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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here.

Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter gatherers are all that informative about our past. These are different people who live in marginal lands. Hunter gatherers of Europe would have had access to prime real estate and extremely food dense coastal areas, made long voyages at least occasionally. Quite simply, successful societies look different.

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>> most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

> Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are nicer places to live.

The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.

> The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.

With a sprinkle of colonizing and ravaging those lesser places, my liege?

More like a century of no cousin marriage / late marriage / nuclear families via bipartite manorialism has produced a high trust people. Everything you attribute to magic dirt or oppression is really this.

This feels like a false dichotomy to me, and if anything, it might invert cause and effect. Europeans pillaged most of the countries that you're contrasting to, and under intense economic pressure, traditional values (especially misogynistic ones) usually emerge as a coping mechanism. Such as child marriage. Liberties are typically the result of relaxed economic conditions, like what Europe achieved after plundering the textiles of South Asia. As economic conditions worsen, we now see conservativism rising in the west.

Europe used to be a lot like other places a millennia ago (I typo'd century above): low-trust, dominated by extended kinship networks, different marriage patterns, etc. The transformation largely happened between the years 300-1500, before colonialism existed. The Church was responsible for much of this transformation. I guess you think Europe just robbed the world and suddenly they had liberal democracies?

You must be very insecure of your claims, completely sidestepping the actual content of my reply and managing to double yours as ad-hominem and straw-man sophistry, not to even bother pointing out the flimsiness of your "European lifestyle" construct itself — sure, the UK can't live without their baguettes — when Europe is rather more representative of postpostmodernist ideologies than of whatever golden-age historical kool-aid you've been drinking to ignore how prevalent the invective "eurocuck" is outside utopia.

These societies are the failed people we left behind.

They’re like the PHP developers of humankind. They limp on, but everyone else moved on a long time ago. If they were successful, they wouldn’t still be doing it.

The simpler explanation is that they continue to do it because it is successful.

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