Tribes

...firms remained stagnant...

...they are our most skilled immigrants, with something above 80 percent of them in high-level technical professions...

...The British emigrants tended to be low-church Protestants—class-climbing Nonconformists—who went abroad "putting profits over grandeur," ignoring the French and Spanish mission civilitrice...

...India is the classic example of how not to take advantage of a tribal world—a socialism that amounts to intolerance...

...In fact, Kotkin describes a Japan that has already reached the height of its power...

...The "tribal" economy, Kotkin thinks, will havecultural benefits as well, bringing new merchandise to a sorely depleted marketplace of values...

...Today," Joel Kotkin writes, "the rationalistic capitalism developed by the Anglo-American diaspora has lost its grip on its ethical moorings, in particular its intrinsic belief in family and self-help and the need for continuous self-improvement...

...For one, the Chinese family unit is a flexible one, and it is the basis for the majority of lending and charitable assistance, far more efficient than either the welfare state or Japanese "companyism"—both of which the Chinese deplore...

...A common thread running through all of Kotkin's vignettes, though, is that prosperity erodes values like ethnic identity, self-help, hard work, thrift, education, family...

...By 1700, twice as many Britons as Spaniards had emigrated to the New World, even though Spain had the larger empire...

...has increased almost thirty-fold (from 32,000 to over 800,000) in the last 20 years...

...It will create a "new pattern of human coexistence that reflects...

...Let's hope so...

...Meanwhile, Japan faces a severe labor shortage...

...The Zoe Baird fiasco—particularly its most heartbreaking result, the expulsion of an aspiring American citizen—is a perfect example of what happens when Americans become too lazy to do the kind of jobs that immigrants will do: they make excuses, and like lazy people everywhere are tempted to use force, cheating, and racism to protect their prerogatives...

...n light of this history, it is ironic that the British have become the eponyms of post-industrial laziness...

...Those with the clout to do so retaliate for perceived snubs...

...the entire enormous richness and range of the human experience...

...It will not replace George Gilder's magisterial The Spirit of Enterprise, but it is the best book yet about the overlap of entrepreneurialism, ethnicity, and mass migration...

...The Chinese have faced discrimination in virtually every place they have settled...

...While some worry that a "tribally" based business world will set ethnic groups at each others' throats, commerce has a better track record at uniting different cultures than does government...

...Kotkin refers to such ties as "rationalist traditionalism...

...In addition to a more easygoing relationship with the cultures they do business with, the overseas Chinese have far better information networks...

...Groups that have it are better positioned to provide capital and credit for one another...

...There are now three positions available for every male college graduate, and its labs are 200,000 research and development technicians short...

...While zaibatsu companies dominated steels and textiles after the war, smaller companies like Sony were working on the cutting edge of technology...

...To take one country, the Chinese account for 5 percent of the population of Indonesia and hold 75 percent of its assets...

...Furthermore, the revolution in telecommunications and air travel means that businessmen no longer have to assimilate into other cultures—giving up their folkways and forms of association—in order to do business...

...Certain advantages appear adventitious but are in fact cultural: Taiwan is one of the most capital-rich countries per capita in the world not because of any natural resources but because its citizens save on the average 30 percent of their gross income...

...This is, of course, no more or less than the "Protestant ethic" described by Weber and Tawney, which exalted thrift, deferral of gratification, and devotion to work, and viewed prosperity as an outward sign of God's grace...

...Finally, a passion for knowledge...

...And in the century following 1832, half of all,European emigrants from Europe came from Britain...

...T he Jews are for Kotkin the "archetypal global tribe," possessing the three desiderata of success in a transnational ethnic economy: • First, a strong identity, what Martin Buber calls a "vocation of uniqueness...

...Which goes a long way to explain their commercial success in the diaspora...

...Leaving aside private donations to Israel, Jews have an extraordinary number of mutual-aid societies, and most global tribes have some form of what UCLA's Ivan Light calls "entrepreneurial collectivism," whether the Korean kye, the West Indian susu, or the Chinese hui...

...At independence, India was providing 2 percent of the world's goods and services...

...The Indian population of the U.S...

...With 400,000 of the best-trained engineers in the world unemployed, graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology, according to the director of its Madras campus, "have become like Indian art, raved [about] and appreciated abroad, but seldom here...

...Kotkin looks at five of them in Tribes: the Jews, the British, the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indians...

...This is usually reflected in a love of education, but general curiosity and sechel, or hands-on smarts, will do...

...Blacks have once again picked up the self-help strain of racial consciousness implicit in the lives of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Tribes, then, is essentially a book about the entrepreneurial impulse...

...Reacting against colonial rule, the heirs to Gandhi worked to wipe out all vestiges of British commercial practice, including the ways—particularly entrepreneurship—in which Indians modeled British rule to their own needs...

...If the Indian diaspora is the first to bring no appreciable benefits to the nation that gave rise to it, that will be largely the legacy of Nehru...

...State monopolies and a labyrinth of licensing restrictions reach down to the humblest vendor, making currying favor with government the only way to go into business at all—not to mention creating a new arena for the forcible imposition of caste and ethnic prerogatives...

...Capital isn't everything, and Jews have thrived in niches like textiles, communications, and retail, where a sense of trends, not capital, is required...

...Stressing the values issue won't lead to ethnic and racial strife (the doom-laden subtext of everything the left has to say on the issue...

...In the 1780s, France still had a bigger navy and four times the population, but could not establish a comparable foothold...

...Mormons, the fastest growing of America's religious "tribes," have entered the mainstream, with two advisers in the Bush White House—Brent Scowcroft and Roger Porter—and a host of high-tech companies including WordPerfect...

...Finally, the Chinese put a premium on both erudition and a Confucian variant of sechel (Taiwanese, for example, make up a quarter of all U.S...

...What bothers Kotkin is that people always ignore culture and look for an external logic to explain away any sort of group pre-eminence, and he quotes Thomas Sowell's remark on the Jews: One academic writer...

...It holds true for other groups, as well, like British Pakistanis, who are self-employed at a rate 60 percent higher than the English...

...What links Indian nationals--Parsis, Sindhis, Sikhs, Jains, and others—is the fact that they all, in different ways, practice a kind of tribal entrepreneurialism that will be a boon to every nation on earth, with the possible exception, Kotkin fears, of India...

...In fact, as an arena in which ethnicity and culture necessarily play a central role, values may even help resolve ethnic differences...

...That the British fit this model is not at all obvious at first glance, although they do have a far-flung financial empire that cannot be explained away as a mere legacy of colonialism...

...Even in high-capital endeavors, Jews do best in fields like diamond-dealing and the motion picture industry, where a knowledge of technique and the industry is a sine qua non...

...It has fallen to a generation of non-Anglo-Saxons like the Indian foundryentrepreneur Vinny Gupta—who reopened several Ohio foundries in the face of opposition from Connecticut executives who were more interested in scuba diving vacations than in their companies—to "bring back the ethics that there used to be...

...The vaunted "partnership" between big business (zaibatsu) leaders and Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MUD—lauded by Clyde Prestowitz and those urging a comprehensive "industrial policy" on the new administration—is to some degree a sham...

...Yet America seems better-positioned than most countries to avoid India-style pitfalls...

...The Japanese are the only tribe that has gained world stature without significant contacts with other cultures, and if there is one cultural trait that will undermine their stature in a tribal world it is racial condescension bordering on overt racism, particularly towards other Asians...

...Importantly, says Kotkin, where love of learning is a cultural trait, education is less apt to drag people away from their cultural roots...

...Today, when we talk about "success," we mean success in a Calvinist world...

...Meanwhile, the greatest entrepreneurs, like Soichiro Honda and Konosuke Matsushita, succeeded despite MITI efforts to derail them...

...And tolerance is crucial if productive tribes are not to be trapped in a subculture of "pariah capitalism...

...I could not help thinking that Hank Aaron was similarly fortunate—that he often came to bat when a home run was due to be hit...

...The warnings—by lobbyists such as Pat Choate and Japanese jingoists like Shintaro Ishihara—of a "Japanese invasion" of capital are overblown...

...The threat of skyrocketing wages had led Japan to accept 300,000 immigrants, mostly from Korea, by 1990, making an unlearning of racism a matter of urgency—for Japan's loss will be China's opportunity...

...Ethnic differences are not going to "melt" as easily as they did in previous centuries, and global competition is more likely to be competition among ethnic groups than among nations...

...it now accounts for less than half a percent...

...Identity grants a sense of independence from the larger society, and fosters self-help and a preference for self-employment—which has reached as high as 46 percent of the Jewish population in some societies...

...said that the nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants to the United States were fortunate to arrive just as the garment industry in New York began to develop...

...Tribes would be worth its price for its refreshing chapter on Japan, which Kotkin shows to be both much more innovative and much less daunting than we think...

...And Berkeley's affirmative-action law school admission policies have brought officially sponsored anti-Asian racism in the United States into public view...

...Thus, the most successful "tribes" are paradoxically both highly traditional and highly cosmopolitan...

...Those who retain those traditional values tend to have a strong sense of ethnic identity—and it will be they who thrive in the twenty-first century...

...The Republicans may have botched their appeal to "values" last fall, but here, just in time for the Clinton era, is a splendid book by a non-Republican to confirm that Dan Quayle was right: values do matter...

...Britain not only provided the tools for the global economy (from accounting principles to the opening of trade routes) but also set the standards...

...Unlike the Japanese, they develop ties with local business, and are much more comfortable working freelance in an open marketplace...

...candidates in electrical engineering...

...Ph.D...

...The engine of the Japanese economy is where flexible, independent firms meet big ones, not where big ones meet the government...

...Second, a global network of mutual trust...

...It is Kotkin's chapters on the new Asian "tribes" that are the meat of the book...

...When Korea opened financial markets in 1991, it invited American, British, and Hong Kong companies, but excluded the Japanese...

...Rather he looks at individual "tribes within tribes," such as the Parsis, whose Zoroastrian faith has strong Calvinist overtones, and who, comprising only .03 percent of India's population, hold 7 percent of its engineering and 5 percent of its medical degrees...

...The real growth in the Japanese economy came from its small companies, which doubled in number between 1954 and 1977 while smaller U.S...

...Chinese culture is rich in informal ties on which trust can be built...

...It would be ludicrous to view the emigrants from a country so riddled with caste and ethnic divisions as tribes, and Kotkin does not...

...In Britain, Asians are fifty times more likely to be assaulted than whites...

...Kotkin uses the scholarship of the former Gaullist minister Alain Peyrefitte to show that British preeminence in colonial expansion was by no means foreordained...

...By the year 2000, India may be the poorest country in the world, yet it keeps churning out geniuses that its state-crippled economy cannot use...

...The battle between those values and complacency is part of the post-industrial equivalent of Mandan class struggle—the battle between entrepreneurial interests and the aristocratic...