Are you Jewish?
Yes. Why?
If I were a rich man,
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I’d biddy biddy bum.
If I were a wealthy man.
I wouldn’t have to work hard.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a biddy biddy rich,
Idle-diddle-daidle-daidle man.
Sorry, but pretty much any group’s “success” is absolute kid stuff compared to that of upper class Brits of Norman descent.
Ha! Yes indeed, good hypothesis.
Before the Holocaust Germany had so many Nobel prize winners…after hardly any.
Ever since excuses came-up, no one is ever wrong.
Muslims also circumcise, or am I missing something?
Regarding the Jewish debate, is it simply that a high proportion of US Jews are middle class, they are status-conscious and their culture esteems education, work and family values?
I think one of the reasons Asians can’t get extremely wealthy is because culturally, Asians are very different from jews. Although both cultures emphasize education the similarities end there. Asians focus on authority and rote memorization, whereas jews are encouraged to think critically and always question. Asians will work hard and become doctors, engineers, etc. but it is difficult to advance, either because Asians lack the self confidence to speak up or can’t play that game. The EQ of Asians is low, in other words.
The other thing is that Asians tend to value face. Thus, that means buying the biggest houses, sending kids to the best and most expensive schools, buying luxury cars, etc and blowing any wealth they may have accumulated for really nothing. Jews are taught on day one the value of investing and the value of delayed gratification.
Of course there are exceptions to every race and culture but as someone who grew up Chinese but is converting to judaism, this is what I see.
What a weird post. FYI 17 of the world’s 100 richest people are Asian. The top-ranking one is #8, at $31 billion.
Please define “Asian”.
Are you really arguing that Afghans and the Japanese should be grouped into the same category?
For myself, I don’t see what Banghladeshis and Koreans have in common and would make it more sense to put them in the same category as opposed to say Norwegians and Brazilians, but perhaps you can enlighten me.
Don’t be so hard on yourself.
Not saying they can’t get wealthy, I’m saying the chances are a lot lower. Given that china itself comprise 20% of the worlds population but jews only 0.2% the chance for a jew to make the top 100 is about 100 times greater than that of an asian.
And when I say asian, I mean, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, philipinos, etc.
I never like lumping Asians all into one category but Americans seem to have this sense that all “Asians” are hardworking, etc. and this is where i completely disagree with this american notion. if you just look at the Chinese, jews are about 100 times more likely to make the top 100 list than a Chinese person.
You’re extrapolating a lot from a limited set of data. Western style capitalism hasn’t been at work in Asia for nearly as long as it has in Europe or the Americas, nor have they been a part of Western culture nearly as long as Jews.
The analysis is even more flawed if you try to use a statistical comparison. While India and China do account for 1/3 of the world’s population, neither has exactly been a capitalist paradise until recently. And what happened as soon as those countries turned more favorably towards capitalism in the last couple decades? Bam. Billionaires popping up all over the place.
Give it a few more generations and more general acceptance of capitalism and let’s see what happens, shall we?
I thought it was relevant to note that as of now (October 9, 2013) with the Economics, Peace, and Literature prizes still to be announced, there are six more Jewish Nobel Laureates:
François Englert (Physics)
James Rothman (Physiology or Medicine)
Randy Schekman (Physiology or Medicine)
Martin Karplus (Chemistry)
Michael Levitt (Chemistry)
Arieh Warshel (Chemistry)
I recognize that this does nothing to elucidate the “why” of this thread’s title, “Why are Jewish people so disproportionately successful?” Still, I find it quite remarkable (IMO, YMMV, etc).
I don’t. On the contrary, it’s exactly what you’d expect based on current institutional trends. I.e., it’s incontestable that, for whatever reason(s), Jews are very overrepresented in modern academia, medicine, and science research in general. It goes without saying that we’d therefore expect Jews to be overrepresented at the highest levels of those disciplines too.
What would be remarkable would be if, given the current demographics of the Western academic establishment, Jews weren’t overrepresented among Nobel Prize science laureates.
I believe Jews win about 25% of nobel prizes (and fields medals, US medals of science, etc) despite being something like 0.2% of the world’s population.
They aren’t any smarter I don’t know what you are reading… They feel they have been suppressed by the holocaust and they are they only ones with struggles. So they stick together. They have lobbyists in DC for Israel which gets strong contacts in business and politics. So they are not any smarter they just stay together and will make sure a jew gets higher up the latter before anyone else even if they are more qualified. I am not anti semitic or agiant Israel. I have to give them credit even though I feel it’s disgusting how they are treating Palestine but that’s a completely different subject.
I wonder what search string brought him here…