[zozbot234]

The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!

[pipes]

Which other developed countries do you mean? The only ones I can think of, have westernised on purpose. E.g. Singapore and Japan.

[zozbot234]

What you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.

[pipes]

That is sort of my point, I can't think of a developed country that hasn't westernised to some extent.

[EnPissant]

And yet when you look at corruption perception indexes, they largely track the Hajnal line. As do so many other graphs.

[zozbot234]

Ireland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.