2/ Male business owners were more likely to engage in untruthful or dishonest behavior than female business owners.
Politically-liberal whites cheated a good deal less than blacks and conservative whites (who cheated at about the same rate).
3/ How did they know the political orientation of the owner? They told me that it was because certain areas in their jurisdiction were overwhelmingly liberal, and certain others were overwhelmingly conservative. They assumed political orientation based upon the business location.
4/ But everyone agreed that immigrant business owners were worse than Americans — much worse — and that:
Middle Easterners were usually untruthful.
But not as much as Chinese business owners.
And no one — and all of them made a big point of this — lied like the Indians.
5/ They told me that when they dealt with immigrant Indian businesses they safely operated under the assumption that there would be lying, falsifying, and cheating of all kinds. This was because none of them had ever run into an Indian business owner who didn't do these things.
6/ The most frustrating behavior pattern they ran into with the immigrant Indians was that even when the evidence of dishonesty was overt, unmistakable, and definitive — literally, "caught on tape" — the Indians would continue to lie, without batting an eye.
7/ I've spend some time on the subcontinent, and I recognized this as a reluctance to lose face. But I've also lived in the Middle East, where the same reluctance exists. But, by all accounts, the Middle Easterners didn't lie as prolifically and unashamedly as the Indians.
8/ I asked the regulators about Hispanic business owners, and they generally told me that they hadn't run into enough of them to be able to form an opinion.
9/ One thing that struck me about these regulators was how matter-of-fact and non-PC they were — being direct probably came with the job — and that this did not vary by their race or sex or age. It was really refreshing.
