> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.

More likely by people who played outside as children. I'm pretty sure that's more universal than spanking.

Which is giving me an idea: are there societal problems among youths that correlate with either a lack of spanking or a lack of playing outside? Most of Europe has banned spanking but encourages playing outside, whereas in the US, spanking is legal but playing outside strongly discouraged. Which kids are doing better? Less violent? Less psychological problems?

The empirical evidence of efficacy of corporal punishment is also mixed, so between the two, I think I'd recommend the strategy that minimizes violence.

> Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed.

I'd be real careful pushing that justification; it can be used to support all manner of unnecessary (and was-never-necessary) evil.

We've been through this before. The empirical evidence is not mixed: there is weak evidence that it is effective at securing compliance in the short term, and strong evidence that it leads to bad long term outcomes. The high-performing Asian families you alluded to in the last thread about this issue are some of the least likely in America to physically abuse their kids. That's because hitting kids is, among other things, stupid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34471156

What are the “bad long term outcomes?” Civilization as we know it is the product of societies that practiced corporal punishment. Most of those civilizations have declined since they abandoned it. Look at the British. They were famous for the strict discipline in their schools. Now they’re a shadow of their former selves. I’m not as ready as you to abandon received wisdom and a track record for some academic studies.

I meant Asians in Asia. Also, as I mentioned in the thread you linked, I’m unpersuaded by your study of Asian Americans, especially because of the highly idiomatic phrasing of the polling questions. I’m also not even sure how you’d design a study to measure this to account for confounding factors. For example, how do you separate parents who use physical punishment because they have poor impulse control (which is quite heritable) from those that use physical punishment when it’s appropriate? And what’s the definition of success? E.g. what if teachers hitting low impulse control students doesn’t do much for the student, but reduces disruption so the rest of the students in class do better? That wouldn’t seem to count in the studies on this I’ve seen.

In the previous thread, you attempted to construct the argument that high-status Asian families somehow endorsed corporal punishment; in fact, they are among the least likely cohorts to do so. That there is a huge diversity of different Asians doesn't do anything to rehabilitate your argument.

Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.

You pointed to a survey that asked people to agree or disagree with the assertion that sometimes, children need a "good hard spanking." As I said in that thread, that evidence is unpersuasive, because it relies on a confusing English idiom. As used in America, the term "good hard spanking" just means "spanking." But if you're one of the 71% of Asian American adults born in another country, that qualifier "hard" implies something more extreme than an ordinary spanking.

We know for a fact that corporal punishment is widely used in Asia. Surveys show that 60-70% of parents in India, China, and Japan spank their kids or approve of spanking: e.g. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/03/content_175.... It's possible that all those Asian immigrants come to American and adopt western attitudes against corporal punishment, but I'm going to need more than a poorly worded survey to believe that.

> Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.

You're the contrarian here! The same survey you relied on in the other thread shows that the vast majority of asian American parents (73%) spank their kids.

> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.

It was also created by people who practiced bundling [1] as a courtship ritual, hanged people suspected of being witches [2], and used mercury as a treatment for melancholy [3].

Out of all the practices you could have picked as a cause of America's current prosperity, why on Earth would you go with beating kids?

You're smart enough to know the difference between correlation and causation. Do you have evidence that physical discipline was the reason America became the country it is today?

If you don't have such evidence, how do you know that we wouldn't have been even more prosperous without corporal punishment as a child-rearing method?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(tradition)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

3. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/10/22/mercury-was-...

It’s not an incidental correlation—something that happened to exist at the same time as contemporary societies were being built. Cultures all over the world came to the conclusion that physical discipline produced better behaved kids. Europeans only changed their view in the last generation or so, and in Asia, it’s still the dominant view.

By contrast, cultures that stopped using physical discipline are almost universally in decline. On the European continent, for example, post-Christians who don’t use physical discipline are being outcompeted by Muslims who do.