<p>Well, what I meant is that there is obviously a general American zeitgest. But how people choose to internalize that zeitgest is a matter of your personal values, which has a lot to do with what you are taught by your peer group and your family. Obviously culture doesn't explain everybody, but when looking at large groups, clearly from a statistical point of view, culture explains a lot. For example, as Sowell explains numerous times, it is no coincidence that the expatriate Chinese (the Chinese living outside of China) tend to perform unusually well in academics, especially in math. Chinese-American students have the highest SAT-math scores of any US ethnic group. Chinese college students attend top-ranked universities far out of proportion than their overall population would indicate, and strongly tend to choose math-based majors like science or engineering far more so than does the average college student. At the UC's, especially at Berkeley, many classes, especially engineering classes, have far more Chinese students than they do white students and in fact often times make up an absolute majority of many classes. </p>
<p>If this were merely the case of only Chinese-Americans, then, as Sowell might put it, one might think that perhaps the cause of all this could be traced to the peculiar nature of the particular Chinese who wanted to immigrate to the US, or of US immigration policies with regard to the Chinese, or both. However, the same pattern of behavior can be found amongst the Chinese in the UK, Canada, Australia, Latin America (largely as descendents of the coolies), and throughout SouthEast Asia. For example, in Malaysia during the 1960's, a total of 404 engineering degrees were awarded by Malaysian universities to Chinese students, compared to 4 engineering degrees awarded to Malay students, despite the fact that the Chinese comprise less than 1/4 of the population in Malaysia and the Malays (a.k.a. the bumiputra) comprise over 60%. In fact, Mohammad Mahathir, former Prime Minister of Malaysia and certainly no Chinese patriot, himself bemoaned the fact that his people simply did not work as hard and study as hard as the Chinese do, and exhorted them to work harder, learn more marketable skills, and develop better attitudes. </p>
<p>As Mahathir once said in an interview: "... the Chinese graduates choose the right subjects so they are employable. We find that the Malay graduates, especially those from the Malay stream, cant speak English at all...There is also attitude. There are some who start off by demanding good pay. Obviously, if you ask how much even before he has decided to take you, he wont think you have the right attitude for the job. So there are many reasons why the Malay graduates are not being employed....I remember we got companies to hire unemployed Malay graduates and pay them RM400 each. But when they got the job, they refused to do anything because it was not their line and they didnt want to learn. They were just marking time, waiting for the kind of job they were interested in. Obviously, these people do not have the right attitude towards work."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.best-of-langkawi.com/SYST-print.php?selectbox=363%5B/url%5D">http://www.best-of-langkawi.com/SYST-print.php?selectbox=363</a></p>
<p>The same could be said of the Jews, perhaps even more so. The Jews have been unusually successful in practically every single academic field. As noted by Sowell "In the first half of the 20th century, Jews won 14 percent of all Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences combined, and in the second half of the century they won 29 percent. In both periods, Jews were less than one percent of the world's population. ". </p>
<p><a href="http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2003/11/04/170334.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2003/11/04/170334.html</a></p>
<p>Jews have also been extraordinarily successful when it comes to highly professional skills. Surely we've all heard jokes of the Jewish doctors, but that only goes to show the prevalence of Jews in medicine for many centuries, at least back to the Dark Ages and perhaps before then. Jews have also been extraordinarily successful in law, in the fashion industry, and in entertainment (i.e. almost all of the early founders of Hollywood were Jewish and to this day, Jews are heavily represented there). Also note that Jews have not been unusually successful only in the US. Jews have also historically achieved great success in Europe, in the Near East (before many of them get expelled due to modern political problems, i.e. the Arab-Israeli conflict), in Canada, in Australia, in South Africa, and so forth. </p>
<p>Here is Ben Stein, himself a Jew, talking about the dominance of Jews in Hollywood.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Jews/%5B/url%5D">http://www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Jews/</a></p>
<p>You get taught by your subculture what is important and what isn't. It is no coincidence, for example, that the Irish have enjoyed unusual success in fields that require strong communications skills - i.e. politics, writing, acting, entertainment. The Germans have always shown unusual skill in engineering and complex craftsmanship, which has allowed them to dominate in the world of optics, industrial machinery, luxury automobiles, precision machine tools, high-end chemicals (the chemical industry was practically founded in Germany), and of course, beer. Italians have shown unusual skill in creative design, which explains their strong presence in the fields of architecture, fashion, sportscars, opera, and the visual arts. </p>
<p>I could go on and on, but the point is that culture is extremely important in determining what you will do and not do. Of course there is a dark side to all this. The success of minorities often times invokes resentment, sometimes murderous resentment. People simply do not like to see those of other races or ethnicities outperforming them, and will often times attribute that success to conspiracies rather than to the ego-destroying reality which is that those people simply worked and studied harder. The most resentment seems to be arisen when one ethnic group who starts off poorer and less successful than another group, but then, through hard work and initiative, surpasses the other ethnic group. That is a tremendous blow to the ego that often spawns murderous rage. For example, a big reason why there have been so many murderous anti-Chinese riots in Southeast Asia is partially because the Chinese have been so economically successful, despite the fact that almost all of their ancestors arrived as penniless immigrants. A big reason that anti-Semitism exists is because people resent the success of the Jews, despite the fact that until about 150 years ago, most Jews were legally second-class citizens with few legal rights and heavy restrictions of where they could live or work. The Jews succeeded anyway despite all of these barriers because their culture emphasized academics and hard work. To this day, many people simply do not want to believe that other ethnic groups are more successful simply because they work and study harder than they do. </p>
<p>Here are some indicative pieces by Sowell. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/sowell.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/sowell.html</a>
<a href="http://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html</a>
<a href="http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html</a>
<a href="http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2004/03/10/11017.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2004/03/10/11017.html</a>
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/sowell.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/sowell.html</a></p>