Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
We should consider the likely alternative - Americans are actually pretty nice to each other, all things considered. It is really quite impressive what American grass roots organisations can do if people let them. Trust in institutions is low because the institutions are being exposed to the harsh light of Very Good Communication and it turns out that bodies that rule by decree are kinda corrupt. That should shock people, but it doesn't represent a radical change in the status quo.
There are serious economic headwinds that someone needs to do something about.
I assume you're coming from the direction that economy first fixes the social issues. That's a valid view but I'm not sure it tackles inequality. No point in a bigger economy if only a few at the top benefit.
"Tackling inequality" comes from reading too many say-nothing articles by Mr. Brooks and not enough time spent reflecting on what we should be trying to do to get the best result for people.
We should not care how much money a neighbour has. In fact, the more the better. I don't want to have to offer them charity if there is an option for them to stand on their own. They could be billionaires next door for all I care and that doesn't harm me or anyone else in the city.
Inequality is one of a number of fake issues that are major unhelpful distractions. The focus should be on median and low living standards.
What you describe doesn't seem to be at odds with what I think of as the inequality problem - a larger proportion of economic value going to folks doing the work rather than the capital investors. It might not even be that drastic a change for that to have real effects over time, and the rich would still be rich.
Rings true.
Inequality causes crime in developed nationsp[0]:
> Comparing across industrialised societies, higher inequality—greater dispersion in the distribution of economic resources across individuals—is associated with higher crime and lower social trust. These associations appear empirically robust, and meet epidemiological criteria for being considered causal.
Inequality also has health impacts[1]. "The evidence that large income differences have damaging health and social consequences is strong."
0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...
The second paper is difficult to argue about because I can't read it, but it is difficult to imagine that someone's quality of life could rise but their health worsens. That seems radically unlikely to the point where you need a pretty solid research base before taking the idea seriously. The paper is probably either making a mistake or says something different in the body text to what the title implies because it is likely that income inequality rose and living standards dropped.
It is the living standard that leads to outcomes. The inequality is a red herring. People are so bad at guessing relative income that they can't even detect real inequality. They usually pick up on poverty instead, which is completely different.
Unless, of course, they buy up a bunch of properties, making it unaffordable for the average income folk to own a home on a reasonable timescale.
When is HN going to learn that simplistic views like "rising tide lifts all boats" and "iTs NoT a ZeRO SuM GAme" are not helpful at all and blatantly false in most cases.?
Which is a problem, but the problem isn't the inequality. The problem is stupid housing policies that overemphasise debt and restrict construction.
> ... "rising tide lifts all boats" and "iTs NoT a ZeRO SuM GAme" ...
Using erratic camel case does not make an argument. It is obviously not a zero sum game or we'd all have Roman Empire era living standards.
FWIW, unrelated to this topic, I think we should adopt Georgist tax policies. That has nothing to do with inequality and it would resolve the situation of wealthy people buying property neatly.
Housing is a good example since our planet has a natural limit which can't be worked around. Otherwise please tell me why Bill Gates owns about 270,000 acres of farmland. There is a famous quote about it. “Buy land—they aren’t making it anymore.”
If you got spare money you are pressured to invest it, since the inflation will reduce the value. But not everyone is able. Thats where your financial gains are coming through you investments. By people who are not able to invest themself and the cake is getting smaller every year.
It seems a lot worse in the disadvantaged socio-economic parts of town. I think there's an attitude everyone having to "fight for mine" and "what has society ever done for me" and in response not caring for it.
As an outsider sometimes you are not aware of cultural norms, but I always felt the margin for error for what Americans considered "acceptable" was too narrow. There was no benefit of doubt, and sometimes an explicit dislike for someone who did not immediately fit in.
The truth is that countries, or even cities, are not monolithic entities. It's entirely possible for each place to have two characters. In the same NYC that was largely kind to me, I was also stalked at by some lowlife with presumably evil intentions.
> ...in spite of the bad reputations both have seemingly earned online
In NYC, there's always too much going on. The critical thing people lack is time. So they interact in ways that don't waste time. That may be being polite... in context.
(source: lived in NYC for 15 years)
It’s a terrible custom in most ways but I don’t think you got a good explanation.
everyone knows its a ploy to make the servers work harder and obfuscate true costs of the meal.
After all, waiters could just refuse this system and they would get a normal salary like they do in Europe.
This said, it is such a global thing in the US (specifically for waiters) that I do not understand why there isn't more pushback if this is a problem for everyone (except the restaurant owners)
FWIW there are more and more restaurants in the US (especially high-end ones) that have gotten rid of tipping but this is a labor-friendly decision made by management and puts the restaurant at a menu-price disadvantage to its competitors.
Is there a legal anchor to this? I was under the impression that "minimum wage" is a salary they must be paid or otherwise it is illegal to employ someone (at least this is how the minimum wage works in France)
So if you earn $5/hr and minimum wage is $10/hr, you are guaranteed $10/hr but if you are receiving tips then the remaining $5 comes from your tips. If you do not, the remaining $5 comes from your employer.
However, a lot of tipped workers earn well over the minimum wage when you include tips. So if the proposal is: "let's get rid of tips and then you can get minimum wage," that's obviously not desirable. What would be more palatable is getting rid of tips and raising the minimum wage closer to what they earn with tips, which is really more a problem with the abysmal minimum wage than it is with tipping per se.
We have a minimum wage of 10 USD/hour in France (net, after the zillion of taxes) but the actual minimum is based on a collective bargain that exists in some families of employment (including waiters). The average net salary for a waiter is 1700 USD/month (this includes retirement, social security, unemployment etc.) - not sure how this compares with the US (if there is a way to compare at all, taken how vastly different the systems are)
No, I’m not trying to be disrespectful and I’m doing my best to be respectful. But it was culture shock and I wasn't used to the array of “we don’t do that here” and “you can’t dress like that there” etc. I was kind of on eggshells in many interactions over things that noone would give a second thought to in the US.
(For context, I visited The Netherlands, Belgium, and France)
Uptight, surely, there are plenty of pockets of uptight cultures in Europe, even more in their largest cities. I consider Stockholm uptight as fuck but on the other hand I'd say that Malmö is pretty relaxed.
Using Europe as a single, homogeneous thing is the same mistake as calling the USA a homogeneous culture. There are traces of culture in both places that are quite orthogonal across many regions but there's so many regional differences that it becomes irrelevant.
I'm not defending the US as I'm often the first to shit on it culturally, but I would definitely suggest getting out if California tbh.
As someone in their 30's struggling to deal with the passive aggressive, unflinchingly uncaring and overall dismissive behaviors of my city's people, I could definitely see this being a trend in my fellow Americans. All lip service and nothing more.
I always clearly explained that I am a foreigner and do not know how to do this or that and I was given ample information.
The one time it did not work is when I had breakfast in a diner in Arizona and left my table after paying. A lady (also a customer) dropped le and time me how come I can leave without bringing my plate back. I was so surprised that I asked "this is what you do here in restaurants? Cleaning after yourselves?". She got mad and told me how I was misbehaved and everything.
She was clearly a weirdo, though.
It's worth noting that in the US, that's a stereotype of the west coast and California in particular. The contrast with NYC is particularly frequently cited. New Yorkers have a reputation for being very direct and coming across as rude but will actually be very nice and helpful once you get past that. New Yorkers will call you names that would make a sailor blush, and then immediately rush to help a woman carry her stroller up the subway steps.
I am in hell right now..dealing with harassment(in the legal sense of the word)from a CA public agency, no less. Everyday I fantasize about quitting something I love because the psychological impact is too much to bear.
The only thing that keeps me going is that one day I hope karma will kick in…
I have become a lot meaner at heart. I wonder if I will turn into a tyrant if I ever acquire power.
In California, the worst racism I have faced is in Berkeley where they wear their progressiveness on the sleeve.
This, this right here - and it's not just the US where this shows up (although it's definitely the most extreme). At the core, I think, it's all about "free speech": when you have a constitutional right to say whatever you want, without any limitations, you will first get a bunch of contrarians yelling all sorts of offensive stuff around "for the lulz"/"because they can", and eventually that sort of stuff gets normalized, and then societal cohesion (especially when the offensive stuff is directed towards minorities) and eventually society itself gets poisoned.
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance."
"Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats [..] the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms."
- https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-prec...
At first blush, "tolerance" seems like a decent precept. You don't bug me, I don't bug you. But it takes only a moment's thought to realize that it doesn't work.
And that effectively makes it pointless. The peace treaty is routinely broken, and might as well not exist. The precept works perfectly well for the situations where it's not needed -- most of the time tolerance is also in your own immediate best interests. But as soon as you try to extend it to cover anything else, it fails.
Too bad. Back to the moral drawing board. Meantime, we can describe ourselves as "tolerant", if it makes us happy, and pretend it's the reason we're doing what we do. But it won't help us make any hard choices.
where else do you meen?
IME, COVID was a real turning point that pushed a *lot* of people into a more selfish mindset, and the "trucker" convoy/occupation of Ottawa really seemed to shed any remaining social decency that still existed in many of these people. Now that cost of living is spiraling way out of control (housing is a prime example, my $100k income virtually assures I will never be a homeowner), it's really galvanizing that selfishness in many while fosting in many more.
Is it that you can't afford a house anywhere, or that you can't afford one in the area you currently are? If relocating (remote work) is an option, my understanding is there are more affordable areas of Canada that have lower average home prices that someone making $100k could potentially afford one on the cheaper end.
I think the individual rational case for abandoning religious institutions is really compelling. Goodness without gods is obviously possible, and villainy with them as well. The religious machine consumes time and resources and the benefits it yields are ill-defined and diluted by its many harms.
However, theology and religion represent the state-of-the-art of a millennia long effort to establish meaning in the human condition.
Today, many academic disciplines look down upon theology when it was, until very recently, the core of what it meant to be a scientist or thinker - especially in Christian/Muslim/Jewish traditions. It's crazy how many in the social sciences, much less the physical sciences, have never engaged with the religious canons that underpin their disciplines. Not so much the bible stories, as the exegesis that gave birth to academia.
Even for the average person, the Church served as inexpensive frontline mental health care (esp. for bereavement, anxiety, and guilt), a social safety net, a source of community, and a source of simple, generally reasonable, heuristics to evaluate daily decisions. These are all things my "enlightened" post-religious life struggles to provide me.
It's totally fine for society to evolve away from religion. I think faith is in inevitable peril as our understanding of the world grows. However, we may be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater by making the assumption that it is possible to simply skip out on something that sat at the core of most human lives for millennia with no ill effect.
Why are credit card agencies and collections companies so cruel to the average person?
Why do airlines not give a crap about your well being?
I wonder if the author has it backwards. Americans are being kicked around by their corporations, and now they are being just as big assholes back. I know that I've learned to treat customer service people differently--not impolitely, but I am fine repeating the same request to them over and over again until they give in.
Unfortunately, this treatment bleeds over to people and businesses that don't deserve it. There's nothing wrong with screaming at a medical collections biller to leave you the fuck alone, but if you're doing that in a family-owned restaurant, then you are the asshole.
It might be systemic.
American style capitalism leads to individualism and an environment where most people cant afford to care for other people.
And in New York? New Yorkers are direct and sometimes rude, but every New Yorker I asked for directions stopped everything they were doing to help me. This is a far cry for behaviour compared to southern California.
The Midwest? Stranger still - there's an enormous emphasis on manners (and they will never let you leave their home hungry), but if you're out of a job? Homeless? Good luck.
America is very strange...
I found myself nodding along to the section on politics - “ If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear.”
And yet the question is never answered “why now?” What has made this point in time so particularly bad? Yes, there were large changes starting in the 1950s to what we read and were taught, but what changed in 2008 (or 2016? See, I can’t even get away from politics to explain the way we treat each other!) that has made things feel so much worse?
I can’t help but think that the pervasively available, ad-supported* nature of social media, enabled/amplified by smartphones, has had a more massive effect on the changes observed than the almost trivial-by-comparison elections in 2008 or 2016.
There’s a good chance that much of the non-tech content on HN is tapped out on smartphones (including this comment).
* Ad-supported is a higher-order problem. Ads are not inherently a problem, but optimization for ad revenue often leads to optimization for engagement, which drags along time-wasting and optimization for outrage engagement, dunking, like-farming, etc.
Are you familiar with the expression "It takes a village to raise a child."?
It has turned politics from the way we make national decisions into a national game. We treat it with the same seriousness as sports -- which we treat as if we were making each decision ourselves, despite having even less effect on the game than the pompoms. Our opinions on both are loud, under-informed, and irrelevant, but we enjoy having them. Enjoyment has become the primary goal.
Something the article talks about is how morality is engendered not found. That the community teaches morality and that we need this or there are gaps in our humanity. Considering how we treat others is a learned skill it is also a taught and reenforced skill. How do we as a society wish our youths to treat each other? We need our systems to engender that.
Geezer reaction: If only this was ~1945 - ~1965 America, I'd say to find a nice little Protestant church* and start attending. An enormous number of such churches were either founded to meet such needs, or grew enormously during the baby boom.
(Not to say that any such churches were perfect. 50% of 'em were below average! But if you lived in a good-sized town, you'd probably have at least a few to chose from.)
*Assumpion - Roman Catholics, Jews, etc. would mentally translate this to "Catholic church", "synagogue", etc.
Nobody ever put a price tag on the value of a healthy living community, so the market is optimizing against it.
I have a feeling minorities in the US would disagree.
And there's the problem right there.
The Constitution is a ground breaking document. Just because it did not hit a grand slam home run in terms of fixing all social ills in one fell swoop doesn't mean it's "rife with racism and sexism". It established the fundamental mechanisms that would enable us to progress as a society despite individual shortcomings and faults. And we have - often at great cost.
It is those same fundamental mechanisms (freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, ...) that are under attack by power mad elites. Without these mechanisms in play, of course everything becomes much more contentious.
But I'm a little optimistic that this would eventually pass with time, If we apply `Tuckman's stages of group development` to the whole world and communication between its parts I think we are in storming phase.
I wish people would just turn off the news. They sensationalize everything, from "Red state" poverty to "Blue state" crime. They know it gets clicks, so they play it up. The modern media model is broken and doesn't serve democracy or society. Couple that will grifters online hocking nonsense to rile people up and you end up with a lot of angry people that aren't really even sure what they are angry about.
not just by those that are in power, but by everyone.. its like they are raised to think that its their right to exploit and consume anyone in their path.
Quite frightening on a huge socioeconomic level. It worries me enough that the few times I've left Australia I made sure that any of my stops did not land in America.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/american-o...
Americans reaping what they sow. What do you expect? The US is one of the most capitalist societies on earth. American propaganda over more than a century has built a culture which venerates the super wealthy and teaches deep hatred for the poor.
This worked to keep a small but important middle strata of workers in line but access to that class is harder and harder. If the system starts to fail for the majority of people, of course people are going to be angry! And American propaganda prevents little class solidarity or basic awareness of the exploitative system, so Americans channel that anger into hatred for one another.
* The media wants sensationalism, because sensationalism gets them peoples' attentions and thus money. There is nothing more sensational than riling up and pleading to peoples' emotions.
* The political powers that be want to keep the people divided. A divided people is easier to control and manipulate, whether it's smear campaigns during elections or undermining the safety mechanisms of our governmental institutions or straight up cancel culture.
How do we solve all this? Beats me, I'm in my mid 30s now and already tired of all this bullshit. I'll spend the rest of my days by myself in the countryside just enjoying the simplicities of life while y'all go and club each other silly.
I don't know if it's because of the two-party/first-past-the-post political system, or if that's a consequence as well, but everything about the US just oozes binary thinking (even on the international stage: remember Bush's "if you're not with us, you're against us" war rhetoric).
There's no room for nuance, everything must be black&white. The typical HN visitor should have the mental bandwidth for nuance, but more often than not that same mentality is showing even here.
Ranked voting would solve this issue. I have never read any critique of it that I found convincing. It exists at state and municipal levels. But until the big states switch it won't change the problem. If swing states adopted it, along with proportional allocation of electoral votes (a couple states do this now) it would definitely change strategies for the better.
The effect is that you can't be the most extreme version of your party and ignore moderates in the hope there are more people that hate the other corrupt extremist, because the moderate candidates will get ranked higher than you by both sides of the artificial duopoly.
In that world, the sensational nature of the media works to uncover sneaky extremists so you can rank all the boring candidates higher, or least higher than the extremist you don't secretly agree with. Either way the boring candidates win.
Someone once wrote that the best kings produce the fewest pages in history books.
Edit: there will be a fortune ready for the person that has a generative model in hand to let candidates change their name to something minimally scary.
"My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...
If you're trying to push as many people as possible to a "survive" mentality, I assume a divided and polarised community helps. Others are coming for your stuff! For your jobs, for your neighbourhood, for your status quo, etc. Make out that your opposition is some ultimate evil.
A more diverse political field and different voting system would likely help. Might stop single issues dominating the playing field? Bring back some nuance.
I think it's too simple to say "the media wants sensationalism" because we all collectively favour sensational content. It suits for-profit publishers, it suits politically active people, etc. But we're making it work for them. We can pretend we're above it, but if @dang let through all the Musk threads on HN, many here would turn full-time arguing in them.
I don't think that's necessarily inherent to right-wing-ism. Left wing politics has also had similar problems, and still does (say, organic food, or the way vaccine denial used to be a left-wing position), but it doesn't seem to dominate the position. Its bugaboos are "merely wrong"; they don't elevate to a movement-wide denial of well-understood sciences or a TV news network devoted solely to falsehoods about their opponents.
Perhaps that's just a way of redefining the terms of discussion: America's issue right now isn't really about right-versus-left at all, but about something else that happens to organize loosely along those lines. Perhaps rightism lends itself better to that, but I'd say that's inconclusive. Certainly left-wing-style thinking was the cause of a great amount of authoritarian violence in 20th century "socialist" countries. And we're left to argue whether that really is left-wing, or whether it's all just no-true-Scotsman.
You're assuming that they believe in the same sets of "real" and "fake" threats, or at least prioritise them similarly.
The American people have always been divided. Until semi-recently (~1960s) the political parties didn't sort themselves neatly on these divisions but over the last 30-40 years they have.
To be tribal/clannish/insider-outsider also seems to be an innate human trait.
Ezra Klein wrote a good book on both the (US) political history and various psychology studies on it:
Good thing we're finally getting rid of it!
/s?
Some things are simply numbers, like increased gun stuff and decreased charity stuff.
Go to the real world, and people are much nicer to each other.
And in the real world, people are even meaner, because in the real world, people can get you with more than just words.