[throwaway43434]

I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

You can see how the author extricates Japan from his 'analysis', but not so for other Asian nations; in fact much of this can be said to be true of China and India (amongst others), but many here and elsewhere will somehow extricate China, but not India for obvious fiscal reasons. This trend is striking if you're old enough to have followed the reporting on a topic for many years.

Yet, little of the culture and the way of doing things have 'changed' in a significant way.

It's kind of like ML, you have some terribly useless set of features, and you use it to fit some dataset. The thing with ML is that you know this is stupid, and you have a test set to tell you it's stupid.

Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.

[linuxkerneldev]

> I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

I think there's an element of truth to your statement. One key sentence in the essay that lends itself to your conclusion is this one:

" A thar-dominated society will never achieve equality, regardless how prosperous it becomes, because prosperity for the masses is a direct affront to the status of the elite. "

But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar-dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.

[DuskStar]

> But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar-dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.

In other words, a "thar-dominated" society won't achieve equality, because the west typically isn't one anymore.