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I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.
On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?
I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.
What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.
And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.
I guess someone has to.
Filtering. Filtering. Almost there.. No, you've still got coffee grounds left over. Keep at it champ.
The average Indian who arrives in the US is not representative of a random sampling of the native population. I'd know, I am one (Indian that is, I haven't been in the States since the NY skyline was a tad bit different).
The number of would be immigrants is far larger than the number that get through. You're filtering for IQ, conscientiousness and a million other things, leaving aside differences in drive that can motivate someone to cross a couple oceans and establish themselves far from home. That's before even getting into sociocultural aspects.
Leadership is certainly a part of it, at least if you're imagining just taking the same group of people and transplanting them under new management. Indian managers, in India, suck ass. They're mostly stick and little carrot, when they're not sodomizing you with it. Our societal norms and governmental system, while not outright dysfunctional, are still glaringly suboptimal in many regards. Being an entrepreneur is god knows how many times easier in the States, and so is relying on talent and work ethic to pay dividends.
The worst part of India, as most Indians who've escaped would tell you, is all the other Indians. The systemic failings are so coup-complete that the best recourse for a talented Indian is to take his talent elsewhere.
This strict system of skimming off the top is how a country that has, the last time I checked reliable figures, an average IQ in the upper 70s or low 80s, manages to contribute the single most successful ethnic group in terms of average income in the US.
There are plenty of other HBD-related factors, IQ here is not distributed as it would be in a homogenous population. I have good reason to believe that the upper caste/Brahmins are smarter on average, and I'm not one myself, just a cut above what would count as so underprivileged that I'd get AA in India. Millennia of strict endogamy and self-selecting for intellectual pursuits does funny things, just look at the Jews (though they were forced into their role more than willing adopters). And these upper caste people are disproportionately likely to be immigrants to the US. Sadly the matter isn't remotely as well researched as HBD in the US, not that I'm not convinced by available evidence.
Presumably this also answers @sickamore 's question, so I'm not going to duplicate it.
The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.
We have many examples of countries where you have a large population at one level and a minority that performs much better. And whether it’s in compounds or in open cities, they typically live in much more advanced, first-world level communities than the rest of the population.
I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this. Rich Brazilians too, don’t accept living in squalor, nor do the wealthier South Africans. Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia likewise build clean, functioning, safe and high quality neighborhoods. Even the British themselves did this in India, and the neighborhoods they built are still some of the most desirable in the country, with gardens and parks and tree lined streets.
But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.
I struggle to understand why all these smart people are content with this, and I think it’s because emigration is an option. If you’re a smart Indian and want to live in a clean and developed country, it’s much easier to move to one (as you are doing) than to carve out a space like that in India. But that’s also pretty sad for India. This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization. It should look like it.
There are plenty of gated communities and upscale neighborhoods. They might not be as pretty as their European counterparts, but they're safe, clean and quiet. And some cities are certainly far nicer to live in, Varanasi is notorious even to Indians as being a hive of scum and villainy.
We've been used to that kind of bullshit, pun intended, well before the floodgates on emigration opened up. It might act as a relief valve for the perfect combination of talented and discontent, but there are millions of us who could make it in the West yet are mostly content to remain, even if they grumble about conditions. I know plenty of doctors more talented than me who decide to remain. It's the default decision.
Humans can adjust to a great deal indeed. It's not that they don't care at all about cleanliness, it's that they don't care enough for that to be their raison d'être. Hell, that's true enough for me, I certainly appreciate Western cities, but them being cleaner is not in my top 5 reasons for emigrating. The other concerns are far more prosaic.
The coordination problem is insurmountable, it's a country of 1.3 billion people, I assure you that some have tried.
When it comes to projects like cleaning up the Ganges, the government doesn't bother because the electorate doesn't care. Not enough to swing an election, which is all that matters. The Ganga is sacred and pure even when the coliform count makes the rectum of the last patient I saw with faecal impaction seem like a sterile field.
What are the best examples?
Uh.. I don't want to doxx my precise geographical neighborhood by naming only the ones I've been in.
I'm sure a quick Google search for "high end gated communities" in a bunch of random cities would suffice. I am at least certain of the fact that they exist, even if I can't point out which ones are the "best".
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