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Comment by motorest | Hacker News Reader

> It's a common trope on here to lament on how the Anglo cultures don't value family ties strongly enough. I'd argue not overly valuing family ties has been a big competitive advantage of the Anglo cultures for centuries, eg. moving for opportunity (improved social mobility), ability to connect with outsiders, couple pairing across cultural/geographical boundaries, prerequisite to a high trust society, etc.

That line of reasoning is just plain sad. It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."

What makes it specially sad is how anglo culture's economic advantage spawns from the outcome of WW2, not this misplaced sense of sacrifice.

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"anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire. The outcome of WW2 elevated America, there's no relationship there to broader anglo culture.

Quite a stretch to jump to "everyone might be miserable". Immigration from Latin American and other non-anglo countries is on a scale where it shapes American and British domestic politics, difficult to conclude that those immigrants are searching for the misery of anglo cultures that they can't find at home.

> "anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire.

I think you're trying too hard to muddy the waters by creating a definition for "anglo" that does not match reality or any use of the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Americans

Even within "European Americans", nearly half has an ethnic origin that is classified as German, not English.

Another important aspect is immigration and naturalization. The bulk of high-skilled R&D specialists who turned the US into the technological powerhouse that it is aren't exactly Mayflower descendants. It's immigrants and first- and second-generation. So it's very hard to argue about "Anglo" thins with the extreme reliance on immigration and descendent of immigrants to play the roles that made all this progress possible.

A few points:

- German and other NW European cultures share the family atomization characteristic of Anglo-Americans

- Anglo as a term stems from England. England is named for the Angles, a Scandinavian/Germanic tribe that invaded Britain a long time ago. The term Anglo-American reflects the seminal English influence on American culture.

- The English and their descendant culture, America, basically invented the modern economic world and it predates WWII by a long time.

The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.

>The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.

How so?

The word "anglo" is so fraught that I think it's probably less useful to try to argue about what it means than it would be to just leave it alone.

I'm actually here to point out that the U.S. had the world's largest GDP as early as 1890, or as late as 1913, depending on your source of data and how it's estimated. So, WWII isn't the origin of that. We can now argue about whether GDP is a good indicator, but before doing that I'd ask for a better one (with historical data) to be suggested.

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

Well, that's a very self-defeatist attitude. I can see how it can make someone sad.

>It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."

Aren't Scandinavian people statistically the happiest? That's not anglo culture.

Admittedly Anglo culture took a lot of influence from the scandinavians (due to Viking conquest etc). I think some of the cultural tenants we are talking about probably did come originally from Scandinavia.

Isn't the suicide rate highest in Scandinavian countries and lowest in South Europe?

The more sad people kill themselves, the happier is the average survivor?

In a static population sure. Over decades?

Britanica did a video on this: https://youtu.be/ldvQOnvc2Io?si=9R1IHMfS0i7RhB8s

Different cultures also define happiness differently. For the scandanvians, happiness stems from contentment and balance, American society tends to link it to consumerism and material success.

US had world’s largest economy well before WWII. It initially took first place in 1880 before going back and forth until 1900 when to firmly took the lead for a century. https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-did-united-state...

It was a huge country with lots of natural resources like oil, gold, coal, etc.

Why are you calling that Anglo-Saxon culture? You're clearly talking about the US, not the UK or France... You're not even talking about the whole US, or the majority, just the culture in the larger cities. Even within the US it isn't the people that were born here who traveled the farthest and learned a new language for an opportunity. This conversation is very surreal.

Someone else? My brother the US median income is miles ahead of everywhere else.

Income alone is not a good measure.

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