Yeah, Hugo is good about bringing up interesting topics and bringing a unique and brave perspective on them.

Your thesis, the role of social networking among overseas Chinese in microeconomic governance and enterprise formation, sound likes something that I would enjoy reading. Do you have it posted on the web? If not, I think Hugo would be kind enough to forward it to me if you sent it to him. I have made the mistake of posting my email on blogs in the past and I am still suffering for it with spam.

I enjoy Hugo’s blog because of the topics he brings up and the following discussion. I hope you continue to contribute your thoughts to this blog. I do learn a lot about things that I don’t normally find in newspapers, radio, or TV. I try to keep up with the latest social research by reading several papers a week from the SSRN eLibrary Database, the papers sometimes overlap some of the issues that Hugo brings up.

I just happen to think that those cultural trends are highly embedded in a substrate of contemporaneous history, geography, economics, law, and broader cultural and intercultural trends (particularly in a multicultural context, when specific ethnic cultures tend to act, if you will, as subcultures in a broader national or transnational culture). Changes in that substrate and its effects on culture make culture I believe often more malleable and fast-changing than is appreciated. This is particularly possible in an immigration context, when the immigrants themselves are in a state of cultural flux, both as part and parcel of immigrating and often enough in response to changes back home that motivated their emigration, and their children often grow up in a bicultural context (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done business with Latino immigrant families in Los Angeles in which the children, often no older than ten, serve as translators).

The Irish in America are an excellent case in point. All allowances for the effects of anti-Irish prejudice aside, the first big wave of Irish who came to America in the 19th century were a pretty sorry lot: fleeing the famine, treated like crap by the English, internally divided by regional divisions and prejudices, and poorly educated. (Most of the Irish ancestry in my family comes from Australia, by way of the prison hulks) The considerable accomplishments of Irish before them going back to the dark ages mattered little to their situation. And their low place didn’t stop their descendants from achieving great success in America later.

I lean towards the human capital theory of cultures. Human capital includes the attitudes, skills, discipline, propensity to save, and valuation of education and hard work. Each culture has various strengths and weakness for different economic enviroments (hunter gatherer, agriculturial, industrial, and information age). Cultures, that value education for its own sake, have a huge advantage when entering an information age enviroment where education is rewarded economically. Cultures do change over time, look at the Irish and the Irish-Americans today compared to 19th century.

The reason I mention the two parent family is because two parents usually transfer a culture’s human capital more effectively than a single parent. I have seen this in my own extended family and in my friends’ families. I have also read numerous studies (controlled for socialeconomic, race, and ethnic group) the large difference of children’s outcomes in single and two parent families.

What I’m wondering is if the contemporary experience is different. The experience of the students discussed in the referenced article seems to indicate that they identify academic accomplishment with race (one is “more Asian” for getting good grades, another is “Mexican at heart”). The students certainly seem to expect different treatment.

I went to Cal, which is 40% Asian as well (and half of that Chinese-American). Something certainly explains these differences in outcome. Are different groups of contemporary immigrants facing different opportunity sets as soon as they get here? It’s a question that is worth asking.

I have a half-Irish background (from my Mom’s side) and my wife has a mostly Irish background. When the Irish started immigrating in large numbers to America, they were considered to be unsanitary, spreaders of disease, and prone to violence and alcoholism. I would say that most people now consider Americans of Irish background to be fully assimilated Americans. I would also say that all the other groups that came through Ellis Island are also considered assimilated Americans: Italian, Swede, Pole, German, Greek, etc.

My father’s mother is from Cuba. I would say my relatives that were born in Cuba and live mostly in the Miami area are assimilated Americans, even though they still mostly speak Spanish at home. I have close friends from Costa Rico, Colombia, and Aruba; and would say that they and their extended families are all assimilated Americans.

When I was in college, about 40% of my classmates were of Asian background, they being first or second generation Americans. They never mentioned that society streamed them into taking engineering classes. However, they did say that their parents encourage them to do well in school, to go to college, and to study something that could support a family like science, engineering, or medicine. I also heard, quite a few times, that their parents did not want them to waste their time and money getting a law degree. That alway got a big laugh from a bunch of engineering students.

One thing that this article had me thinking about, something I was already wondering in the context of current debates about immigration, is whether, in the talk of “assimilation”, if we aren’t in some senses assimilating immigrants into stratified tiers based on race or culture or country of origin. Assimilation is generally thought to have a positive connotation in discussions of immigration to the US, hearkening back to the melting pot and the immigration of a century ago: everyone who came through Ellis Island would eventually lose their benighted Old World ways and become generically “American”, rising with a good dose of the Protestant work ethic and a can-do attitude. I wonder, whether or not this narrative was ever true, if it means anything today, or if we aren’t in effect pursuing assimilation of a rather less egalitarian sort, streaming immigrants of different origins into an already stratified and unequal structure, such that we could even be lowering the potential aspirations and opportunities of some.

And, of course, I look forward to your post on Christian-feminist sexual ethics — that’s something I’m really wrestling with right now.