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Comment by EnPissant | Hacker News Reader

There are multiple factors at play:

- Among those who believe in intellectual differences among human groups, very few believe Europeans are the most intelligent group. The prevailing opinion you would find is that both Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (your second example) are more intelligent on average.

- Northwest Europeans encountered intense selection over a Millennia starting around 300AD through a couple of mechanisms: The Church banning cousin marriage, and Biparte Manorialism. This resulted in the destruction of kinship networks, established the nuclear family, and selected for the high-trust peoples that enabled a kind of society you can still only find among those peoples.

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You're not even responding to the question. You're describing (what you believe to be) features of global civilization today, projected out from "300AD". But at various points over that interval, European civilization wasn't on the leaderboard, and was being outcompeted by the Khmer, Mali, China, you name it.

You see this all the time in these kinds of discussions, the assumption that because "western" civilization possesses X, Y, and Z traits, history must consist of a linear progression towards realizing those traits. Obviously, no. For many centuries the west was brutal, illiterate, tribal, and chaotic, primitive in ways other cultures were not.

It's just a tedious history lesson except that it abruptly falsifies the idea that you can look at "civilizational achievement" and reason back to genetic superiority. Obviously you cannot. You could come up with some other evidence for genetic superiority! But this particular argument is patently wrong.

The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!

And yet when you look at corruption perception indexes, they largely track the Hajnal line. As do so many other graphs.

Ireland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.

Which other developed countries do you mean? The only ones I can think of, have westernised on purpose. E.g. Singapore and Japan.

What you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.

That is sort of my point, I can't think of a developed country that hasn't westernised to some extent.

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