Living outside America
ryancarson.com
ryancarson.com
I don’t view the USA as the center of the world - i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday. If you take a historical perspective this is how many empires fall. They overreach by trying to annex large parts of the world, spend all of their resources doing so and eventually implode. The British and Roman empire are good examples.
I stopped calling myself a Christian - the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening. If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room.
I occasionally felt embarrassed of America - I have a mixed relation with America. On the one hand it's a great country with amazing and open people that will gladly help a stranger, and has an amazing work ethic. On the other hand I have a problem with Americans not knowing or caring about how the rest of the world functions, how Americans define themselves in terms of their job, and their aggressiveness on the Geopolitical arena.
I believe America’s time as #1 super-power will come to an end within my lifetime - I think this is already happening.
"If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room."
As an 18 year old American, active in American politics (I've done minor campaigning, father is a US History teacher), this is utterly strange. A politician that was not some denomination of Christianity would be, most likely, completely unable to win a Presidential election. And that's even if they were a religion the Christian majority feels close to, such as Jewish. If they were Muslim, or so help them atheist, they would stand no chance at the White House.
I recently had a friend of 6 years from the UK come and visit for two weeks, and we had a number of discussions on cultural differences. When he mentioned that the majority of people in the UK were not religious, I was dumbfounded. I (foolishly) thought it was everywhere as it is here. In my community at least, to openly question the existence of a God is a social faux pas. I have an interesting perspective having been on both sides of the coin, but in the end it scares me as much as it scares you. The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.
Looking at it I noticed that I'm from one of the least religious countries in the world (Denmark).
You probably know this already, but Yahweh's prominence on the coinage and in the Pledge of Allegiance is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn't until 1908 that 'In God We Trust' was mandated on the coinage, and 'under God' wasn't inserted into the Pledge until 1954, as part of a wider anti-communist reaction. The supposed areligiosity of the Founders is often overstated by modern-day atheists with an axe to grind. However, while you'd be hard pressed to find a more pompous and puritanical Christian than the likes of John Adams, even he was strongly supportive of the separation of church and state: "Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion."
Except perhaps religion meddling with the national government?
As to the Founders, whether or not they were religious, the abuse of their legends has gotten old many times already. Many political factions (though the Tea Party are the worst culprits) have misinterpreted, misrepresented, and straight up lied (or worse, not actually known) about their history and beliefs, and used this confusion as a platform for their opinions. It's disgusting.
I suspect it depends on who you hang out with :-)
The idea that someone can claim some benefit via allegiance to actual God in a political setting is pretty scary, IMHO.
There are people ignorant about the world in any country, I'm not sure why we always single out home bound Americans for being apathetic to world events. There is plenty of that to go around, even in Europe where people tend to travel more to other countries, but especially in China and even in Japan where people have many misconceptions about the rest of the world.
There are no more superpowers, not when IEDs are easy enough to procure by anyone.
People are fairly comfortable in most developed countries, they are in some way too stable: oppurtunities are provided, for sure, but the urge for mobility is not as strong as in the states. The states is very different, however: oppurtunities are not as numerous (economically segrated educational system), but the drive is much stronger to take them when presented because it sucks at the bottom.
There is a considerable amount of cultural distance between, say, one of the Cascadia cities (like Seattle), and Mississippi, and Boston, more so than you often find between different European countries. What deceives people is that Americans nominally all speak the same language despite the stark cultural and historical differences between regions.
My dad worked in nuclear, so I moved around a lot when I was a kid: Tricities Washington (sagebrush country), Toledo Ohio, Somewhere (Pennsville) New Jersey on the tristate border, Vicksburg Mississippi, and finally back to the PNW (Seattle). Actually, many Americans are fairly mobile, much more so than their European counterparts. Its not unusual to meet others like me who moved around a lot as kids (and are still moving, just not in the states anymore).
General American ignorance is quite a myth, though I'm sure their are many stationary Americans, there are just as many Americans who've lived everywhere.
I think this is a myth, and potentially a very dangerous one.
Asymmetric warfare only works when the side with greater symmetric power holds back due to other (political) concerns. If the US used full power in a total-war unrestrained sense, IEDs would be wholly irrelevant to the outcome. That's true even in a war using"just" unrestrained conventional weapons.
The lessons from Viet Nam, Iraq, Somalia, etc. are valuable for both sides in situations where there is no political will for unrestrained power, but don't make the mistake of believing that unrestrained power is forever off the table.
To me, at least, it seems like making that mistake in thought, on either side, virtually guarantees that it will some day come right back on the table, and with a vengeance.
( with the possible exception of the Pope )
And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have to skip through five channels before I hit a non-American production.
> the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening
Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious.
I'm sure the author didn't mean that, that his observations are an honest account of his journey but I can't help to notice that articles like this strike this weird SWPL chord "I'm from America but I'm not like the rest of those simpletons" (that's a mild version) and comments to them tend to be real oikophobia festivals.
No, I'm not an American and don't live in the States (otherwise the whole tv exercise would be pointless).
As is the most important and expensive chip inside your China-produced computer.
And CERN had very little to do with the WWW; more on that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572
Is it an American company that made it? Yeah it could have been produced in China because labor there is cheaper than in California. Next year it could be produced in Vietnam.
> running an operating systeem developed by a Finn
Last I checked he is an American citizen, isn't he? So +1 for America then? Would you agree? If you go by your logic, then nothing from America is from America, because most people could easily trace their ancestry to one of the ships that came America at some point.
> delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN.
Ok, we can argue about the first two. This one is just silly.
No shortage of non-American computer and personal electronics manufacturers I can think of.
> Last I checked he is an American citizen, isn't he?
He wasn't for 95% of his life...
Source?
For crime see my comment below (or above, remains to be seen).
Afaik about american statistics, the poorer, lower class groups, are more religious -- e.g. "white trash", latinos and black ghetto cultures. So there is no overrepresentation of those, e.g. blacks, in jail...?
Citation please.
"A 2001 review of studies on this topic found "The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relationship between religion and crime." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_and_religion
The Nordic countries regularly feature at the top of the 'Best places to live' and 'most atheistic countries' lists. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but that should be enough to at least question your assertion.
I can't make a proper citation from home but if you're really interested those guys http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Crime-Correlates-Lee-Ellis/dp... have over a 100 studies on religious people being less criminal, and a handful on religious regions seeing less crime.
Also, "varied and contested" can describe all evidence ever gathered in social sciences.
After WWII, the US had an economy so large we consumed half the oil that was consumed in the world. Our economy has grown since then but the rest of the world has too. We are down to half our percentage of energy use, and this is a general proxy for economic activity. So we are growing but developing nations are growing faster. Additionally we re incredibly dependent on oil to the extent that it would be a fair summary to say that the main job of the US armed forces is to protect international oil supply.
So the US isn't about to drastically collapse, but the role in the world is declining and will continue to decline. I think within my lifetime we will see the world shift from a unipolar model with the US as the sole superpower, to a world dominated by several major world powers.
Are you just playing devils advocate (no pun intended)? Because there seems to be a rather large creationism, abstinence only sex education, and homophobia shaped blindspot in your view. There's plenty of ostesnibly legitimate stuff that religion does to damage society without needing to do anything outright illegal (but if you need illegal, then we need only look as far as systemic child abuse in the Catholic Church). I suspect that when the OP talks about being frightened, this is the kind of thing he's thinking of. Certainly this is some of the stuff that frightens me.
Of course this is not to say that religion is all bad. I know one couple, devout members of a Christian sect, lovely people and I have great respect for them. Why? Because they walk their talk and they don't feel a need to proselytize all within earshot, trying to force others to live by the same rules they do. I assume they must realise at some level that they have no right to make such a demand. I wish more religious people were like them.
Not trying to step on any toes.
For me at any rate, as a person who does not consider themselves religious in any conventional sense, I don't find the fact that someone believes something without proof to be frightening at all, in and of itself. The problem only comes when someone else uses those beliefs as the basis to impinge on my own life/liberties or the life/liberties of others who do not share their belief.
Speaking as somebody from the UK I can guess one reason. In this country, and the other European countries I've visited, religious views are generally part of people's private, rather than public, lives. I no idea of the religious views of most of my friends. It's not part of the public persona of whether somebody is "good" or not. Their actions define that.
So in this context the only people who are public and outspoken in their religious views tend to be the extreme ends of the religious spectrum. Either in viewpoint (the gays are evil nutjobs) or because their religion encourages them to get out there and convert folk.
These tend to be folk that you don't want to hang out with - whether you are religious or not.
It one of those odd internal dials that I have to turn in my mental model when I visit the US - that people within the "normal" range of religious views will come up to you and talk religion.
Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more
References? By that logic more secular countries and areas would have higher crime/drug rates and lower volunteer rates... and the opposite seems to be true if anything. In the US anyway the percentage of atheists in prison is way lower than the percentage in the general population.. but maybe that meets atheists tend to be smarter criminals :-)
People who say the US was imperialistic seem to forget that we didn't, for example, send tanks into France when they wanted to pull out of NATO, which is more than you can say about the other superpower. The British empire stationed troops and bureaucrats all over the world where they weren't wanted. They directly ruled over civilizations larger and more ancient than their own. Aside from the Philippines (whom we granted independence in 1946) and Hawaii and Puerto Rico (who both want to stay with us), we didn't really do that. It starts getting far more abstract when you talk about American imperialism via Coca-Cola and blue jeans.
The U.S. is a weird sort of quasi-empire with military outposts and large economic interests all over the world, but in territories that aren't their own and with the notion that the countries we inhabit are not part of the U.S. in any way shape or form. Sort of like vassal states, but without all the "pay us your tribute or we'll invade and burn your cities down" that modern America is terribly uncomfortable with.
It's an interesting academic exercise to pick apart where the U.S. is and isn't like an Empire because it's not that simple.
And here's a graphic from 1898 which proudly shows the US eagle dominating an entire side of the globe, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:10kMiles.JPG
I know you mentioned the Phillipines and Puerto Rico already, but what's striking is that you somehow think it doesn't count as a real empire. But there's no inherent reason why the USA should have such a large sphere of influence, other than it can. There's not even any inherent reason why it had to dominate all the land west of the original colonies, wresting it not only from native Americans but other colonial powers.
For most of its history the USA was proud to say it was building an empire and dominating other nations (for their own good, of course!). I'm not sure when this propaganda effort started that there is no American empire -- perhaps the US wanted to assert it was more pro-local-sovereignty than other competing empires, like the USSR.
The continental US west of the original colonies was an interesting case. We only got the bulk of it because Napoleon put the entire Louisiana Territory on fire sale--he wanted to cut his losses in America after losing Haiti and needed the money to try and conquer Europe. We only really wanted the Mississippi River delta to begin with. We did kind of pick a fight with Mexico, but we didn't conquer the whole country, and even paid for the parts we took. Oregon was a disputed claim and we split it down the middle with the British. And Alaska we paid for fair and square. As for the American Indians, you have a point there but frankly smallpox had already depopulated the continent and it was practically empty. If it wasn't, I don't think anyone would have been able to conquer America from the American Indians--nor would any colonial power.
When people call the US an empire, they usually aren't thinking about the Spanish-American War. They're thinking about all the countries we station troops in (most of them asked us to), or all the Coca-Cola we sell (which the world voluntarily buys). We have a big sphere of influence because not too long ago, the world needed us to. We were the only democratic allied power left largely untouched by WWII, and our "imperialism" at the time consisted largely of a Marshall Plan designed to rebuild a continent that destroyed itself twice over, both times somehow roping us into the action.
Can you honestly think of a country the US has dominated against its will since the Philippines? You might be able to make a case for South Vietnam, and you could name maybe a dozen countries we covertly subverted, but outright domination? We didn't hold a candle to the Soviets.
There are many countries where the US has toppled one government for another, or propped up a leader the populace didn't like.
That's where most of the criticism comes from.
Oh yeah, we helped set up a leader friendly to the cause of righteousness, supplied him with advisors, gave him weapons or gave him access to buy them, ensured that he was friendly to exporting the mineral/oil/food wealth of his country via our companies and institutions, shared intelligence about his adversaries, installed a military base and ensured we had the right to conduct our wars using his territory.... but it's not like we took over the country! We are the friends of the common people!
In his view, the problem was that Rome based their economy on conquest and pillage. As they'd conquer places, theyd bring back gold into their economy and this would allow them to lower or eliminate taxes. During this time of expansion they did well, and the complexity of their culture increased quite a bit, but in the end, this phase had to come to an end, and Rome was unable to sustain their economy internally. Their attempts to do so involved additional complexity and a great deal of additional attempts to regulate their way out including quantitative easing of their currency.
In the end, the problems were too great and the society collapsed from within, through the very process by which they expanded (greater and greater complexity of society).
One interesting thing I would add that Herwig Wolfram suggests is that the Western Empire was particularly poorly suited because of the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which limited the tax base and made taxes harder to collect.
The Byzantine Empire listed much longer but a couple hundred years after the Roman Empire fell, they too experienced a massive simplification when faced with the Arab invasions. They did so in a more controlled way however and survived but in doing so, Tainter suggests, transitioned from a Roman society to a medieval one.
What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US.
Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.
I'm really curious where it comes from. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of American mass-media? Every European knows the New York skyline and what "NYPD" and "FBI" mean.
How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?
I'm Australian, and despite numerous cultural shifts, when you graduate the natural place to go is Europe. The thing young Aus/NZ people do is backpack around Europe.
When I was growing up, I knew a lot about the US from Mass Media, but it was pretty shallow. I saw the US as a mono-culture. When I finally visited the states that's what shocked me most - it's a diverse, complex place. In many ways more so than Europe.
I have my doubts about #4 too.
I think the problem is that all the non-boring places to live in the US _are_ a monoculture, mostly due to the network. (Then again, most non-boring places on Earth are all converging to this point anyway.) The parts that diverge from the monoculture are places that would be horrible to live (e.g. the south, the rust belt, etc).
Heck, if you go to Texas, Austin is culturally different from, say, Houston.
I've lived in the Southwest, the Northeast, and the Northwest. I can say these areas are culturally different and if you don't see it, you haven't lived in enough places.
I think the big problem is that culture is largely invisible to those who grow up in it. All the little things you do, how you greet people, the little micro-dialects of the language, etc. are so second-nature that they are hard to see.
That only means American culture is more exported than others in many forms like movies, TV shows, etc. People like to watch American shows, American that, American this, etc. If Honk Kong and Seoul were able to export their culture as effectively you'll know about them too. A lot of people know about Paris and Cannes in the US. Doesn't mean they are "well educated" or anything. Nor the other way around.
(Although I will say that Red Dog was a nicely done and uniquely Australian movie.)
This is true and it's true in SEAsia. In Japan, SK culture has pervaded TV and entertainment, moreso than American Entertainment. Go to Taipei and you can see the evidence of Japanese culture (well, this is two-pronged, Japanese legacy on the island as well as youth culture) along with SK culture. The only place American culture might have the upper hand in SEAsia is in blockbuster movies --but that's a minority of movies shown or seen.
In Africa, lots of the entertainment, while English language, is Nigerian English with Nigerian TV and music being very influential.
As for Hong Kong vs Seoul, I would look for boxy Korean characters in Seoul and various Chinese forms in HK.
I'm a USAn who has never been to Germany, Korea, or Hong Kong... but I read a lot, and pay attention. Most smart people do both of those things. I suspect it's part of the definition of "smart" these days.
As an American, that weirds me out.
That said, I was probably extremely unusual amongst my peers in thinking the US was just one of many countries when I left. Also, at that time I had thought that China would be dominating everything by 2020. Now, after having lived in China, I'm more bullish on the US than ever. Not only is it continuing to attract the smartest and most ambitious people in the world, but there's a huge demographic advantage, too. Whatever the babyboomer retirement does to the US, it will be far harder on Europe. Japan and China will be even older.
That doesn't make me doubt #4, though. Lifespans are going to increase.
A lot of this is complicated. The US, as the only superpower (financial, cultural, and military) is not just one country among many. What happens in the US affects every corner of the planet. I am living right now in Indonesia and I see that every day. There are other countries which this can be said for, but they all are oil exporters and their impact is solely a function of those oil exports.
At the same time, I find a lot of Americans seem to think the other countries don't matter as much as they do. Consequently we have these bizarre discussions of how anti-American one country or another is, and, absent them calling America the great Satan or the like, one wonders how much of it is being intolerant of a level of dissent in foreign countries that would be perfectly allowed at home.
So the truth is very often more complicated than simple dichotomies.
The exception is that I would agree with #4. The US has a number of huge looming challenges which affect our country in a way no other country is affected. These include what I call "peak oil" (see below, not quite what peak oil theorists mean), the baby boomer retirement (this affects us differently than China or Japan, but Europe is going to feel the effects too), and a need to repair/replace much of our existing infrastructure. The infrastructure disrepair is becoming evident now, but I want to spend more time on the others.
Peak oil is usually defined as an absolute peak in production, after which production cannot rise to the same level. This is not what I mean. Instead I mean peak production relative to demand. We passed this peak in 1973 and after the oil crisis, oil supply never continued to grow in the way it grew prior to 1973. The crisis itself may have been political and the peak may be economic, but that doesn't make it any less real. Since 1973, oil production has gone up and down, but never continued to grow steadily as it had in the past.
Oil makes our economy work because it is a cheap source of energy. Unconventional hydrocarbons can help there, but they take much more energy to extract, and thus when energy is the limiting principle of your economy (and thus the primary cost), these are only profitable at high oil prices. Unconventional hydrocarbons thus act as a cushion against the sort of drastic decline we might see if we were only looking at light sweet crude. They are not a perfect substitute. And so I predict that oil production to the extent it increases, will not do so as fast as demand, and thus energy prices will continue to rise. The key driver of this demand is economic development in China, Brazil, India, and other countries. And thus any increase in production will not cause a collapse in oil or energy prices. Also note that most renewable energy has a comparatively low energy return on investment and so they are only really profitable when oil prices are high also, so they too act as a cushion. A transition from stored solar energy (fossil fuels) to current solar energy will not be economically pleasant.
The problem here is that higher energy prices, particularly oil prices, puts the brakes on all aspects of the economy and the US is particularly vulnerable. The US may already be past peak oil consumption as oil consumption has been falling off in recent years (how much is due to the Great Recession is hard to know however).
Retirement also affects different places differently. Europe and the US are likely to be hardest hit by the baby boom retiring, but the US is particularly vulnerable. In most countries in the world, retirement is not expected to be independent. When you retire, you move in with your kids, and help them raise their kids. They pay for your medical bills, and feed you, and you help them out as you can. In Europe and the US this is different. The expectation that we will have independent retirement means we have to save up vast amounts of money for that, and we also have to have programs like Medicare to provide the costs for caring for the elderly. However, the US is uniquely bad at cost control. Our public sector pays more per capita on medical care than any other country in the world and that's just the public sector (Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and state/federal gov. insurance pools). We can't control costs there and so the costs will be truly hard to bear. Entirely missing in the health care reform debate has been this incompetence of the federal government to control costs in any way.
The US has one significant advantage in all this but it is one that could go away suddenly and leave us stranded. The USD is the world's reserve currency. This means that the national debt can be eased by the US essentially printing money to get out of debt. However, if that changes, the US access to international credit will suddenly be very different and our debt will become difficult to sustain. Right now we are lucky because there are no real alternatives. The Euro was looking good for a while, but not anymore.....
tl; dr: The US has a number of significant and unique challenges which will erode our presence in the world over coming decades. How much erosion we suffer will depend on a lot of factors however.
This article has always stuck with me and I think speaks to what you're trying to say. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...
"There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness."
"If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it."
"But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take. This is the atmosphere in which Nobel Prize winners are nurtured. A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents."
Aside from the obvious ambiguities of what defines sophistication of a culture: It feels like you're begging the question to me. "Americans are unsophisticated because they're a young culture so they're unsophisticated..."
Moreover I think suggesting that an entire culture is full of optimism and youth because it's only 300 some-odd years old strikes me quite sweeping. The modern nation state is barely as old, and it's not as if Americans don't have some cultural heritage that goes back much further than that.
There is lots of influencal US culture. From rap to mcdonalds. We may look down upon it now, but all of tat will age into cherished cultural relics when they stop being relevant.
I think the point the OP wanted to make, is that the US has less dead culture, compared to say Europe.
I dont mean to suggest Europe has little culture, but unlike the states, it also has a lot of dead culture. Culture that may still inform our identity, and of which relics and remainders are embedded in the fabric of everything. Yet it is dead culture: most of us not even capable of imaging how life would be in such a culture.
You might also consider various fine arts to be "dead", in that their peak point has passed. Not sure if I'd argue that, but it's clearer to argue that specific schools of art meet that definition. e.g. I don't think anyone will surpass Bach in organ music.
Modern European culture isn't the part that's dead, it's that there are also "dead" cultural artifacts in Europe, while the US was basically a clean slate. That's a plus for Europe in some ways, but in some ways actually helps the US -- having to create everything from scratch, taking the best (well, maybe) of other cultures, is itself interesting. Look at Singapore for another example.
Christianity is a fusion of Greek, Roman and Jewish thought.
The founding fathers of the US were profoundly Christian. Their politics of the day was largely what made sense to ex-British subjects. The revolution of 1688 affects the US vastly.
US political systems were created built on thousands of years of European History. Prior to 1492 US history is European History.
The US has altered and changed the ideals and beliefs that the people who founded it started with but it was not a Blank Slate.
Just because Jerusalem and Rome are not in Ohio it doesn't mean they affect the US any less than they do Sweden.
Think of cultures like the Sioux, Iriquois, Navajo, Mayans, Incas, Aztec, etc etc.
"Pre-Columbian American culture" being that of the various Native Americans, not of the world in general pre-Columbus.
(I wish I could s/Colombian/Columbian; so easy to get those confused in various contexts)
Nor did I say that American culture has this quality of youthfulness because the US is a comparatively young country. In fact that seems unlikely to be the cause, because there are younger countries that don't have it.
Ultimately -- and semantic quibbling aside -- I think you're right that American culture is (and by extension, typical Americans are) particularly energetic and optimistic.
I'm not sure I agree with unsophisticated, unless you mean "less formal".
One thing I noticed in Ecuador was the level of visceral patriotism I had never seen and yet the lack of sense of "we're number 1" that is equated with this in the US. It was as if Ecuadorians said "We love our country. Let's make it number 1."
In Indonesia, it's different. The Chinese-Indonesians are afraid to get involved in politics, and the religious politics makes the Christian Right look pretty tame. Malaysia is different still, in weird and disorienting ways.
I felt the same way when visiting Australia for the first time. The sense of a "Pioneer Spirit" with a vast mostly unexplored territory seems to still be there. It was actually quite infectious.
Well, sure, nothing is certain, except that economists are often wrong. I listened recently to some 1998 academic conferences about economy and all the guys did boldly envision a slow steady growth for the next 25 years... Moreover, none of them did say a word about the East-West rebalancing, that is under everyone's pen these days. So let's not listen to them, sure.
But, still, I have the weird feeling that some people like pg and Fred Wilson have a kind of blind spot on China. It is sad because they could have more interesting things to say than economists.
Gosh, these two years money is raining over Beijing start-ups, VCs are praising founders to accept their money, every new things created in the US instantly generates tens of (shanzhai) Chinese copies. One can dismiss Chinese hot start-up temperature as artificial, ungrounded, or not fertile, or whatever, but I wouldn't understand how one could plainly ignore it.
The threats to the US are not other countries getting better than us, but the decline of the nation-state in general, or some global catastrophe which would harm everyone.
(There are plenty of specific areas where other countries are better than the US, but no single country which is enough better on enough things to be a serious competitor.)
I was much more down on the US before leaving the country. Independent of that, I would strongly suggest spending a few years living and working overseas, not just traveling for a few weeks as a tourist.
(The UK/Canada don't really count if you're from the US, either, IMO.)
I think it's much like picking a car. You can argue the pros/cons all day and night but it just boils down to what you personally prefer and what evidence you feel justifies your decision. Declaring a country is better than any other because it has more money, weapons, CCTV cameras, mountains, lakes just seems silly, no?
(I'm discounting countries savaged by war, famine etc because I'd say by most accounts but not necessarily all, they wouldn't be better)
I think that statement is more a state of mind rather than based in fact, which it is often proclaimed to be. I'm sure plenty of Americans would fight me to death to try and prove it though.
US foreign policy is a bit too interventionist for my taste, but I'd prefer it to pure pacifism. A better-armed UK or France is probably a reasonable compromise for that. However, most US foreign interventions (except Iraq) aren't that horrible for most citizens (and even Iraq wasn't that much worse than Iraq 1991-2003 or 1980-1988) of the foreign countries, certainly compared to invasions and occupations by other countries.
A fair example being how fucked all the bitcoin startups are going to be once the market is big enough for FinCEN to care about... or e-gold if you want a historical one.
The US is fine and dandy... if you don't mind not having privacy, and keep your "world-changing" ideas within the lines of what the military-industrial complex sees as acceptable.
The key IMO to all of this is separating out software development from server operations from financially backing a currency from applications of the system from auditors from users. Banks suck at software development; developers suck at finance. By separating the concerns, you can do regulatory arbitrage as well as focus on your strengths. (this isn't my idea; I think Ian Grigg of Systemics came up with it in the early 1990s, if not earlier). Fully separate arms-length entities, different people, not the e-gold "offshore, really" approach. You could create a fully anonymous bearer blinded token infrastructure as software, and then have servers for it, where some of the currencies were entirely non-financial and thus non-regulated (distributed locking mechanism for distributed software systems, resource allocation, anti-spam credibility systems, game currencies), and others which were financial currencies issued by real, established financial institutions with KYC (a dollar currency, shares, futures, ...). Same software, so the developers have no legal risks themselves.
Luxembourg also works, if you have $3-5mm or so to meet the requirements to issue (at least, that's what it would have cost in the late 1990s when I last looked; you need some connections, but they come with having money and hiring people from the industry). Switzerland and possibly Liechtenstein may work. I'd skip dodgy ee or south pacific places (e.g. Vanuatu, Narau) since correspondent banking relationships would be trivial to sever.
If you were totally focused on gambling ("gaming"), some crown colonies (IoM, Gibraltar) might work, or Panama.
You could do it in the USA if you met KYC and also treated it as a commodities trading system, regulated under CFTC. You can become a CFTC exchange (like Chicago) for $5-10mm. I'd probably actually do the operations for that in Chicago just to be totally known to all the local regulators, although NYC or SF would also be possible.
The thing I absolutely wouldn't do is try to run a payment system which is at all anonymous in the US, and if I did a payment system in the US, it would meet all KYC and MTB requirements. That puts your capitalization required at a few million dollars more than otherwise, but it's not a big deal.
We already have a PayPal.
(Or have you unsubbed from cypherpunks?)
The idea is to use the same infrastructure for that, for non-financial mass-market anonymous stuff, and then if anyone wants to run it, for anonymous financial stuff.
End user retail purchasing on the Internet (which is what PayPal largely does now), and user to user small value transfer ($1-3k) which is also paypal, is kind of uninteresting in general. Credit cards are fine for purchasing, and user to user payments are a pretty niche thing.
Sure, it's subjective, but humans are generally a lot alike. As with anything, "better" (with the exclusion of "strictly better") is a valuation that 'the typical human will prefer option X', taking into account the trade-offs of option X vs. typical attitudes towards those trade-offs.
This is why it is so easy to exclude, as you did, countries ravaged by war et al., because the typical human does not appreciate war and famine enough that few things will make up for it.
You can sort subjective preferences to get an objective rating.
I don't defy USA has a great contemporary culture but it's just one side of it. Another side is what you so easily dismiss - the history and traditions. Culture in the sense we're discussing is not something you can associate with one person. It's a collective term that basically describes the full range of learned human behavior patterns, which of course includes the baggage accumulated over the years (in some cases thousands of years) of history. Which USA doesn't have in the same degree as most of other countries, simply because it is a relatively young country.
Maybe I put too much stress on the traditional side of culture but coming myself from culturally very uniform background I always thought about USA as a multi-culture nation. Hence my surprise at pixie's statement. Shared media, history and education are basically common traits of every country (except for the ones that changed borders recently). Unity of values and the perception of the surrounding world may really be unique to America, though I'm not sure if putting Black people from Boston and immigrants from Asia and Mexico in the same bag as Rednecks from Florida is not an overgeneralization.
What you describe as a part of culture I see as a proof of multi-culturality. Can multi-culturality be a part of culture? I guess it depends on the definition. But I would argue that American culture is not uniform (of course many aspects are but I think most historically rich countries are much more uniform in that matter).
I admit it's kind of remarkable how everyone is religious in America. A bit less if you look at the crime rate (what happened to Thou shalt not kill?) but still. However I still stand by my previous statement - all the things you mention are not characteristic only to America. Maybe you can't appreciate it because it's a foreign culture to you but culture of many countries is just as uniform as American and often richer thanks to the hundreds of years of history. And wealth is hardly an American-only thing. As I mentioned, all these points together apply to Japan as well and many of them (not necessarily all at once) to other countries as well.
Haven't seen a supermarket the same way since.
That's something as an outsider living here in since around last December I've noticed. Your government is quite broken. But it somehow still works. (Paradox, I know!) For instance, the healthcare bill that was recently passed largely solves the textbook problem of information asymmetry in the health insurance market. It almost didn't pass, but it did. Same seems about the immigration laws - although they are yet to be "fixed". It's a country where, ironically, a "professional news organization" like Fox News exists at the same time with with a "comedy" show like the Colbert Report.
> Unless something major changes, the American focus on consumption will eventually erode our influence around the globe.
That's a quote from the original article. I don't quite see how consumption is wrong. Especially, since from what I see, consumption here in the US is based on the idea of buying things that solve problems. That give people the incentive to invent tools to solve problems. Trust me there are a lot of countries where they don't like to spend money at all (consume). There are everyday problems there that aren't solved because tools invented for them will not be bought. Your quality of life is stagnant if "buy only bare minimum" is the model you want to follow.
Are you talking about Germany?
That being said, your point about under consumption and unwillingness to improve life by buying better basics to solve problems is something new to me.
As an Australian who has travelled the world extensively, spent a great deal of time in the USA, and currently lives in Canada, I strongly disagree with this statement.
It should also be noted that in most quality of life indexes, cities in the US rank far below many of those in Europe, Canada, and Australia - that is one such meaningful metric in my mind when declaring the "superiority" of a country (which I think is a pretty absurd notion anyway)*
* http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-repor...
Having personally lived in two of the most recently top-ranked cities (Vancouver and now Melbourne) I'd say the indexes are mostly bogus.
Evidently something as important to quality of life as the weather isn't much of a factor given that it rains for most of the year in Vancouver. I haven't look up where SoCal ranks, but personally I much preferred living there to Vancouver for the climate alone.
And house prices in Australia are so absurdly expensive that I can't even consider buying (although I'm quite happy renting).
It's a cliche, but if you're really ambitious the US really is the land of opportunity. E.g., Elon Musk studied in Canada after leaving South Africa, but it's in the US where he started PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX.
The science says that social mobility is much higher in other countries like Denmark than in the US:
> Several studies have been made comparing social mobility between developed countries. One such study (“Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults?")[5][15][16] found that of nine developed countries, the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility with about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income passed on to the next generation. The four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...
Countries with a high immigrant population in the preceding generation score very high - just because the first wave of immigrants probably did relatively badly compared to the average population, so if their kids do average that looks like high mobility
Yes, because he did study in the US, at the University of Pennsylvania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Early_life). Granted he had a scholarship, but people like Elon Musk tend to get scholarships. For regular Americans state schools are affordable w/ government loans.
> The science says that social mobility is much higher in other countries like Denmark than in the US
No offence to Denmark but I can't imagine that many immigrants chose to immigrate there instead of the US because of social mobility scores.
By definition most immigrants are ambitious, or at least willing to risk leaving their country of birth for the possibility of greater opportunities elsewhere.
But if you look at population, production volume, China would look like the center, with the rest of the world as fringe exotic life on its borders.
Center of population is somewhere near Afghanistan I think, but that's kind of a silly measure (like "the average person is 50% male").
US manufacturing production was #1 from 1895-2010. China is #1 now, but the US numbers are far more certain than China. If you look at total industrial base, the US is far above China (wealth vs. income, basically). I think Japan and a bunch of European nations actually would beat China on that metric.
The funny thing is calculating it at high resolution would require classified data (the best measures of the exact shape of the earth are classified; they are used in ICBM flight path calculations, and deviation from an oblate spheroid is significant when you want to put something on a tennis court from the other side of the world. The exact distribution of mass (some concentrations of heavier materials) and magnetism (for MAD detection of submarines) are similar.
To be fair, most of the places you lived in that 15 years sucked really hard, even just objectively. The good non-US places are way better than the states in almost every measurable aspect.
Raising money in Germany or the UK is a huge pain. Purchasing things is a pain. Hiring and firing. Finding people who actually understand startups.
What on earth would make you qualify the situation like that?
-- all right, ive read it I think the final paragraph gets it right: gov pending was at an all time high in that decade. And it sounds like, most of the supposed risks no longer apply, because of the Euro.
But you are correct in that Holland isnt the best place for a startup.
Basically, once you discover natural resources (in the case of NL, natural gas), it crowds out all other activity. You can earn a great return from exploiting the resource, so the best people, best capital, etc. goes into that.
With floating exchange rates, you get currency inflation, but you can have the same problems even with fixed exchange rates or common currency.
A bigger problem is the general "resource curse". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
I remember talking to people who said "at least we (Afghans) don't have oil, then we'd really be screwed."
Americans are in favour of a person being extraordinary, the dutch are not. We cherish "acting normal". One of the most used expressions is "act normal, and you'll already be weird enough"
Generally speaking, this is not a bad thing. The amount of attention whores and drama queens is much lower than the states. But for truly remarkable people, this does not make their perfect habitat. Theyll need thick skins.
Germany. Better education, better attitude, more open-minded, less harassment for being weird/nonstandard, median level of critical thinking ability, healthier food, better transport, more cultural things to do/see, better solutions to the growing underclass problem you described elsewhere.
There are tons of hacker-mindset people here (it's something in the water, I swear), and while there are lots of annoying hoops to jump through in the entrepreneurial arena, the general quality of life is vastly improved over the US in almost every meaningful day-to-day way. Economically the differences have already been done to death.
The US is coasting, and I believe it will implode financially within our lifetimes.
I'm also using SFBA, NY, Boston, Seattle as exemplars of the US. I'd rather live in London than New Mexico, but there are parts of the UK worse than New Mexico, too. (amazingly. I didn't know this until living in the UK.)
US universities are stronger than German universities, at least in commercialization, graduate studies, etc. K-12 could go either way; Baltimore public schools are worse than what I assume are the worst German schools, but Palo Alto, Stuy, etc. might be better (at least I don't know of anything comparable in Germany).
Great films, worth watching.
You can see Wasp, which won an Oscar for best short film, here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aJjj8v3xVs
Trailer for Fish Tank, featuring Michael Fassbender: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1yMOdjyp0
Oddly we also seem to be developing one of the better tech hubs outside of London in Newcastle, so the rise of technology could see things improve.
Given the European financial crisis, this seems misplaced. Not to say that there will not be a financial collapse, but only if there is one it will be world-wide and the US will not be the worst off of the Western nations.
The contenders are: China, India (a unified Europe -but age is a problem). Russia is borderline has tremendous resources, but lacks the population and suffers from a paternalistic state (very tsarist in modern clothes).
Plus, Germany depends on foreign demand. When the world economy tanks, German economy tanks because there isn't enough internal consumption to pick up the slack --just as in Japan.
Better education - Kind of, although most of the top universities are still in the US.
Better attitude - Nope, not in my opinion
More open-minded - Nope, not in my opinion
Less harassment for being weird/nonstandard - Nope, not in my opinion
Healthier food - Yes, I agree on that
Better transport - Yes
More cultural things to do/see - Always depends on the area and there's enough to see in the SF Bay Area
Better solutions to the growing underclass problem - I only partially agree here. There's a reason why the Euro is on the decline in the last couple of months. Europe has many problems still to solve. Of course, the US also has many problems, that's why I partially agree.
Strongly disagree on this one here, after 4 years in Australia. Better public transport, better health care, better wages, less political bullshit, better immigration policy.
You say this without any qualifications, when what you seem to mean is "superior for starting a tech business". That's a pretty major qualification to leave out.
It's obvious that most of the computer revolution was driven by the US. The dotcom boom was enabled by the very large American stock markets, and would not have been quite so possible elsewhere. That's undeniable, and I think the world is thankful to the leading lights in the US behind the innovations we enjoy today.
I went to the US as an undergrad hoping to experience the promises of its culture and energy. I learnt a lot from my time there, but in fact my opinion of the US moderated somewhat. Previously I thought it was the land of opportunity, creativity and liberty; after, I realised it also had deep problems with the way things ran (healthcare system, inequality and social distrust, deadlocked government). (I never lived on the West Coast - only visited.)
After returning to Asia from the US, I thought I'd prefer living in Canada, for easy access to the American market as well the Canadian healthcare system.
Another aspect is, it's simply not "done" in my home country (and I assume most other countries) to publicly label yourself as "the best". That's something I noticed among some Americans, and I can't agree with it. Where I'm from, there's always something to learn from someone else, and someone to build better relationships with. Calling yourself "the greatest nation on Earth" or the like smacks of arrogance, even if it could be argued to be true for some value of "greatest". Arrogance is, I suspect, why much anti-American sentiment exists.
If you go to Africa, >90% of the people love the US, and would consider the US by far the best country in the world. We were never a colonial power there (well, basically), and have done huge amounts of good for them. The exceptions are a few people in Angola (who may feel we betrayed them), Libya (most of whom are now dead), Somalia (well, whatever, I'll accept that), and Egypt (where pan-Arab anti-US sentiments over Israel, also largely due to the cold war, predominate over Africa).
Countries like France, Australia, etc. might dislike the US due to arrogance, but that's more like relatives fighting -- the US and France have a lot in common, and are ultimately allies, and aligned on most issues. It's not open opposition.
The big areas which have substantial anti-US sentiment are Islamic or Arab countries (largely due effects of US+Israel and US v USSR, and US actions to secure oil), and Central/South America (where we were colonialists, and where the drug war is causing huge problems). Venezuela is the only new anti-US place there (Cuba is a legacy of communism), and that's mostly due to us being allied with the previous regime and with Chavez's populism -- basically the same as US+Shah leading to US v Iran now).
I can say that because I'm from there and I am one. And yet I can report much the same: I moved overseas to unfamiliar shores, and the result has been an enlightenment, a much clearer perspective on the parochial vs the universal. To look back at one's origin with fresh eyes. It's refreshing and challenging and will change anyone with a shred of self-analytical capability.
This became clearest to me when living in the Netherlands. There were two identifiable Dutch social modes: either cliquish & insular, or open & welcoming. The latter was strongly correlated to those Dutch who had travelled. I'm not saying the former were unfriendly, it was a matter of acceptance: I was simply always a guest.
I have observed this trait in many since, and in myself.
Note that I do not believe an overseas holiday is sufficient to achieve this. You'll have to stay somewhere, become at least a little bit of a local. My experience has been that six months is sufficient, two years is optimal.
Specific to this point as someone that has lived in England forever I find it really strange how on the reddit atheism subreddit all the (American) posters act as if they're persecuted for their Atheism whereas in England religion is just something people do in private if they do it at all, it's hard for me to understand the way r/atheism posters perceive their persecution, but reading someone from America saying that how England is very different with religion makes it easier to understand.
This is unprecedented because it's simply not true. The best statistic I could find for this is 11%. Even 11% seems like a very high number based on my personal experience. As an American who has lived in different parts of America my whole life (and currently living in a high-tourist city with people from all over the US), I can say that most people in most parts of the US do not believe that the rapture will happen within their lifetime.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_US_0602.p...
http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedfiles/Topics/Issues/Politics...
41% in no way jibes with my experience, even as someone who grew up attending white rural evangelical churches. You might get 41% (or much higher) to say it might occur, but I am seriously skeptical of "definitely" percentages.
The survey I linked has some interesting facts about American Christian beliefs about science. Strong (79%+) majority believes global warming is a serious problem, for example. Even a slim majority believes in evolution.
In any case, that's not the scary poll. It's polls like this one that are scary: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/12/interracial-marriag...
This was from religious and non-religious folk. Nobody was mean about it to my face - but it felt like people expected bad things to happen because of it.
I suspect there is a tipping point for religion. It is easy to be culturally Christian and accept basic tenets (i.e., God exists) when there aren't significant vocal doubters. Currently, even in secular areas, it is seen as a bit rude to vocally doubt the existence of God.
(Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that.)
No, you've went into a field whose practitioners are largely non-Christian, and since you've probably acquired most of your social circle directly or indirectly through that you mostly meet non-Christians.
If a kid who grew up in a religious family in London and went to a religious school most of his life where almost all his social group was religious left the UK after school and moved to Seattle to work for Google or Microsoft, he could reasonably blog years later that the US is largely a non-Christian country based on his experience.
Even amongst Brits who would willingly tick "Church of England" on a census form, it seems to be only a minority who attend church, perform religious rituals, proselytize, or attempt to defend their faith.
I caught my wife ready to tick CofE on a form once and asked her if she believed in God. She thought and said "Well, no. Not really." Yet, culturally, she was brought up to just say she was CofE and a Christian because, culturally, she lived that way without ever being pious or knowledgable about the theology of it.
http://ir2.flife.de/data/natcen-social-research/igb_html/ind... (section 12 - religion).
From this survey 50% don't classify themselves as "belonging to a particular religion". Rising to 64% in the 18-24 age range. A generational change seems to be happening.
10$ note - "in god we trust". £10 note - Charles Darwin picture on it.
I guess it explains a lot.
I read a few comments about atheists being "ashamed" in states - I don't really see that happening in europe. Even in the far eastern parts of it being overly (and I probably have a bit of a different definition on this word) religious is being nowadays quite often considered weird. Especially among young people in bigger cities.
Less than 30% of American adults are at a healthy bodyweight, so it's really not an unfair generalization.
More importantly, stereotyping an entire country of people as stupid is about as uncivil as it gets. When the country of stupid people in question has been continually transforming the world with scientific breakthroughs, engineering, and producing most of the movies the rest of the world wants to watch... it comes off as sour grapes.
I say this as someone who's spent nearly my whole adult life on the opposite side of the globe from America.
It's inexcusable, considering the breadth of information available to the contrary, but most just never expose themselves to it. I know I didn't until I moved away.
Found this in the comments. After having lived in different countries for the last 15 years (originally from Germany), that has become my conclusion, not only regarding the US and UK. It takes some time (years) to get really used to a culture and understand its thinking.
As for his specific points
1. I have no idea how somebody with half a brain and access to the internet can have this notion. Maybe I am the exception to the rule, but I never fancied my Country to be any more 'important' than any other nation. In fact, the opposite was often considered given that modern civilisation has few roots in the Americas.
2. Never believed in religion in the first place
3. Every country has their fair share of embarrassing points, and of course their fair share of unfortunate embarrassing people. I have rather enjoyed seeing that the human condition is more or less the same the world over. I also feel occasionally embarrassed by my fellow countrymen, but I figure the best way to counteract that is to represent myself, and by association my country, the best I can.
4. As for that, we will see. I've not seen anything that screams out to me "This economy is vastly more productive than the US" in the areas that I have visited. Perhaps public transport and some infrastuctural aspects lend themselves to a more efficient country, and the US should certainly take a look at those things.
Oh well, I'm glad to have had the experience of travelling throughout Europe, but I would expect some deeper takeaways from somebody that literally spent years immersed in a foreign culture.
What you get is a not a first hand view, but a 2nd hand view, from the worst observer possibe.
Im pretty sure, that language is key to any culture. And because of that Americans, even when they travel, will have less understanding of the culture, than the natives have of the states, simply because we can actually read your constitution, watch your daily show, know your founders and the culture that shspes your idenity.
Want to learn about the world? Dont travel! Learn a language.
I don't think my mediocre-to-decent French helped me appreciate France any more, but if you say so.
Here's a reasonable question: were you able to notice the quality of the poltical debate? Its nothing special within Europe, but the kind of nonsense that passes for a polticsl debate in the states is quite a contrast.
I read that to mean "Learn English", which makes sense, but is not very helpful to an American because only learning English as a second language gives the advantages you described.
I totally understand your point, but coming from the other side as an American, what language should we learn?
Disclaimer: my kids will be learning Mandarin Chinese.
Thank you!
* closes tab
It's certainly chic to hate on America these days, but I now tend to give much less credence to those who do.
This gravitation toward a shared belief makes it not surprising that living where most peoples' belief is that God does not exist would result in one sharing that belief.
Thanks for the article. It's always great to see other perspectives on the world.
A few years later, I worked abroad for some time. Post "9/11" people were cruel and bitter. They really despised us! This year though, everyone was talking about Apple, Instagram and Facebook! I don't know if these are just hot topics but people were excited to talk with an American about them. I was glad to hear the tone had changed some.
I spent 3 years abroad, recently returning to the USA this summer, and I will try to outline some of what I learned, although it is somewhat difficult as this knowledge has become ingrained in me and obvious as to seem to require no explanation.
- English as lingua franca
The average person doesn't realize how dominant English is as the world's language, how that dominance is reflected by our leading industries, and how the prevalence of English helps exports our culture, values, and by extension, our products. For example, the majority of the latest scientific research is written in English, regardless of the scientist's nationality. Every programmer across the world learns a rudimentary English just by virtue of being a programmer, as most programming languages are in English and the majority of programming technical guides are in English. When travelers of different nationalities meet in a 3rd country, they speak English. When businessmen of different countries do business together, they speak English. As native speakers we have a built-in advantage. But our potential weakness is failing to understand different nationalities. Especially as the other countries grow in power. I've heard, from the English-speaking Chinese in China: "We understand your culture and speak your language. You, on the other hand, don't understand ours at all. We have the advantage."
- Dominance of American cultural media, internet, and education Hollywood movies, American music artists and bands, tech companies, and higher education all hold significant leads over whatever competitors foreign countries can muster. Besides China, the rest of the world doesn't use their version of Facebook, and none of them have the engineers to keep up. The majority of the top 100 Universities in the world are in the USA. And most of the world watches American music and movies. Its ironic: a commonly heard stereotype is that Americans have little to no culture, when American popular culture is by far the most dominant in the world and unmatched in its breadth, choice, depth, and quality.
- US Consumerism This is a little more complex, but you still can see this if you look hard enough: the world economic system is built around US consumers. Take a look at prices for electronics in Asia, for example. In the very places where the electronics are made, the retail prices are all significantly higher than those in the US. Samsung and LG TVs cost more in Korea than they do in America. Computers cost more in China than they do in the USA. I frequently found myself waiting until I returned to US soil before I made any big ticket electronic or computer purchases, because the savings were ridiculous.
Once you look into the price disparity, you realize that other countries, mainly the exporting ones in Asia, manipulate their currencies, and build their economies on the back of US consumers. It's a potentially dangerous cycle because our consumerism habit is encouraged and built-in to the system via currencies and our addiction to credit, making it a hard habit to break.
- the effectiveness of USA institutions: legal system, courts, law enforcement, Congress, media, higher education Good governance and higher civilization aren't created overnight, and are not easy to develop. If you look at any 3rd world country, you notice immediately that the country often borders on anarchy due to lack of effective political / governing structure. Either the President is a brutal dictator, or the police are corrupt, or military generals are the de facto leaders, or the legal system is weak and the laws unenforced, and the list goes on and on. Effective government does not arise from air. It is built on decades or centuries of experience and stability. To maintain its effectiveness is a constant struggle against the evils inherent in man: laziness, corruption, abuse of power, etc. and a fight that seems to be slipping away from us in recent years.
The strong laws, governance, loyal military, and highly educated and productive citizens of a country are what make countries like America, those in Western Europe, and increasingly, some in East Asia good places to live.
Interestingly, even though reddit seems to hate cops, in my experience cops in the USA are paragons of professionalism compared to those in developing countries. It's hard to imagine, but cops there just don't take the profession very seriously. The standards of law enforcement in developed countries are another level entirely. And you can apply this "higher level" concept to the other areas I outlined above: judges, courts, the military, businesses, politicians.
If we let our vigilance slack, then the strong civilizing forces, whose bond make a civilization great, will begin to weaken, and the country's excellence will begin to regress.
Sorry, I took a tangent there.
- differences in political systems and their effectiveness This is hard for me to explain because I consider it as self-evident as 2+2=4, but I'll do my best. It's clear to me, and many other people who have studied political systems across the world, that democracy isn't a one-model-fits-all-countries panacea. Democracies (if you could call them that) often fail where there is no historical precedent or experience for it, and the populace is unfamiliar with or uninterested in participating in the democratic process. Uneducated, unengaged citizens are a recipe for democracy failure. Other factors that ruin a democracy's effectiveness: corrupt leaders and lax enforcement. The leaders just rig the elections and the enforcement just lets it all slide.
Another issue is public policy. Looking at what other countries have tried and how it works in their countries is like drawing up a theoretical policy experiment and then seeing the results before your eyes. The policy's results won't ever match 1-1 with your native country if said policy was implemented due to differences in culture and environment, but just seeing how others have done things opens your mind to the possibilities and forces you to understand a different perspective. The same applies to cultural values or mores. Often I have found myself in Asia in wonder at some common practice or another that is superior, in almost every way, to what we have in America. (And I've found the opposite as well).
- crumbling US infrastructure vs. the World's "Crumbling" is a bit of hyperbole, but still, the first thing you notice when traveling is how new and modern the rest of the world's airports are compared to those in the USA. New York, America's supposed mecca of culture and a truly international city, has airports whose decrepitness puts lesser cities to shame. Don't get me started on the subways.
I would say that the USA has one of the best governing infrastructures, but only average (and slipping fast) physical infrastructure. Oh, and US Broadband speeds rank is #12. I'm particularly emotional about that one.
Overall, the US is still one of the best countries to live in the world for a number of its strengths that are unmatched, and will not be surpassed for the next several decades, if ever. But signs are showing that the civilizing fabric which holds our country together is weakening: deadlocked political process, income and wealth disparity at historical levels, the Great Recession, and what some might lament as a decline in values and morals into a disgusting morass of consumerism, selfish individualism, and celebrity worship.
But it could be all part of the cycle, and the future is still bright. The highly educated citizenry, and especially the youth(courtesy of all those student loans!), are some of our greatest strengths.
Meanwhile, at the risk of sounding un-PC, the uneducated underclass is our biggest weakness, although I'm unsure whether historically it is larger in size relative to the population.
I'm not bearish on America... yet. There are too many good things going for it. The energy, dynamism, ambition, and intelligence are all in absurdly high concentrations in numerous US cities. The political system just needs a little tweaking.
Couldn't you have just copied them from Britain and France - wouldn't that have been easier ?
My point was that the law itself often isn't the problem. China and India have strong laws; they just aren't enforced properly. The problem is corruption and lack of cultural values and professionalism in those institutions. To use a startup analogy, the problem is not in lack of good ideas, the problem lies in the execution.
Living in Los Angeles, I notice the same sort of thing about our freeways. I think part of it is that they were the among the first built, and they haven't really updated.
Interchanges are a particular sore point. The 101 north to 405 south interchange is a joke. One lane, 270 degree turn. Traffic crawls through it. And it's literally at the busiest interchange in the world.
Or the 110 north to the 5 north. It's like a theme park ride it's so narrow and curvy and hilly.
Of course, the 134 east to the 5 north has no interchange ramp. You have to leave the freeways and get on surface streets to change over. There's a few of those around.
On this point, it's important to note that the price disparity is largely due to the way items are taxed in Asia. South Korea has both VAT and a luxury item tax; China has a luxury tax on foreign brands. You need only look to Hong Kong, which has the cheapest prices in the world on e.g. Apple products (because you need a microscope to find a tax in Hong Kong) to break down this model. Your main point re: currency manipulation, especially in China, is still valid and important, but this is a bad example.
Besides currency controls is the VAT the only reason for the price disparity?
"Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it)."
A good review of the book: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-ma...
I too have had the experience of living a big chunk of my life outside the US, about 18 years, between South America (mostly Argentina) and Europe. I've also split my time in the US between east and west coast.
When abroad I have at times felt embarrassed to call myself an American. Well, first of all, I hate the use of the term "American" because, well, we don't own the entire continent. I feels utterly ignorant to say "I am an American". In the UK at least you can say that you are a "Yank" and it is more accurate. Anyhow, this might be a minor point. Just because it is convenient I'll continue to use the ignorant reference and call myself an "American" in this post.
Yes, Americans are fat and ignorant. At least that's a big part of what we project. Some of it has to do with how egocentric we tend to be. I have met Americans that have a hard time placing countries --much less cities-- on the globe. You often hear things like "I can't spell" or "I am not good at math". I can't recall ever hearing such expressions in other countries. If you can't spell your own language or handle high-school level math you are actually looked down upon in a lot of cultures. Just one step above an idiot. It really sounds moronic from the vantage point of other cultures. So, be aware of this fact. While it might seem funny to you to make a comment like that, the other person could be thinking that you are a "burro".
I am the last person to propose that government get involved in directing behavior through taxation and the like. I've posted before on the whole healthcare law mess. However, there is one tax credit that I could probably get behind in a serious way if it was implemented correctly: A tax incentive to have Americans travel abroad with some frequency.
I truly believe that we would fix a LOT of problems both here and elsewhere if the average US citizen had a more accurate world view. In Europe it is easy to travel from culture to culture. It's just a train ride away and it can be really cheap. Here in the US it is harder and far more costly. It is logical that most would simply travel a few hundred miles away within our country than get on a plane and see other shores. An intelligently-done tax credit to promote foreign travel could do wonders in this area. We need people to travel out of the country a few times (not just once) during their lifetime to gain perspective and learn.
If the average American understood what the world looks like on the outside and, perhaps more importantly, what the US looks like when looking-in, they would behave differently and vote differently. We would be a different country.
The topic of religion in the US is also a tough one. I, like most, grew up in a religious environment and later rejected it. As an atheist now I can't help but see some of what goes on with all religions as nothing less than lunacy. A collectively accepted state of dementia. A tsunami kills hundreds of thousands of people and the religious still can't logically look at the gaping holes in their demented belief system. At one point you'd hope that someone would rationalize that if their god truly listened to their prayers and helped their football team win a game while allowing someone to get killed or raped across town, or someone else half beaten to death at the stadium parking lot or hundreds of thousands of of people die in an earthquake...well, something ain't right.
Anyhow, the fact that American politics is so overly loaded with the need to express devotion, dedication and history with one religion, Christianity, is of great concern to those of us who can look at things from a different plane of thought.
From outside our country this looks ignorant and, well, ridiculous.
There are so many consequences to having religion as a dominant force in politics. Gay rights and scientific research are two examples that come to mind. It is personally offensive to me --not gay-- to hear believers who consider the gay to be unholy abominations (and worst). When you try to explain that being gay is a genetic mutation (not a pejorative) that is no different from having blue eyes they laugh at you. That's when the topic of evolution often comes-up. It is personally offensive to me that they challenge evolution as though anything they could offer is even remotely relevant to the conversation. You try to explain that the mechanism for evolution is the very reason that their kids don't look like perfect clones of each other, and they come up with counter-reasons that one couldn't even imagine. And, when religion mixes with politics you have things like the drive to teach "creationism" to our kids. Again, from many distant shores this looks nothing less than retarded. And they are right.
A lot of the above is very negative. Here's the good news: There is a TON that is great about this country and this people. We, with all of our faults, manage to have created a society that is orderly and, for the most part, law-driven. Just ask an Argentinian about how their crazy governments and rampant corruption at all levels has, effectively, destroyed what used to be a very nice country. In the US we disagree. And, yes, polarization is horrible right now, but we somehow manage to run things reasonably well.
There's also a lot of creativity in this land. There are cultures that have huge issues with this. Both Europe and Asia have examples of this effect. A lot of the behaviors and culture that the US promotes internally lead to finding diamonds in the rough and allowing them to shine through.
Yes, here you can be nobody and rise to be anything and anyone you can dream of becoming. And that's why the US has led the world in a technical and, yes, cultural revolution that has had no equal. I am proud of being an American, warts and all. I strive to be above average and make sure that my kids develop a world view and cross cultural view from the get go. I also respect other cultures and understand that nearly everyone who is positive in the world has something valuable to offer. I could go on, but that's probably enough of a brain dump on this topic.
FYI, homosexuality is not genetic. Although genes play a large role, they are generally thought to explain the variance in sexual orientation for less than 50%.
As real Americans would say, "Whoop-de-doo!"