Why Asians Can't Think (Outside the Box)

The higher average intelligence of East Asians compared to Europeans is well documented. The question is: why do East Asians -- despite their intelligence -- lag behind Europeans in measures of creativity, particularly over the past millenium?

Dennis Mangan recently looked at differences between thought styles of Asians and Europeans in this posting. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science provides the grist for discussion:

The first four Euro-American nations are overrepresented among the Nobel laureates by a factor of 5 to 10; Switzerland is overrepresented by a factor of 28! In sharp contrast, all Asian nations are underrepresented among the Nobel laureates. Japan, for example, has been a major geopolitical and economic power for most of the 20th century (Small and Singer, 1982). Yet it has produced only 12 Nobel laureates, the same number as Austria, which has one-sixteenth of Japan's population.

This problem has long been known to East Asian specialists as the "creativity problem" (Eberts and Eberts, 1995, pp. 123-127; Taylor, 1983, pp. 92-123; van Wolferen, 1989, pp. 89-90). Some argue that the ideographic Asian languages curb abstract thinking and creativity among Asians (Hannas, 2003).....Whatever the reason, it is evident from Table 1 that some combinations of cultural, social, and institutional factors combine to stifle basic science in Asia.
_Kanazawa (PDF)

A similar story is told in Charles Murray's classic compilation "Human Accomplishment." While Murray went to great lengths to include as strong an Asian componentas possible in the history of human accomplishment, the cumulative list of Asian accomplishments up to the present fell short.

Q. You pay a surprising amount of attention to Asian culture. Does that stem from the six years you lived in Asia beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer?

A. Put it this way: There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture, 30 years after I last lived in Thailand. Two of my children are half-Asian. Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain domains.

When I began the book, I actually hoped to give Asian accomplishment a still larger place than it wound up getting.

Q. Why did you end up with mostly Dead White European Males in your inventory of 4,002 significant figures?

A. That's what happens when you employ the methods I used. And as I spend many pages in the book describing in perhaps excessive detail, those methods are not skewed by Western sources that are unfairly oblivious to non-Western accomplishment. _Charles Murray Interview

So, how does one explain the lagging of East Asians behind Europeans in the creativity race? La Griffe du Lion suggests that East Asians have such high visuospatial ability, that their overall IQ score is lifted higher than all others except for Ashkenazi Jews. But while visuospatial / mathematical ability is quite important in many fields of hard science, mathematics, and engineering / technology, deep creativity and radical innovation appear to spring from yet other parts of the cognitive neural assemblage beyond mere visuospatial ability.

Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and make original and creative contributions to science is because they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary psychology ("academic conservatism") is actually fatal. Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific revolution. _Kanazawa PDF

A conformist culture will certainly lend toward an anti-innovative conservatism, which can leave life-long imprints in the brain of a growing child. On the other hand, culture does not spring out of nothing. Culture is strongly influenced by the genetic complement of a population. For example, communist totalitarian conformity was forced onto several nations of Eastern Europe at roughly the same time that China was forced into communism by the victory of Mao's PLA. But communism did not last in most of the European populations, whereas in China the CCP is still the locus of one-party rule.

Long ago, inventors in China devised gunpowder, printing, paper money, the magnetic compass, and probably other wonders now lost to history. But even millenia ago, entrenched Chinese conservatism prevented the constructive uses of most of these inventions. It was left to Europeans to expand and innovate on these ancient inventions around the time of the "renaissance." Has there been a fatal "lack of curiousity" in Chinese culture?

This lack of curiosity extended into science. While ancient China was in many ways more technologically advanced than ancient Greece, knowledge for its own sake was never valued. The ancient Greeks in contrast wrote and debated tirelessly about abstract ideas that had no connection to the real world. _HBDBooks

Similarly, Hindu mathematicians devised advanced arithmetic notation and algebraic logic, as well as other advanced mathematical concepts for the times. These ideas moved along routes of trade and conquest to Islamic centers of thought in Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Andalusia ... where the Hindu ideas were combined with ideas from ancient Greek mathematics, and a synthesis of sorts was created. But it was left to Europeans to take the Hindu - Islamic - Greek synthesis along with rediscovered Greek ideas, and turn them into the modern mathematics upon which modern technology is based.

East Asian scientists and technologists certainly have the brilliance to maintain and advance the modern technologies that Europeans are bequeathing to them. The question remains: what will be the pattern of advance? Will we see a plodding, step by step elaboration and revising of science and technology centered on current fields of study, from the new "Asian renaissance?" Or will we see the sort of radical creation of entirely new foci of science and technology of the sort we have become accustomed to over the past few centuries, from European inventors and researchers?

There is much to be learned about the cultural -- and genetic -- reasons why different populations seen to have different habits of thought. Rather than shying away from such research as somehow "racist" or "not PC", we should get busy understanding all aspects of this universe we live in.

Limits to Growth: China and India

A long list of concerns about China is feeding the trend: inflation, shortages of workers and energy, a strengthening currency, changing government policies, even the possibility of civil unrest someday. But most important, wages in China are rising close to 25 percent a year in many industries, in dollar terms, and China is no longer such a bargain. NYT

Both China and India are facing problems with shortages of workers, rising wages, corruption, and inflation, which are causing large western industrial companies to begin building new factories in other countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines.

Inflation in China — more than 8 percent in February, March and April and 7.7 percent in May — raises the prospect that labor costs will soar even faster soon. That could push up prices for a wide range of goods exported to the United States.

China is also phasing out its practice of charging lower corporate tax rates for foreign-owned companies. By contrast, Vietnam still offers foreign investors a corporate tax rate of zero for the first four years, and half the usual rate of 10 percent for the next four years.

...A popular saying among Western investors these days is that Vietnam is the next China. Cambodia, with even lower wages attracting garment manufacturers, is called the next Vietnam.

But how long those analogies will hold — in a world where economies evolve from agriculture to manufacturing to services in a couple of decades — is unclear.

As foreign investors leap into each new country, they drive up the cost of workers and goods, a dynamic that makes it less likely that a shift in investment patterns will hold down inflation in American imports.

...even in India, workers with industrial skills or the ability to speak English are increasingly scarce — and their wages have been rising by 10 to 20 percent a year.

That has led to worries about India’s long-term competitiveness, even at companies investing heavily there, like Ford, which is planning to spend $500 million on factory expansion. __NYT

High fuel costs will soon enter the picture as well, perhaps inducing some western corporations to think closer to home when planning new factories. As automation takes over more of the manufacturing process, labour costs are less of a concern, and shipping costs take on greater relative importance.

China's remarkable growth rate has been part real and part bubble. Many analysts have been predicting an unlimited steep trajectory of growth in China for at least the next decade and a half. But the bloom may have partially gone off the rose. Chinese government duplicity has papered over much of the underlying instability in Chinese financial institutions and in Chinese society itself. Ham handed censorship of the internet and all public discourse, along with liberal arrest and harassment policies against perceived political dissidents, have projected a mirage of political stability to western analysts.

We will have to see how things look after high fuel costs, inflation, slower growth rates, less foreign investment, newer ways to circumvent government censorship, and less favourable international attention hit the CCP fan.

Soot from China, Asia, Escapes into Global Air

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It is finally being recognized that soot plays a larger role in climate and the melting of polar ice than does CO2 and other conventional greenhouse gases. Besides this indirect role of causing melting snow and ice, soot may also play a more direct role in "climate change":

The report concludes that the atmospheric warming effect of black carbon pollution is as much as three to four times the consensus estimate released last year in a report by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The findings are of concern to areas such as the Indian subcontinent, where retreating glaciers in the Himalayas have the potential to flood densely populated areas and affect the drinking water of billions of people.__LAT

China is likely the world's largest emitter of soot, by far, given its huge dependence upon dirty coal power plants. China has become so polluted, in fact, that Olympic athletes have traveled outside of mainland China to train for the summer games.

As can be seen from numerous satellite images, the soot emissions of China and Asia do not all stay close to the sources of blight. In fact, Canada and the US suffer from wind-blown soot from Asia. Certainly the northern sea ice has suffered from contact with Asian soot.

The IPCC GCM's are in urgent need of modification to address new findings in the area of soot contributions, ocean oscillations, cloud feedbacks, solar cycles, and other important contributions to climate change which have hitherto been ignored by the climate orthodoxy.

Chinese Communism--Can China Ever Recover? Can the Rest of the World?

The story of Communist China is a story of ecological devastation on a monumental scale. The destruction being inflicted by the CCP and its policies upon China--and neighboring countries--is so severe as to require most of China's cash reserves to remediate. If it is even possible to repair.

In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world's manufacturer. Among the planet's 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world's cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world's buttons, half the world's silk neckties, and half the world's fireworks, respectively.

...Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world's biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined.

...the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.

...Acid rain caused by China's sulfur-dioxide emissions severely damages forests and watersheds in Korea and Japan and impairs air quality in the United States. Every major river system flowing out of China is threatened with one sort of cataclysm or another, including pollution (Amur), damming (Mekong, Salween), diverting (Brahmaputra), and melting of the glacial source (Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra). The surge in untreated waste and agricultural runoff pouring into the Yellow and China Seas has caused frequent fish die-offs and red-tide outbreaks, and overfishing is endangering many ocean species. ... the planet's deforestation problem is largely one of illicit logging, and China is the world's leading importer of illegally logged wood. Chinese wood purchases have also helped finance armed conflicts conducted by such international pariahs as Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Burma's military government, and the now-deposed regime of Liberia's Charles Taylor.

...The largest source of that pollution is the billion tons of coal China burns per year, more than virtually all the world's developed nations combined. The International Energy Agency reported in November 2006 that global coal consumption had increased as much in the previous 3 years as in the 23 before that, and that China was responsible for 90 percent of the increase. It operates more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants and puts a new one into operation every four to seven days. Few possess scrubbers that could limit emissions, and those that do tend not to use them, since scrubbers drive up the plants' energy and maintenance costs. China's central government has issued some fairly strict regulations to limit plant emissions, but they are rarely enforced because of corruption...

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The government of China wishes to export its "enlightened way of life" to Africa, South America, and much of the rest of Asia and the East Pacific. Clearly the ecological devastation China is creating within its "greater economic sphere" exceeds anything that "global warming" could ever produce in the developed western world--whether in the next century or in several dozen centuries. China has destroyed in a few decades what western industry would take thousands of years to destroy--given the strict environmental regulations in the west that are generally enforced.

But environmental pollution may not be the worst type of pollution being foisted upon the Chinese people and other peoples who are falling under the control of China's corrupt and oppressive CCP. The mental straightjacket such subjects of the CCP must wear is even worse than the physical pollution that is killing their bodies. The subjugation of the mind and spirit by the authoritarian police state destroys hope, even within the small proportion of Chinese who are benefiting from the current economic "boom."

While material improvements suggest the possibility of increased freedoms and opportunities of other types, relative material affluence also can increase a sense of personal worthiness--an expectation of something better. Revolutions tend to occur among the better educated, intellectual-leaning children of the first generation to experience a better life.

Tiananmen Square was a very premature gambit for liberty by students and young people who sensed an opening in the atmosphere of oppression. It failed because the students did not understand how to bring about change in an authoritarian system that had no mercy. Had Gandhi attempted to liberate China from the CCP rather than liberating India from the British, he would have ended an organ donor and a failed liberator. One must understand the system you are attempting to change.