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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Except it doesn’t work like that. I’m from Bangladesh. What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no. Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-...

We know this will happen. Bangladesh was in fact a grand experiment in this regard. After independence in the 1970s, an intellectual elite gave the country a western style constitution, with principles of secularity and freedom. What did the Bangladeshis do with it? They quickly repealed those provisions, made Islam the official religion, etc.

It is a popular mental dysfunction in the west to deny that culture matters. To believe that the west’s material wealth is the result of random chance, rather than what people believe, how they act, and what they do.

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Exactly. I would much rather live in Singapore, something of a dictatorship, than Bangladesh, a democracy. Democratic freedom is often worth very little. Open borders would work well if sovereignty were held in competitive non-democratic institutions like Futarchy or a standardized-testing/sortition based rotating aristocracy, as both would be held in check by the freedom to exit that would exist in a world with true open borders. However, if we just keep our government as it is and allow open borders it will decline in just the manner you mention.

Singapore is hardly a dictatorship. It's not a very free democracy, but they run free elections and a significant part of what keeps PAP winning these days is stealing opposition policies.

I don't see a massive distinction between Singaporean elite-driven one party "democracy" and American elite driven two party "democracy". Both fail in certain ways but they function up to a certain point.

well if you cant see any difference it probably mean you know very little about the institutions of one or both countries.

Having lived in both, I like saying that Singapore is a fake dictatorship, whereas Hong Kong is a fake democracy.

>standardized-testing/sortition based rotating aristocracy

We had that for a couple centuries where the test was birth right. Somewhere down the line, we decided to cut their heads off.

Democracy in theory gives ordinary people power to choose their country's destiny. As someone who has a loved one in sg, I think their situation is peculiar but part of it is that their "aristocracy" actually does a decent job of providing for most of the people, so they don't feel the need to revolt against the PAP. In the US, we too have an aristocracy (although people might not want to admit to it) but they have not done a good job of taking care of people and so they is currently a lot of unrest that is flaring up here and there. It has a different flavor, but there is certainly political strife. So, imo, aristocracy is not a stable system because that aristocracy, being unaccountable, can turn against the people that hold it up, and thus be vulnerable to deposition.

Since people change their opinions and traditions very slowly, changing cultures probably takes generations.

For example the United States constitution didn't happen quickly - there was a long period of people writing and discussing about such things, the age of enlightenment (I'm still grasping to understand how it happened, it seems so unlikely). There were also only under three million people living in USA when it became independent.

This is something which always gets me.

So it is widely accepted that there is no/negligible genetic difference, but there are cultural differences at least when it comes to prosperity.

However it is also the case that cultures are extremely slow to change - multiple generations - almost to the actual speed of evolution. Essentially conceding the point that even if it isn't genetic there is some kind of heritable negative/missing positive traits which can last multiple generations.

No, humans have not evolved in hundreds of thousands of years, well beyond the beginning of recorded history.

That's preposterous and obviously false. We're seeing fast evolution on the scale of thousands or even hundreds of years. See Baujau, for example.

You seem to be arguing that this is a protective notion, when really it argues the opposite. If you bring two large groups of people together, their respective cultures are not going to change quickly. And if their cultures clash with each other, you have a recipe for enduring intra-national strife.

Is there an actual historical example of this? Most civil wars throughout history aren't due to immigrants, it's usually due to geographical and cultural divides that have long existed in a country.

Most countries in history didn't have immigrants from the other side of the world either.

The United States imported Africans as slaves for 100+ years. While some flair ups occured, black people never fully revolted into a situation that could be called a civil war. The US Civil War was fought over slavery, but it was fought between the North and the South, not black vs. white.

Ditto on Chinese immigrants in the later 1800s, Germans, etc. The point is that immigrants are always a minority in their host country, so they naturally have less of a base and thus power.

I would argue that most intra-national strife comes from histories of wars and blood feuds. The Balkans being a case of this.

> And if their cultures clash with each other, you have a recipe for enduring intra-national strife.

Feels logical but also feels unproven.

I didn't argue it as a protective notion.

Culture is important, but history and context are very important too. For example, it explains well why the US thrived economy post-WWII almost immediately while it took time for European nations to catch up.

Moreover, it sounds like there's a jump in logic in your post. Immigrants don't export their culture usually, they mostly adopt the new country's culture for the most part. Certain things are retained but people who've never immigrated before don't realize how much moving to another place changes you.

I'm not going to tell you that there won't be problems caused by increased migration. Anything that changes the world so much will cause problems. I'm not going to tell you that America's material wealth is the result of "random chance", either. But I do think that quite a lot of it is the result of centuries of immigration, each wave of which was met with much the same objections.

It's one thing to caution against removing all barriers literally overnight. I don't know that it would be a disaster, but I don't know for sure that it wouldn't, and it's reasonable to exercise some caution. But, at the risk of making an inflammatory analogy, it would have been morally defensible to ask if there was a way to end chattel slavery in the US without a civil war that killed ~3% of the population. It was not morally defensible to oppose ending it. Global apartheid is an evil of a similar scale, and first world governments its active cause, not innocent bystanders. It is our duty to figure out how, not whether, to end it.

Say what you want about BD (and the analogy the religious right used in [1] about national symbols was grotesque) but in Pakistan if a government minister said what that guy did in [2] about removing the state religion he’d probably be shot. My BNP supporting former boss in the states seems to think doing so is selling out to India. That’s progress I guess.

[1]https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-...

[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-isl...

thank you for posting this! Progeny of the developed world are not allowed to say such things.

Er, wasn’t there a dictatorship and a coup along the way?

It’s a complicated wrinkle to explain. Yes, the amendments happened during Ershad’s regime, who took power in a bloodless coup. Calling it a dictatorship is a strech: Ershad tried to have elections, in which one of the two major parties participated. More importantly, since Ershad left power in 1990, nobody has moved to change the constitution back, Islam plays a bigger role in politics than ever, and and 82% of the country (according to Pew polling) suppoets making Sharia national law.

sorry, you're basing the entire dismissal of a posit by our OP that offers massive economic benefits, death of a sordid black market and freedoms for all because of an article where someone removed a statue of a woman?

People would have to arrive, in numbers for a long time, have kids, retain the culture perfectly in that regards as it blends into US cultures and then override the existing culture to do so. That's like 100 years in a vacuum. That's like imagining you'd see to eye with your ancestors from 1918. Ya think?

The melting pot of the US worked wonders in many regards. But its capacity is limited; the rate of arrival, compared to the country's population, has an upper bound when melting still works fir the newly arrived, when cultural transfer is still seen as valuable, as opposed to just keeping to live the way they used to, and failing to blend in enough as not to pose serious problems.

I don't think any of those concepts have established enough mathematical proofs to discuss with such confidence.

If 1M people of culture A arrive to a territory inhabited by 1 person of culture B, which culture will prevail? With a high confidence, A.

If 1 person of culture A arrives to a territory inhabited by 1M people of culture B, which culture will prevail? With a high confidence, B.

If we assume more or less continuous, non-chaotic behavior of this function, the range of A/B ratios where the change is hard to predict must be somehow narrower than [1/1M .. 1M], likely closer to [0.5 .. 2].

This is not a mathematical proof, of course, just an illustration. Mathematics is only possible where axioms hold; in human world, very-very few, if any, axioms ever hold.

> What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US?

> we would be tearing down the statue of liberty

> It is a popular mental dysfunction

This characterization of people who disagree with the parent, along with the comments above, does not seem to invite discussion, but rather a flame war.

> it doesn’t work like that.

In fact it has. People have been making the same predictions as you about immigrants to the U.S. since the first immigrants arrived. Can't trace your family to the Mayflower? You shouldn't be running the country. (I'll save redundancy by citing my other comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437962

And yet the evidence is that the wealthiest country in the world and its leading advocate of democracy (over a longer timescale) is run by those very immigrants and their decedents.

Freedom and democracy are universal values; they are embraced in "cultures" all over the world (U.S., almost all of South America, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, India, Europe, etc. ...) and provide the most stable governments, the most freedom, and the wealthiest economies. Bangladesh might have had a bad experience - there are no guarantees - but of course we don't know how much that depends on poor execution nor do we know if other forms of government would have been better or worse. Maybe democracy was actually the best option.

If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not. You also wouldn't get large groups of people who don't think democracy is a good idea, and yet we have China.

Universal values are closer to, don't have sex with your mother or don't eat people and we still have notable exceptions for those

> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not.

TIL that the Greeks were nei bother. Rome was also originally a Republic.

Why is this entire thread full of bollocks history and bollocks sociology?

Rome and Greece showed up thousands of years after early cultures. Rome also had its democracy replaced by a dictatorship.

Id go as far as to say that someone thinking that Rome and Greece are early cultures might be the person with "bollocks history"

Rome was still ~BC, Alexander the great was ~300 BC. How early counts in your book?

Are you suggesting that Christ's birth was the marker for early history? There was the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittities, Sumerians, the early Chinese, and the early Indian just to name a few organized civilizations that are thousands of years older.

Additionally you are using Alexander the Great as your earliest marker? How was he democratic at all. He was a literal military dictator as were the Hellenic kingdoms that's descended from his empire

oi. Lets not forget you start with:

> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not.

We have a ton of resource from the Greeks because they wrote shit down. By invoking "the earliest" civilizations you're hiding behind a greater unknown because we lack an equivalent level of written resource until ~3500 BC. So written resource becomes available 5,500 years ago and democracy has written examples available 2,000 years ago, 3,500 years after written record. Ergo, according to your bullshit if something occurs 3,500 years after writing is established even though that was 2,000 years ago that means _nothing_ toward "universal values".

I can't believe you'd twist history like this to much such bollocks points. What the fuck does "universal values" even mean? We can barely trust the tablets we have and we have limited to no written record of societies beyond 3,500 years ago. But because of this window of 3,500 years between writing and democracy not appearing you classify it as "non-universal". You're full of shit by basing your entire argument on this window that conveniently fulfils it. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years yet this 3,500 year window is all that matters to you. Dwell on that.

For reference, I am not arguing that democracy IS a universal value but just against that you can prove what is or isn't a universal value by cherry picking our patchy written record like you do.

Alex is a shit marker to be fair but gives a general gist for the rise of the Hellenic world. Examples of democracy within city states existed prior to 6 BC Athens but 6 BC Athens is the best known one.

First off, you can calm down, no need to call me full of shit because you don't like my arguments.

As to your points. We have written history from thousands of years before the Greeks. The code of Hammurabi predates them significantly. We also have scattered historical records from other ancient cultures and it's not like their government system was a mystery. They had Kings and emperor's, not elected leaders.

Even with the Greeks, how many of the city states had any sort of democratic system and weren't a monarchy or oligopoly? Youre accusing me of cherry picking but all you can point to is a single geographic area in a relatively small span of time and even then, only a few of the population centers had any sort of democracy.

Since we just asked you to stop breaking the site guidelines and then you posted this, I've banned this account until we get some indication that you will use HN as intended in the future. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com with that.

In HN comments, it's more important not to turn this site into a flaming pit than it is to be right about Hellenic antiquity.

Because it's the internet. Please don't make the threads even worse by posting unsubstantive comments. Annoying as things may be, this is not the way to raise the quality of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

you complain at this point? I feel like this is complaining about someone sneezing during a flood.

Perhaps; we don't see all the comments. But other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break the rules.

> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures ...

Certainly there is plenty of writing throughout recorded history in many cultures about freedom and oppression, and democracy as a form of government at least goes back to ancient Greece and Rome (a republic).

We have no idea how often it was implemented on a small scale (a village, etc.), but I find it hard to believe that nobody thought of taking a vote until 1776.

Implementing those things in government might have been difficult, but so was developing physics, literacy and the Internet. That doesn't mean people didn't want those things throughout history.

> Universal values are closer to ...

I don't think it's worth debating the meaning of 'universal'.

Greece and Rome are nowhere near early cultures, they came thousands of year after organized civilizations. It's also not useful to point to them when their democracy's were short stints in their historys and overtaken by authoritarian governments.

Based on the responses I've had to this post I think people might believe I am against democracy. My point was that it's not a universal value of humanity and so if we want democracy it needs to be supported. It will not be supported by base human instinct

One anecdotal bad thing some Bangladeshi did does not prove the entire ethnicity is bad or that they can not co-exist with modern western values. And I am not sure what you want to prove by saying that the initial western value based constitution did not persist, are you implying that this can never happen in that country, that the specific ethnicity is somehow different or not capable of something better? It is not like this kind of thing does not happen in other places (this kind of thing has happend in the USA too).

Not mentioning how this amendment happened was sloppy on his part.

>What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no

It's ironic that people in the US who have such great fear of immigrants worry about being overrun by criminals, when the US itself already has by far the highest amount of criminals locked in prison in the world.

>Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty

Quite silly to point to mere symbolism (whether or not a statue exists) while ignoring the physical reality of human suffering behind bars.

Who said anything about criminals? Bangladeshis are by and large law abiding. But more than 1/3 believe that people who leave Islam should be put to death. The problem isn’t crime.

Is country X's incarceration rate not related to the quality of it's legal system and institutions?

Not in the direct manner you seem to be implying.

The article that rayiner posted was in reference to overzealous policing of arbitrary culture based moral offenses (not being islamic). Are many of the laws in the US not overzealous and arbitrarily moral based as well? For instance non violent drug crimes being punished with harsher sentences than violent crimes?

To a first approximation, incarceration rate is equal to rate of crimes times percent reported to police times percent of solved cases times prosecution rate times sentence length.

Some of these are bad things, some of these are good, and the last one is ugly.

Starting at the beginning of your equation, is what constitutes a "crime" not defined by the legal system to begin with? Perhaps the US has run wild with their definitions and militaristic enforcement of crimes

They could have stayed part of Pakistan. It could have been worse. My family is Ahmadi. We left for the US in 1986 right before I was born over this death penalty for apostasy business.

You're referencing poll data and using that to project human behaviour across demographics. Not sure that's good science. Secondly you don't factor in that often capital punishment has majority/plurality support in most nations.

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