Nordic versus other behavior

Europe and the U.S. are both being overrun with illegal immigrants from the South. We recently asked the question, ‘Why?’ One answer, we’ve found, could be the former’s higher levels of Future Orientation. This ability to fully conceive of and plan for the future creates societies that are the envy of the world.

A freier, in Israeli eyes, is a shopper who waits in line to pay retail. It is a driver who searches for legal parking rather than pulling onto the sidewalk with the other cars. … The fear of being a sucker turns driving into a bumper-car competition and makes grocery shopping as trying as arm wrestling.

… ‘In London, the culture is to give way, be a gentleman, don’t compete,’ said Peri, the former editor. ˜But an Israeli is the opposite. If you are stronger, why should you give way to someone weaker? In a debate, the British will say, ‘You have a point.’ In a debate here, no Israeli will admit he has been persuaded to change his mind. That shows weakness.’

Americans often find the Israeli attitude intolerably rude. Israelis, meanwhile, find Americans to be the biggest freiers of all. They are naive idealists. … Americans are perceived as innocents who follow the rules and who believe a person will actually do what he promises to do. ˜An American is willing to trust until someone proves to be untrustworthy,’ Shahar said. ˜Israel is much more like the rest of the world, where the basic assumption is that people . . . should not be trusted until proven trustworthy.’

‘Public welfare’ is a concept without meaningful application [in the Arab world]; there is no common good.  Generosity is suspect as a ploy for advantage.  Idealism and sincerity are penalized.  Self-sacrifice is akin to lunacy or martyrdom.

But here’s the curious thing: While Egyptians are content to live in filthy, battered buildings, the insides of their homes are always immaculate.  … When I asked friends if anyone had ever considered a neighborhood block association or an owners’ association to clean up common areas, they would chuckle and say “Oh, THAT would never work here.”  No doubt it wouldn’t. My friends did not feel that their responsibility extended beyond their own boundaries. 

¦ When we first came to America in 1972, my father was amazed at the way Americans waited in line at Disneyland. No complaints, no cutting. In Iran, we have zerangi, a concept that loosely means “cleverness.”

… Most, if not all the time in Iranian culture and society, a zerang person is seen in a positive light … For example, a person who knows how the American legal system works and is able to work it to his or her advantage is zerang. A person who is resourceful in business and has made something of himself is zerang. … It does not stop here; a person who is able to wittingly cheat people, companies, businesses, governments of money is zerangand an idol for many Iranians. …We Iranians, although outwardly criticize corruption, internally glorify it and wish to master it.

If I am buying from or selling to a relative, I neither seek profit nor concern myself with money. The same can happen in a transaction with a friend. But, if I am dealing with a stranger, then there are no rules, other than the one of exploiting him to the utmost.

[ ¦] a limited radius of social identification resulting in a lack of concern for the interests and well-being of people outside the family, and for the society as a whole; the generalized absence of trust throughout the society; absence of due process, [ ¦]  low incidence of organized group solutions to common problems; nepotism and corruption; tax evasion; absence of philanthropy.

Among normal [sic] nations, a class that desires something for itself tries to get it by agreement with the other classes. . . . But a class attacked by particularismfeels humiliated when it realizes that in order to achieve its desires it must resort to these organs of the common will.

The fault wasn’t [the boy’s]. His parents, his older brothers, his uncles had taught him that society is a jungle and that you don’t get anywhere unless you think only of yourself.

…the English sensitiveness to the ‘laws of things’–the law of the road, the law of the sea, the law of the hunting field. … the English are the teachers of the world, not merely in their quickness to perceive these natural laws, but in their cordial and sincere obedience to the restrictions which they impose upon each individual for the good of the whole.

Each Englishman is his own regulator. … The need of outside safeguards or guarantees of any kind is therefore less urgently felt than in other countries. The average level of honesty in English civil life is singularly high, as is shown in the usual disregard for detailed precautions against fraud or deceit.

… No bureaucracy in the world can vie with the English Civil Service in its devotion to the interests of the country. … it owes much also to that instinct for co-operation, that objectivity, that absence of self-seeking, of vanity and of personal passion which are typical of the whole race.

b) Scandinavians

The second pillar of happiness is a high level of trust between people, even for a stranger on the street, according to Wiking. This could be a spillover effect from people’s high level of trust in the government, which is underpinned by a low level of corruption. “We have a belief that our democratic institutions protect us and that the state… wants what is good for us,” he said. … “Danish society is more cohesive. The quality of social relations is somewhat stronger” than in the rest of Scandinavia, Wiking said.

The Swedish language does not have an appropriate word for clientelism, and when journalists refer to clientelism in other countries, they usually have to add that this is a practice where politicians exchange favors for political support. Yet, on the whole, the practice of clientelism is relatively unknown in Sweden. Evidence from scientific research suggests that the Swedish bureaucracy works in a relatively universalistic manner.

Consensus comes about relatively easily in Japan. … Networks based on reciprocal moral obligation have ramified throughout the Japanese economy because the degree of generalized trust possible among unrelated people is extraordinarily high. … Something in Japanese culture makes it very easy for one person to incur a reciprocal obligation to another and to maintain this sense of obligation over extended periods of time.

At least €1 billion of EU aid poured into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in recent years went down the drain, auditors say. Looking at €1.9 billion worth of 16 aid projects in the vast, troubled, country between 2003 and 2011, it said: “Fewer than half of the programmes examined have delivered, or are likely to deliver, most of the expected results.” … He said the EU in 2005 also helped to equip and train a police force of some 1,000 officers, “but when we came down there and checked [in 2012], ¦ we could find no trace of it.”

An estimated €120 billion is lost to corruption each year throughout the 27 member states, the EU commissioner for home affairs Cecilia Malmstrom has said. “In public procurement, studies suggest that up to 20 to 25 percent of the public contracts’ value may be lost to corruption,” said Malmstrom on Tuesday. … the worst offenders in public procurement cases areBulgaria, the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania and Slovakia.

Shivpal Singh Yadav is in charge of housing and construction in northern Uttar Pradesh state,  …  “If you work hard, you can steal a little, but don’t behave like bandits,” the Press Trust of India quoted Yadav as saying at the meeting in Etah town, about 124 miles from capital Lucknow.

One of the biggest [scandals of post-EU Greece], involving the leader of the Public Power Corporation in 1986, apparently elicited the following response from then-Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou : ‘[ ¦] he made a joke of it saying that he had no problem if an official “makes a little gift to himself,” provided that the amounts not be outrageously high.’

Latin America, which has thrown off decades of military dictatorship and embraced representative democracy, remains plagued with endless corruption scandals at the very highest levels of government, as can be seen today in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile,Venezuela, Guatemala, and Peru .

Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico.  Maywood was the first California city with an elected Hispanic City Council, one of the first “sanctuary” cities for illegal aliens, … Council meetings were conducted in Spanish.

… Charges of corruption and favoritism led to one recall of city council members and threats of more recalls are heard to this day. … Today, Maywood is broke. Its police department dismantled along with all other city departments and personnel. Only the city council remains.

Today, South Gate is 93 percent Hispanic. … Nearly half of South Gate’s population was born outside of the United States, and 80 percent of the town’s residents speak Spanish at home.

In 1997, Albert Robles won the race for city treasurer and began collecting an annual salary of $69,000. Meanwhile, he had seen to it that his friends and business associates were awarded city contracts worth millions. … his political opponents were not faring nearly as well. City councilman Henry Gonzalez was shot in the head but survived the wound. Another political rival had his car firebombed. The crimes remain unsolved.

The move comes amid findings that “almost all” the cases of large-scale electoral fraud in England since 2000 have occurred in areas with largePakistani or Bangladeshi communities. … The report by the Liverpool and Manchester team found both communities shared “a wide range of vulnerabilities, which may make them susceptible to becoming victims of electoral fraud”.

The main issues highlighted were the influence of the “kinship networks” combined with an absence of mainstream party political activity.

In the capital, as well as the states of Mexico, Tamaulipas and Querétaro those stopped by the traffic police pay bribes over 80 percent of the time.While these represent the worst, the national average is just under 70 percent (in only four states is it less than half of the time).

Teuk Thla Market [in Phnom Penh] is a clearinghouse where soldiers, police and occasionally criminals haggle over all things police- and military-related, from footwear to stun guns, and even insignia of rank.

Interviews with buyers and sellers alike reveal a vicious cycle: Government officials in charge of procurement sell state-owned gear [destined for their troops] to vendors. Vendors, in turn, sell it on to other police who flock to the market after finding themselves under-equipped partly because much of the gear intended for standard issue winds up in Teuk Thla instead!

Most African hospitals are desperately short of medicine. But on the streets outside, any type and variety of medicine is readily for sale, most of it pilfered from the hospital pharmacies or diverted before it even makes it that far. Those with money can afford to buy medicines privately; those without–and that means the vast majority of Africans–simply suffer until they die.

One civil servant told India Today magazine the Uttar Pradesh state’s Public Civil Service Commission had been visited by more than 5,000 families searching for grooms with lucrative bribe income potential. … families wanted their daughters to marry civil servants because they know they will take home high, tax-free bribe payments. “There is widespread acceptance of graft in the society. No parent gives a damn about monthly salary, all they are concerned about is whether he [the groom] is at a position which allows him to take bribes,” he said.

Twenty-five [Cameroonian] people were charged Thursday with obtaining at least $75 million in fraudulent Medicaid payments from the District of Columbia government, a series of cases that federal prosecutors said added up to the largest health-care fraud in the city’s history. Among those charged was Florence Bikundi, 51, of Bowie, Md., … she was able to [falsely] bill the city for $75 million in Medicaid .

“This investigation has revealed that Medicaid fraud in the District of Columbia is at  epidemic levels,” said U.S. Attorney Machen. “This fraud diverts precious taxpayer dollars,  drives up the cost of health care, and jeopardizes the strength of a program that serves the most  vulnerable members of our society.”

A Daily Mail investigation in 2011 … described street after street of opulent mansions and villas, surrounded by high walls and with their own pools, which, on paper, were the homes of virtual paupers. They were all allowed to declare their own income for tax purposes – and officially, they were only earning €12,000 – or a paltry £8,500 – a year, below the tax threshold, … prompting one economist to describe Greece as a ˜poor country full of rich people’.

And, should the taxman rumble this common ruse, it can be dealt with using afakelaki ” an envelope stuffed with cash. There is even a semi-official rate for bribes: passing a false tax return requires a payment of up to 10,000 euros (the average Greek family is reckoned to pay out £2,000 a year infakelaki.)

In 2011 Revenue was commissioned to investigate the extent of tax evasion and possible benefit fraud in 26 Danish residential areas characterized by having … a high proportion of immigrants and their descendants.

˜I am very negatively surprised by the results. Frankly, it is disturbing and very unsatisfactory that there are such massive problems in complying with laws and regulations on tax, VAT and social services in these 26 critical areas. We will not accept that in some areas of Denmark there exists a kind of parallel economy in which the participants will only reap the benefits of the welfare state, but do not participate in the financing,’ says Minister for Revenue. ˜Revenue are shocked. Evidence suggests that it is not ignorance concerning the rules, but rather deliberate cheating. Regardless of where you were born, you must follow the rules. Tax evasion is antisocial behavior.’

How to square this circle between official poverty and misery and the veneer of a well-off general public? There is a vast and completely unreported cash economy in Central California. Tile-setters, carpenters, landscapers, tree-cutters, general handymen, cooks, housekeepers, and personal attendants are all both finding work and being paid in cash. Peddlers (no income or sales taxes) are on nearly every major rural intersection.

… At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

At a test center in northern India’s Bareilly district, state-appointed inspectors making a surprise visit last month found school staff members writing answers to a Hindi exam on the blackboard. When the inspectors arrived, the staff members tried to throw the evidence out the window.

Sometimes the stories are horrifying. A 10th-grader in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, accused his principal last month of allowing students to cheat if they each paid about $100. The student’s impoverished family could barely manage half the bribe. Distraught, he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire in the family kitchen. He died the next day.  In Mumbai, officials said that installing closed-circuit cameras reduced cheating by 20%, but teachers said students in at least one school in the city’s Parel neighborhood disabled the cameras by pelting them with rocks.

In China, academic fraud has reached ‘epidemic’ levels, as exposed by activist Shi-min Fang:

In 1998, after eight years studying in the US, I returned to China and was shocked to see it was deluged with pseudosciences, superstitions and scientific misconduct. From 2000, I started to publish articles on the site fighting scientific misconduct and fraud. … The majority of cases exposed areplagiarism, the exaggeration of academic credentials and faked research papers, which are endemic in China. … New Threads has exposed more than 1000 cases of scientific fraud.

As tens of thousands of Chinese students prepare to study in the U.S., they might reflect on the experience of some of those who went before them. According to an estimate by a U.S. education company, some 8,000 Chinese students were expelled from American universities last year alone “ and the main reasons were poor grades and cheating.

Chinese ingenuity 

Here in Mexico, people toss out litter with reckless abandon. You can see it everywhere ”on vacant lots, roadsides, even in irrigation channels. … The Mexican equivalent of the EPA reported in 2001 that only 53% of the trash in Mexico winds up in officially-designated landfills and dump sites. The remaining 47% is tossed outside “in valleys, roads, vacant lots, bodies of water and clandestine dumpsites”.

After about five minutes, we made our first stop: a road-side garbage dump where cows were feasting on the refuse. We were still in an upscale area, and I asked Kasturi how all this garbage ended up in the streets there. Her answer surprised me.

“My neighbors are purposely dumping it in these streets, and most don’t see anything wrong with their behavior. In India,” she went on, “waste is considered a threat to a person’s dignity and status.” Bangalore instituted door-to-door trash pickup in 2000 ”a forward-looking program in India at the time. But many residents believe their front door is too close to home to place garbage. Instead, they chuck their waste into these street-side dumps. “Bangaloreans dump their trash in the streets not because they are poor, but because of habit and culture,” said Kasturi. “ ˜As long as my house is clean,’ they think, ˜what’s the big deal?'”

‘That said, there is a terrible toss-it mentality in Guatemala. We were recently riding in a mini-van with a young boy (about 12) in the Peten region and when he made a move to toss a small styrofoam plate out the van window. I stopped him and tried to explain that if tosses a plate and everyone else tosses a plate pretty soon the road is ugly and the villages are sick and no tourists come and his dad (a local guide) is out of work. He looked at me blankly …‘

… California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento “San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland.Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here ” composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands.

Jose Fernandez looked out his apartment window near MacArthur Park [in Los Angeles] and admitted, in defeat, that he’s grown accustomed to the view: Torn couches, dingy mattresses, broken dressers, dusty headboards.  …”I’ve seen junk stay out there a week, sometimes a month,” the 24-year-old said. “Everyone walks by and stares. No one does anything about it.”

Hoping to put a stop to the rubbish, the city recently launched a $1-million cleanup effort  … Much of the focus is on the immigrant-heavy neighborhoods of Westlake and Pico-Union just west of downtown. … Chairs, rugs and other larger pieces block the alleys and sidewalks in a smelly obstacle course that sometimes reaches 10 feet high.

“I work in Hartford CT ¦ The area of the city where I work, a formerly pristine area in the city`s heyday, is a battle zone representative of urban minority life. …  Hispanics are, by far, the majority constituency.

… The sheer amount of trash and litter thrown everywhere is mind-blowing. On the sidewalks, in the grass, in the road, everywhere. Bottles, cans, candy bar wrappers, styrofoam cups, an endless supply of cigarette butts, empty cigarette boxes, etc ¦ The littering I speak of cannot be characterized as anything less than sheer contempt and disrespect for basic norms of civility and appropriate behavior ¦

The highways of [majority immigrant] north Ile-de-France have been targeted for clean-up.  Garbage has been piling up there due to incivility as well as the gypsy camps dismantled recently, which left huge piles of trash.  In some places, veritable open-air dumps have taken over. The prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis has complained to the government, stating, “In far too many places, garbage has become part of the landscape. This cannot go on.”

When Israeli-born author Ayelet Tsabari first immigrated to Canada in 1998, a strange sight caught her eye on the sidewalks of Vancouver. Beneath every Canadian bus stop sign, as if commanded by an invisible drill sergeant, citizens young and old automatically formed into neat, ordered lines. “I was wondering, ˜Why are people standing like that?'” she said.

And the phenomenon is not only baffling to Israelis. Ms. Tsabari described bonding with an Iraqi friend over the “foreign and strange” practice. But from Russia to China to Italy to the entire Middle East, there are billions of people around the world who are genuinely confused by the penchant of English-speaking peoples to constantly form into queues.

Farming led to elites, and there was no avoiding their power. ¦ The old-style, independent-minded personalities that had worked well among hunter-gatherers were obsolete. … Since the elites were in a very real sense raising peasants, just as peasants raised cows, there must have been a tendency for them to cull individuals who were more aggressive than average, which over time would have changed the frequency of those alleles that induced such aggressiveness.

Agriculture itself, and the particular form it took in state societies, must have selected for personalities that can only be called bourgeois, characterized by the traits that make a man successful rather than interesting. … It takes a certain type of personality ”with traits including patience, self-control, and the ability to look to long-term benefits instead of short-term satisfaction ”and natural selection must have gradually made such personalities more common among peoples that farmed for a long time.

By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding makes the development of civil society more difficult. … Extended families that are incredibly tightly bound are really the enemy of civil society because the alliances of family override any consideration of fairness to people in the larger society.

As far as economic consequences, Turkish researcher Melike Bildirici has led several studies searching for links between economic success and consanguinity (Bildirici et al. 2009, 2010, 2011). He asserts that  

The countries that reached the highest development levels banned consanguineous marriages in the 19th Century [ ¦] According to our opinion, consanguineous marriage is a significant impediment to economic development.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded. As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them.  (Nicholas Wade via Steve Sailer)

Male combativeness is especially strong in highland pastoral societies beyond the reach of State control. … If highland pastoral societies represent one end of this behavioral continuum, the other end seems to be the low-lying farming societies of east and southeast Asia, where State formation, rice farming, and sedentary life favored collectivism over individualism and a general pacification of social relations. Rice farming seems to have been a pivotal factor: water use and maintenance of irrigation networks requires peaceful and orderly cooperation among all community members.

(See also HBD Chick, Flatlanders vs. Mountaineers.)

For pastoralist groups (especially nomadic ones) in arid or mountainous climates, out-group emnity seems stronger.  Tribal groups remain small, and frequent mobility means attention to constant danger.  Martial values become widespread and highly prized in the group.  Military might and aggressiveness are emphasized; feminine values like cooperation, compassion, compromise become dangerous to the survival of the group.  Outsiders are perceived as potential threats. (See Steve Sailer on the dangers of letting immigrants from such places into your country.)

Imagine if you grew up lying. Not a little bit, for convenience, but during every public moment of your life: at school, at work, at social events. You had to lie to survive, because the punishment for telling the truth was the loss of your academic or professional career, or even prison. For Russians who came of age before 1991, this is the only way they know. The mature generation grew up with this behavior during the later years of the Soviet Union.

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