Why Is USA Different?
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
I'm so thankful that I didn't pursue a career that required me to read, write, and possibly take seriously pseudo-intellectual crap like this.
We speculate that "survival of the fittest" applies to people.
A) Successful behavioral patterns will flourish (which is what Hayek says in The Fatal Conceit, and also reminds me of the ideas of The Selfish Gene); or
B) Societies that display successful behavioral patterns will themselves flourish.
(or both, of course)
Also I have been told having the baby sleep in the same room reduces the risk of sudden infant death, so I wonder if the extra room really is a result of an evolved cultural advantage.
Anyway, could it be that the US is simply bigger than most other WEIRD countries? A lot of more people would imply more people of the extreme variety. Also, I think you have a lot of space over there. So bedrooms are cheap, too, which would also explain the extra bedrooms. A lot of families in other countries simply can not afford extra bedrooms for babies.
Also I didn't like the pattern of this article of building up authority by stating some random statistical facts, then using that artificial authority to put forward some random theory of cultural evolution.
That was the first thing I though of as well. My baby doesn't have her own room for the simple reason that we don't have a room to spare.
The only people I know who don't have their baby in a separate room still have an empty room in their house.
It was a very strange factoid to put into the article, but because it was at the start I immediately skimmed the rest doubting it's research or authenticity.
Yeah, that was a weird example to talk about. I was immediately thinking, why is that weird? Excited parents are just preparing a separate room for their future, post-infancy child (which isn't unusual at least in the 1st-world, right?) ahead of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
Perhaps part of the reason the USA is a statistical outlier among WIERD societies is simply its size. It has by fa the biggest population of any WIERD country. This means that most of its cultural influences come from within the country, whereas for a smaller country, a larger proportion of its cultural influences come from outside it -- meaning that smaller countries are less likely to be outliers.
Is that valid?
Here I can see something different http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_Productivity_levels_2...
Although there probably is some measure of worker productivity that US ranks best.
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=LEVEL
(Most the top countries on Wikipedia's chart have a high cost of living. A burger might cost $8 in France compared to $5 in Ireland, but that doesn't make a French burger flipper more productive than an Irish one.)