It can’t work in the US, because it’s not a society that works together for the collective good, or to raise everyone’s quality of life.
It’s a bunch of individuals in a dog eat dog situation who happen to live nearby.
It’s a bunch of individuals in a dog eat dog situation who happen to live nearby.
In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Asian nations, on the other hand, have been very crowded, for a very long time.
This has resulted in a much more interdependent mindset.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There's really no nation on Earth that is as good at "ganging up" on a problem, as Japan. Korea and China are catching up quick, though. The US is very good at manufacturing footguns. We don't tend to play well with others.
It really is hard for exceptional people to make their way, in Japanese society, though. They have a saying "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."
Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.
Most Aussies I’ve known are quite independent.
I really like them; maybe because we share so many traits.
Also, the US was where the British sent their convicts, until we had a big prison riot.
Aussies are friendly and kind, not locked in a dog eat dog world.
, at the top of this comment chain, that it can’t work in the US because people don’t work together.
Also in Australia the waste majority of the population arrived much later and most were always attached to coastal cities. These cities were dominated by British aristocrat early on and later the British labor movement and reflects the culture of London. Australia politically was a part of Britain in many ways for 100s of years after the US had gone its own way.
The same is true to a lesser degree for the North East Coast in the US, arguably it works more like Britain/Australia but the South and everything West is quite different.
Aussies work together, not against each other
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1nbrov9/australi...
I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.
Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.
It’s really hard to be empirical, in these types of things.
In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.
You could consider other causes.
>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.
>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not...
One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.
In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.