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Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say it's an Indian only phenomenon, plenty of that everywhere

Sure, but you always have to ask, to what degree?

If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.

It's pretty well correlated to wealth inequality. The more wealthy cheaters there are, the more the masses are pro-cheating for themselves.

But to that intensity, ingrained-ness? That's not how it is in the UK[0] - to anywhere near that degree I mean.

edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with

well check out italy, you can substitute italian with indians and keep the entire paragraph almost word for word.

I suspect it's a common theme of countries that managed to keep an identity while under a long foreign domination. when the state is the enemy for generations, the ethics and norm about law and legality become a lot more flexible.

I was also thinking about Italy, especially with how popular people like Berlusconi always were precisely because they were never playing by the rules... but it's possible that it's still a difference in degree. I don't know if Italians would go to such extreme lenghts just for a t-shirt. I don't really know Indian culture though, so I can't judge.

Would this apply more to southern Italy more than north?

> Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...

* https://archive.is/SYP7l

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_southern_It...

The criticalness is a general Italian phenomenon. The one thing that unites Italians, north and south, is the perception that Italy is stupid and corrupt.

How about Finland? That's not the general attitude here.

well am not well versed about everyone history, but a cursory search says it maintained special status granting cultural and political independence for quite a while and rebelled within a decade of the russification project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Finland

That's a ridiculous generalization

I didn't see lots of Italians creating a PR just to get a T-Shirt

you need to start thinking percentages and not counts. also, and in percentage, knowledge of what a github even is in Italy is far lower; IT is still seen as the nerd kids choice and not as a professional career.

The populations of Italy and India aren't even remotely similar.

India dwarfs the entirety of Europe, never mind Italy, by population size.

I would compare population numbers and percentages. India has 1B people. Uk is less than 10% of that.

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