Eastern cultures seem better at things like running manufacturing plants too. Any situation where sublimation of the ego can provide better outcomes.

I have my own theory that companies like Samsung and TSMC build plants in western nations primarily to hybridize this culture and avoid falling into certain traps. If Samsung can figure out how to get their American flash and LSI lines to yield the same as the Korean lines, they've probably achieved a more robust manufacturing process.

In my view, it is because if you don't, you die. This isn't merely about the division of labor; it’s about war between nations. The peoples here have endured thousands of years of cycles between violent upheaval and social stability. If you cannot rely on organizational cohesion to weather a crisis, you simply won't survive.

How does this differ from the Middle East? Because our friends in the Middle East have truly 'died off' in waves; many of the peoples who once inhabited those lands have long since been replaced."

I see a link with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model:

“The polder model (Dutch: poldermodel) is a method of consensus decision-making, based on the Dutch version of consensus-based economic and social policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s. It gets its name from the Dutch word (polder) for tracts of land enclosed by dikes.

[…]

A third explanation refers to a unique aspect of the Netherlands, that it consists in large part of polders, land reclaimed from the sea, which requires constant pumping and maintenance of the dykes. Ever since the Middle Ages, when the process of land reclamation began, different societies living in the same polder have been forced to cooperate because without unanimous agreement on shared responsibility for maintenance of the dykes and pumping stations, the polders would have flooded and everyone would have suffered. Crucially, even when different cities in the same polder were at war, they still had to cooperate in this respect. This is thought to have taught the Dutch to set aside differences for a greater purpose.”

The Indian subcontinent also mostly farms rice but doesn’t display effective large scale cooperation or rule following. I wonder why?

Growing up, my American-addled brain could not comprehend putting the "good of others" above my own empowerment. The focus on the individual (me, I suppose) was a thing I was, for some reason, proud of about the U.S. (or perhaps "the West" by extension?).

Only as an adult, with a wife, kids (and perhaps a better perspective of the world?) did I realize how foolish I was growing up. And I see more and more how we, as a nation, constantly pay the price for that mindset.

Honestly, having spent a lot of time in Korea (which famously grew so much rice that visitors from Japan and China from the 16th century were astounded by their bounty of food), I disagree with the premise..

Queueing discipline is non-existent; people will take what they want without waiting for others who arrived first. Business standards for fair dealing are just as bad if not worse than many western societies. Family/personal connections are favored and nepotism is rampant. Driving behavior is extremely selfish and causes a lot of accidents (running red lights, default behavior at uncontrolled intersections, etc). Their problems with concentration of money and power are just as bad if not worse than the west with chaebols essentially above the law and abusing their workers to the extent that people have no time for families - so What makes Asian societies more “cooperative?” Is it just their attitude that they think they are more cooperative?

Are they, though? Outside of Japan and it's former colonies which they were trying to assimilate into the same culture, Korea and Taiwan. Just a quick look at the road traffic tells a lot about culture being individualistic or cooperative. Or a garbage problem. Or public greenery problem. Basically any social issue where good cooperation is not immediately rewarded and has to be done either out of the goodness of the heart or because a person is capable of long term thinking.

I'm thinking that the real culprit of collaborative culture is the historic bidirectional relations between the high ruler of the land and his vassals, and same down the chain. If the rule was absolute and one directional (down) throughout most of the land history, then there is not much chance that collaborative culture may develop at the lower levels. And if there was a bidirectional relations, even very limited, if rulers weren't almighty but sometimes had their own responsibilities towards subjects, then the collaborative culture had a higher chance to evolve.

X (formerly twitter)-tier generalization.

Eastern culture seems too big a term. What do you think is cooperative in Chinese culture? The whole point of the Chinese imperial ruling system post-Qin is to make sure people don’t cooperate to secure the emperor’s rule. It worked wonders for two millennia. Then the totalitarian Leninist system perfected it with modern technology, party organization and propaganda. The modern mainland Chinese people cooperate because there is a powerful central government pushing. Random people have minimal trust towards one another for cooperation. Yes we build power plants and highspeed rails. But we also quarantine cities and abort fetuses en mass and engineer famines with the same system. It’s cooperation with totalitarian characteristics.