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Having spent time in southern Italy I don't buy the historic narratives. Singapore was a swamp long after the historic issues impacted Southern Italy. China was wrecked in the 1900s but they are really putting in effort into building their country.
The issues in Southern Italy are related to an inability to organize. Buses crawl through cities in Sicily because there are parked cars everywhere. Building will be in disrepair and nobody bothers to paint them. They are not too poor to buy paint. The ticket machine at the train stations are constantly broken. There is garbage on the street despite high unemployment. Why are they not cleaning if they have nothing to do? There are basic issues with petty crime, people not being able to queue properly, loud behaviour and other anti social issues that make life hard there.
What struck me most about southern Italy is the lack of any large scale organization. Even when walking through large cities like Naples there are few businesses or organizations that seem to have a turnover of more than one million Euros. There are plenty of small restaurants, cafés, tiny hotels etc. Southern Italians seem perfectly capable of managing their own small scale operation. But they seem to fail specularly at scale. There seem to be few instances of larger groups of people coming together to achieve anything. Southern Italians are the inverse of Chinese and Japanese people.
There is simply no way a semiconductor manufacturer or any high tech firm can function when people can't cooperate. Southern Italy is a bit like India. There is plenty of talent and individually the people can be amazing. However, as a collective there is widespread dysfunction.
As for HBD narrative I found southern Italians to be much more European and lighter in complexion than expected.
Wasn't Singapore already a full-blown British colony (the better kind) with a large ethnically Chinese population with deep mercantile tradition to draw on?
Singapore/Malayan Chinese were incredibly rich by Chinese standards prior to WW2. Part of the reason the Japanese were so vicious during occupation was since money from SEA Chinese funded a lot of the mainland resistance.
On the other hand the jump between where Singapore was on the eve of independence and where it has since gone is huge and it was far from a given
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Could you appreciate the brain drain argument? Going by my own family, something like 17 out of 20 of my parents' generation left Sicily for America to start a new life away from the rest of the europoors.
This should tell you a lot about the psychology of those who chose to remain (though I love some of them). If you have enough ambition to paint your 700 square foot "house" with no windows that was a carriage repair shop in the 1940s, you might also have enough ambition to say fuck this lets leave for America.
The issue is that other European nations had similar levels of migration without long term disastrous effects on the economy and IQ.
It seems more likely to me that there might have been some initial difference and that most of the brain drain was internal in Italy due to very long running differences is economic development between the north and the south. Perhaps similar things happen in other places but it's less of a regional divide and more that the talented people went to the local city so if you measure the entire region it looks unchanged, while in Italy it doesn't.
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It seems like late-19th/early-20th century migration to America might have been roughly a quarter of the population of Sicily, which (assuming they were non-random, which seems obvious) could certainly be expected to have an effect. On the other hand, Sicily was poor before and poor after, so who knows?
The counterfactual is, of course, Ireland, which saw much higher and longer migration and now has the same wages as the historic colonial overlord.
Ireland is independent, sicily isn't. Independence can motivate some patriotic notions that slow brain drain.
It wasn't independent during the period of greatest emigration though.
But it was independent during the era of petty kingdoms, before the vikings. Sicilians were the playthings of Carthage, Rome, and Pyrrhus of Epirus. At least the Irish tribes were independent back then.
Culturally, the Irish at least had a memory of freedom from subjugation, even if they weren't actually united back then.
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Isn't Ireland benefiting from being vastly smaller and benefiting from being a low tax location for foreign corporations?
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