by Mossling on March 2nd, 2011, 9:52 am

CanadysPeak wrote: Try telling an ethnic Chinese and a Vietnamese they're the same race and you'll get the answer (assuming you live to tell the tale).

Forest_Dump wrote: Specifically the more "tribal" and/or egalitarian types of society do not use the concept, at least not in the same way (with variation that I think can be correlated with interaction with broader state-level societies).

Forest_Dump wrote: I have not seen anything quite like your specific configuration before, let alone defended in any way.

people with a common heritage who strive to retain their original culture and language

In San Francisco, a visit to Chinatown with it's signs in Chinese and people speaking Chinese verifies this reality

people of the same gender, race, and/or ethnic group tend to favor each other's company.

trade credit in Africa—Raymond Fisman of Columbia University concluded that trade creditors are twice as likely to finance entrepreneurs if they are from the same ethnic group than if they are from a different one.

Ola Bengtsson of the University of Illinois and David H. Hsu of the University of Pennsylvania discovered that the founders of venture capital-backed startups and the venture capitalists who serve on their boards are much more likely than random to have the same ethnicity .



Why Investors Prefer Entrepreneurs Who Look Like Them

similarity breeds trust between entrepreneurs and investors. According to Bengtsson and Hsu, it's easier to develop shared understandings and implicit agreements with people who are like you.

Your odds of getting money from someone who is similar to you are greater than the odds of getting it from someone who is different.

Iolo wrote: This archaic 'race' stuff seems to be desperately deep in the American psyche, doesn't it?

I seem to recall that Chinese people and Vietnamese people are happy to embrace their shared racial history - in my encounters with them, at least. Xinjiang Chinese (Uyghurs) and Han Chinese are probably more likely to clash (as they have done recently in those NW China riots), and yet their culture has deeply chinese elements, and their physical features are often visibly 'Chinese' when compared to neighbours slightly more further afield - such as in Cambodia. The Uyghur Islam is also apparently a 'Chinese brand' of Islam - not something that would unite them more with Arab Sunni Muslims, for example, rather than their secular Chinese brothers."In addition to eating pork, the Uygurs of Changde Hunan practice other Han Chinese customs, like ancestor worship at graves. Some Uyghurs from Xinjiang visit the Hunan Uyghurs out of curiosity or interest. Also, the Uyghurs of Hunan do not speak the Uyghur language, instead, they speak Chinese as their native language, and Arabic for religious reasons at the mosque. [...] Most Uyghurs are Muslim, and practice Sufism." Wiki: Uyghur People Just today I was listening to an Anthropology lecture relating how an ethnic group from Cameroon referred to "white people" - namely the French and British Engineers who had been working nearby. Did not many darker-skinned groups refer to, and reflect upon, the very different pale skin of Europeans when they arrived in their lands?Interesting - maybe I will have to have a look around the net a bit. What is the most common main general influence upon the preferred economic interactions of nations, then? Political system? Like how the Communists of the Soviet Eras worked together?"Rather than being one melting-pot society,.... the reality is that many US cities are made up of neighbourhoods of." Intercultural Business Communication "Sociologists have found homophily to be very common. Studies show that rich people want to associate with other rich people. Lawyers like to be with other lawyers. Doctors prefer to hang with other doctors. AndSo it shouldn't surprise you that investors prefer to finance entrepreneurs who are similar to them. But you might not have considered the implications of this basic tenet of human behavior.[...]In a completely different setting—In yet another context,In fact, they find that having "a shared ethnicity almost doubles the likelihood of a match."Academics have a lot of theories about why people favor those who are similar to them, but two are particularly important to entrepreneurial finance. The first is thatThe second is that similarity gives investors more control over the entrepreneurs they back. Being similar increases the odds that the entrepreneur and investor travel in the same social circles. Because ostracizing someone from a common social network is a good way to punish bad behavior, Bengtsson and Hsu explain that investors prefer similar entrepreneurs as a way to get more leverage over them.The ImplicationsFor an individual entrepreneur, the implications of homophily for financing are fairly benign.But homophily exists across a variety of dimensions—race, age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, and so on. So your odds of getting a specific investment might not be that different than those of anyone else because of the way your particular attributes match with those of investors. " Businessweek.com: Overlooked When Raising Capital: Investor Preferences Try going to China or India with your racism-ometer at the ready, lol. That may broaden your opinion somewhat, methinks.