that by cheating the hardest and fooling the gullible Westerners intentionally... which indicates that this culture is so endemic in their home country that it is the ONLY way for them to get ahead.
(The third option is that those are the same thing: the 'most talented' Indians are also the ones best at playing that game, and that's maybe the scariest possibility of all, we're inviting the 'superpredators' of their society here.)
I have also had some perfectly delightful, non-scammy/defection interactions in various contexts, and in most cases they're pleasant to interact with when money isn't on the table. And I have a few Indian dishes that I really do enjoy, I would never say their culture is without its pros.
But as I've stated before, I have little problem, zero discomfort looking at the broader, population level stats and drawing the obvious conclusions from those. One of the big ones that still sort of puzzles me... how does a nation with 1.5 billion people produce so few Olympic-Caliber athletes? They've won 41 medals... TOTAL. That's one-third of what fucking KENYA has, and Kenya started competing in 1956, compared to India starting in 1900. Granted Kenya is a bit specialized in which events they win.
And my 'theory' is that that whole area of the world assumes that defection/low trust is 'normal' and act accordingly, and when introduced to a high-trust population, they're more inclined to view these folks as potential suckers (in the P.T. Barnum sense) than they are to realize they can achieve much greater things via cooperation here.
So that reading pretty readily confirms my priors... which makes me suspicious enough to want some independent verification.
If you know how I feel about high-trust societies... you probably get why I find this concept disgusting and mildly terrifying if true.
Consider for example the way the current President of the United States treated employees, contractors, lenders, wives etc. in his pre-political life, paying no meaningful price for it. "Hustle" (used upthread as a term for what high-trust societies don't do) is an American English word for behaviour that is as American as school shootings and trillion-dollar software companies (American old wives in my social circle blame PT Barnum). There was an American culture which told white boys from good families that hustling was beneath them. Now you can get >$10 billion in VC money for a company with the motto "Always be hustlin" (Ebonic spelling in the original).
Northern Europe (partially including the UK) was high-trust by default in a way which makes us quokkas when dealing with untrustworthy immigrants. America was high-trust by choice and effort (a British snarker would ask "why do you think they need so many lawyers?"), and it feels like you stopped trying starting at some time during the Clinton administration*. I don't know enough to know if the book about how it was done or how and when it stopped being done has been written, but I suspect Tanner Greer of Scholar's Stage has a better idea than most.
* High trust is of course still the default in some closed or semi-closed social circles like individual small towns or the Silicon Valley elite. That doesn't mean society as a whole is high trust, but I suppose it is a big improvement on real low-trust families where only kin can form that kind of local trust network.
I think much of the decline is explained by the cost and time of travel being reduced. Disparate populations are still easy to reach, but before we had mass communications, information about unsavory individuals might propagate slowly.
Snake Oil Salesmen are a well known trope in Westerns, where it was possible to arrive in an isolated town, scam the relatively trusting townspeople, leave before they realized the scam, and arrive in another such town before word actually spread.
Even today, it can be hard to punish a scammer if they stay mobile. Or simply operate outside the jurisdiction of the people they're scamming (oh look, India again).
Dunbar's number is probably pretty closely correlated to the largest community you can operate the runs solely on trust, rather than introducing contracts, mediators, and other dispute resolution systems.
Still, there is something 'magical' about being able to leave your garage door open, your car unlocked, and expect to find your Amazon packages left unmolested on your doorstep, and likewise be pretty certain that if someone DID try to take your packages or steal your car the neighbors would either intervene or call the police, who would in fact take it seriously enough to try to catch the miscreant.
One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage. It was (is?) an epidemic, and I really can't see how you maintain trust in a system when the people tasked with enforcing the rules are the ones violating them flagrantly. And, oh dear, I have to note that A Majority of the Security Screeners are nonwhite..
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The very obvious rebuttal to this is India's murder rate. If the subcontinent is truly a hellish honour culture where maintaining face is prioritized above everything and pursued with fatal resolve, it's odd that its murder rate slots it in between Kazakhstan and Turkey. Obviously one could maintain that there's some massaging going on, but it's fundamentally tough to hide bodies and I can't believe that the official rate is that far off the actual rate.
I might be inclined to accept that there is a nugget of truth the post has been built around, this kind of petty zero-sum honour culture is not exactly uncommon in developing nations. But it seems greatly exaggerated.
But a conventional honor culture(like in America’s black ghettos or parts of the Balkans or the rural south) is not exactly what’s being described- the idea is that Indians find scamming and lying admirable as long as you aren’t hurting your buddies. The really rough parts of New Orleans or rural Albania don’t work that way, going back on your word is worse than murder.
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I've worked with probably a dozen or so Indian coworkers over the years and this does not describe any interaction I've ever had with them. I am also deeply skeptical that a kiwi farms post from a thread entitled "The India Menace - Street shitting, unsanitary practices, scams, Hindu extremism & other things" which cites no evidence is going to contain accurate generalizations about Indians.
From the Indians I have worked with I'd say India follows a particularly brutal version of the 80/20 rule, call it then 98/2 rule. There are a few who are really, really good. The rest are so bad I don't know how they got through their interview (though I have heard having your friend do the remote parts of the interview for you is common amongst that community).
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This very strongly goes against the cultural relativism arguments, which a lot of left ideology is built on, imo.
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