Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Part of the conflict over “values and culture,” however, is over things that affect human capital.

As a Bangladeshi immigrant who married into a white American family, it’s really hard for me to not notice the devastation mainstream American culture has racked on the ability to develop human capital. My younger siblings in law, who are in their early 20s live in towns (these are mainly white, working to middle class towns) where everyone’s parents are divorced, drug use doesn’t get you a beating from your dad (who often isn’t there), etc. Kids can’t get their feet under them because their home situations are always changing. For boys this is particularly bad, because their natural inclination is to cause trouble and the only thing that can keep them in control is a network of older men. (My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and remarked that he couldn’t do anything anywhere in the village without word getting back to his father.)

Money can paper over a lot of problems, I’ll give you that. But it seems to me that if Americans were as poor as Bangladeshis, their society would totally collapse. The culture isn’t suited for survival or upward mobility.

I think this is the main con of American individualism. The alternative is the culture in Asian societies and perhaps to some extent in European ones as well - there is always an Uncle or Aunty who is watching out for you. Of course that has cons where you can't do things that are unconventional, but at the very least you have a stop gap to help young people who are lost.

The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form of American individualism than exists today. Europe is quite poor relative to America precisely because its anti-individualism prevents the formation of economic-political environments conducive to wealth creation.

One could argue that this historic wealth creation also coincided with a high degree of Judeo-Christian religiosity. We're yet to see if the same success can be replicated under an equally individualistic culture, but one without a unified moral fabric via religion. And I say this as an Asian who was raised a Hindu and is now an atheist.

>We're yet to see if the same success can be replicated under an equally individualistic culture, but one without a unified moral fabric via religion.

Isn't China an example of that?

Is China known to be individualistic?

And yet that same sort of "village culture" of adults in a neighborhood looking after the kids collectively was very common in America throughout much of its history; co-occurring with individualism.

I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Economically, there was less government imposed communitarianism. But American society itself wasn’t all that individualistic at the community level.

> The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form of American individualism than exists today.

Do you mean the 1800s? Manifest Destiny? That time when the Americans bought Louisiana for peanuts to double the size of their country, kicked out Mexico to double the size of their country again, bought Alaska to add another 20%, again, for peanuts, and "conveniently" wiped out all the original populations in those territory and provided free land for probably half their population? And also leveraged their common language and culture to steal, pardon me, transfer, industrial technology from Britain?

Gee, I wonder how they got rich, every nation in the world should have been able to reproduce that, right?

I'm not saying that Americans didn't also do amazing things as individuals, but it's REALLY, REALLY hard to be sure that the end result came from those amazing things or from the shady things I listed above.

The idea that America got rich from stealing and oppression is a pernicious myth that keeps other people poor.

Every country has plenty of stealing and oppression in its history—you can always point to that to reject the assertion that something different matters. If India was rich, you could point to all the stealing and oppression of the Mughals, etc. But you’re just pointing to correlation, not causation.

Countries that went from poor to rich in the 20th century, like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, among others, without Manifest Destiny and all that jazz show your model to be overall simplistic. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew systematically made is poor nation into a rich one by copying the parts of Anglo society he thought was responsible for their wealth. And guess what, it worked!

My point was, it's both.

There are a handful of countries who did not benefit from shady dealings and still made it through and the one you pointed out was built by a enlightened and relatively benevolent genius. Hard to scale that.

The point is that if the success of America was due to mainly “shady dealings” and not a successful culture, then Yew copying aspects of the American system to implement in Singapore wouldn’t have worked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com