Here is another good example. People in north are more bylaw obeying. For example in north people will wait for a green light to cross the road. People in south treat red light more like a suggestion. Same goes for all traffic regulations. How does this go with individualism vs collectivism?
Here is one more. People in north will lie more often not to hurt someone's feelings, about their cooking, how others dress or behave, and generally are more politically correct. I'm not sure if it denotes more tolerance or compassion, or obedience, but definitely helps a collective life of a group by avoiding confrontation. People in south are more direct with their opinion. Again, I'm not sure if it is due to being more emotional, or contrarian, more egoistic, strong willed, but surely it is more individualistic.
Also, statistically speaking, people in north tend to share more with others, either by obediently paying taxes or giving freely to charities. People in south tend to share less with strangers but are more generous to immediate family. Which one, you might think, is more collective? My pet hypothesis is that this is hunter-gatherer vs farmer issue, expressed through natural selection.
South is more farmer like, farmers have private fields which benefit family first. If they have more then they share with a village. If father and mother die, kids usually die too (in the past). Hunters-gatherers live in multifamily groups, they all hunt and gather together, then they share and eat together. Whole group is the "family", a big commune. When mother and father dies there is not much change for their kids, because the group will still share equally. In this case, by law of natural selection, Europeans with more h-g admixture should be more sharing/collective, while with more farmer admixture more possessive/individualistic, well family sharing oriented.
I know the big argument, for north being more individualistic, is an example of people of the north being entrepreneurial capitalist in nature, therefore more greedy-individualistic. I'm sure the entrepreneurs need to be individualistic-leader like, but the biggest part in it is that ones from north are more collective (more hunter gatherer). It means that they will embrace anybody from society to work in their company and most importantly in management, as long as they have the best skills for positions. Entrepreneur from south will be more inclined to give positions to immediate family first, the farmer's way. Therefore he will not get the best talent to run the company. Multiply this by last couple of hundreds of years of capitalism and voila, this little advantage of hiring better talent for positions is giving north Europe economic advantage over south. Mind you that south was economically ahead most of the history till 17th century, thanks to family-feudal oriented ways. The best way how to control production from the land. It sees that now however, in times of industrial and free market capitalist economy, the north is ahead. And it might be due to more collective nature of running business.
Off course there will be other differences in character of people to account for north/south differences and how economies and countries are run. I was just emphasizing things suiting current discussion best.
I can see that you have never cycled through Amsterdam or another major city in the Netherlands LeBrok
That's the art of crossing trough the street, sometimes take the footpath, just enough not to make accidents, but no more no less, on the edge
And you can ask the neighboring Belgians here (Maciamo, Bicicleur); the Dutch are famous for t
heir blunt, rude behavior....There are differences between calvinistic North and much more law abiding Lutheran North....
Of course the Italians have an awe-inspiring and grand old culture!! Deep bow. And my twelve years old twins still learn Latin (besides Greek). No Italian learns Dutch so I know my place.....
But in the case of the development of the modern society the North Sea area did accelerate! The HBD chick made this very clear:
“‘Rather than focus on why Europe diverged from the rest in 1800 we should be asking why the North Sea diverged from the rest in 1000.
By 1200 Western Europe has a GDP per capita higher than most parts of the world, but (with two exceptions) by 1500 this number stops increasing. In both data sets the two exceptions are Netherlands and Great Britain. These North Sea economies experienced sustained GDP per capita growth for six straight centuries. The North Sea begins to diverge from the rest of Europe long before the ‘West’ begins its more famous split from ‘the rest.’
“[W]e can pin point the beginning of this ‘little divergence’ with greater detail. In 1348 Holland’s GDP per capita was $876. England’s was $777. In less than 60 years time Holland’s jumps to $1,245 and England’s to 1090. The North Sea’s revolutionary divergence started at this time.“
Seems without discussion.
Her explanation is as follows:
" The combination of two not wholly dissimilar groups (franks+frisians, for instance), with one of the groups being very outbred (the franks) and the other being an in-betweener group (the frisians), seems perhaps to be a winning one. the outbred group might provide enough open, trusting, trustworthy, cooperative, commonweal-oriented members to the union, while the in-betweener group might provide a good dose of hamilton’s “self-sacrificial daring” that he reckoned might contribute to renaissances."
Interesting
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/going-dutch/
And yes this Dutch golden age culture was a blue print for New York:
“While short-lived, the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland had a lasting impact on the continent’s development by laying down the cultural DNA for what is now Greater New York City. Modeled on its Dutch namesake, New Amsterdam was from the start a global commercial trading society: multi-ethnic, multi-religious, speculative, materialistic, mercantile, and free trading, a raucous, not entirely democratic city-state where no one ethnic or religious group has ever truly been in charge. New Netherland also nurtured two Dutch innovations considered subversive by most other European states at the time: a profound tolerance of diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry. Forced on the other nations at the Constitutional Convention, these ideals have been passed down to us as the Bill of Rights.”
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2016...-in-medieval-netherlands-and-new-york-values/
And the Italians, always the clannish family comes first. Sometimes a strength. But in modern days sometimes a weakness, family first and not the common wealth and it doesn't always combine with a free liberated spirit.....
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/la-famiglia/
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/il-risorgimento-and-italian-inbreeding/
