Book thread on "The Billionaire's Apprentice," by Anita Raghavan, an Indian-American journalist. It chronicles the rise and fall of three-time McKinsey director and Goldman-Sachs board member Rajat Gupta and billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. (1/n)
Raghavan refers to Rajat's generation as the "twice-blessed," benefitting from both the end of the Raj and the passing of the Hart-Celler act of 1965, which allowed them to escape their newly independent homeland and come to the US instead, where they quickly rose to the top.
The book spends some time chronicling the ethnic divisions in NY finance and business. There was a WASP ethnic clique and a Jewish one, and the newly arriving Indians quickly set up their own. The usual process was firms beginning to hire Indians to get a leg up on...
...their American competitors, followed by the Indians leaving or taking over and hiring more Indians, forming their own ethnic network, and shutting Americans out. This process is an example of a prisoner's dilemma; Americans...
...are harmed by being shut out of large chunks of the market by Indian ethnic networks (note: ethnic networking is a zero-sum game; other groups doing it hurts you), but companies feel the need to hire Indians to compete. The solution to this dilemma is immigration restriction.
Raj Rajaratnam in particular used an ethnic Indian network of insiders at a number of American tech companies as a source of internal secrets to use for insider trading, making billions. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs got over ancestral hatreds to form a common front against whites.
Despite being a book about Indians committing crimes, the book practically oozes Indian triumphalism, with Gupta's ascension to director of McKinsey representing the company rejecting the 'homogenous [read: white] past' in favor of the 'diverse and multicultural future'.
The first Indian at McKinsey, Tino, made it a priority to promote and mentor more Indians. His group then helped lead white collar outsourcing to India in the 90s.
Raj Rajatnaram was incredibly successful with his insider trading, becoming one of the 400 richest people in America.
What brought Gupta down was selling information about Goldman Sachs to Rajatnaram while on the board. Both were jailed.
Funnily enough, Gupta's father was arrested during the Raj for impersonating someone else to take an exam for them. The author expects us to sympathize with him because he was doing it for a good cause (raising money for the socialists).
The author concludes that the fact that two leading lights of the Indian-American community were arrested proves that Indians have made it, as they are powerful and secure enough to commit crimes at the top of American society, and are starting to flex their power.
I think the big takeaway from this book is that high-skilled immigration from India is a terrible idea, because they form ethnic networks (zero-sum) to shut out Americans. The small boost a company gets from hiring one is not worth the long term transformation of institutions.
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Book thread on "Into the Cannibal's Pot", written in 2011 (pre-Great Awokening) on post-apartheid South Africa and its relevance to America, by the daughter of an important anti-apartheid activist.
Mercer directly compares the ethnic transformation of America via Hart-Celler to the turnover of the state to the ANC in South Africa. Same process, just slower. She is very hostile to both Hart-Celler and Civil Rights.
The book is full of incredibly vicious crime stories. One of reminded of how over-the-top horrific black-on-white crimes in the US tend to be.
Sean Last has correctly pointed out that Ellis Islander assimilation is mostly a myth, at least politically. When looking at white ethnic groups, generally only the traditionally Protestant ones are majority (R).
But was a simple partisanship analysis misses is that this is basically a consequence of the Mean Voter Theorem. Whites are still a supermajority of US voters, so the dividing line between parties is among generally leftish white ethnic groups.
If you look at political views (specifically: govt redistribution, free speech, gun ownership, govt regulation, and postmaterialist values), rather than partisanship, there is a clear clustering of white ethnic groups.
Murder rates are often used as proxies for crime rates in international and cross-temporal comparisons because murder definition/reporting is consistent. Other crimes like rape (definition creep) or theft (goes unreported if not likely to be punished) don't have this property.
However, medical advances (both in terms of technique and access) have a massive effect on murder rate. Injuries that would kill someone in 1950 are usually treatable today, with huge improvement since the Vietnam war. The gap with pre ~WW2 (before antibiotics!) is even larger.
Note that "improved medical care" doesn't just cover medical tech; transportation and communication improvements are also very important. Getting to the hospital fast leads to massive difference in survival rates. Presumably ubiquitous cell phones make this even quicker today.
The idea that Europeans are generally politically to the left of Americans because of American occupation seems quite wrong. The most infamously leftist country in the world is Sweden, never occupied.
The actual occupation governments, set up shortly after WW2 by the Americans, tended to be quite right-wing, conservative, and anticommunist (without much in the way of "social liberalism" either).
The postwar Labour-governed UK was famously more leftist then most of Western Europe or the US. I won't deny that the UK was extremely in hock to USG at this point, but Labour was not imposed by USG and their ideas/personnel predated WW2 and had continuity w/ UK, not so much US.
Just read "A Bitter Harvest," Ian Smith's memoir. In a lot of ways, it's like the inverse of Lee Kuan Yew's similar "from Third World to First." Rather than Yew defeating the Communists and successfully navigating a difficult foreign environment to build a great nation...
Smith aims to defend his nation against Communists acting with the aid of virtually the entire world, including Britain (played a major role w/ Singapore as well, if course), the United States, and eventually even South Africa.
Ultimately, Rhodesia's sin for which it was destroyed wasn't racism (it was one of the most studiously race-neutral multiracial polities I'm aware of, with the primary deviation from this ideal being pro-black).
Obvious question is if Haredi life expectancy is because they're actually healthier then otherwise similar, but less religious Jews, or if it's that they're underperforming their intelligence/"genetic quality" (low levels of genetic load) in terms of SES. Could be a mix of both.
Still, something you notice in US data is that *controlling for intelligence* (or its various proxies such as race, SES, or education) the religious do better on a whole host of outcomes then the secular.
In other words, smart people are less religious (on average), but smarter religious people do better then smarter seculars and dumber religious people do better then dumber seculars.