What Armenians should know about life in America (2014)

But, I also think it's normal that sometimes things work the way they do because it's part of the local culture and the natives actually like it that way. Other times, of course, the bad aspect is just dumb, yet also very hard to fix (American healthcare).

In the last couple of decades in America, some "thought leaders" have made a serious effort to convince us that "it's like that because we live here and like it that way" is not a valid reason, at least when that reasoning gets in the way of the country being more of a commercial clearing house. In other words, a political trend to convince Americans that if you don't have an economic argument, you don't have an argument. This frustrates many people, and I guess sometimes makes them say reductivist stuff like "if it's so bad, why are you still here?"

Edit - typos

Eg take for example the lonely individualism and lack of community the article talks about. If you discuss that with an American gender studies student, they'll say "oh we have many studies about that, it's called toxic masculinity" which implies it's a global problem with men who need to be "fixed". But actually as the article points out, no such lonely individualism exists for men in many other cultures, so it could more accurately be called "toxic Americanism".

Writing a blog post of your own opinions is courageous?

This seems like a pretty standard blog post where the author has strong opinions about how people should live and then critics his adopted country using those same opinions.

Well, I’ve been here since I was 6. It’s home. I’m not going anywhere. I’m still allowed to have a critical view.

That may be the thing which saves the US in a pandemic like this.

Gotta love the constant car hate that is usually coupled with an anti-development NIMBY attitude that prevents denser cities.

I'm in my mid 20's living on the West coast, and have seriously considered getting a 2bed condo or small house and asking my parents to move in with me. I'm white and my parents are from the US as well, so it's not something that's culturally expected of me at all - it just seems like a good idea for socialization, getting help around the house, maintaining relationships. But when I've broached the topic with friends and even my own parents they think I'm absolutely crazy. I could see it being harmful for dating solely because of the cultural expectations, but I really don't see what the problem would be.

Suburbia is also so harmful to the elderly. I saw it happen to my grandparents where they usually only socialized with each other indefinitely unless someone came to visit with them. They couldn't drive, so they had to have someone get groceries for them or take them shopping every week. They had no need to walk around or climb stairs on a regular basis, so entire parts of their own home were completely off limits to them, and I think it contributed to them losing the ability to do so. Of course they didn't want to leave their house, but living in suburbia also made it much harder for family members to take care of them, because everything was out of the way. Thinking about it still makes me sick - it seems so stupid to me that this is the life we decided to invest in across most of the country.

The way you describe it is that it's some bizarre form of living that was forced upon people.

I live and work in a mid sized town in the Midwest. My main uses for a car are related to being a part time working musician, and I could probably figure out how to use Uber/Lyft/Cab for that activity. My spouse and I can both bike to work, and are within walk / bike distance of basic shopping.

But if you want that lifestyle, you have to demand it. Perhaps somewhere like Berkeley, you don't demand it because it's thrust on you, or the alternative involves 2 hour commutes each way. Perhaps you won't be as choosy about your job, which in any event is a feature of living in a less dense / rich area.

And of course the other problem with the US is that you feel like you have to reach for that high income, because of the risks of being poor or even middle class in a cutthroat society. I suspect if we had free health care and a better safety net, people would be more willing to make those "sacrifices" and live a slower paced lifestyle.

> Much of the rest of the world takes for granted architectural principles of how to build life-affirming human settlements. These principles evolved over thousands of years, and it’s no accident that so many cultures reached the same conclusions. Urban Europeans, and indeed Armenians, are accustomed to vertical growth, mixed-use development (shops on first floor, apartments above), sidewalks, plazas, public squares and street cafes. These are the fixtures amidst which your halcyon childhood days played out, where you walked hand in hand with your first love, where you met friends for coffee, and hopped the train to work. It’s the corner with the pastry shop, it’s the supermarket down the street, and the bench in between.

> Few people can prepare themselves for the degree to which Americans have, in the last half-century or so, taken this entire corpus of human experience and thrown it completely into the trash, with the exception of a few older cities–not the places where the majority of Americans live. What has replaced it is a surreal moonscape. For those accustomed to the traditional urban civilisation, the primary question in America is: where do I go? What do I do? Looking around leads to an intangible but intense realisation of emptiness. Suburbia is both a cause and an effect of the destruction of civic and community life in America: there’s increasingly little to come home to, and vanishingly little to go out to.

I suppose they did prefer it that way. They voted with their dollars and they ended up with main drags that run for miles, filled with parking lots, strip malls, mega-stores, and fast food restaurants.

When I've gone back in the last couple of years, it's not quite as bad as it was in my memory. It still has the same nationally marketed conformity, but it is not as uncontested as it used to be. There are a lot of mom and pop ethnic restaurants, for one thing. It's not as uniformly crass as I remember.

I took a long, rambling walk while I was on a visit last year, and I was pleasantly surprised. Off the main roads, in the residential areas, it can actually be an interesting place. Maybe this is true of almost anywhere. Of course, it is all built for people to get in their cars and drive to the business districts.

Growing up wasn't all ${nationalBurgerChain} and car culture, though. My friends and I rode our bikes for miles, and anywhere we found woods or swamp we built forts and played make-believe games with D&D themes.

The US as a society is highly individualistic. Living on your own at 18 for instance, is considered absurd in a lot of regions of the world because children are supposed to care for their father/mother later in life.

1. Many countries are much more collectivist than the USA. If in your family or clan or tribe or village someone starves, and someone has food (or money), then the expectation is that the food flows to where it is needed. There is much less “mine vs yours”.

2. The difference between market exchange rates and purchase power parity, taking into account the cost of living. A household gross salary of say 72k p.a. in the Bay Area might really not be very much, but 6000 USD per month seem huge for a family in the Philippines or Armenia. So you should be able to give up 1000$ a month easily - it would help the family at home immeasurably, while for you going from 6000 to still unimaginably opulent 5000 should be peanuts.

3. As highlighted by the author, the USA epitomises wealth for many. The reality that many Americans also live precariously or even struggle hasn’t arrived in less educated circles (and most US TV shows consumed abroad don’t help to correct that picture).

One of my friends is married to a Chinese woman, and she sends money back to her parents in China every month.

That might not seem a bad thing by itself, but her parents are constantly pushing her to send more, and berating her for not doing well enough to send more. She has 3 siblings, all of whom also live outside of China and send money back, and her parents make a kind of nasty competition out of it. Poor woman has been in tears plenty times because of it. My friend isn't too impressed with this, especially as she actually sends more money back that she keeps for them.

1. American commutes tend to be by car. Other countries have more walking, biking and transit commutes. (Note that foreign transit tends to be more relaxing than American transit). And a walk or bike commute is exercise, which americans have to go to the gym to do. 2. In cities, American commutes are much longer than average. The article was talking about urban centers where immigrants go, so it would be instructive to compare to foreign city commutes. 3. Other datasets show the US having longer relative commute times.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/american-comm...

Definitely one of the more 'wtf' moments when I moved.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri...

Not really, no. You can build a much bigger house and/or save money for upgrades to things that are expected to increase the later sale value of the house (chiefly, the kitchen, but also things like nice outdoor spaces) instead of building with brick. In some areas brick houses are more common but they are mostly older ones. It’s difficult to recover the extra cost of building with brick when selling a house, so it’s rarely done. Since most houses are build by housing developers contracted to one or more newly-building neighborhoods, they’re very sensitive to anything that would reduce their margins or see finished houses sit on their books, and all-brick construction would usually do that.

Brick is sometimes used in pasted-on façades, usually as a kind of “skirt” on the lower part of the front of the house. These may not even be full bricks, but ones cut lengthwise to maximize use of material and reduce weight (see: “pasted-on”)

[EDIT] I should add that the overriding concern of almost all home construction and renovation in the US is reducing the amount of labor required. That’s where most of the cost is, so it’s ruthlessly optimized.

Not everyone. In "flyover country" there are a lot of solid craftsmen doing solid work.

Anyway, ONE reason is that the drywall home is more pliable - you can adjust the layout and change out the wiring / piping with relative ease. Of course, at that point you don't have much house left, other than a few supporting structures.

The American home is really the cement basement/foundation (outside of Florida), a carrier beam or two across the basement (metal) and a few wood carrier beams on the upper floor / floors. Insulation is typically fiberglass. After that, there is not much substance to it. The brick on the outside does not bear weight.

They do last a decent amount of time when maintained though. Then again, maintenance is high.

I miss living in houses made of wood. And how easily central air systems are installed in wooden homes.

Or the house is already built, and tearing it down to make a brick one is $$$ plus permit maybe will be denied.

And most homebuilding companies only use wood.

> Even poor people don't build houses from plywood. But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses.

It isn't generally just plywood, that would be a very unusual house.

As for your question of cost, with brick exterior walls, the marginal cost of interior volume decreases with size, so the question of an "awesome house" kinda changes. What people expect to be paid for labour is also higher.

Brick is not a panacea, when it comes to building houses. It is an efficient thermal conductor, so insulation is more difficult, the way you have to fasten the interior of the house to it causes thermal bridging. Common ways of constructing brick buildings can cause condensation on the inside in cold winters, which can cause damage and harm air quality.

There are two and three hundred year old timber homes. It is quite doable if you have large enough overhangs, and a durable roof.

Also keep in mind Russia and Kazakhstan have a completely different climate to most of North America.

Then on top of all of this, a lot of North Americans think of houses very differently. There are people who are building for a lifetime and a legacy, but most are content to have a comfortable sizeable dwelling which isn't going to collapse. It's fine to build a mediocre timber home, if it means that people get more or less what they wanted. As somebody who appreciates fine quality housing, I'd like it another way, but it seems that my fellow North Americans have something else in mind, and that's their business.

Further, the American model might be more susceptible to damage, but the damage is more cheaply repaired. It also lends itself to remodel as trends change (e.g., central heating and airconditioning, innovations in indoor plumbing [like removing lead-based plumbing], computer networking, as well as changes in interior layout trends), which allows a property to hold more value for longer.

2) The invention of air conditioning (and low prices for heating) allow inefficient architectures while maintaining reasonable comfort.

3) Corporatization of construction led to structures that are efficient and quick to erect.

4) Insurability of a tract house with standard architecture is much better, due to predictable materials + labor costs.

In America, houses in Maine can be built completely differently from houses in Florida.

The reason we don't build out of stone/brick, besides cost of construction, is that they're terrible insulators. So your heating or AC bill is going to go absolutely through the roof.

A wood frame stuffed with insulation means your home can be energy-efficient. This is a good thing.

We don't fetishize a house being "solid" and we don't generally punch our walls on a regular basis. :) "Solid" sounds like a big waste of money to me.

Not everyone. In the more rural areas there are a lot of farm houses build very solidly.

These are usually build according to traditional techniques stemming from the European guilds of carpenters and masons.

Additionally, Americans are fairly fond of tearing down existing structures to rebuild which is harder to do with brick.

Thirdly, wood is an abundant resource in the US.

As the author, it’s not for me to say whether I hit the spot on “entertaining and informative, but a bit of an exaggerator” for everyone, but I can tell you that’s what I was going for in both articles you read. So, thank you — I think? :)

In view of the foregoing:

1. I agree that overall US tax burden is lower than Western European tax burden; my intended point wasn’t at all that it’s equal or higher, merely that a) it’s not _so_ much lower, an order of magnitude lower, or anything like that, and more importantly, that b) given what difference does exist, the much larger difference in government services and social safety net does not correspond.

I think this point could have been easily lost had I spent time on a more comprehensive of tax rates, or belaboured tirelessly that US tax rates are, in the end, somewhat lower.

2. I don’t think I lavished excessive attention on the living cost structure of major cities. The point was instead to explain to hypothetical immigrants where a lot of Americans’ money goes, no matter where they live, including in most tracts of “Middle America”, “flyover country”, “Omaha”, whatever you want to call it.

I live in Augusta, GA myself nowadays (which, for all intents and purposes, approximates a kind of “Omaha”), having lived in Atlanta for ten years and in Athens, GA for a good chunk of my adolescence and adulthood. Much of what I said in the article still applies, I think—the criticism of vacuous suburban layout more so.

I don’t know quantitatively whether “most Americans live in a suburb”, but I would readily and decisively say, on the strength of extensive experience living in and travelling around the US my whole life, that “most places in America conform to suburban layout”. They really do. Some Americans seem to want to quibble with the idea that Irving, TX, or Alpharetta, GA, or Bethesda or whatever are “suburban”, but in terms of the critical lens here, they absolutely all are. The places I have been to in the US that don’t conform to the Standard Suburban Layout are exceptionally few—so few that they can be individually enumerated—and the overwhelming preponderance of US “municipalities” and “communities” do.

3. The procedural emphasis of American jurisprudence definitely corrects for a lot of deficits in the venal systems that preceded it, and there are certainly two sides to this argument.

It's definitely an interesting phenomenon. I work at a large tech company, and within my team of ~70 people, I think there is maybe one other person beside myself who was born in the U.S.

My suspicion is that this is mainly due to the fact that U.S. culture no longer prioritizes STEM the way it does pop culture and entertainment, and so I don't really have any sympathy for the apparent inability of people born in the U.S. to compete with those from other countries who (at least from my perspective) appear to study and work much harder.

On the topic of large class sizes, there is definitely room for improvement in the US system; being at a poorly-funded mid-tier public university, we had several courses that were so large that there were overflow rooms with a camera pointing to the main lecturer in the main room, and these were lecture halls that could easily hold 400.

I guess that given the breadth of possible options when it comes to American universities this is one area where YMMV.

For example, the introductory engineering classes you typically take in your first year are large 300+ classes taught by professors with lectures 2-3 times a week. Additionally, TAs (typically grad students) would hold smaller sessions for those classes with maybe 30 students each.

Once you move into more specialized classes the size goes down significantly and are all taught by professors.

Articles like these are great for giving you a taste of what things are like in other countries, and making you see that your way isn't the only way things can be. Travel does that too, and in a much more hands-on manner.

One of the things that made an impression on me on a work trip to the US was that I was talking to a colleague and she said something about her not being well in her mental health the previous year, and then immediately apologized to me for "burdening me with her problems".

I was speechless at (and still don't fully understand) the cultural factors that lead people to apologize for mentioning a detail of their personal life to a coworker, but it seems to me that life must be much more lonely like that.

Currently ~67% of the population owns or lives with someone that owns their home, and 30% of those homes are mortgage free. So, ~80% of the population has a mortgage or pays rent, which IMO fit’s almost all just fine.

PS: Many people are paying rent or have a mortgage while owning a home, but that’s less of a problem.

https://taxfoundation.org/how-much-do-people-pay-taxes

In some countries, taxes are high, and you get good public services and a comprehensive social safety net (most of Europe).

The US is exceptional in having high taxes and mediocre (at best) public services (plus a huge army and health care for the elderly - at least something).

The US floats around the mid 20% range, while Europe is mid-30% up to 50% (Sweden).[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...

EDIT to add: Though to understand some points (eg that despite widespread poverty, nearly every household owns an apartment or house), living in a CIS (ex USSR) state would help.

Erdogan, however, should steer clear of Armenians IMO.

Then again, I'm Greek. I don't think I know a single person who emigrated (and I know a lot of those) who doesn't dream of coming back at some point. I guess you can never really stop wanting the things you grew up with.

"Most professional occupations"? I don't buy this at all.

For the vast majority of jobs, while there is no "upper limit" etched into law, incomes above a certain point probabilistic impossibilities. Most jobs' incomes are distributed within some band with tight standard deviations. A retail worker will statistically never make $200K. A typical vanilla office worker won't make $1M. Anyone who does is a 5-10 standard deviation outlier. The bands are wider maybe for lawyers, doctors, software engineers, but their salaries are not unlimited. I've never heard of a software engineer that makes $10M/yr. Maybe there are one or two in the world?

For people who own their own businesses, their income is still limited by how many sales they can make, how many employees they can hire to grow, and how much time in the day they can put into the job. Still not "no upper limit".

There are vanishingly few classes of jobs with virtually no upward limit, like CEOs of mega-corporation and Wall Street traders.

Without money I think unto the future of one’s children. In the opposite direction, the degree to which you have money is the degree to which you can be morally effective in your community. The very poor and the very rich, IMO, have a different slew of interesting moral choices.

I chuckle a bit when I hear people say how great my home country is and how they wish they could move there from the US.

Would be great if you could also share some detailed thoughts on why you think the American way of life is better.

Can you give an example of the American "legal system" vs this "justice system" in another country?