Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skissane 1077 days ago
> the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government

Don't social class and education play a big role here too? University-educated professionals in country X very often have rather different attitudes from poor villagers in country X, so whether your immigrants from country X are mostly university-educated professionals vs mostly poor villagers may be much more significant than the mere fact that you are accepting immigrants from that country.

> Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth.

The two largest non-European immigrant groups in Australia are Chinese-Australians (over 5% of population) and Indian-Australians (over 3%). Among second-generation Chinese-Australians, 35% of married men and 48% of married women have a non-Chinese spouse; for the third and subsequent generations, the percentage rises to 69% for men and 73% for women. Similarly, for second-generation Indian-Australians, 56% of married men and 58% of married women have a non-Indian spouse. And those are figures from the 2006 census, [0] and I expect 2nd/3rd+ generation intermarriage rates have likely increased since then.

Isn't that an example of "assimilation" working? My friends in high school included a half-Chinese guy and a half-Indian guy, and I have half-Japanese second cousins – and I couldn't tell you what differences in culture exist between them and myself, I don't know whether there actually are any.

[0] https://tapri.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/v17n1_2khoob...