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Yes but children regress to the mean somewhat even with highly-filtered parents, chain migration is going to be something that gets lobbied for exhaustively and without end and is closer to unfiltered. There's also a certain social effect where the children of people who had top 1% outcomes in life to get out of Bumfuckistan and get to the West, even if intelligent, will fall short of parental accomplishments/expectation and then blame it on Racism instead of recognizing their parental achievement.
This is particularly exacerbated in a decent amount of groups where the family that chose to remain in the country of origin are actually doing pretty damned well (since they're top 1%ers intelligence-wise in an emerging economy, a lot of which have gone gangbusters especially if you are in that 1%) and thus look back at their cousins who are still at home and see they've got insane luxury lifestyles whilst their parents choosing to bail on Bumfuckistan has earned them, the children, an upper middle class lifestyle. I grew up with a lot of Asian diaspora Western-born first generation immigrants where this theme came up a lot, where their parents looked like a genius fleeing Vietnam circa 1960 and yet circa 2020 the family (that was upper echelon enough to get the people that left the resources and education to leave) back home are 9-figure millionaires whilst the emigrant is a Doctor.
Then inevitably a torrent of bitching about 'wah my cousins all get random do-nothing sinecures and drive Lamborghinis around all day, it's the rice ceiling keeping me down in the West' when they should have just stayed in the initial country where they were of the upper crust.
Vietnam has spent decades rapidly climbing out of crushing poverty, yet the number of centi-millionaires there was still only 58 just a couple years ago. If you know close relatives of 2+ centi-millionaire families, your experience may not be statistically normal. I know it's easier for a whole family than for an individual to amass that total wealth, but even plain millionaire individuals number only in the few tens of thousands in Vietnam.
Qualitatively, though, I'd bet there is a "big fish in a small pond" effect that applies to many more people. PPP is an average over many classes of goods, and some things (real estate, anything Baumol-effected) are much more affordable to Vietnamese residents than to Vietnamese-Americans here.
Unfortunately I couldn't audit their finances in detail, but the luxury goods they consumed and the way that their cousins gambled seemed indicative that they've got enough money to be 'ultra rich' inside Vietnam. Maybe not 9-figures explicitly, but I'm aware of 8 figures worth of cars owned by one of those families and that's just the overseas offspring without knowing a ton about their parents.
Baumol is huge for this sort of stuff. Servants and labor are vanishingly cheap compared to what they are in the West. I've had coworkers go back to India after getting remote privileges and turn 100k USD per annum into 3 live-in servants and a very nice house in second-tier cities
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I suspect that Vietnam's numbers of the Rich are somewhat underreported due to a large amount of corruption in play over there, though 'capable of living the lifestyle of a 'rich person' in the West' is likely considerably cheaper due to Baumol and service roles being 10% of the cost. You're also probably going to have more leeway to get around potential legal barriers to your wealth like taxes. On the other hand, it could be VND Centi-Millionaires since that's only about 4k USD.
I'm based in SEA currently and FIRED and I'm fairly sure if I tried to mimic my current lifestyle it'd cost me about 10x what I'm paying for it now and I'm somewhere that's not as cheap as Vietnam.
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There are populations in Africa that are pretty smart. It is an oversimplification to talk about blacks. There are too many different populations.
That's true, but they do also get to benefit from a bunch of programs and systems that were essentially expressly setup to deal with ADOS and associated globalized guilt over them. I went to University with a guy who was Igbo, had forehead scarring and was son of a mid-tier UN official and had a very nice setup in Nigeria from what I saw on Instagram. He ended up getting instantly hired as a graduate into a cushy diversity role before getting bored after 2 years and returning home to get back to the Princeling lifestyle. He wasn't a genius but also was like solid level for the course I was doing. No sane person would call him unprivileged.
Also true. I do wonder if long term that is bad for the Igbo. Assuming in 200 years there is still an economic return to hard work and intelligence do you short circuit selection pressure when the economic return is provided regardless of hard work and intelligence?
Is it a better use of his intellect to run the family business/concerns or to go grind at UMC careerism in the West?
Family business
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They just join the mass of DSA failsons who are disproportionately white who blame the same downward mobility on capitalism.
It stands out because people hate this behavior more from foreigners (or "foreigners"), and the DSA-types know better than to appear as a movement of white failsons looking to loot others. Better to do it in the name of minorities.
True, though the DSA failsons are frequently getting actively selected against for University and Jobs plus their parents weren't as filtered-for in their mildly-accomplished careers in the West and thereby you'd expect less of an issue with mean regression.
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