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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.
In 1987, 40 Heathrow baggage handlers were arrested in a single week for stealing from checked bags. There were also major problems in France and Italy through the 70s and 80s with this, back when their handlers would have been mostly indigenous.
But change is important in an interesting way. Technological advancement papers over the cracks in a failing society. So gang violence and drug crime increase, but huge advancements in emergency medicine mean that the homicide rate still falls. Ubiquitous CCTV, plate detection and cellphone tracking slightly reduce residential burglaries, even though the neighborhood as a whole seems shadier and less welcoming. The numbers on paper look good, but everything feels worse.
Yep.
Technology fixes social problems which, I would argue, allows social 'rot' to spread underneath since now certain traits that were selected against on the population level are now still present but less noticed since we just use the tech solution (apply this logic to AI if you wish, lol)
When I first moved to my current area, 10 years ago, I was in the cheapest apartment I could find that still allowed pets. This was my first apartment after living in a College Town.
After years of no problems with Amazon deliveries, I started getting about half of my packages swiped off my stoop. I wondered for a bit if it was Amazon Delivery driers being incompetent, but nope. I did the classic approach of filling a cardboard box with trash and leaving it out, and that, too got taken.
But a few months later, Amazon introduced An Amazon Locker at my local mall. So I could ship items there and pick them up at my leisure.
Problem solved! Except now it was a 15 minute round trip to pick up stuff, so I would have to schedule it around my other errands. The whole POINT of Amazon delivery is to NOT have to leave the house!!
And of course, I had to live with the knowledge that some of my neighbors were wanton thieves, which was the real issue. Can't leave my door or my car unlocked ever, knowing that. I did own a large dog at the time so I was relatively certain they'd not try to break into my unit.
(They've since added a locker at the convenience store w/in walking distance from that apartment. I have to assume they track package theft and use that as a basis for where they put the lockers).
Yes, I'm GLAD that technology solved a social problem... but it didn't actually solve the problem. Just routed around the symptom. I VASTLY prefer my current neighborhood, where not only can I leave Amazon packages sitting out for days, the Neighborhood facebook group will actively coordinate to find misdelivered packages and, if packages are going missing, immediately use the doorbell cameras to figure out if there's a thief about.
And we do that without using that classic bit of technology known as a gated community, so I can feel reasonably good that my neighbors are actually being neighborly.
One way to determine if a piece of tech is an 'unalloyed' good or if its just a hack borne of 'necessity' is whether people still choose to use it/pay for it when they genuinely don't have to do so. I never use Amazon lockers these days since the technology of bringing items to my doorstep in two days is the one I actually want.
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