Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

I can tell you why my society isn't entrepreneurial. We basically believe everything should be hard and we frown upon people who appear to be taking short cuts. This attitude served us well before the advent of technology but now it just gets in the way. Let me give an example. As recently as 50-70 years ago we lived a subsistence way of farming. Working the land was done using a hoe with a handle that is about 40cm long. Working the fields meant a lot of time bent over. One of the neighboring tribes decided to lengthen the handle of their hoes meaning they worked more upright. Probably had more mechanical advantage. Our reaction as a tribe was to call the other tribe lazy. To this day this is how we react when something new is introduced, loads of skepticism and derision of the person who dares introduce something new. By the time we come around to embracing whatever it is all the opportunities associated with the new technology have been taken up by the very few entrepreneurs. Normal from outside the region. Off course they are exceptions but these are far and few between. We make for a great workforce and we made for a great army back in the day when tribal wars were a thing. In this modern world we are getting left behind. So I guess in a nutshell some societies probably embrace change better than others.

Certainly not libertarian, and I would argue that it should be troubling to anyone who values civil liberties.

There was not that sort of investment in South Korea, and of course in Vietnam the opposite happened since the communists won the war there.

The Igbo may have many different subgroups but they’re conscious of their own existence and other groups are conscious they exist. I’m sure there are liminal groups who are Igbo enough to be discriminated against in Hausa or Fulani areas but different enough that in majority Igbo areas they wouldn’t be considered “real” Igbo. Having fuzzy boundaries doesn’t disqualify an ethnic group from existence or we wouldn’t have any. This consciousness marks them as different and in areas where they’re a minority that makes them a minority.

They’re also clearly disproportionately involved in commerce. As you said

> there's an ethnic group in my country - the Igbo - that are so pervasively, aggressively[0] entrepreneurial that it's become a meme.

If they’re a minority that’s disproportionately involved in trade that makes them a merchant minority.

They also have non-central features of being a merchant minority, like being subject to pogroms but as I said previously Yankees are another example which were never subject to that experience. In Ireland the Protestant minority used to fill a similar role.

> And the other half would almost entirely be Yoruba, but I don't see you leaping to call the Yoruba a merchant minority.

If the Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba had been put into one state by the British, the Igbo had not abc there was enough inter-state hostility to prevent migration the Yoruba would be that *Nigeria’s merchant minority. The Yoruba are clearly more commercial than either of the other groups. But that didn’t happen and the Igbo are Nigeria’s merchant minority.

Classification as a merchant minority is a matter of degrees. Protestants in Ireland, Yankees in the US, Germans along the historic borderlands with the Slavs, all of these groups were a lot more involved in trade than the majority popular but they also engaged heavily in primary production. Classic merchant minorities like Jews, Armenians or Parsis didn’t. Igbo are clearly closer to the first group than the second in those areas where they’re a majority.

Have you considered that looking up things on the Internet is not exactly a suitable proxy for actually having experience with a situation? When I mentioned Western arrogance, I wasn't anticipating that I was going to run full-tilt into it immediately.

> The Igbo may have many different subgroups but they’re conscious of their own existence and other groups are conscious they exist.

I don't quite see how that has anything in the slightest to do with what I said - I mentioned nothing about fuzzy boundaries, and what you are "sure of" unfortunately (or fortunately) has no actual bearing on what is real. The barest real knowledge of Nigerian history would have informed you that the Igbo have been in the north of the country for less than a hundred years, which is pretty much no time at all when talking about ethnic groups.

> As you said >> there's an ethnic group in my country - the Igbo - that are so pervasively, aggressively[0] entrepreneurial that it's become a meme.

If you did not understand what I said, you might as well have said so rather than go on a Wikipedia binge to seem knowledgeable. That statement was referring to the society-wide master-apprentice system that the Igbo have, undeniably capitalist but inherently prioritizing the success of the collective over the success of the individual.

> If they’re a minority that’s disproportionately involved in trade that makes them a merchant minority.

They are not a minority, but I am rather tired of trying to explain that to somebody who apparently thinks US/European-type demographics are the only kind that exists. How, exactly, do you call one of three major groups that each make up twenty-something percent of a population a minority without falling over the cognitive dissonance?

> They also have non-central features of being a merchant minority, like being subject to pogroms

They were not subject to pogroms because they were a "minority", jesus christ. The '66 pogroms in Northern Nigeria were part of a countercoup in disproportionate response to a coup d'etat earlier the same year which had ended the lives of (amongst others) two especially beloved Northern political leaders - Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and the Northern premier/Sokoto's crown prince Ahmadu Bello - and placed Easterners in power instead. The pogroms and the ensuing civil war, which Western Nigeria took opportunistic advantage of, were largely an attempt to reconsolidate power in the North.

Oh actually never mind me, it was just "'minorities' bad" and not a complex political situation in a newly independent country.

> But that didn’t happen and the Igbo are Nigeria’s merchant minority.

Or consider that of the Igbo are not among the ethnic groups in Nigeria that could possibly be called merchant minorities - but that would actually require knowing more than a quick Google about the country. For example, it's rather clear that you're unaware of the history between the Yoruba and the Hausa both prior to and during the colonial era, or that the Fulani are an actual minority ethnic group both in Northern Nigeria and in the country as a whole and would actually be fairly classifiable as a "merchant minority" if we cared to apply political labels made for populations in diaspora to people living in their own country - the Fulɓe are semi-sedentary, widely dispersed, tend to live in ethnic enclaves, and have formed several ethnic subgroups throughout West Africa due to integration with clear majority populations.