> So spare me the great advantages of those orderly people who once upon a time came across the Atlantic to colonize the new land. They are no different than anybody else, and with a little luck their little islands are as racist as they come.

The Dutch built multiple advanced societies on three different continents (their homeland, the Americas, and South Africa) whilst Bangladeshis have not succeeded in building any. I care a lot more about how they did that--and not breaking whatever cultural magic is responsible--than about how nice they are to foreigners.

You seem to take Dutch (or American) culture for granted. I think of it as a fragile local optimum and that we should be terrified that immigration will cause regression to the global cultural mean.

> Yes, who would have thought that having a massive head start in money and education would lead to a lasting advantage over time? Where do you think the term 'old money' comes from?

The head start doesn't count for much. If it did, Mexico would be richer than Massachusetts. Utah was populated by Mormons fleeing religious persecution more than 200 years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony, but its median income is only 6% behind.

Regardless, it's not a money thing. Italian Americans, for example, overtook English Americans in income long ago. New Jersey has a similar median income to Massachusetts. But Massachusetts is a far better state than New Jersey on most social metrics.

> But there is a very good chance that the UBO of their presence in the USA is exactly that group of descendants of those New England Puritans, and not the immigrants. And that allows you in turn to point at them as failures, rather than as the exploited.

This is a third-world way of thinking. Societies get rich by creating the social and legal conditions that allow building things and running businesses, not by exploiting people. That's why culture matters so much for prosperity.

The main reason why the Dutch do what they do is because:

- it takes less than 2 hours by car in any direction to be abroad where they speak a different language

- NL has been overrun historically by (not in any particular order) the Romans, the French, the Spanish, the Germans and has been in long and complicated wars with all of these, and in many cases more than once.

- In spite of being tiny what you know as 'the Dutch' is internally extremely fragmented, there are at least 10 different cultures, this isn't so much a country as it is a bunch of mini countries in a trenchcoat, with the dividing lines not being so much geographical as cultural.

- Trade. You can't really do much here other than think and grow potatoes and beets. Other than some natural gas in the North we have no natural resources worth mentioning, though at some point we had some coal mining in the Southernmost area. So trade it is and in the past trade meant shipbuilding.

- Theft. Slavery. Colonies. Exploitation. NL absolutely excelled at all of those at some point in the past.

Bangladeshi's not being able to emulate the Dutch in that sense should not come as a surprise: we were small but absolutely ruthless in war and in trade at a time when the cards in the world were being shuffled. We did not suffer from the resource curse and very early realized that religion is a personal thing and so limited the amount of influence that the various religions had here. And finally, science was adopted wholesale because it was good for business.

Those factors, as well as a culture steeped in work just to keep the country in existence (without all that work it would simply disappear and become a river delta again) are where the main differences with a place like Bangladesh lie, and I don't doubt that the potential for doing this is present in many places that are not doing well today.

At the same time: the current generation of Dutch people are losing sight of all of this, they take it all for granted and it's theirs to lose.

Abroad in those colonies the Dutch have been horrendous and the amount of wealth plundered (from places like Bangladesh) is off the scale, the only countries that can compete are England, Portugal and Spain, and Belgium to some degree as well and that's not a pretty story either.

This is a small country that is fabulously wealthy that has been built on a lake of blood. And because the blood wasn't spilled here we can pretend that we are the good guys but make no mistake, we pretty much invented genocide and have committed war crimes that we are proud enough of that the perpetrators have major streets named after themselves. We more or less invented externalization.

So so much for 'Societies get rich by creating the social and legal conditions that allow building things and running businesses, not by exploiting people.'

This is not the country you want as an example for that statement.