> And in fact, when averaging all predominantly Jewish nations'
> [Jewish communities'???--ams]

"Jewish nations."

Alright, I'll bite.  How many "predominantly Jewish nations" are there in the world right now???

 However, you'll find if you can get your hands on Hofstede's book

I'll try to do that.  Is it _Culture's Consequences_?

 it seems that Jews are indeed
> > high on Openness - but also low in Agreeableness and high in
> > Neuroticism, as I have suggested on previous occasions.
>
> ams: And higher on Conscientiousness

No, PDI correlates *positively* with Conscientiousness!

I don't recall what you may have said the correlation is, but let's say it's .40--that would explain only 16% of the variance  in C.  The reasons I tend to think the Jews might score high on C in spite of being low on PDI are:

1.  They tend to be very driven to succeed--they try harder.

2.  If their famous ingroup altruism is not explained by higher A, maybe it is explained by higher C, creating a sense of  obligation.

If Jews do indeed try very hard to succeed and make sacrifices to assist one another while being low on both A and C, this would seem to need some explaining.

Thus, the extremely low PDI of Israel (higher only than one country - Austria, I believe) is inconsistent with claims of high Jewish C.


> Are there differences between the scores of secular Israeli
> Jews and fundamentalist Israeli Jews?

IND correlates inversely with the importance attached to religion.

Now here is something else that's curious.  Supposedly prosperity increases IND. (And, according to John Wesley, it also undermines religious piety.)  However, David Landau in _Piety and Power_ writes that the Haredi (so-called "ultra-orthodox") Jews in America (as opposed to Israel where they freeload off the secular Israeli state and American Jewish generosity) are the most economically successful segment of Judaism as well as the most religiously intense.  Of course, a lot of their income gets channeled into their relatively large families--typically around six children according to Landau's book, even though Talmudic law only requires 1 boy and 1 girl per couple, which, if strictly followed and no one had fertility problems, would yield an average TFR of about 2.5 per woman; so they aren't obligated to have to have such large families.  They could choose to have smaller families and enjoy more of their wealth for themselves.  They also respond generously to the constant demands for donations to assorted Jewish causes.  The Jewish anomaly seems to indicate that increased wealth does not have to lead to increased IND or decreased piety.  The key to Haredi success in resisting the temptations of prosperity seems to be intensive religious education through all grade levels, and self-insulation from the electronic mass media may also play a valuable role. 

BTW, based on your first hand observation of Jews, do they seem to work harder than other whites? How would you compare them with East Asians in similar positions--or, assuming you have had less exposure to East Asians in analogous positions, with the reputations that East Asian managers, entrepreneurs, and professionals have for working very hard and putting in longer hours than Whites? Do you get the impression that Jews are extra-hard workers or put in longer than average hours? Or are they more like Aryans than Orientals?

Note that UAI tends to have a greater effect on the *style* of religion a country adopts; MAS and IND(inversely) are associated with traditional religiosity.

Interesting, but "associated with" doesn't really tell us much.  Traditional religions, especially monotheistic ones, tend to legitimize  patriarchal authority structures and to discourage individualism.  So which is the chicken and which is the egg?

> And that LTO--Long Term Orientation--looks interesting.
> The US should score extremely low on that one.

I agree that LTO is better than I first gave it credit for. Yet LTO still seems like a bandaid for a cultural schema which doesn't include intelligence: LTO looks like -IND + IQ,

I'm guessing that when you write "include," you mean "acknowledge."  LTO seems to me to be synonymous with cultural continuity.  It seems logical that this characteristic would be inversely correlated with IND; I'm not sure how important IQ would be to it, although a high IQ culture that wanted to preserve cultural continuity would probably be better at creating the institutions and custorms that would allow its goal to be attained.  But Middle Eastern cultures are no doubt higher on LTO than higher IQ European cultures  such as the US.

I agree with you that the US is becoming higher on UAI.  Americans pride themselves on being open to change, but in fact we are becoming ultra-conservative, and not in the good way.  Basically, Americans now don't won't *anything* to change, and not because they think they living in the best of all possible worlds.  Americans have become suspicious of any major reform--liberal or conservative--and suspicious of new or unfamiliar ideas or information.  Just for one example, "Great Society" programs that were legislated and implemented in the 1960's could not be implemented today, but neither can they be rolled back or significantly changed short of some catastrophic crisis.  Political debate must avoid serious controversy at all cost, because voters will "punish" candidates who stir up too much controversy.  Even if they agree with such politicians in principle, most of them will reject as him as simply "too extreme."  Americans now are terrified of anything the least bit extreme or controversial.  Their most important maxim is, "Don't rock the boat."  Of course, fears of terrorism only make this tendency worse, but it seems to me that Americans are "too" afraid of terrorism. Our national trepidation is  to the point that it often seems, well, unmanly.  Well before 911, the increasing adoption of "zero tolerance" policies, sometimes leading to ludicrous reactions to innocuous acts or comments, indicated growing aversion to uncertainty or risk of any kind.  Increasing UAI may have enhanced the response to 911 and subsequent events as much as the latter enhanced UAI.  Is it possible that increasing the rules and regulations--both de jure and de facto rules--can itself increase UAI?

and probably also has some inverse function of Extroversion thrown in.

On the other hand, MAS, which I haven't discussed much in the past, is much more interesting. It has implications for eugenics (rich, low MAS cultures have higher birthrates

How much higher? Like Sweden? They're still well below replacement, although they did manage stay near replacement longer than most European countries. 

and tend to focus more on bio-related fields than mass production), war (high MAS cultures fight more), ethnic relations (high MAS cultures are much less forgiving of weeak minority groups) and intergroup struggles (high MAS cultures tend to see life as a zero sum game; feminism requires that men be lowered, affirmative action demands that Euros be lowered. Low MAS cultures are more interested in quality of life).

Note to Chris: Nordic nations are feminine. *Extremely* feminine.

Yes, and I basically agree with your analysis of them.  Their feminine tendencies did not arise solely from modern Marxism, but had deep roots in their history and culture.  I'm sure militaristic Sparta was also a low MAS culture (compare Viking Scandanavia and warlike Celtic Ireland, both, like Sparta, with relatively independent women), but culturally sophisticated Athens was high MAS.  Athens' foreign policy was also more expansionist than Sparta's.

 the more obvious culprit: Bioegalitarian hysteria is much less prevalent in Japan.

What do you think accounts for this? Why haven't they "turned against themselves" the way the Germans did after both countries' defeat in WW2?

> How do these traits develop? Could a country's government
> "engineer" its culture in such as way as to raise or lower
> its scores on these various scales?

Yes, in some cases.

How to boost IND: increase general wealth.

I don't think American levels of IND need to be increased.  Can they be lowered without making a country poorer?

How to boost UAI: increase perceptions of threat.

That's one way.  Perhaps making more laws or rules also does this. Why do the "large majority" of Roman Catholic countries score high on UAI? (Ireland and the Philippines being two notable exceptions--the Philippines surprised me; and Ireland has long been compared to the US and India for the prevalence of religious piety.  Does adopting English, as both countries have done, tend to convey some influence that weakens UAI?)

How to boost MAS: ? Encourage competition in children ?

Or increase sex role differentiation? (Or decrease it to lower MAS?)

How to boost PDI: ? Increase stratification ?

Are you sure that low PDI countries are actually less stratified than high PDI? Or are the classes merely more permeable? Less class consciousness?

Note that IND and UAI, taken together, are especially important in dealing with ethnic strife: Collectivistic, Uncertainty Avoiding cultures are full of purges and genocides. You've gotta love the Middle East. Maybe if America is lucky it will be able to recreate the wonderful conditions prevailing over there, over here.

Yes, it does seem to me there is a tendency in the contemporary West to become more like the Middle East and the Balkans--two areas with a similar history, often even under the same government, both very multicultural (more pejoratively, "Balkanized") regions with near impermeable groups living side by side.

That's different from the Latin American model which emphasized a common Iberian (Spanish or Portuguese) cultural heritage to keep them together, more or less.

Canada seems to have decisively embraced the ME/Balkans model, and the formation of the EU virtually requires such a model, although there does seem to be some resistance to accomodating "undiluted" Islam.  The USA, which typically falls in with the dominant trends of other western countries, seems to be by far the most ambivalent country regarding multiculturalism (although George W. Bush has recently made it quite clear by some of his comments that he is not among the ambivalent; he is quite comfortable with moving in a more multiculti direction).  The seeming ambivalence of the US regarding the current strong multicultural trend in Western civ may be due to our rising UAI.  We are currently incapable of coming down either decisively for it or decisively against it, or of openly debating the question. Either we will "drift" to a decision, almost imperceptibably except in hindsight, which I think is the more likely case; or at some point American society will simply "snap" and do something drastic, although I have no idea in which direction.

~Alypius