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Comment by pault | Hacker News Reader

Do you think this has something to do with traditional Spanish culture? Ex-Spanish colonies are also notoriously led from the top down, and I read an interesting theory that the reason the Aztecs were so easily assimilated vs indigenous North Americans is their rigidly hierarchical organization allowed the Spanish to essentially hot swap themselves into power.

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I think it has to do with culture, but not in the way you suggest. Up until the mid seventies, Spain suffered a dictatorship that followed a bloody civil war. That means that for decades society had very little social mobility and a lot of cronyism. Scientists, artists and intellectuals in general were purged during the war, looked down upon later, and the inherent censorship and closeness of authoritarian governments made the country culturally barren.

Many decades have passed since then, and nowadays Spain is of course a fully developed democracy, but the remains of that society still exist. It is present for example in the value given to stable jobs by the low-middle class, where people basically assume a glass ceiling - "why take risks changing jobs or try to start a business? You don't have the contacts nor the money anyway".

The lack of people with technical backgrounds in the upper class is also very evident: In the US you'll find many engineers that later went for an MBA and moved into leadership positions, and many companies have engineers as founders. Here, business administration is a career, not a masters degree, and for people who graduate in such programs, it is assumed that they already have the money or the connections to start their careers already in a leadership position - they practically choose "boss" as their job description, so to speak.

there's also the whole racism thing. north american settlers basically wanted nothing to do with the natives, except to claim their territory. we have a folktale of the one time a white guy and a native girl got together and it was "a big disaster". latin america has its own racism problems, but there was way more race mixing which is probably a more important diver of assimilation than who controls the power.

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