Why are Jewish people so disproportionately successful

In Indonesia at least, the overseas Chinese have faced considerable discrimination and persecution.

So now the question is: What educated cohesive subcultures have not enjoyed disproportionate success?

How about Mormons as another success example?

I don’t think Judaism, Jewish heritage, or Jewish culture is unique when considering success as defined here.

I agree totally. They just happen to be a very prominent example, in the Western world at least.

Like the Doper culture? :wink:

I’d say that these things are true, but also they operated in conjunction with a history of intermittent persecution over the centuries that, at least in Europe, (a) kept Jewish people from ever being able to settle down and become landed gentry, getting by on the accumulated wealth of previous generations, and (b) kept them in a state of reliance on assets that were portable and couldn’t easily be taken from them. And knowledge and intellectual skill are as good as it gets in that department.

In short, the effect of this history of persecution was that the tradition of valuing literacy, ideas, and argumentation never got a chance to dissipate, as it might’ve for some group that was able to rise to the top of the heap, and coast on their wealth once they got there.

Some areas yes, like politics, and maybe business. But how many Mormon Nobel Prize winners are there? Even highly accomplished Mormon scientists? Not too many or too accomplished. Quakers a few more, and one Nobel prize winner.

Agreed that being a perpetual outsider culture with a strong value on education will correlate with disproportionate success and is certainly a large part of the answer. And that is not all of the answer. The complete answer must explain the facts that 26% and 41% of the world’s total Nobel Prizes in Physics and Economics respectively have been won by Jews, an over-representation that no other educated outsider minority culture comes close to.

RTF … yes like Doper culture, very seriously. The arguing that my wife bemoans as dysfunctional or at least annoying (“Why is everything a debate with these kids?!?”) is a quintessential part of the culture and a key elemental skill, worldview even, in certain fields. It is that worldview that attracts people to the Dope and why Dopers have an over-representation of intellectuals … not people with higher IQs, but people who are attracted to putting the brains they got to those sorts of uses, people who are interested in questioning answers that others accept. We Dopers are not so smart either (certainly not as smart as some think they/we are) I don’t think … but we do have quite a few with a particular sets of useful habits of the mind.

I don’t think that changes anything. The OSC are not just some run-of-the-mill minority, but are helped by strong ties to China itself and other OSC families. There are almost 50M OSC throughout the world, most of whom are in Asia This is significantly different form Jewish populations.

Ok, but over-representation in Nobel prizes is not necessarily related to disproportionate success. We may have many Hindu Indians who win Nobels in the future but with enormous number of Hindu Indians there are it will not easily correlate to greater success for that group as a whole.

It … is … a certain sort … of disproportionate success. It may or may not relate to other sorts of success. The point is that with the “enormous number of Hindu Indians” a large percent of Nobels being won by them would not be disproportionate success … it would be proportionate success. The fact there are relatively few of them is a function that Indian culture does not develop and exploit the full intellectual potential of most of its people and perhaps to some Western world centrism of the Nobel process.

Missed the edit window: I realize that defines disproportionate representation, but that could simply be a necessary characteristic of larger groups. Nobel-ability within a group as a whole may be independently based on the same conditions required for financial success, yet not as a factor in achieving other definitions of success. It may even be something tied to unique circumstances in a narrow timeframe. If the Society of Friends had not been a declining religion in the 20th century we might have seen the same kind of disproportionate representation in Nobel prizes among them.

ETA: Ok, since you saw the first part, yes the Indian example wasn’t to explain the disproportion, but the effect of circumstances in creating the disproportion or lack of it.

Is the Nobel Prize really a good example? It is decided by a committee, no? That introduces at least some subjectivity into the results.

Things like billionaires or Thomas Edisons seem a truer measure. But then again, culture. Bah!

As an aside, are there still any Hebrews? Have they been re-branded, or did they fade out somehow?

First, that list is incomplete. Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is another Quaker Nobel Laureate as well as Frederick Sangar who won the Nobel Prize (twice!). There may be more, I stopped looking after a brief skim. There does appear to be an extended family (PDF warning), of which Sangar and Hodgkin were members, that have won eight prizes between them, however, and to what extent all of these can be considered Quaker Nobel Prizes is up for debate.

Second, are we really trying to pretend the Nobel Prize is subjective, and that it’s a cut and dried issue that Joseph Lister, a man who revolutionised medicine with his work on antisepsis, was not worthy of a Nobel Prize, whilst those who did receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology undoubtedly did more profound work than he did?

Third, half of the scientists listed on that page were dead before the Nobel Prize was even thought of; the first award only being made in 1901, with the prize not being awarded posthumously. I’d argue at least one (Dalton) of those Quaker scientists did pioneering, revolutionary work that, if performed a little later, would undoubtedly have been recognised by the Nobel Committee.

Lastly, the world population of Quakers is about 360,000, whilst the world population of Jews is 13.3 million, 36 times as many, and by the time the twentieth century came around, where science came into its own (and the Nobel Prize appeared), the Quaker star was already beginning to fade.

(Disclosure: I’m neither a Jew nor a Quaker).

Their small number.

If you want to calculate success per Nobel Prize winners, you should start by discounting the useless Nobel Prizes – the Peace and Literature. So I get 161 Jewish Nobel Prize winners. With 13.3 million people that amounts to 1 per 82,608. The Faroe Island has one Nobel Prize winner. There’re 50,000 people on the godforsaken islands. So 1 per 50.000. Ergo the Faroese are vastly more successful than the Jews. Actually more so, since Jews tend to be killed and Faroese tend to breed like rats. So the relative population size was probably a lot more to the Jewish side if you go back a few years. Hurrah for me. I’m successful per proxy!

Also fun to compare:
Mormon criminals and Jewish criminals.

From the above wholly unscientific comparison, it seems that even in crime Jews do much better. While the Jewish immigrant generation (1880-1920), had less alcoholism, crime, and domestic violence than other immigrant groups, when they did cross over to the dark side, they did great.

The infamous Mormons were lone sad individuals who murdered for provate reasons, like Ted Bundy. Compare that to the big Jewish mobsters, or to Bernie Madoff, who got away with the biggest Ponzi scheme history ever saw.

I am not sure how much I can add to the discussion; we have had so many interesting comments and supporting statistics up to this point.

The question is not a simple one to answer, but I will try to give my opinion based on what I have observed.

As some have touched on already, Jewish culture has always encouraged children and adults to study hard, whether the material is religious or not, so they tend to do well academically. Aside from that, I think that it has been a matter of being in the right place at the right time. A case in point is Hollywood; many of the early pioneers of the motion picture industry, such as the original Warner Bros., were Jewish, and it is common knowledge that to this day the Jews still have a very large presence in Hollywood. Experience has taught many of them to recognize a profitable opportunity when they see one.

As for their success having anything to do with “genetic IQ,” I find that too controversial an idea to offer any kind of feedback.

Capt Ridley’s,

Some valid points about Quakers as a specific example (albeit the Nobel being subjective and some who deserved it not getting on the list is one that presumptively cut out some Jewish contenders as well, unless you posit a strong anti-Quaker bias by those who have been on the Comittee). My counterpoint remains: “success” as measured by having outlier levels in sciences at least, is not something that follows in all or even most outsider groups that highly value education, even if Quakers are also over-represented. It alone is an insufficient explanation.

Don’t forget the great Jewish master spy tradition (my personal favorite is the notorious Two-Gun Cohen, who handled counter-intelligence for the Chinese in the 1920s-30s).

“Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor… except crime!”

An excellent article pertinent to this op!

One bit that applies to one point made earlier:

Another about a different one:

Again, my take, FWIW: I have no quibbles withe the cpncept that IQ, whatever it actually represents, is to a large degree genetic. There seems little debate that the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is very modestly higher than the genral population mean. That difference is modest enough that it means very little for the average person however, Jewish or not. Most Jews are still pretty broadly average in IQ. Yes, a broadly better than average IQ is required for the highest level of accomplishments but it is not enough. As the article points out:

but the overrepresentation is greater than that. One must also have the interest in applying that IQ in particular ways. That interest is cultural. Jewish culture has both had the outsider insecurity and has pushed the concept of argumentative nerd and geek as an aspirational model for centruries while the most able in many other cultures were aiming for warrior or hunter or craftsman … not being a person of books (let alone of the Book). Once again, these differences between Jewish and other cultures is no longer as true. Younger Jews are less insecure about their place in the world and other cultures elevate the argumentative geek/nerd archetype too now. Whatever gene pool factor has been extant may even be less pertinent as Jews marry others in increasingly greater numbers (although to be fair, they do tend to attract and be attracted to smart mates with similar cultural values …)

This looks like bad math to me. Number of Nobels to the population is not a clear correlation to anything, and neither are Olympic gold medals.