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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can't trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple.

Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today's technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as 'problems' and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.

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This argument feels like an oversimplification to me.

These are only two examples of "collectivist" societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China/Russia seems like a false dichotomy.

Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).

My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.

The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.

It's deeply American to call Russia "collectivist". It's more similar to 1800s America, economically, than it is to the USSR. Oligarchs owning resource extraction for sale into capital markets.

Generally when people say "collectivist", they mean "bad guys in black hats and also I liked Ayn Rand"

Russia is collectivist not because of their economic system but because of their nationalism. National rejuvenation is prioritized above the prosperity and freedom of the individual.

That's just a narrative the ruling thugs use to explain to people while their lives continue to be shitty while the rest of the world keeps improving. Most people in Russia are brainwashed into believing that, even though they're not well off by any means on a personal level, Russia is a global superpower that can rival the US. BTW I wonder if the current absolute embarrasment of Russian Army in Ukraine will be able to speak some sense into Russian people - but, judging by what I see in the Internet, the official propaganda has already convinced Russians that their army is fighting against entire NATO forces and not just Ukrainian army (because obviously, just the Ukrainian army would be defeated in under a month).

Yeah, if anything, Russia is a hyper-individualist ultra-capitalist endstate of society - every man for himself, taking care only for himself and everything you need has to be paid for. Even soldiers have to buy their own equipment with predatory loans from people that stole it from the army.

Calling Russia (heck or even China) "collectivist" is just repeating propaganda from expired times and show a horrifyingly poor education.

the nordics are probably the most individualists in europe. Look to the south for more collectivist cultures. The strong nordic state welfare actually enables people to be individualists. there s no argument about what society must do, but the evidence shows that people gravitate that way

They are collectivist in the sense that they pay very high taxes without trying to weasel themselves out of them. But yeah, they pay them so that they can actually live an individualistic life :)

> they pay very high taxes without trying to weasel themselves out of them

You haven't met rich Nordic people, IMHO.

> Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).

Nordic societies are the most individualist societies on earth. Their policies are all about individual people and their wellbeing. They have no collectivist concept of a greater good that is above the individual. In Russia and China the concept of national rejuvenation is paramount above the individual. These nationalist visions are maximally collectivist. Trump is a lite version of this. The sociocultural construct of "America" and the sociolegal construct of "freedom" is supreme over the actual positive freedoms and negative freedoms of the individual. Self-described right-libertarians are often very collectivist in actual practice. You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.

> You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.

I don't neccessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but the above seems obviously false. Most anti-immigratio people are not for it because of some abstract ideas, but because they see immigrant as direct competitiors for their jobs. That was one of the biggest reasons behing Brexit votes for example.

I believe the motive is more ethnonationalist than is admitted to in polite circles. "Culture" or "jobs" is the euphemistic front, but the true reasons are fear of crime/terrorism, and fear of becoming a racial minority and the consequences that will have on their voting power and racial supremacy.

Anti-immigration that comes from fear of crime is collective guilt and collective punishment. Only a small minority of individuals will be criminals, but the entire collective is punished all the same. Anti-immigration that comes from fear of racial diversity or fear of cultural change, is also a collectivist motive, it's a more nationalistic and nativist iteration of collectivism than fear of crime.

If the earnest reason is jobs protectionism, I'd still argue that protectionism isn't individualist. It's not explicitly collectivist, but it's a suppression of individual rights for cynical reasons. At least, it's anti-individualist, if not collectivist.

> I believe the motive is more ethnonationalist than is admitted to in polite circles. "Culture" or "jobs" is the euphemistic front, but the true reasons are fear of crime/terrorism, and fear of becoming a racial minority and the consequences that will have on their voting power and racial supremacy.

In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs. So, neither a threat of terrorism nor racial supremacy (they're all white). I guess one could be afaid of some regions losing its inherent British culture though.

> In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs.

Perhaps true in many people's minds, but it largely seems to be the case that native Brits do not want to do those jobs. Either Brits tend to see themselves as "above that", or there is a serious shortage of workers in those areas (structural problem). Therefore, such jobs were left undone or severely delayed. The UK got what it literally asked for and is now finding out that it didn't actually want that.

Brexit was a mish mash of motives. Some of those motives were explicitly collectivist, others were anti-individualist if not collectivist.

Brexit was partly fear of Muslims, not just job competition with Eastern Europeans. You see this in the discussion around Syrian refugees from people like Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray and Sargon of Akkad. They wanted to exit the system that enabled that. This particular motive was collectivist.

In addition, Brexit was partly the typical arrogance and wounded ego you see from declining and fallen empires. The glory days are still fresh in people's minds. There's a feeling that Britain is on the decline. People couldn't accept the egalitarian terms and low status of being just another ordinary EU member state. This also is collectivist through and through.

Every single highly individualistic society seems to be in population decline (more so if you factor out immigrants from “anti-progressive” Muslim or Catholic countries). Individualism seems to be a self-limiting feature of society: it’s unpleasant to raise children in highly individualistic societies, which makes such societies inherently transitory.[1]

Is societal self-obsolescence how you define “progress?” How successful can your society really be if your people don’t seem to want to raise kids in it and perpetuate it? If you have to import people from collectivist societies just to take care of your elderly?

[1] The inverse is not true—many collectivist societies are also facing population walls—but for quite different reasons.

Birth rates dropped to below replacement rate in the 70s near universally among developed countries, far before many of them became increasingly more individualistic.

American culture and attitude seeping into most of those countries kicked into overdrive the 21st century, but birthrates were already low by then.

The hidden variable here is the newly available innovation of birth control pills.

It's just nature's way of filtering out people who like sex but don't want kids.

Prior to birth control, having a genetic predisposition toward liking sex was enough. In the future, most people will also have a genetic or cultural disposition towards wanting kids.

> It's just nature's way of filtering out people who like sex but don't want kids.

More like:

It's just nature's way of filtering out people who like sex but don't want [more] kids [right now].

That’s a lot of people, and thus, less kids.

Taking it to its logical conclusion, it’s nature’s way of filtering out people who either (a) have good short term but poor long term planning, or (b) have good impulse control.

Uhoh.

Exactly this. A couple of centuries from now, people will laugh about that time people thought that the population will collapse.

Most likely, there is an enormous selection pressure right now for any genes that predispose people (and in particular women) to want to have (many) kids. If those genes are as common as I believe, they should be dominant within about 10 generations (counting from approximately 1970).

And that selection pressure hasn't existed for the entire history of life? I don't think genetics have nearly as much to do with it because we are not living in a "state of nature" where genetics are the dominant factor in reproductive fitness. Even Richard Dawkins recognized this many decades ago when he coined the term "meme" to refer to the units of cultural lineage that clearly influence evolutionary fitness by altering the behavior of the people who hold them.

edit: I mean, you're not wrong, but I'd posit that there is enormous selection pressure for memes that promote fertility.

> And that selection pressure hasn't existed for the entire history of life?

Not at all. For most of evolutionary time, organisms didn't even have any kind of cognitive capacity at all (being single celled organisms). Even after brains started to develop, mating behavior was primarily instinctual. And even up until this day in humans, the sexual drive may easily overpower any desire to prevent pregnancy if people (and women in particular) doesn't have access to birth control.

Arguably, the sexual drive may have been so strong that there may have been a selection pressure favoring INHIBATION of reproductive behavior (K selection).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Especially so in females, as under some conditions, having fewer offspring and investing more in each may provide a higher number of surviving offspring than giving birth to more, but with less investment in each. Without birth control, even K-selection strategies ended up with 5 or so offspring per woman, on average, with about 2-3 surviving children on average.

With child survival rates near 100%, K-selection strategies are now strongly disfavored compared to r-selection strategies, even without birth control. (So r-selection has probably been selected for at some level for the past 150 years or so in the West). Birth control simply multiplies this effect.

> because we are not living in a "state of nature"

This, I'm sure, is a fallacy. The rate of genetic adaptation is directly linked to the strength of selection pressures, where "selection pressures" are not just survival rates, but rather the number of surviving offspring.

To quote wikipedia: "Contrary to popular belief, not only are humans still evolving, their evolution since the dawn of agriculture is faster than ever before"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

> "meme" to refer to the units of cultural lineage that clearly influence evolutionary fitness by altering the behavior of the people who hold them.

Memes (as coined by Dawkins, not the pop culture use) are their own replicators. They code for the replication of thoughts and ideas.

Memes are not very tightly coupled to the physical fleshbags they inhabit. Like regular viruses, they often pass from host to host laterally, even though some forms are often transferred to children.

But there is no reason to think that this has limited genetic evolution (meaning adaptation, not necessarily "improvement"). This is basically orthogonal to whatever the memes are doing. (Though there is an interaction term where genes and memes form part of the natural environment of each other as replicators).

Genes may not be the dominant factor in reproductive fitness right now, but unlike for memes, the relative frequency of genes depend directly on reproductive fitness, meaning whatever variance DOES ALREADY exist in the genome for reproductive fitness are under a massive selection pressure right now.

For many, if not most memes, reproductive the reproductive fitness of the hosts has little impact on the ability of the meme to replicate. For some memes (or meme-plexes) like religions, one _could_ argue that they attach themselves strongly enough to families that they are inherited in a way similar to genes.

However, I would argue that memes can lose this power much more quickly than genes can. Just consider how quickly Christianity have been losing power over most Western linages lately.

Meanwhile, genes will continue to build up momentum for as long as the selection pressure remains. Currently, that pressure is for women to WANT to have children. While cultural effects may come and go, any genes coding directly for that will be reinforced. If these genes already exist, this will take a few hundred years. If mutations are needed, it could take 10x longer.

Eventually, though, if the selection pressure persists, having babies will have the same pull on female brains as sugar, sex or serotonin-inducing social affirmation.

At some point, though, REAL overpopulation is likely to be a limiting factor. Real, as in famine or disease will place a hard cap and re-introduce child mortality rates of 50%+.

> Memes are not very tightly coupled to the physical fleshbags they inhabit.

Which is why the most successful memes are those which induce an artificial coupling, e.g. religious beliefs that infuse culture so thoroughly that they are passed from parent to offspring essentially by default. All the major world religions do this to some extent, and it's on vivid display in the more cult-like sects.

> Currently, that pressure is for women to WANT to have children. While cultural effects may come and go, any genes coding directly for that will be reinforced.

Perhaps the fundamental disagreement here is about whether or not the extent to which a woman "wants" children is encoded primarily in genes. I have trouble believing that, on the whole, genes have anything more than a marginal influence on birth rates in the presence of freely available contraception. I could be wrong. But there's probably a reason why at least one major religion forbids the use of contraception. That looks a lot like a meme that has taken matters into its own hands, genes be damned.

> A couple of centuries from now, people will laugh about that time people thought that the population will collapse

The population won’t collapse. It’s just that it’ll be Muslims and Mormons doing the laughing.

Also it's a little presumptuous to think the individual drones will be capable of laughter.

Maybe in some places Muslims and Morons will prevent collapse. Just maybe, though, as many factors can prevent that.

In other places, like China and Japan, I don't find it likely at all that Muslims or Mormons will be allowed to do so.

Still, given enough time, genes will adapt to the new pressures of female choice and birth control. That could be a few hundred years (at most) for genes already present in the gene pool, or a few thousand if mutations are needed.

You're assuming this is entirely genetic.

I believe desire to procreate is just as much caused by environmental factors.

In particular, living in cities vs living in the country. If the organism sees "resources and space and hard to come by" (like, say, living in NYC), it will put the fertility program "on hold" until it finds sees "there is an abundance of space and resources" (for example, living in a bucolic countryside with ample food around).

The drop in birth rate since the industrial era has nothing to do with genes, and everything to do with urbanization, at least from where I'm standing. :)

> You're assuming this is entirely genetic.

Not at all. I'm merely assuming that there is a non-zero genetic component.

> The drop in birth rate since the industrial era has nothing to do with genes, and everything to do with urbanization, at least from where I'm standing. :)

I completely agree. Well, urbanization and other, related environmental factors (even farmers have fewer kids than before).

When you change environment for any species, there is a possibility that reproduction rates go down, sometimes radically. For instance, if you put cheetahs in a zoo, you're not likely to get many cubs. From a reproductive perspective, a zoo is a very hostile environment for a cheetah, even if they are guaranteed enough food, a qualified vet and have no risk of being killed by lions.

Still, over time (and unless the population goes to zero), when facing an environmental change that is hostile in the short term, the species will adapt to the new environment. When this adaptation only requires a change in relative frequency of already existing genes in the genepool, this can go very quickly. (Which is perhaps the greatest benefit of sexual reproduction.) If it requires a string of mutation, it can take a very long time.

A quote from a prof in college (that he perhaps wouldn’t say today for fear that it might be misinterpreted):

“You don’t understand evolution unless you understand how contraception could cause overpopulation.”

I do wonder if this falling population in developed countries trend will last more than 1-2 more generations. We’d better have the rockets ready to go by 2100.

Wouldn't it be far easier to colonize Earth ocean floors than to colonize Mars? Both are seem similarly hopeless, but ocean floors seem easier, just because of transportation difficulties alone.

> having a genetic predisposition toward liking sex was enough

Maybe re-read that a few times. Is it reasonable to believe that a significant portion of the population would not like sex? Is there any possible evolutionarily-sound explanation for that?

> in population decline

So? It's not the most populous groups that dominate, quite the contrary. The world had half the population just 50 years ago.

Yeah I find the conversations about population decline quite odd. We've seen the results of population explosion, and I don't think many agree that the results were great. But they also weren't that bad. I think people miss the point that (if you're a fellow Millennial) that when your parents were born there were less than half the number of people on the planet than there are today. I don't think rapid decline will be a good thing (just like rapid increase wasn't) but I don't think it is an existential crisis either.

World population: (1804) 1 billion, (1927: 123yrs) 2 billion, (1960: 33 yrs) 3 billion, (1974: 14 yrs) 4 billion, (1987: 13 yrs) 5 billion, (1999: 12 yrs) 6 billion, (2011: 12yrs) 7 billion, (2023: 12 yrs) 8 billion.

I think the reason for it is that those conversations tend to focus on local community as it relates to society's ability to support its existing retirement model. This conversation is then repeated across multiple countries with varying degrees of intensity, urgency and political backing. In the old country ( Poland ) for example, in 2016 ruling party introduced a stipend for each kid[1]. The official results don't seem to support the approach though[2]. I guess my point is that it may be existential crisis for some communities more than others.

Naturally, it does not help that discussion of it almost invariably brings a question of overpopulation and all the baggage that brings.

[1]https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?langId=en&catId=1246&ne... [2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/poland-populatio...

When the population is growing quickly the ratio of young:old people is high. When the population is shrinking, the ratio becomes very small.

A society with many old people and few young people will suck

But is there a significant difference between how much support very young (pre-adult) people and how much support elderly (post-retirement) people need? At some point during rapid population growth there were a lot of the former, and we managed OK. Now there's a lot of the latter, and not so many of the former.

As it is, many of the costs for elderly people seem to be about medical inventions to (arguably artificially) prolong life. I'd suspect that will become increasingly expensive, to the point that expectations around how much it's reasonable to spend on such treatment may change. As it is, COVID caused quite a significant increase in mortality among elderly populations - it was undoubtedly pretty awful for those directly involved, but society as a whole seems to have adjusted since.

> But is there a significant difference between how much support very young (pre-adult) people and how much support elderly (post-retirement) people need?

Compare the cost of elder care to child care.

That's what I'm asking - both are very expensive. But we see supporting pre-adults as "investment" (education etc.), whereas it's hard to see it that way for the elderly - the selfish view would be that it's more like an insurance policy to give you confidence that society will still consider it important to care for the elderly when you join their ranks.

Young people are cared for in large groups via schools. They have no wealth or political power.

Old people can be very expensive, can still vote, and most will have a economic power for this specific generation.

In the past when you were a working couple with kids, you hoisted your kids into your grandparents to help raise and there was no opportunity cost. There’s no converse here.

Good luck passing legislation to reduce care for the old while they’re the largest chunk of the population.

I imagine the homeless numbers of elderly are going to skyrocket over the next few decades because of this.

The robots will save us, surely!

America's population advantage over Europe gave it a significant edge over Europe during the 20th century. That aside, it is axiomatic that any functional culture should be able to maintain a fertility rate around the replacement rate.

Minorities can disproportionately succeed by having extreme in-group preference and solidarity, and something approaching a monopoly on some sort of highly profitable racket. They will end up in a position where they are despised, but protected. Where their in-group solidarity is called out as subversive hate, and they are attacked for this preference, pogroms ensue. I'll just out and say it, a lot of Whites are concerned their children will be treated the same way some of their medieval ancestors treated Jews.

The collectivist societies, like South Korea and Japan, are experiencing stronger and worse populations declines than highly individualistic societies.

Which societies are even still growing? I thought that even developing countries were falling off in birthrates. I assume the world in 2100 will be mostly Amish people and Israelis at this rate (and the oceans will be a couple meters higher too).

Are they, if you factor out immigration? As far as I know, in Europe, the recent-ish immigrants are propping up birth rates, but they adapt to the average in two or three generations.

They're not collectivist societies. South Korea in particular is effectively more American than America. From shopping-mall centric kpop to double eyelid surgery, no country has so thoroughly absorbed Western standards as SK has, and then some. Japan slightly less so, but not by much. Even China today is ruggedly individualistic with much less social trust than you'd find in Europe or the US. If anything funnily enough as some people have pointed out, countries like Britain now look like Japan did 20 years ago, they've if anything leapfrogged us at our own game.

I've traveled a lot, in particular Asia and I would struggle to name one country that actually deserves to be called collectivist.

I think the real issue is that "collectivist" and "individualist" are very crude terms that attempt to summarize a whole litany of cultural nuances.

My son just started 2nd grade here in Japan after being born and raised in the US (spouse is Japanese). It's really clear that here, children are socialized to think of the group to which they belong before themselves when contemplating their actions. Stated differently, people are socialized to identify strongly with the groups to which they belong.

Does this mean the society is "collectivist"? I don't really know. I do observe that many of the social activities involved in group cohesion here are viewed as somewhat burdensome obligations. I believe it was de Tocqueville who first observed the seemingly novel and unique way in which Americans viewed social association:

"When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it.

When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it."

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/tocqueville-on-the-spirit-...

that is a very good point. I think what Japan really is and what you observe in the culture correctly is conformism. And paradoxically, it's the atomized nature and individualism that enables it.

A generalization that's often made about East-Asian countries is that they have weak civil societies and strong states and it's the latter I think that leads people in the West too easily to think of them as collectivist. But it's really the lack of spontaneous association (I like the Tocqueville quote) and the passivity that enable that situation.

The US in that sense is much more collectivist than we generally think, and one case for this in my opinion is the surprising energy that they can quickly gather to rally people behind a cause ,for example militarily. Americans are very quickly to mobilize and pursue quite abstract collective goals.

I would argue Japan and Korea at least maintain a degree of collectivism- in areas such as extended family living arrangements, support for local business and agriculture, and (ostensible) income and educational equality etc, but its actually all window dressing when your economy is thoroughly modernized on a western model. The economy is life and death- the thing that tells young people you have to move to Tokyo and join the rat race. Though in Japan at least I have seen encouraging trends of people opting out.

I've always thought Chaebols seemed like a kind of marriage between collectivism and capitalism. I certainly don't consider it American-style when it comes to capitalism.

As for shopping malls and other hardcore evidence of "Americanism", from what I've read the US still leads the world in retail shopping space by an embarrassing amount if anything.

As for K-pop, this is one I don't understand. How is it different from western boy/girl bands or for that matter J-pop, other than being export-oriented it seems.

Why are Chaebols more collectivist than e.g like General Electric?

Their success is a collective goal. They are created and maintained by the govt as well as supported by the public as a way of mainlining control over the economy versus foreign companies. The more collectivist countries and the more collectivist-oriented policies in mixed economies certainly do strive for the same things with the same tactics. So I obviously am not saying large US companies are devoid of collectivism or don't owe any success to it. But they are a smaller factor here.

Personally I suspect giant US companies arise out of courtroom victories more than any other factor. I'm not sure where to categorize that exactly. Maybe Beurocratism. At least it has a kind of impartiality to it, though also tending to benefit the market leader the most in its own way.

But many collective societies are also facing similar issues of loneliness and isolation. This isn't just a western problem. We also see this same problem all across Asia: India, Japan, China, Korea. Some of these countries even had a rise in isolation before the US. I don't think it is a individualism vs collectivism issue, though I'm not going to dismiss it from the equation. I think it is that humans have just gotten comfortable as our lives have all tremendously benefited. We have little day to day problems. The problems we face now are much more abstract and existential than before, which tend to not be as motivating for adopting risky behavior.

As I noted, the inverse is not true--some collectivist societies are also declining. But the reasons are different. Some Asian societies really socialized an anti-natal mindset in the mid-20th century as a means of population control. China's one-child policy was the most brutal manifestation of that mentality. In the short run this was helpful to development. But unless they can break out of that cultural trap, in the long run it will destroy those societies.

I disagree. The issues Japan is facing look very similar to what the west is facing: loneliness. Here's a 12 year old article stating the same thing about Japanese men having no friends[0]. We see similar trends in Korea and even China. Yes, there are other contributions to the population declines. The parameters have different values, but I'm arguing that the same parameters exist. That the models are actually quite similar.

In China we are seeing the Lay Flat movement as a response to 996[1]. One could argue that the loneliness is forced upon these people because of their working hours, but I don't think that as different as you make it out to be. There definitely is a linkage to higher work hours and lower number of friends.

[0] https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/growing-n...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Both Japan and Korea have been strongly pro-natal basically forever, and both are staring into the abyss in terms of maintaining their native populations.

Both suffer from exactly the same set of problems:

(1) Massive numbers of people living in densely-packed, high-rise apartments. Population density inversely correlates to birthrates in developed countries.

(2) If you factor in Forced Fun Time and commuting, salarymen in Japan often work nearly all of their waking hours, six days per week. Korea is worse, from what I understand.

(3) The male population is deeply unfit here in Japan. This correlates strongly with low birthrates.

(4) Pay is very low. It is exceedingly difficult to raise a family on the average Japanese or Korean salary until you are in your late 30s or early 40s, by which time you don't have the energy or inclination.

(5) Whatever time, capital, and energy that remains is commonly spent on games, porn, and booze, all of which are highly profitable.

It's a downward spiral, and would take drastic action, most of which would cause significant short-term pain for the wealthiest chunk of the population. Ergo, it's not going to happen.

no one goes there any more, it’s overcrowded !

I think the same thing is happening all across the world: women are becoming more educated and independent and with birth control they choose to have less kids. That's also happening in the West. How otherwise would you explain falling birth rates everywhere? Indian is seeing falling rates and many places in the Middle East and Africa. This can't be explained by some government policy.

> This can't be explained by some government policy.

There are massive government programs to suppress the birth rate in India, the Middle East, and Africa, for development reasons. My dad spent his career working on those programs.

I'm unaware of any government intervention in say Iran or Lebanon yet the birth rate has dropped significantly there. I do think in most of the world young people find themselves faced with unaffordable living costs and an uncertain economic future, which probably reduces the amount of kids they have, but that's not really intentional policy and it again comes back to my point that women can now choose not to have kids and even not to marry.

> You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can't trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan).

I live in the US but grew up in a society closer to low trust. Lots of pros and cons to both, but I think one thing you are overlooking is that there are things a family/clan provide that are not replaceable by institutions or other things.

No institution will provide the same moral support when a loved one passes away that family/clan does. No institution will blindly stand up for you, no questions asked. There are downsides to these types of societies, but there is a lot of value to these types of bonds/relationships. Less about trust, more about care. You are never emotionally isolated (even if you really want to be). You're always interconnected.

I believe this is why the U.S. has such a large gang culture in ubran areas. Everybody wants to feel like they belong to something, and if they don't get that through family, then they turn to their local street for that.

In Europe, it's the football hooligans. They're quite large groups (thousands of people in every major city) that spend time together and fight together (against police and other hooligan groups). It's like US gangs, but without making money aspect and luckily mostly without guns.

> No institution will blindly stand up for you, no questions asked.

which i think is good - blindly standing up for someone, and unfettered loyalty, is not a sign of a good, rational democracy.

Families do that, but even then, only to an extend. Your position should be defensible by a fair institution, but only if your position is _actually_ something defensible as agreed to by society at large.

> The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple.

I'm not sure what you mean by "trust", beyond small interactions like say...taking a photo with a phone for them or helping them with the door. I can say, confidently, the vast majority of American's do not trust strangers. FUD permeates every news outlet and as economics get more desperate (most live in economic long tail) opportunists are rightly feared and seen everywhere. Litigation is unusually high in the US. US society has even begun to socially monetize the predictable nature of humanity with baited porch pirate prizes and hazard-trapped bike theft, etc.

Those ‘small’ interactions maybe benign for you but where I grew up there was non 0% chance they’d take the phone and run away if I asked them to take photo. I don’t think you truly appreciate how much trust your country has.

Some families have been trained to choose not to ask someone for any reason. There is also the common experience that someone will say no or ignore your request for photo-taking in the US (as well as there being a nonzero chance they run with it). The underlying issue is it's more about trust in risk management. Who wants to get a possible $1000 ticket and probation for a 200$ phone? There are much easier ways to snag a phone (bars, resorts, pickpocketing, etc). A thief certainly isn't going to do it at somewhere like Disneyland or Mount Rushmore, where there's a zero chance that you'll get away if there's an incident. Is it really about trust in the people? Not in the way the article describes.

Just curious, what makes Disneyland or Mount Rushmore different than say the Eiffel Tower

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32844573

https://metro.co.uk/2016/02/19/gang-of-disneyland-child-pick...

I don't know enough about the Eiffel Tower, since I was focusing on the US, where I have decades of experiences.

Disneyland has active cameras over every visible square inch of the part (including along the floors, dark corners, under the trash cans, et al). The Disneyland agents acting as tourists also roam the park and monitor suspicious activity. Anaheim's Disneyland is easily the most monitored public space on the planet. Pickpockets can still move about, but they don't tend to take phones from people in the open and then run with them. My comments were in the context of existing overt trust, not the gamut of every possible criminal activity. Pickpocketing, confidence schemes, violence, etc notwithstanding. The movie, "Welcome to the Giftshop", which is partly about Banksy, makes note of how Disneyland is harder to do something overt than the manned wall between Israel and Palestine.

Rushmore National Memorial is a difficult place to commit crimes in for other reasons. First, there are very few roads that come in and go out. The walkway up, that is commonly traveled, is lengthy, not very densely populated, and requires going through the giftshop. It's remote in a practical way, making it a very simple place to lockdown (just like Disneyland). Second, it's got enough federal employees to quickly act and they tend to do so with wide authority. Any sort of overt activity at the park, would be far more risky than going down the road to one of the bordering tourist trap towns 10 minutes away in multiple directions.

Sorry, I think you meant "Exit Through the Gift Shop"

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1587707/

You are correct. Apologies. It's a great film.

> Litigation is unusually high in the US.

That kind of trust, trust in institutions. people litigate and trust that teh state will resolve things, and they also trust that the law will prevail. Not trust in the sense of safety , that only happens in very homogeneous/cohesive societies

There are countries in which, if you let in a contractor crew to your house to do any kind of work, you have to watch them like a hawk because they're likely to steal from you if you're not looking. Businesses will routinely take advantage of you not being careful and cheat you. etc. US and western Countries in general have little to no of that, and that enables a lot of trust. In Germany, it's even common for Internet shops to send goods to custmers before receiving payment (the customer can pay up to two weeks after getting e.g. their new iPhone or laptop). Think of how much scams that would generate in many third world countries.

I don't know that it follows that it's a deliberate shift towards individualism, or if society is effectively pidgeonholing people into these behaviors.

> > presented with numbers about declining trust

> proceeds to distrust the numbers

thanks.

declining trust does not mean "Low trust".

And I m not sure about declining trust either (despite what people say). people are much less likely to solve interpersonal differences face-to-face rather than through a public impersonal institution , it's just that institutions change , now we have large private-sector agents running our lives , and too many of them are in the tech sector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

This is not what an oxymoron is (that would be something like individualist community). There is no direct contradiction between individualism and our social aspect, we have always been social and we invented societies and institutions to make space for individual freedom. When these institutions and societies collapse the individual swallowed by larger structures. People have these kinds of simplistic notions and then argue against pulic spaces, but those are required for individualism to be possible in the first place and once they are privatized and accepted there will be no individuals just googlers/metaers/amazoners people subsumed into a larger hierarchical community (neofeudalism).

You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can't trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan)

This is the definition of trust unless I am missing something. Trusting your family or clan is social trust.

Low trust society means low trust between people publicly (in society). Family trust is private and isn't what is being talked about with this label.

trust in public things. or as it says here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

"the ability of various peoples to organize effectively for commercial purposes without relying on blood ties or government intervention"

I think it's framed as a "problem" because it is associated with high rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide.

It doesn't seem like people like how things are going all that much

The US having the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world doesn't really make it seem like a high trust society though, does it?

I'm not sure you have the correct definition of a low trust society. If the US was a low trust society due to it's gun ownership Mad Max would be more than a movie. In fact, Mad Max is a perfect example of a low trust society. All but the most degenerate Americans believe murder is wrong... so I'm not sure what kind of point you're making about guns. That alone is a shared ethical value. An important one, too!

America is very high trust. It still has something that resembles a democracy, private property rights, businesses, etc. All of this signal that Americans can have shared ethical values - a fundamental point of high(er) trust societies. None of these would be possible if people fundamentally didn't trust each other. Despite what the media portrays Americans as almost none of it is true.

Do people in low trust societies see murder as acceptable? That seems unlikely to me. I suppose one problem even with the discussion is that killing another human is sometimes acceptable; murder is by definition the unlawful killing of a person as defined by that society.

Nevertheless, doesn't the US have the highest murder rate in the developed world? Again, it does not sound like something I'd associate with high trust.

A couple questions occur to me as well - how does gun ownership correlate with high and low trust society (by your definition). And I'm sure this exists on a spectrum and societies will change over time, so which way would you think the US is trending?

How you treat the "other" is the measure of a low trust society. Murder is wrong and not tolerated within the clan, but violence towards the "other" is ignored and in some cases encouraged. Yes, there are hate crimes in America but they make the news and promoted to the FBI. This helps build trust.

Gun ownership correlates to a desire to defend yourself from out-groups. You expect people to behave according to the set of ethics you and your countrymen follow. A gun is a tool to provide oneself a way to insure their own life. You can have a high trust society. That doesn't mean that crime doesn't happen, nor does it mean the (theoretically benevolent) police can respond in time to save you. High trust does not imply victimhood. A high trust society is generally cohesive and has a shared set of moral and ethical values that allow for kinship and constructive work. High trust societies with firearms are generally safe - as America is.

Gun deaths have trended down dramatically since the 60s (source: FBI) and with all but a few unfortunate locations in the US you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than shot. Ignoring suicide, the US is a very safe place much to chagrin of the yellow journalists. This sounds exactly like a high trust society to me. If it was low trust, every street corner would be dangerous. Chicago, for example, is a microcosm of a low trust society. Most of Africa is low trust. Afghanistan is low trust. Clan-based warfare is a sign of low trust. China, for example, is a (somewhat) high trust society yet has incredibly restrictive firearms laws.

> And I'm sure this exists on a spectrum and societies will change over time, so which way would you think the US is trending?

According to the actual FBI data released in the last several years gun deaths continue to decline from record highs 60 years ago. The vast majority of murders are gang related (a cultural problem), and the vast, vast majority of remaining data is taken up by suicides. As far as I can tell not only is the US a high trust society in general (I can open a business anywhere, I can buy a home anywhere, I can generally expect someone to be kind to me), it's also safe despite it's gun ownership. The anti-gunners always seem to ignore cultural differences in countries. For example, comparing Sweden or Finland to the US. These are still culturally homogeneous. The US is a veritable melting pot of 10,000 different cultures. This has a dramatic effect that people avoid talking about because it is politically incorrect. In this sense the US can be viewed as a lower-tier of high trust due to the lack of cultural homogeneity. Though I would still argue on fundamentals the US itself is very high trust, albeit somewhat awkward and very self-deprecating.

I think your issue trying to resolve high trust is stemming from the media portrayal of the US. As someone who spends every waking moment here, and many moments outside of metros, I just don't see what horrors the media reports. If it does exist, it's somewhere else (and I honestly can't be bothered to worry about it).

> According to the actual FBI data released in the last several years gun deaths continue to decline from record highs 60 years ago.

That isn't exactly my understanding, at least over the last couple years - didn't 2020 bring a sharp rise in homicides (along with gun ownership)? Perhaps I'm just a bit sensitive since I tend to hear gunshots at night every so often and a police officer just gunned a man down in his car for nothing more than eating a burger in my neighborhood just a few weeks ago. Last I heard he was still on life support.

But overall I have to say that my experience of living in the US just feels like being trapped in a box with lurking predators everywhere. Everywhere you go, there's some scam or hidden fee (which doesn't really feel that different from a bribe now that I think about it) that someone is just waiting to spring on you. God forbid if you need some kind of healthcare - no one can tell you what anything will cost, but they will bill you something, probably a lot. I get that that might not meet the definition of low trust, but it doesn't feel like high trust either.

> If the US was a low trust society due to it's gun ownership...

I think you have the causality backward here

> America is very high trust...

We're as polarized as ever, virtually no one approves of our leadership, and everyone thinks corporations or "the media" or "the deep state" or some faceless billionaire is behind the scenes pulling the strings.

So no, there's no trust in this country. You've confused trust with apathy and defeat.

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