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Jun 15, 2021
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I think it's hard work combined with looking for ways to be well-paid for hard work.

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"If you compare Ashkenazi Jews with other white ethnic groups in America, they seem less special. They don't top the charts in IQ, wealth, or any other "interesting" metric I can think of."

Wait which American white ethnic groups do you mean have comparable IQ, wealth, and other interesting metrics, as Jews?

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Jun 16, 2021
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Jun 16, 2021
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Very interesting, thank you. If you have the statistics on WASP IQ and wealth on hand I would be grateful to get a link! I agree that it is kinda misleading to compare "Ashkenazi jews" to "non Ashkenazi white people" because the latter group is a vast and highly diverse group. Someone in these comments said something like all Ashkenazis share mitochondrial DNA with 4 women, or something to that effect, so it is almost like looking at a specific family tree rather than a race.

It's interesting that in the graph in the original post the ethnicity that does the best are Belarusians. I wonder what the average american-belarusian IQ is.

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Jun 15, 2021
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Jun 15, 2021
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Have higher rates of depression or higher rates of seeking treatment? I am not aware of the data of which you speak

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Being smarter is correlated with higher rates of depression. They think more and that depresses them. Ignorance is bliss.

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Jun 15, 2021
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Would you be willing to expand on how Jewish culture feels foreign to you?

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Jun 15, 2021
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> as it would point out the intrinsic supremacy of one group over another, with no recourse given to individuals in either group to change this perceived disparity.

I think there are very few individuals in the world who can change any group disparity. A couple of kings and Bill Gates, maybe. For most of us, that's not a productive goal. It's probably more helpful to focus on how I can change individual (not group) circumstances, whether in my own life or lives of those around me.

I'm also not sure about the "intrinsic supremacy" part. If nation A defeats nation B in a war, we don't say it's because of intrinsic supremacy of the nation A. Same if athlete A defeats athlete B.

I do agree that such a piece would feel iffy. But I also feel it's often worth it to investigate and understand why something is iffy.

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It's perhaps surprising that an alternative solution, that Jews are disproportionately successful because of the blessing of השם, is not mentioned in your post, and is mentioned in Noah's only to note that he will not be considering it.

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I think the Holocaust is generally viewed as an argument against that.

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Do you mean that the Holocaust was so awful השם cannot exist, or do you mean that the Holocaust proves the Jews are not השם's chosen people?

(depending on your answer, you may want to note that השם made a great people out of the Ishmaelites as well)

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Surely he means neither of these, but simply that the Holocaust proves that being the chosen people doesn't mean that you'll be materially successful or happy.

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Maybe that being the "chosen people" was not (and never was) equivalent to being "disproportionately successful."

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There are plenty of hints in the Hebrew Bible, and in history since then, that terms of the blessing are something like "you will be so improbably prosperous, given your resources, that your neighbors will constantly be tempted to kill, enslave, and oppress you."

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Jun 15, 2021
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It's a fairly common theme in the patriarchal narrative: see Gen 26:12-14; Gen 31:1-2; and mostly notably Ex 1:7-14.

Jahweh is expressly identified as a warrior in the Song of the Sea (aka the Song of Moses): Ex 1:3. Some believe this song to be very ancient. If correct, one might infer the warrior aspect to be original.

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I think you nailed it with middleman.

Which didn’t have to happen in America, but as of today has and did.

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"tempted to" is hedging language. Makes the prophecy true even if nothing happens.

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I don't think that's what's in the bible-- it's more like if you don't obey God, your neighbors will attack you, maybe even conquer you.

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That is in the Bible, as well.

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I think that's basically a conversation-ending theory. If one accept that as a theory, what more is there to say or talk about? So like, its technically valid, but can be ignored, the same way "we're all in a simulation" can be ignored

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From the perspective of "truth-seeking" (in contrast to "entertainment-seeking") - conversation-ending is a great feature of theory, isn't it? Anyway, I would reserve this term to theories which are self-defiance (such as absolute solipsism etc).

And by the way, Scott - I don't know if you're aware - but the way you explicitly distinguish Ashkenazi from other Jews here would be considered highly racist in Israel. Probably similarly to how discussing the possibility that blacks have lower IQ than whites may be perceived in the USA.

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Well, it ends the conversation before we reach any kind of understanding that would allow us to make predictions. One says "God did it" and shrugs, while other people say "no wait, I think physical reality might follow certain rules and equations..." and end up with greater predictive power later on.

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The nature vs nurture argument (and more specifically, the IQ vs culture argument) has been going on for the past fifty or so years. Both sides have been unable to convince the extremists on other side of the rightness of their interpretation. With the advent of PCR techniques, The IQers have been able to point to specific alleles which are significantly correlated with IQ, and have said, "Aha! See intelligence is a heritable characteristic!" The Culturists point out that IQ tests are pretty one dimensional when it comes to measuring the full range of human talents and behavioral repertoires, and that the tests can (a) be culturally biased, and (b) different testers and testing regimes can significantly improve or depress the results of the testees. Most researchers now agree that it intelligence is heritable but that also can be affected by environment and cultural situation. Of course, there are the extremists on either side of this question that are still fighting the old wars. What has been achieved? Little really. If you're extremist on either side of this question, you will not be convinced by the evidence that other side marshals. If you're in the middle, you'll shrug your shoulders.

However, I will leave you with on tidbit. Lewis Terman did a long-term study of the life-outcomes of people who tested 3 sigma above the IQ mean (i.e. geniuses) — n was ~1200 if I recall correctly. The study continued to run after his death. The study showed that geniuses were not very exceptional achievers. Most of Terman's "Termites" ended up with middle-class to upper middle class incomes. A lot were very successful in professional careers, such as Drs and Lawyers. But a lot didn't achieve much of anything of note. No Nobel prizes. No great works of literature or art. A few millionaires, but none of them became super wealthy. Of course, most of the "Termites" were WASPs. I'm not sure what a similar study on the life outcomes of Ashkenazi Jews with +3 sigma IQs would show.

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Hypotheses involving divine agency are notoriously difficult to falsify. I don't fault their exclusion here.

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Why do only post-19th century Ashkenazim get this blessing? There's little sign of similar success among any other Jewish tradition or before 1800.

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I think the Jewish people have always been disproportionately successful. That’s why there’s always been conspiracy theories about them. It’s just that the intellectual system changed in the 1800s. Measuring and rewarding academic achievement more fairly. Perhaps believing you are a unique and special people is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy?

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I think the simple fact that Jewish people were often the only visible ethnic minority around has for more explanatory power than Jews being economically successful for why there are so many antisemetic conspiracy theories.

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The Roma have been around as well in Europe for about 600 years. But, contra Yuri Slezkine, Ashkenazis and Roma have remarkably little in common.

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Napoleon accidentally transferred God's blessing from the French to the Jewish people.

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My only response on this substack is “השם works in mysterious ways”.

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my only response is your counting of responses works in mysterious ways

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So you came to this substack, that clearly has an atheist bent, to comment on how strange it is to you that the author did not entertain this ill-defined, baseless, unfalsifiable hypothesis that has no explanatory power? If השם cannot be understood by humans, then השם is of no use as a hypothesis, and you are simply wasting people's time.

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yeah what sort of a nutter links the Jews with God

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Sir, Madam, or Other: perhaps it may assist you in recognising the intent of the comment if it is explained that this is not meant absolutely seriously, but is an example of what is known commonly as a "joke", or jocular/humorous expression intended to evoke hilarity in the readers/listeners rather than an attempt to stick it to the atheists.

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I will bet you $500 that the commenter Alex Power was not joking. Please for the love of השם tell me there is some actual confidence behind all that smug pedantry.

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There was a hint of a joke there; if these two rationalists note they are Jewish yet aren't willing to consider the theory that השם has something to do with things on Earth, how Jewish are they?

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Perhaps the societies in which the Sephardim existed were less amenable to such success by religious minorities or perhaps even the majority population. Spain and Portugal were deeply cursed by the resource trap, as I recall.

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My impression is that, prior to the last century or two, it was the Sephardim who did well. David Ricardo was Sephardic. But the Rothschilds were Ashkenazi, so that would be an exception.

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It's quite simply IMO.

"Achievement" is some function of secularization (can't contribute productively to modern science if you're dissecting the Torah) * demographics (Jews were expanding as a share of the European population up until ~1900) * literacy rate.

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Ashkenazi Jews tended to be affluent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as they were invited to the Polish commonwealth to fill bourgeois jobs needing literacy and numeracy.. But their population boomed so much from, say, 1600 to 1900, that they filled up all the upscale jobs open to them, such as finance, and many were forced down the economic ladder to be tailors or milkmen or whatever.

The 2005 Cochran-Harpending paper on the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is immensely informative on this topic:

https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

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My recollection from Sowell is that Volkdeutsch filled many such roles in Russia proper, but they were purged in the world wars & revolution.

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The Russians, like Catharine the Great, invited the Germans in to do advanced stuff. Germany was far enough a way that this didn't see too much of a security risk.

The Polish aristocrats thought about inviting in numerate German after the Mongols massacred a lot of their indigenous urban bourgeoisie in the 1200s, but then they worried that the Germans lived right next door and might try to take over Poland. So, they chose Rhineland Jews to be their new bourgeois.

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Those were some prescient Polish nobles. Although there had already been Germans seizing territory in the east by then.

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Actually, before XV century it was rather Polish princes, dukes and kings which did the inviting, and they did invite a lot of German settlers.

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Medieval and early modern Poland used to accept any valuable refugees ejected by Europe's perennial conflicts, including wars of religion. E.g. it accepted quite a lot of Huguenots.

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It's more like the Germans were invited and did in fact proceed to take over (often successfully, e.g. in Silesia). The put-down of Kraków's bourgeoisie uprising (and subsequent purge of german-speaking citizens) was a major turning point in reinstitution of a centralized Piast state.

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"By analyzing the proliferation of long nucleotide sequences that are identical in the unrelated individuals in their sample, the researchers determined that a population bottleneck of approximately just 350 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals occurred in central Europe about 700 years ago, followed by an exponentially rapid population increase." https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry

These 350 individuals probably consisted largely of high-IQ lawyers, bankers and scholars. This genetic profile would have remained in the same population that exploded in Eastern Europe. Even if these Eastern Jews were mostly peasants (because there wasn't a huge division of labor in the High Middle Ages), they were obviously very smart peasants.

When the Industrial Revolution and capitalism opened up opportunities for intelligent people to achieve financial success after circa 1800, the Jews were naturally able to take advantage.

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They weren't peasants. Eastern Europe already had a peasantry, and even hereditary serfdom well past its abolition in western Europe. Jews had middle-men occupations.

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They were more likely to be in those positions, it's true. But there weren't enough middle-man positions in such an undeveloped economy for all Jews to have one (like tax collectors, merchants, landlords, licensed vodka dealers).

But having a high IQ leads to better productivity in almost any job. So I would imagine that Jews tended to be more successful as farmers as well. ("Peasant" was a poor choice of words because you are right they weren't really feudal peasants in the legal sense but just agrarian smallholders). Of course, back then, unlike today, having a consistently higher income meant lots more surviving children than a poor person (say, 8 vs. 1) and a correspondingly geometric increase in population percentage.

I am kind of surprised that essentially none of the comments mention IQ or genetics. I wonder if it's because people don't know the facts or if they're just afraid to mention them even in an anonymous comment.

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My understanding is that they ran out of middlemen positions after their population exploded. Which reminds me of the downward mobility in Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".

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It's beyond doubt that IQ is important in this, with Ashkenazi jews probably averaging ten points higher than the mean of 100. IQ is the best predictor of future success in education, employment and financial stability. I am not for one moment saying it is the only thing we should value about people (finding ways for people who aren't gifted that way to be valued and successful in society is something we have failed to address in modern times), but it cannot be ignored as an embarrassing form of 'privilege' we pretend isn't there.

There is also the fascinating hypothesis that jews in the diaspora were selected for intelligence, often being restricted to the unchristian work of moneylending and working with figures, and perhaps doing all the bookkeeping mentally to avoid written records come the next tax collector. I can't speak to the American immigrant experience, but I did live in the east end of London many years ago, where poor jewish people were common. Even then, they didn't stay poor long as the work ethic shone through and they soon made the clockwise trek to the north London suburbs. And good for them. An example to the rest of us, especially considering the pretty horrible way the establishment spoke of them in those days.

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Are you kidding???? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Court_Jews or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule. " For instance, Jews ... were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Baghdad. The list goes on and on. How could you possibly say that?

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Those were Sephardi, so it’s not relevant to Ashkenazi achievement. In Europe Jews were prohibited by law from owning land or many professions. Medicine and moneylending were not excluded. I don’t think a Jewish lawyer would have gotten a fair hearing for a client so most likely the lawyer stereotype emerged in the 19th Century. Culture matters, like Moses Mendelssohn walking hundreds of miles to be allowed to study, or Richard Feynman mentioning that a yeshiva student’s mother observed her day was made because she had met a General and a Professor the same day, and most would not put the two in the same esteem.

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Yes, exactly. Scott claimed that Jewish intellectual success is limited to post 1800 Ashkenazim, which is obviously false. It is also present in pre 1800 Ashkenazim and pre 1800 Sephardim.

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Maybe the key is mixing low income traditional Jews into a western society that tolerates them? Looking at French Jews, most of them nowadays are Sephardic and they're famous for all being doctors and lawyers. Might be difficult to have data on the phenomenon given ethnic statistics are forbidden on France, but maybe Israeli statistics on olim from France could be useful.

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If it's correct that there was no similar success before 1800, we could rule out a genetic explanation.

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Yep. But that's the opposite of correct.

Scott has to know better. He also knows the data on Jewish IQ and the data on the genetic basis of IQ. So he's playing dumb for whatever reason.

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Read up on figures like Josef Nasi, the Sassoon family, or the success of Sephardim in England, the Netherlands, Ottoman lands, etc. There was plenty of success.

Plus there was the privileged status of many Ashkenazim in the Polish Commonwealth.

Ashkenazim in Central Europe and the East were some of the last to get emancipated and also happened to be where the bulk of Jewish population growth was following the reconquista; so the notion of them being the only ones to experience a sudden boom in well being and only following 1800 is probably a reflection of it being a relatively large phenomenon being observed in a particular time.

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Surprising the Scottish Enlightenment is referenced, but there is no mention of the Haskalah -- the contemporaneous Jewish enlightenment -- that began in Germany in the 1800's then spread eastward. Prior to this event, European Jews were a backwards people, at least by Enlightenment Europe standards.

Modern-day Ultra Orthodox Jews provide the best glimpse of pre-enlightenment Jewish culture. It's also probably not a coincidence that one of the poorest towns in the US -- Kiryas Joel, NY -- is a modern-day Orthodox shtetl. The same pattern repeats itself in Israel today, with Ultra Orthodox communities resembling the third-world.

While there is genetic evidence for higher Ashkenazi IQ's, the most important historical factor was living in close proximity the European Enlightenment, much like the Scotts you mentioned. Without it, Jewish communities would have continued to live in relative poverty, with minimal cultural advancement.

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We did pretty well against Pharaoh that one time, admittedly after a bit of a losing streak

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Because the Jews only discovered European culture (or greek wisdom as they used to call it) in the 18th century

And by a strange coincidence the jewish group that discovered european culture was the group of jews who lived among europeans

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I find it hard to believe that the Ashkenazim took nearly two millennia to pick up the culture of the place where they lived.

They're not the only European Jews, either. There are also the Sephardim.

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Actually, on re-reading, I note that I missed that Noah does discuss this theory: "In addition, I think that a large part of whatever Jewish overachievement remains will probably be attributable to the fact that Judaism is a religious minority, and religious minorities tend to overachieve."

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I don't think Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses tend to overachieve.

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Jehovah's Witnesses underachieve but I think part of that is that their religion

1) relies on converts, who are mostly poor to begin with

2) bans practitioners from public service, meaning the law will never be better-than-neutral in favor of the community

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I heard a claim that at one time Jehovah's Witnesses were discouraged from pursuing higher education due to their prediction of the imminence of the end of the world (so it wouldn't be very useful to become an expert in worldly matters). I'm not sure if this is still the case, but there's something on the JW web site about higher education not being that important or valuable:

https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/jw-education-school/

In Orthodox Judaism, secular higher education is often sometimes viewed with suspicion or not seen as very prestigious compared to religious study (although there are certainly many Orthodox and observant Jews in secular academia). But in more liberal and secularized forms of Judaism, it's *very* prestigious, and often more so than religious education. So that's kind of a complicated subject that also varies from Jewish community and denomination to Jewish community and denomination.

One other thing that seems different between the Witnesses and Judaism is that the Witnesses have a particular central authority that is supposed to study and interpret the scriptures for them, and then send out authoritative interpretations and teachings (which are often presented in very simple, straightforward language that can be understood without a lot of education). In Judaism, there is no such central authority, and, while the Orthodox definitely have a very strong emphasis on respecting spiritual authorities (like one's own community's rabbi), there's also commonly an idea that (1) any Jewish man is capable of aspiring to contribute to religious scholarship or to become a religious authority (although in Chassidic Judaism there can be a hereditary element to some forms of religious authority), and (2) all Torah study is inherently spiritually beneficial to any Jewish man or woman, and inherently makes the world better, and the more of it the better, in the world as a whole or in an individual's life.

On the latter point, I think I once heard someone claim that the very first verse read in translation by an idly but genuinely curious lapsed Jew pleases God just as much as the millionth verse re-read in Hebrew by an aged rabbi who immediately thinks of 100 connections and associations. Although I don't remember where that claim comes from at all, and I might have more or less made it up.

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A possible reason for this: The poor members of a religious minority leave for the majority faith. Coptic Christians in Egypt are an example for this.

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Yes, this is exactly correct. Note also that this also probably also applies to the Ashkenazim, and to many other groups such as the remaining Zoroastrians (i.e. Parsi).

There also seems to be a second effect in the Levant where the Christians holdouts didn't mix so much with later arrivals that might have had lower genotypic IQ.

Note that in the US, there is something of an inverse relationship between the average income of a Protestant denomination and the degree to which it is populated by more recent convert families. The highest income is seen in the Episcopal Church and the PCUSA, which are basically direct descendants of the Church of England and Church of Scotland, respectively, and neither has ever been very good at conversion and thus both of them mostly consist of families that have been in those churches a very long time. Meanwhile Baptists, who mostly represent families that abandoned those churches in the 19th century, are considerably poorer. A group like Jehovah's Witnesses seems to consist of people who then abandoned groups like the Baptists in the 20th century.

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If its really helpful to continue in the racial success vein, what is the rate of success in America of all immigrant groups at the same time in the same regions?

You could compare with the Irish (mine), Italians, other Eastern Europeans such as the Poles, the Germans, the list goes on. My quick answer is all groups did well in America comparatively- depending on region and time.

Chosen professions of course affect income- which is not the only measure of success, but seems to be dominant in the world we’ve chosen. (We as in present day America). To explain that a bit; if your father was a firefighter or a cop being that might be more important than “income.”

If your father had a love of the soil and raised you the same, being a farmer might be more important than income (it had better be).

Maybe if we must take this path we compare the different groups? Instead of looking inward at a closed circle?

Scott doesn’t compare apples to oranges but by saying “America” certainly that’s the context.

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Is this meant to be a direct reply to my comment above? I don't see the connection. But yes, for the most part there's not an obvious large disconnect in achievement between the various European groups that migrated to the US in the 19th century and early 20th century. Of course, for the most part these groups are more related to one another than any of them are to the Ashkenazim, and they've intermarried in the time since their arrival in the US to a much greater degree than the Ashkenazim have.

The obvious disconnect among white people is mostly between earlier arrivals -- the British who ended up in Appalachia vs. those who ended up in New England, say (later arrivals tended to avoid places that were already poor, i.e. the South). Albion's Seed would suggest the differences between British-descended populations are cultural, which probably makes sense, they mostly came from the same island. Though, while I'm not an expert on the current evidence here, I also have to think they started with some genetic differences, and the pattern of American migration (e.g. brain drain from poorer regions to richer ones) might have exacerbated those differences.

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how is that surprising?

If they were orthodox jews I would fine it surprising, but of course they are not. I find this comment more surprising, because it suggests that God interferes in temporal matters, which, considering the sum of temporal matters currently, I find a very amusing suggestion.

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This is to be fair, a rationalist blog. But if we were to countenance it then we would have to agree that it took about 2000 years for God to get going with that blessing. Longer, maybe.

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If true, this hypothesis could be both tested empirically and exploited practically.

But if we admit theological explanations for the success of religious groups, I don’t think the overall evidence favors Jewish monotheism specifically.

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This comment is on is the blog of the author of https://unsongbook.com/ . I'm sure the thought of testing the hypothesis has occurred to him. It has also occurred to me.

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It's an easy hypothesis to test. We just have to create a different universe with a different God, and see how much money the Jews make then. The grant proposal writes itself.

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How can it be tested, if any apparent conflict between it and the facts is dismissed with "השם works in mysterious ways"?

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I'm pretty sure that it was also written in Bible that blessing is conditional on following God and his Law and unless they do, they will be punished severely by God. And I think that most of American Jews are far from being Orthodox, they are mostly atheists now, I guess.

I'm not saying that your explanation is impossible but I would consider this as the another argument against

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I was going to suggest that, it doesn't seem like Jewish piety correlates with economic success, which would be the only way to come close to testing this hypothesis.

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Wouldn't that require the whole burden of proof of the existance of השם?

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Because it's an extremely unlikely theory, requiring far stronger evidence to be believed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If mundane solutions such as genetics and culture exist and are equally able to explain the data, they are to be vastly preferred.

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I read aloud in my head, so it annoys me when people use scripts I can't pronounce in otherwise Latin text. It also comes across as a little smartassy - flaunting your knowledge of foreign scripts to signal learnedness. Please transliterate next time.

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השם transliterates to "hashem" literally meaning "the name", often used by Jews in lieu of writing/saying the creator's name.

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Thanks!

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Any chance anyone has data on the percentage of Jewish children born to married parents over time vs. other ethnicities?

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I once read that in early 20th century Budapest, Jews had an illegitimacy rate of 10%, compared to Christians who were around 30%. This was brought up as one of the many reasons why Jews had a higher population growth in that era compared to Christians: child mortality was significantly higher among ilegitimate children.

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We are a people with a deep connection to Jewish sacred texts and at the same time a people who were persecuted for that connection. That persecution bound us closer to our books, The modern world is a world of words not muscle. That's my explanation.

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Wouldn't the same be true of Sephardic & Mizrahi Jews? They don't seem as accomplished.

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they may not be accomplished recently, as they lived in countries that were poor in the 18th-20th centuries, but they certainly have been accomplished in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Court_Jews or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule. " For instance, Jews ... were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Baghdad

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Christian minorities also seemed to do better than average within the Ottoman empire. In "The Long Divergence" Timur Kuran (who is himself Turkish) explains it via Islamic law entrenching principles that made it difficult to form corporations.

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perhaps. but the statement that sephardic and mizrahi jews don't seem as accomplished only holds up for the past couple hundred years, when sephardic and mizrahi jews were living in less developed countries than ashkenazic jews.

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I think an interesting contrast between Ashkenazim and Sephardim is how their prayer services go. Sephardim (in my experience) do most of the prayer service out loud and in a communal way. Ashkenazim have far more long stretches where everyone reads to themselves quietly. I've always assumed it was because literacy levels were higher in Europe so the people could actually just read from their prayer books. But in communities where literacy wasn't the norm there's far greater focus on learning everything off by heart.

Admittedly I've never actually checked if this is accurate in any way.

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My paternal grandparents were both Jews who emigrated to America separately before World War I. My grandfather was the son of a Polish cobbler (and the first person in his family who was taught to read). My grandmother was the daughter of a Russian rabbi who was killed in a pogrom and who walked out of Russia without any other family as part of a group of people emigrating to America via Hamburg. Both came from small villages and neither could have been considered anything but poor.

"But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural."

That seems the more plausible answer, if one is willing to consider that cultural norms can be embedded very deeply into individuals. The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.

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My grandfather and some of his friends were discussing their children one day, and he finally responded to the many "my son the doctor" remarks with "my son TEACHES doctors." (Dad was on the faculty of Stanford Medical School at the time.) The story goes that the conversation changed topics after a long pause.

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No one made the obvious retort: “Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"?

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Not part of Grandjoe’s story if they did.

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> The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.

I would be interested in seeing a survey about people's cultural attitudes toward physical books and how those relate to their cultural background. E.g., things like

* do you feel better in some way having more physical books present in a place where you live or work? (does it make you feel more comfortable or emotionally positive toward that location?)

* do you feel bad in some way when you or someone around you shows physical disrespect for a book? (e.g., throwing it in the trash or recycling; placing it on the ground; breaking or damaging the spine; physically throwing it across a room)

* do you find it emotionally pleasing to acquire books and emotionally difficult to part with them, in a way that feels subjectively different from acquiring and parting with possessions in general?

These things are all true for me, and I grew up in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish household, but I also noticed that they were and are true of many of my middle-class friends from non-Jewish backgrounds.

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It's an interesting cultural proxy I've anecdotally noticed myself. Whenever jewish friends would visit my home in the US the first thing they almost always noticed the above average number of books we had. In Israel it's very common for people to have decorative bookshelves for their most treasured (usually religious) books the same way many other cultures have special cases for their dining china.

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Hmm, my parents (not Jewish, and only first generation intellectuals) had the same feelings about physical books; I grew up lovingly reading lots of books, but resented this sacred admiration of books as such. It was partly just teenage rebellion, but partly me living in a society where printing was already cheap, a lot of garbage got printed, and books were gradually moving into virtual reality anyway.

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Cultural preferences and genetics are deeply interwoven in humans. The reason why the Dutch are so tall is that culturally they don’t have a preference for shorter women most societies have.

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Of course, another plausible cause here is that Jews who couldn't hack it within that religious tradition left for other religions, so this ended up serving as a selective effect for high literacy, which probably meant higher IQ. So while it's a plausible cultural thing, it's also plausible that the culture eventually gave them a genetic advantage by selecting against lower IQ members.

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What does the horizontal scale on the chart represent?

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Geography, but not very effectively. It's just added in so not everyone is in the same place.

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Are you trying to say that the world is not one dimensional?

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Don't be silly, it's two dimensional (provided you don't count the turtles)

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Ah, thank you!

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I'm still confused, because the key says that the colors indicate geographic region. And then those colors are sorta... split up? Like all the Europe is on the left, but then there are Asian countries in the middle and on the right...? And if they were just spacing out the points for legibility then why are a bunch of them clustered on top of each other so as to not be legible?

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Agreed. I can't make sense of why groups are where they are.

Why are Greeks next to Luxemburgers but way off from Macedonians?

Why are Egyptians next to the Japanese but a world away from Moroccans?

Why are Nigerians so far from most Africans for instance Ghanians[sic]?

Why are Brazilians so far from Agentineans [sic]?

Why are French Canadians around Australians, Japanese, Nigerians and Pakistani?

There has got to be some rationale...

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I assume the vertical axis is income? It doesn't seem to be labeled.

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if you click through to the source, there the axis also doesn't have a label but does at least have a title: "Age/Sex-Adjusted US-Born Median Personal Incomes in 2015-2019"

So, yes, it does seem to be income. Sort of.

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If the “groups should be represented according to their share of the population” (in college admissions, professions, etc.) standard were applied to Jews it would be devastating.

Luckily, Jews are “white” so for some reason it doesn’t count? And people decided Jewish quotas were immoral discrimination but Asian quotas (not explicit ones, admittedly) are somehow ok? This doesn’t make any sense on principle, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I hope we end up with “discrimination is bad”.

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Well said.

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> This doesn’t make any sense on principle

Maybe the people doing it don't have principles, other than "do what benefits me / my group / my ideology".

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