Thanks to a confused account of the Roma people’s origins, “bohemian” has come to mean unconventional and artistic. It should mean someone with a knack for business. Bohemia is the heartland of the Czech Republic, and the Czechs have long had a talent for moneymaking. On the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, according to the historian C.V. Wedgwood, “they had gained a reputation for commercial acumen, and their folklore glorified the virtues of labor.” Throughout its turbulent existence, the ramshackle Habsburg Empire depended on the prosperous Czechs for heavy industry and tax revenue. After World War I, the empire dissolved into an uneasy collection of successor states, but Czechoslovakia continued to prosper. The country’s per capita GDP in the 1930s was roughly equal to that of France.
Even a half-century of communism couldn’t suppress these commercial instincts: The Czech Republic’s transition to a market economy has been one of Eastern Europe’s success stories, at least compared to its sluggish neighbors. The 1993 breakup between the Czechs and their Slovak cousins can also be explained by economics. The Czech Republic, led by Thatcherite Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, embarked on the “velvet divorce” to pursue a more aggressive program of market liberalization.
Despite centuries of warfare, technological and social change, and political upheaval, the Czechs’ commercial instincts endure. Why? Truthfully, we don’t know. Perhaps it’s favorable geography, or their proximity to the equally industrious Germans, or long-standing customs and habits that celebrate, as Wedgwood put it, “the virtues of labor.” Whatever the reason, this small Central European country enjoys an unquantifiable but persistent economic edge.
One explanation we can safely dispense with is racism, if only because the Czechs have never had much power. Among liberals, however, the idea that culture or other factors unrelated to discrimination explain group disparities is almost taboo. And while it would be silly to deny the lingering impact of racism on socioeconomic outcomes in America, a cursory survey of ethnic minorities around the world reveals persistent differences unrelated to chattel slavery or institutional discrimination. The experience of these groups suggests that racial and ethnic disparities will endure long after outright discrimination has receded.
The Czechs are one of many Central and Eastern European ethnic groups with a talent for making money. In late 19th and early 20th century Budapest, the city’s economic life was dominated by Greeks, Germans, and Jews, who subsequently assimilated into Hungarian society and often intermarried with the local nobility. Across Eastern Europe, pockets of Ashkenazi Jews sprung up around trade routes and emerging urban centers. German settlers established themselves as far east as the Volga, bringing their craft and commercial talents with them.
Before she became notorious for her controversial parenting practices and a bizarre academic pseudo-scandal, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua coined the term “market-dominant minorities” for ethnic enclaves that wield disproportionate economic power in their adopted countries. Chua’s first book, World on Fire, is a photo negative of the Thomas Friedman-helmed subgenre of pro-globalization books from the 1990s and early 2000s, complete with globe-spanning trips to exotic locales, extravagant name dropping, and vivid encounters with colorful locals. The difference is that Chua struck a pessimistic tone that has proven sadly prescient.
Once you know what to look for, market-dominant minorities are everywhere. Chua’s family of ethnically Chinese Filipinos are an example, as are other Chinese enclaves across Southeast Asia. Expatriate Indian communities that sprang up around the periphery of the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and in African outposts of the British Empire, memorably chronicled by V.S. Naipaul, follow the same pattern. So do Nigerians in West Africa, Jews in post-Soviet Russia, and the Lebanese diaspora in Africa and Latin America.
Chua’s book is almost 20 years old, but some striking contemporary examples support her thesis. In Azerbaijan, a small village of “Mountain Jews” is home to four billionaires and between 12 and 18 centimillionaires who made their fortunes in the post-Soviet economic free-for-all. In 2018, the movie Crazy Rich Asians was hailed as a triumph for diversity and inclusion in Hollywood. But the film wasn’t interested in “Asians.” It was interested in the Singaporean Chinese, one of the most obvious examples of a thriving ethnic enclave in the world. Woke critics of the movie noted that its sanitized version of Singapore omitted the city’s large Malay and Indian communities (one even coined the term “Chinese Privilege”).
What explains the economic success of these disparate groups? Some, such as white farmers in Zimbabwe, are legacies of colonialism. Others, such as the Lebanese of West Africa and Mexico, are just terrifically entrepreneurial. We might speculate about the economic advantages of extended kinship networks, customs and habits that celebrate hard work, or a certain adaptability buried deep within certain communities’ inherited cultural programming. Whatever the case may be, some groups tend to be more successful than their immediate neighbors.
The question of culture in the United States is complicated by a history of slavery and racial discrimination, but even among “whites,” we can pick out distinct tendencies. The economist Milton Friedman, remarking on Scandinavia’s low poverty levels, observed that “in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.” The Scots-Irish, according to the historian David Hackett Fischer, produced a disproportionate number of American pioneers, explorers, and soldiers.
Not long ago, when the term “white ethnic” was still used to distinguish Polish or Italian Americans from the WASP-y country club set, these differences were widely acknowledged. Midcentury writers from Herman Wouk to John Updike were exquisitely attuned to ethnic and religious fault lines. But assimilation, fading cultural and religious practices, and the recent tendency to label Americans of European descent as members of an undifferentiated class of “white people” have caused these distinctions to fade from the public consciousness.
As the country diversifies, it is easy to see why Americans continue to resist cultural explanations for ethnic disparities. Emphasizing culturally transmitted differences between groups is a hard sell in a highly individualistic society. Cultural factors defy easy quantification and manipulation by data-driven technocrats. They can also bleed into crude racial essentialism.
Nevertheless, cultural differences persist. Acknowledging their existence does not imply a comprehensive explanation for certain groups’ success or excuse racial discrimination. But wherever these differences originate, they are likely to endure for the foreseeable future.
For decades, Americans have cluelessly exported our ideological and intellectual fads to the developing world, often inflaming tensions in the process. The combination of market liberalization, which creates obvious winners and losers, and mass democracy, which invites ethnic scapegoating, has proven particularly toxic. Now, our domestic politics threaten to re-create the same problems at home. Nearly 20 years ago, Chua identified Asian Americans as an emerging market-dominant minority within the U.S., vulnerable to resentment and ill-feeling for their economic success. The recent wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans is typically attributed to COVID-19 or tensions with China. A more plausible (and frightening) explanation is that these attacks mirror the collision of ethnic and economic resentment common throughout the developing world. Cultural differences between ethnic communities have long produced divergent economic outcomes. As the U.S. becomes more diverse, these differences are about to become starker just as we’ve embraced the polite fiction that they can be solved by a few corporate diversity seminars.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
