It's really hard to give much credit to an article talking about "Europeans" and "Americans" as if these were homogeneous groups.
1) Nothing is homogeneous. Even a single static object is not 100% the same now compared to how it was 10 days ago. But in order to make any observation, one has to generalize to the point that has statistical significance.
2) Despite saying Europeans and Americans such articles don't mean ALL Europeans and ALL Americans. For Europeans they mostly mean Western Europe: Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, etc. For Americans they mostly mean the stereotypical middle class suburban American, not a Manhattanite yuppie, nor some Idaho farmer, or "white trash".
3) The idea is not to see if the article's observations hold 100%, but whether they hold more often than not.
Western Europe includes Italy, Spain, Portugal and UK, too. As soon as I read the title, I thought to children in my country (Italy) and I saw the enormous gap.
It does, but there's also the North/South division (even within a single country, like Italy, but even more so generally).
South Europe is not really "Western" in this sense (and in other senses, e.g. with respect to religious heritage and ethics, catholicism and orthodoxy vs protestants, etc).
What you wrote about religious heritage is also weird... Protestant Austria? France?
What you're meaning is just Germanic countries (except France).
To the grandparent: Luxembourg's dirty secret is corruption. France has high unemployment. Standards of living are actually pretty nice under the sun, and outside of the high-pay but nerve-wracking shitty weather of "the north". I agree on the more discipline part, but only when it comes to public behaviour.
Where in western Europe have you lived?
If you ever meet anyone from Dalmatia, ask them what their word "fjaka" means, then ask them why they have it...
And of course, terrorist is simply nothing more than a stereotype, because there is no pattern at all which could possibly correlate the string of terror acts. Those terrorists are actually Buddhists from Tibet, that's what those are!
How could I have been so wrong??? Horrible, deplorable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for_E...
Already we were discussing here the original article, which used a more restrictive definition -- and explained that.
Being a foundation in 17th century doesn't mean it hasn't floundered since. But that's not the point either.
To quote WIkipedia:
"Western Europe is the region comprising the western part of the European continent. There may be differences between the geopolitical and purely geographic definitions of the term."
What?
{
(South != West) && (!Discipline != Discipline) && (SouthEuropeanMentality != WesternEuropeanMentality) && (SouthEuropeanValues != WesternEuropeanValues);
}I lived in 4 different countries in continental Europe (France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands) and while, of course, there are differences, it is staggering the quantity of shared things, in the daily life…
No amount of calling bullshit is going to change the fact that Spain and Italy are mired by corruption scandals. The root cause of that is the mentality, the way of thinking, and lack of discipline: "to hell with everyone else as long as I have plenty to eat, guzzle, and screw". The results speak for themselves. For instance, what is the unemployment rate in Spain, especially among the younger generation? Why?
It's not about wanting your home country to be part of "Western Europe", or whether it was its cradle, or whether it is "worth" it to be.
It's about whether it fits certain modern socio-economic criteria for a SPECIFIC definition of western europe.
To quote Wikipedia:
"Western Europe is the region comprising the western part of the European continent. There may be differences between the geopolitical and purely geographic definitions of the term."
Check: United Nations Statistics Division geoscheme for Western Europe (hint: no Italy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Modern_division...
Or others...
> No amount of calling bullshit is going to change the fact that Spain and Italy are mired by corruption scandals.
Germany, for example, in the last years has been known for VW, Deutsche Bank and Siemens scandals, showing links between corrupt business and political power. BER international airport is another example, and there are countless of other examples. And those were huge examples of corruption. Corruption is a systemic problem, and thinking that in central Europe there is no corruption is just a very dangerous mindset.
> "to hell with everyone else as long as I have plenty to eat, guzzle, and screw".
...
> The results speak for themselves. For instance, what is the unemployment rate in Spain, especially among the younger generation? Why?
The reasons are complex, Spain no more than 10 years ago showed fantastic grow rates, very low public debt, very low unemployment. Essentializing the problems of Spain as a problem of "mentality" just shows ignorance.
In Germany, the courts function and there will be consequences. In Italy or Spain, not so much.
P.S: I guess that children in Italy were running and screaming quite a lot also at the time...
Yes. And then the reformation happened -- and the power has since long been gone from the catholic europe.
It's much more accurate to divide Europe between the Northern, Germanic (Germany, UK, Scandinavia, Netherlands, Austria), the Southern, Latin (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) and the Eastern, Slavic. Of course the separations aren't so clear-cut, but I am under the impression that when I read something about "Why are the Europeans so much better" it often matches the Northern category.
In fact, I should take it all back, for I find in the process of communicating like a normal human I've generalized the very notion of improper nouns. Not all improper nouns are the same. And I've generalized generalizations themselves; not all of them are bad. Mea culpa.