Western Europe began to overtake the rest of the world long before it established colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (source) In Why Nations Fail, economist Daren Acemoglu sees global inequality as a legacy of colonialism. Wherever European settlers were numerous enough, they formed inclusive, democratic societies that aimed for sustainable growth. Wherever...
Read MoreIs Japan dying? (Source: PBT Consulting) Today, East Asia is widely acclaimed for decade upon decade of economic success. Yet this success rests on a very fragile foundation—an aging population with the world’s lowest fertility. This situation is viewed with surprising indifference by East Asians and Westerners alike. As with so many other things, we...
Read MoreMcDonald’s in Taipei. By the 1990s, Taiwan had already become a “post-nation” (source) East Asia has long been bucking the trend toward globalization. Its countries have become major players in the global marketplace, while jealously guarding their cultural specificity and national character. But East Asia is now getting with the program. South Korea in particular...
Read MoreCartoon lampooning the traffic in mail-order brides (source). About 40% of married men in rural South Korea have wives of foreign origin. Until recently, South Korea had no ethnic minorities. Nor did it have a history of being a colonial power. While slavery did exist, the slaves were not from elsewhere. Today, however, the country...
Read MoreYakuzas (Japanese mafia). The largest Yakuza syndicate is over 70% Burakumin. Source Here are a few themes I wish to write about during 2012: Archaic admixture: A wild goose chase? With the discovery that Europeans and Asians are 1 to 4% Neanderthal, there has been a rush to learn more. What genes are involved? Does...
Read MoreMember and observer states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). In both the east and the west, defense alliances have become less centralized and more loosely defined since the end of the Cold War. They no longer contain regional conflicts and may actually cause them to go global. (source) Tensions are mounting on the Korean...
Read More“Global Korea” poster. Has South Korea become the new posterboy for globalism? East Asia has been an outlier in the developed world. Like Western Europe and North America, it is integrated into the global economy and enjoys a high standard of living. This is particularly so for the original five ‘tigers’: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,...
Read MoreUpper-caste Indians. Clark’s model works poorly in State societies where class divisions are rigid and where different classes operate according to very different rules. In my last post, I discussed Ron Unz’s essay on selection for intelligence in East Asian societies. This paper, as its own author points out, makes the same point that Gregory...
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Pupils studying for the Chinese civil service exam. One conundrum of human biodiversity is the high mean IQ of East Asians, specifically Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. On average, they outclass all other human populations on IQ tests, which were originally designed by and for Europeans. This intellectual success is matched by the economic success not...
Read MoreDrinking from the wrong chalice? By his mid-40s, Michael Jackson had skin like parchment. The end of 2010 is drawing nigh, and the time has come to review my predictions from last year. Brain growth genes Back in 2005, it was found that human populations vary considerably at two genes, ASPM and microcephalin, that control...
Read MoreModern humans changed little when they initially spread out of Africa and into the Middle East. Real change occurred farther north, when they entered seasonally varying environments that differed much more even in summer. Three years ago, a research team led by John Hawks found that the rate of genetic change accelerated once ancestral humans...
Read MoreWith the onset of the glacial maximum c. 20,000 years ago, and the ponding up of the Ob River, humans circulated less easily from one end of the steppe-tundra belt to the other. This barrier separated ancestral Europeans from ancestral East Asians. Outside Africa, people seem to have the same amount of Neanderthal admixture, be...
Read MoreIn my previous posts, I’ve argued that China is entering a demographic transition that is already occurring in other developed countries, i.e., decline of the indigenous population and progressive replacement by higher-fertility immigrants. In this post, I’ll focus on how the initial phase will play out over the next ten years. The China of tomorrow...
Read MoreIn my last post, I predicted that China will undergo the same kind of demographic transition that is occurring in other developed countries. This transition will be characterized by: 1. Fertility rates well below the replacement level. 2. A heavy influx of immigrants from poorer regions of the world with higher fertility, mainly sub-Saharan Africa...
Read MoreIn recent years, China has emerged as a major world power and predictions are being made that it will soon become the world’s leading economy. This trend is a source of much pride for the Ch
In North America and Western Europe, the past forty years have seen a radical shift in the marriage market. Before, there were too few single men, particularly past the age of 25. Now, there are too many at all reproductive ages … and even beyond. A similar shift has occurred in East Asia, in part...
Read MoreI have argued that sexual selection has varied within our species in both intensity and direction (men selecting women or women selecting men) (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2008). In particular, it seems to have varied along a north-south gradient with men being more strongly selected in the tropical zone and women in the temperate and arctic...
Read MoreThe human mind seems to use facial color to determine whether a person is male or female. A man has a relatively dark facial color that contrasts poorly with his lip and eye color. Conversely, a woman has a relatively light facial color that contrasts sharply with her lip and eye color (Russell, 2003; Russell,...
Read MoreWhen Pedersen wrote the above almost two decades ago, he did not exactly fear the new marriage market of too many men chasing too few women. In fact, his prognosis was largely upbeat. There would be “lower divorce rates”, “greater marital stability”, “enhanced marital satisfaction for women”, “greater commitment by males to procurement of economic...
Read MoreHow did archaic humans evolve into the different populations of Homo sapiens we see today? The answer has long divided anthropologists. Some opt for the ‘out-of-Africa’ model; others for the multiregional model. According to the out-of-Africa model, we all descend from a small group that existed some 100,000 to 80,000 years ago somewhere in eastern...
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