Why is southeast Asia so advanced?

Great Debates
121

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Based on my observations of people with IQs in the 70s? I would expect such a nation to simply not have a functioning airport or seaport
They might have a government, (based on the premise that brighter people can secure and holds power), but they could simply not have any actual infrastructure. You could not keep water and sewage flowing or traffic lights operating or provide electricity if half the nation had to be shown each day how to do any task more complicated than rolling dough or shovelling dirt
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I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the electricity and airports in Nigeria (such as they are) have made extensive use of foreign contractors; that their skyscrapers were built by Western (or Oriental) construction companies; and ditto for their highways and railroads.

I will guess that even in situations where it’s nominally a local company (or local labor) that performed these functions, if you look closer, there was heavy non-local involvement.

If I’m wrong on this point, I will concede that there’s a good chance that the IQ measurements for Nigeria are wrong OR IQ doesn’t mean what the “psychometric” set seems to think it means.

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[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Try to claim that these countries are doing well because they are ‘smart’ is ridiculous.

The answer is clear - the countries that have done well in Asia are the ones which have embraced capitalism and free trade. What’s the difference between North Korea and South Korea? North Korea is a capitalist country with open borders, and North Korea is a communist country with relatively closed borders.

Hong Kong started with the same population mix as China - no intelligence difference. Hong Kong was run in a “Laissez-Faire” manner by the British governor, and to this day has one of the least regulated economic systems in the world Hong Kong has been an economic miracle - a magnet for foreign capital.

You can look at countries that made major turnarounds in their economic fortunes, and it’s always correlated with the opening of trade and reduction of restrictions on economic behaviour. The poorest countries in the region (for example, Vietnam) were the last remnants of communist economics. Vietnam is starting to turn around, but only because it has gradually accepted capitalism and trade into the mix.

South Korea, Singapore, Indonedia, and even Japan used to be thought of as ‘sweat shop’ nations - places which only had the advantage of very cheap labor. These countries had populations that had strong work ethics - they had to, since they worked their asses off just to survive.

These countries started off as sweatshop nations, allowed themselves to go through that phase, and saw huge influxes of foreign capital as as result. That allowed them to build modern infrastructures and drive up the value of their labor, which improved the lives of the people, allowed them to become better educated and healthy, and gave them even more of a competitive advantage. It’s a ‘virtuous cycle’. Having started with virtually no infrastructure, they started fresh with the latest in technology and building techniques and gained yet another advantage.

The same thing happened with Germany to some extent. Having a good chunk of its (old) industrial base destroyed in WWII, and then rebuilding with more modern factories and infrastructure gave them an early advantage in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and their economy exploded. (West Germany, that is. east Germany remained a communist hellhole).

So here’s the ingredients, if you want to cook up your own economic miracle:

  1. A stable government
  2. Economic freedom
  3. Free Trade
  4. A peaceful population with a strong work ethic
  5. A comparative advantage in cheap labor, to start.

The last is actually rather important. Nations that have other comparative advantages, specifically around resources, have not done so well, despite getting huge influxes of foreign capital. The reason is that the resources usually fall quickly into the hands of governments or oligarchs, and therefore actually prop up centralized systems of government. The middle east is a good example. Foreign aid to Africa is another - rather than building wealth from the ground up through the people (and therefore developing robust, distributed economies), the aid flows in to corrupt governments, which use it to buy off cronies and maintain the systems that cause the poverty in the first place.

When the comparative advantage comes from the people themselves, governments are forced to back off and allow their economies to develop.

So if you want to predict the next emerging first-world countries, just make a list of the biggest ‘sweat shop’ nations today, and filter the list by selecting the ones that have the most open markets and the least amount of government interference.
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For the most part I agree with all of this. From an economic success standpoint, the factors you cite are necessary. There is one more factor: the intelligence to take advantage of the other factors. Intelligence is necessary; it is not sufficient. Wealth is only one proxy by which one might infer a population’s intelligence, though, and as I mentioned above it is a crude one. North Korea might have failed to follow your economic wealth recipe, but based on accomplishments such as their development of rocketry and nuclear programs, it’s not as if one could look at North Korea and say there is no reason to infer a national intelligence on the order of their neighbors in the South.

For those of you unenamored with the idea that intelligence is either quantifiable or has much to do with national successes, and that IQ tests are lousy proxies, I offer the following thought experiment: Give me a nation filled with individuals who have all tested at an IQ of 120. You may have a nation filled with individuals who have all tested at an IQ of 90. Let every other parameter be the same. Are their courses and successes on the world stage going to be the same?

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That begs the question as to whether there are nations where the entire population averages a lower intelligence than others. And to the extent that there may be, how much of it is due to malnutrition, poor natal care, and other factors that can change as an economy improves? In other words, maybe average intelligence grows along with the economy, and the countries that are poor aren’t poor because of low intelligence, but because they don’t have the political and economic systems required to kick-start the economy down the path to prosperity in the first place.

I certainly think there are other cultural factors at play which prevent some countries from liberalizing. Tribalism, for one. The notion that your tribe should be favored over others is an impediment to freer trade and capital flow.

I’ll bet there were people who thought the villagers in poor asian countries were too stupid for capitalism. Until they had their asses handed to them in the global marketplace by those ‘stupid’ villagers.

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[QUOTE=BrightNShiny]
Again, this is silly, you simply seem not to understand the nature of historical or economic analysis. If tomorrow, global warming shuts down the Indian monsoon cycle, then Indian agriculture will collapse, causing the Indian economy to contract signficantly. Because there are too many unknowns in the future, current trends may not hold.
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If the factors you describe are so fleeting that they can’t be used to predict the future better than a random guess, they aren’t very interesting to me.

I’m interested in explanations that can be tested. I’m willing to give you a “fudge factor,” i.e. I’m not demanding 100% accuracy.

Yes, but I don’t believe there is a simple and direct relationship.

Just because you have data doesn’t mean your explanations are not ad hoc.

No I’m not.

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the electricity and airports in Nigeria (such as they are) have made extensive use of foreign contractors; that their skyscrapers were built by Western (or Oriental) construction companies; and ditto for their highways and railroads.

I will guess that even in situations where it’s nominally a local company (or local labor) that performed these functions, if you look closer, there was heavy non-local involvement.
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Note that I said nothing about construction. I am aware that a lot of stuff gets built in the Third World by people brought in from the First World.

However, people with an IQ of 70 could not be used to simply keep the stuff running after it was built. In an airport, once you’ve taken the people who have scored above 70 (whch would probably include a lot of “slow” people from 70 to 90), and made them air traffic controllers, department managers, reservations specialists, and mechanics, you’ve still got over half the population that is not capable of being ticket takers, security people, or even baggage handlers. To keep the water running, you have to have a lot of people at the lower end of the scale to maintain the pipes, but those “loewer end” people still must be able to function above a level of IQ 70 unless they are going to be paired, one for one, with people of higher IQ.
Heck, if over half the population had an IQ of 70 or less, the population could not even successfully raise children (as in “keep them alive until adulthood” not as in “create well-rounded adults”).

Have you ever worked in a labor intensive occupation? Back before automation, you could have probably filled up a production line with people of IQ 70 or less whose only job was to set and tighten a particular bolt for eight hours every day. However, having worked in construction and on freighters, I can tell you that even ditch diggers and stevedores have to have more intelligence than that represented by an IQ of 70 to get a job done.

Who knows? Are we going into a heterogenous population from a country where food and education are fairly stable across the nation and extracting only those persons who have either an IQ of 120 or 90? Or are we wandering out to different countries with different living conditions and selecting people based on tests that may or may not be equivalent? In a thought experiment, we can specifiy that we are separating smart people from dumb people and asking “Which will more likely succeed?” In the world as we find it, we are faced with an enormous range of socio-economic factors, widely differing political and economic systems, a mish-mash of educational systems, and disparities in diet, and would be asked to make a decision based on the separate scores of non-identical tests as though they represented some objective reality.

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
If the factors you describe are so fleeting that they can’t be used to predict the future better than a random guess, they aren’t very interesting to me.
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They’re not fleeting, and I didn’t make a random guess. China’s economic reforms have been underway for 30 years now. If that’s your definition of fleeting, then I think you need to pick up a dictionary.

If you’re grasp of history and economics is this thin, then there’s no point to this discussion. My predictions are easy enough to pull from my posts. Simply because other factors are also in play, that doesn’t mean the stuff I’ve posted is fleeting (unless you think capitalism is fleeting :rolleyes: )

If you were, then you wouldn’t be pushing you’re untestable “intelligence” hypothesis. I’ve given you my predictions, and barring disruption of current trends, they can be verified in 20 years. Of course, for someone with as a nonsensical worldview as you have, if in ten years there was global flu pandemic, this would someone how disprove capitalism. :rolleyes:

This is a completely untestable theory. You can’t even state what you are talking about clearly.

Ah, ok. So data doesn’t prove anything, unless it proves your own pet non-theory.

Yes, you are, despite your claims to the contrary. If you are talking about a quality that can be increased by education, then you are talking about education levels.

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[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Note that I said nothing about construction. I am aware that a lot of stuff gets built in the Third World by people brought in from the First World.

However, people with an IQ of 70 could not be used to simply keep the stuff running after it was built. In an airport, once you’ve taken the people who have scored above 70 (whch would probably include a lot of “slow” people from 70 to 90), and made them air traffic controllers, department managers, reservations specialists, and mechanics, you’ve still got over half the population that is not capable of being ticket takers, security people, or even baggage handlers. To keep the water running, you have to have a lot of people at the lower end of the scale to maintain the pipes, but those “loewer end” people still must be able to function above a level of IQ 70 unless they are going to be paired, one for one, with people of higher IQ.
Heck, if over half the population had an IQ of 70 or less, the population could not even successfully raise children (as in “keep them alive until adulthood” not as in “create well-rounded adults”).

Have you ever worked in a labor intensive occupation? Back before automation, you could have probably filled up a production line with people of IQ 70 or less whose only job was to set and tighten a particular bolt for eight hours every day. However, having worked in construction and on freighters, I can tell you that even ditch diggers and stevedores have to have more intelligence than that represented by an IQ of 70 to get a job done.
Who knows? Are we going into a heterogenous population from a country where food and education are fairly stable across the nation and extracting only those persons who have either an IQ of 120 or 90? Or are we wandering out to different countries with different living conditions and selecting people based on tests that may or may not be equivalent? In a thought experiment, we can specifiy that we are separating smart people from dumb people and asking “Which will more likely succeed?” In the world as we find it, we are faced with an enormous range of socio-economic factors, widely differing political and economic systems, a mish-mash of educational systems, and disparities in diet, and would be asked to make a decision based on the separate scores of non-identical tests as though they represented some objective reality.
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I suppose this bone has been chewed on long enough. I appreciate the thoughtful replies from you, Pizzabrat, Sam Stone, BrightNShiny, and others.

As I look at my own reactions and biases around the issue of intelligence and the successes (or lack thereof) of a population, I think my frustrations center around two areas:

First, there is the science of the discussion. It seems to me what studies are out there support–however we may wish it otherwise–that there are differences in intelligence among individuals and populations. While I recognize the enormous potential for abuse around this (often, unfortunately, by idiots) I nevertheless personally find the efforts to explain it away unconvincing and hollow.

Second, a frequent consequence of dismissing population differences is to lay blame for groups who do poorly at the feet of others. Some group or nation is doing poorly? Since they draw on the same base talent pool, some other explanation must be to blame. Given the history of institutional racism (as you have pointed out many times) there is a common predilection to let that or similar explanations stand as the only explanation, discarding out of hand even the possibility that basic, inherent population differences exist. It would be academic suicide, for instance, for a university researcher to even propose that East Asians are just plain (genetically) smarter, and that’s why they have more gadgets. Yet a study proposing everything but that explanation would be perfectly publishable. Casting out explanations without even studying them is bad science, and in the long run, bad science is will lead to bad decisions about to help the disadvantaged, however well-intentioned.

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[QUOTE=BrightNShiny]
They’re not fleeting, and I didn’t make a random guess. China’s economic reforms have been underway for 30 years now.
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Then why did claim it was “silly” when I pointed out that 50% accuracy is worthless?

Before I answer that, let me ask you this: How would one test your explanations?

Oh really? So it’s your statement that any quality that can be increased by education is itself equivalent to education?

129

brazil84 and **BrightNShiny **, take deep breaths.

You guys are now into the realm of posting so many single line swipes that neither of you can possibly be sure that you are arguing against or rebutting or confirming any specific point.

Each of you need to back off and post a coherent explanation of your positions and just let slide any potential misunderstandings that have gone before.

“Are too”/“is not” is simply not a productive debate.

130

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Note that I said nothing about construction. I am aware that a lot of stuff gets built in the Third World by people brought in from the First World.

However, people with an IQ of 70 could not be used to simply keep the stuff running after it was built.
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I disagree to a certain extent. According to Wikipedia, Nigeria has 33 million men between the ages of 15 and 64.

If their average IQ is 70 that leaves approximately 1.5 million men with IQ’s of at least 95.

Assuming that a few hundred thousand are in school, or otherwise indisposed, that leaves a workforce of at least 1 million men that is probably decent enough to do a semi-decent job of keeping a few airports running and supplying erratic electricity service to parts of the country.

This is especially so if the workforce is supplemented with foreign contractors.

I couldn’t find much on this online, but I did find this:

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Which still leaves the proble that over half the country would be incapable of keeping their own children alive long enough to survive into adulthood.

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[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Which still leaves the proble that over half the country would be incapable of keeping their own children alive long enough to survive into adulthood.
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Why? Someone with an IQ of 65 might be a lousy parent, and their child might have a much higher risk of dying, but that doesn’t mean that none of their children will survive.

There are plenty of animals that are obviously far less intelligent than people who succeed in raising their young.

Anyway, I did a couple searches – infant and child mortality rates are tragically high in Nigeria.

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
Why? Someone with an IQ of 65 might be a lousy parent, and their child might have a much higher risk of dying, but that doesn’t mean that none of their children will survive.

There are plenty of animals that are obviously far less intelligent than people who succeed in raising their young.

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You mean ones that have natural survival instinct? The animals that don’t require care until the young is… 10?

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Since tomndebb thinks I’m swiping, I’ll bow out of this thread. I think my arguments are pretty clear, so I’ll leave it at that. I’ve made my historical and economic arguments, and I think they’re pretty self-evident. If you don’t agree, then such is life.

135

[QUOTE=Snarky_Kong]
You mean ones that have natural survival instinct?
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I think that humans have natural survival instincts. Have you ever stopped eating food for a while and gotten the urge to eat? Do you think you feel that way because of some television show you watched when you were little?

So, no, when I say “animals,” I’m excluding human beings.

136

[QUOTE=brazil84]
I think that humans have natural survival instincts. Have you ever stopped eating food for a while and gotten the urge to eat? Do you think you feel that way because of some television show you watched when you were little?
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Wanting to eat because one is hungry does not get food into one’s mouth. Acquiring food requires a level of planning that does not occur in people with IQs below 70 (particularly when you’re talking about a population in which half of the people are below 70). There is a remote chance that a person with an IQ below 70 could survive in a paradise where food dangles from trees or is found in roots 365 days of the year. In a location that requires at least subsistence farming to provide some minimal intake of calories (or where food is produced elsewhere and the person must engage in some form of commerce or industry to secure food), a large numbers of persons with IQs below 70 would probably starve, themselves, much less feed their children.

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[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Wanting to eat because one is hungry does not get food into one’s mouth. Acquiring food requires a level of planning that does not occur in people with IQs below 70 (particularly when you’re talking about a population in which half of the people are below 70). There is a remote chance that a person with an IQ below 70 could survive in a paradise where food dangles from trees or is found in roots 365 days of the year. In a location that requires at least subsistence farming to provide some minimal intake of calories (or where food is produced elsewhere and the person must engage in some form of commerce or industry to secure food), a large numbers of persons with IQs below 70 would probably starve, themselves, much less feed their children.
[/QUOTE]

Do you think that acquiring food is among the most cognitively demanding tasks that would be faced by a hypothetical parent of low IQ living in Nigeria?

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
Anyway, I did a couple searches – infant and child mortality rates are tragically high in Nigeria.
[/QUOTE]

Infant and child mortality rates are tragically high in Nigeria, but I think you’ll find that’s due more to poor medical care and poor sanitation than it is to anything else.

Tomndebb is right. People with that level of mental retardation that you’re postulating have enough trouble taking care of themselves in day to day life, let alone raising children. That’s going to be even more true in a place like Nigeria, that doesn’t have the sort of social welfare protections that the US does.

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[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
Infant and child mortality rates are tragically high in Nigeria, but I think you’ll find that’s due more to poor medical care and poor sanitation than it is to anything else.
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I did a google search on “child mortality nigeria”

These selections are from the first hit:

I would agree that a lot of the children in question would not die if their village had access to western style municipal water and medical care. However, it does appear that poor parenting causes and exacerbates a lot of the problems.

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:Z_DoXDPd7SoJ:www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol11/2/11-2.pdf+child+mortality+nigeria&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
Do you think that acquiring food is among the most cognitively demanding tasks that would be faced by a hypothetical parent of low IQ living in Nigeria?
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Have you spent any time with someone with an IQ of 70? Your line of reasoning doesn’t clear the first hurdle. These are people who cannot take care of themselves without significant outside help. With little assistance and with 50% of the population in the same state, no society, no matter how dysfunctional, would be able to exist.

Your premise is a non-starter.