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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Culture.

I'll use the relatively non-controversial example of the Chinese. In Malaysia, they're a small minority of the population yet totally dominate business.

Why? Because they are extremely entrepreneurial, work crazy hours, and do this consistently up and down, from the tiny boutique in the streets to the multinational.

Why? I have no idea. But somehow its ingrained in their culture. I don't believe they have a special gene that uniquely benefits them. They're simply culturally centered around business and productivity.

On the opposite end there's the culture of apathy. To live by the day, accept one's state even if bad, and to make zero effort to improve it, even if opportunities present themselves.

These cultural differences very much exist and are plain to see and replicable, and lead to drastically different outcomes. But I guess simple truths are too controversial now, so let's go with the "systemic" nonsense.

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Another (extreme) example of that is Australian Aboriginals. The government literally forces companies to give them jobs and they still remain poor.

There's a whole strain of academic sociological research that asks why efforts to fix this always fail. I read one of the papers once, it got linked to from somewhere and it was interesting. It described the cultural issues reasonably well but bent over backwards to paint the problems as mere differences, not something they should fix but as things others should just learn to somehow work around (they had no suggestions for how). The possibility that the aboriginals are fine as they are and don't care about getting richer didn't really come up either which was interesting.

The major problem is timekeeping. Apparently you can't say to an aboriginal, "let's meet at 10am" because they might just turn up at 2pm instead and not see anything wrong with that. Or they might go walkabout and you don't see them for days. In turn it means they can't be integrated into any kind of team-based workforce, which in turn means they can't hold down any kind of job (like mining).

Another issue is the cultural fixation with funerals. They're expected to travel back to attend a funeral for almost anyone in their village, at any time, at short notice, and they always do it even if it conflicts with work commitments. They don't care if they lose their job as a consequence.

The sociologists have a neat way to describe this cultural feature - they say aboriginals view time as circular and endless, vs the linear time that everyone else uses. To what extent this is a rationalization of western academics vs something real is a bit of a open question.

I'm surprised there's enough separation between aboriginal australians and everyone else for differences that intense to still be possible. No subgroup in the US is that different from everyone else.

That's an example that sounds mildly similar to island culture in the Caribbean. Many there take a slow life approach and don't live by the clock.

Culturally, there are ants and there are grasshoppers. It's a story as old as time.

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