Earlier: Why Does Mentioning Latino Littering Trigger Liberals Into Rage?

From a reader:

I think you may be interested in the attached Lancet article:

The relationship between cultural tightness–looseness and COVID-19 cases and deaths: a global analysis
Prof Michele J Gelfand, et al.
Published:January 29, 2021

It describes a study into the relationship between what they call “cultural tightness” (and its opposite “looseness”) and COVID-19 cases and deaths.

The authors say “The difference between countries in their ability to limit cases and deaths might be linked to cultural variation in the strength of social norms. Psychology has long recognised the power of social norms—implicit or explicit rules that constrain behaviour—for coordinating action. Yet countries around the globe vary widely in their adherence to social norms. In earlier research,2 we showed that tighter cultures such as China, Singapore, and South Korea have stricter rules and punishments for deviance, whereas looser cultures such as Brazil, Spain, and the USA have weaker norms and are much more permissive. Tight cultures have a lot of order—ie, less crime and more coordination and self-control;”

Now I happen to have lived out here in Hong Kong for a considerable time and some of us here had noticed a similar thing although we weren’t calling it “cultural tightness”. In the early stages of the epidemic people spontaneously took steps to mitigate the spread by almost universally, voluntarily, wearing masks and by staying home more etc. There was subtle social pressure to conform – usually enforced by eye contact and facial expressions. Some small sub groups such as the Filipinos, and “White people” ignored the new norms for a while but started to come round (the most intractable being the Filipinos and the French).

It was clear very early on that things were proceeding in a very different way in the West and in Asia. Almost as if there have been 2 different pandemics.

It does seem clear though that “cultural tightness” is a proxy for ethnic (or at least cultural) homogeneity . I think it’s partly an in-group/out-group thing and partly due to communication barriers and have been looking for evidence either way in whatever info I could get from the West but it seems to be a topic that has been avoided, at least until they came up with another name for it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate of Covid infections correlates with propensity to litter. E.g., Japan has virtually no litter and no Covid. And here’s the L.A. Times’s graph for California cases:

In this graph, the bluish bar (teal?) represents % of all cases in California and the pink bar % of population 18 or over.

So Latinos in California are contracting Covid at a much higher rate per capita than other groups.

(By the way, as I’ve been mentioning, over the course of 2020, blacks seemed to learn at a steady rate how to avoid infections, for which they deserve credit. But of course the media has no interest in praising blacks for showing responsibility for themselves since it conflicts with The Narrative that African-Americans are always and everywhere victims of whites and have no agency.)

Evidence is mounting that illegal alien farmworkers were hit the hardest.

But, in general, cultural factors like fatalism and looseness about following procedures might also play a role.

So, somebody should do a study of correlation between littering and getting Covid.

Of course, as Tucker Carlson found out when he pointed out that Latino immigrants tend to be the worst litterers along the banks of the Potomac where he goes fishing, noticing that Latinos tend to litter more is the Worst Thing Ever, so forget I even mentioned it.