Going Dutch
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
By the way, if you're interested in the history of the Netherlands, there's a dutch movie coming out later this year about the flood of 1953: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230194/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953
I spent a lot of time thinking about how things must have been to live 50 years ago, and how much we've come to take (this very limited sense of) openness for granted.
Anyway, when in Rome, do as the romans. Hard if they have weird customs, I agree.
You must have been pretty far out in the "inaka". :)
You need a large population to support 24 hour consumerism.
Since gas stations have permission to stay open around the clock they're used to get emergency food. You can also get food delivered on Sundays and in the middle of the night, so it's not so bad.
Any time I finding appealing stories of the allegedly comfortable northwest European life, I just remind myself of things like this.
If it somehow enabled 50 cent beers and 2 euro bottles of (good!) wine, I am not about to complain.
Aldi enables 50 Cent beer and 2 Euro wine. Their drive hard bargains with their supplieres. Interestingly Aldi pays their employees quite well and seems to occupy a higher moral ground in the German opinion than Walmart does in America. (Lidl, the second big discounter chain, has a reputation for mis-treating employees, though.)
Perhaps a small New England state could pull it off (and they do try) but to engineer a Dutch system from Washington is asking a bit much. The author perceptively observed that Dutch don't trust government any more than we do, but have a strong sense of communal responsibility to each other. That is only possible on a small scale, I think. After all, they only have 16m people on a tiny piece of land.
When I lived in Holland some years ago, one of locals pointed out this irony: "You Americans have only two political parties but can't agree on anything, while we Dutch have dozens but pretty much see eye-to-eye on everything."
Do you think that matters? I feel no more connected to people living 100 km away than people living 300 km away.
I was too lazy to find more a classy way to call BS on a sweeping generalization that makes it sound like Americans have some special individuality gene, while the Dutch are all genetically predisposed to socialism.
Pardon my French, but if you don't like it vote me down.
It's called culture -- not genetics. Would you agree that there are several important distinctions between Dutch and American culture?
Lets not forget that Holland basically invented modern capitalism and the US has many programs much more socialist then their equivalents in the so called social states of Europe.
People are free to move to a country with a value system that's more closely aligned with their own, e.g., one that seeks to flatten wealth disparities. But that's not what people want, it seems. A lot of people feel a strong impulse to convince others that their value system is the best.
Huh? Aren't they on par with countries like the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, etc?
actually quite a few spots behind.
http://www.newmajority.com/ShowScroll.aspx?ID=8a80f624-92a7-...
The NYT article doesn't make any mention of the fact that emigration from the Netherlands in 2004 was the highest since 1954. This makes me wonder if things are really as wonderful there as the article claims, although it does a pretty good job of pointing out the pros and cons.
http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/local_news/why-are-they-all-...
"In 2004 almost 50,000 people born in the Netherlands decided to leave and live in a foreign country. Since 1954, the number of emigrants has never been so high. The Dutch economy, with the exception of the early 1980s, has never been so poor since 1954.
The Netherlands is undergoing the longest period of stagnation in two generations, according to the latest statistics from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis."
I thought it was a widely held "fact" that the NL is overcrowded and that dutchmen should try to find their lebensraum elsewhere.
It's a pity though, cause the metaphorical meaning of living "room" is precisely what I meant.
Sometimes bordering on (self-) censorship. So that caution is not necessarily a good thing.
I agree that one should be careful when using emotionally charged words, but I also think that playful usage might be a way out of the self-censorship that surrounds a great many dreadful historical events. Not just in Germany.
It's easy to imagine the Netherlands having the same problem. Of course, emigrating to a less dense country is an easier solution.
Modern Germany is dense, yes. But guess what: People are migrating en masse from states like Saxony-Anhalt (118 inhabitants/km²) to Baden-Württemberg (301 inhabitants/km²).
[1] In quotation marks, because there was no state called Germany back then.
The author conflates many issues here. Most people disagreed with Fortuyn because he was a right-wing populist who managed to form a fringe party that consisted of sorry losers. The guy himself was intelligent, witty and utterly narcissistic. He was like a character in Oscar Wilde's plays who had a bon mot for everything and solutions for nothing. Not the kind of person who should have political power.
That is up to the voters to decide, no?
Have you repented for the murder of JFK, Lincoln and some school personnel in San Diego (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Ann_Spencer) yet?
But I do think the analogy holds. Theo van Gogh was indeed killed for his anti-Islam statements, but by a disturbed individual who had hoped to solve the situation that way. It only made it worse, of course.
The murder of Pim Fortuyn follows more or less the same pattern. Killed by a disturbed individual that figured that was the only way to stop him.
Fortuyn especially had a relatively large following among the Dutch. I don't think "punished" is the right word for it, since it implies that there is any legitimacy to their murders, or even sanctioned by the populace, which is simply not the case.
Anyway, what I think the most important issue is that the people in positions of power (1) actually try to do the right thing and (2) that their views on what is right are not too skewed. Both of which are generally true in the Netherlands I believe.
Lastly, on conformity as mentioned in the original article: I would not even know what is meant with conformity. True, you will have to conform to store closing-times which is a silly rule that needs to be changed. But there are hardly any social norms, you may be openly gay, atheist or deeply religious and wear whatever you want. Just don't expect to be viewed as sympathetic when you dress ostentatiously (where would you be?).
'lack of inidividual initiative': Why should people be individually be burdened with taking care of social problems, when we have a government in place just for that task?
From what I see on the TV and read in newspapers this is changing.
> I would argue that the economic consensus model in the Netherlands is quite recent in historical terms, and that even today, it contains a fair amount of conflict.
> In 1982 the Dutch state...
And the 4 paragraphs later he ends with:
> These changes are worth noting, but they came about only after extremely difficult struggles that took decades.
Some of the social issues he raises are interesting, but overall I feel that this is a poor response.
> they are forced to emigrate, as in the case of Somali-born politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who violated the Dutch norms of “consensus” by insisting on publicly discussing female genital mutilation; honor violence; honor killings; and forced marriages.
She was forced to emigrate because she lied about her past. If she hadn't she wouldn't have been allowed in in the first place.
Given the overall message of Christianity (read: Christ) then, by your definition, there should be no want or suffering in the world, but yet there is. You are free to believe what you want about the Dutch, but at the very least, you have to admit that they have created a society that attempt to provide some basic standard of health and social well-being to its citizens. Not the same can always be said for other "compassionate" Christian societies.
"Finally, the single biggest predictor of whether someone will be charitable is their religious participation.
Religious people are more likely to give to charity, and when they give, they give more money: four times as much. And Arthur Brooks told me that giving goes beyond their own religious organization:
"Actually, the truth is that they're giving to more than their churches," he says. "The religious Americans are more likely to give to every kind of cause and charity, including explicitly non-religious charities."" http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2682730
You're misunderstanding Christianity. Jesus said: "For you always have the poor with you" Matthew 26:11. Christians don't believe that its possible to eradicate poverty. In fact we believe that society will continue to grow worse until the end. The point is not to build a utopia, it is to personally help those you see in need.
I'm curious as to the percentage that goes outside givers' own churches.
"when they give, they give more money"
I'd also be curious to find out whether or not the less religious give more time, and how much money that time is worth.
Depends on how you count worth. The lawyer who volunteers at a soup kitchen, to use a lesswrong.com example, is giving up X dollars per hour of income to provide far less than X dollars per hour of charity, and since this is true for people who give to charity in general (without reference, but I'd be very surprised if it were controversial), it seems clear that people who primarily give time are donating for reputation rather than effect. I've no clue about the relative proportions of time and money the religious and non-religious give, though.
What about the lawyer who does pro bono legal work for the same soup kitchen? Or (closer to the HN crowd) the coder who puts up a website for a charity?
"it seems clear that people who primarily give time are donating for reputation"
Reputation is one possible motive, but I could imagine others: warm-fuzzy feelings, a desire to connect to one's community, a lack of funds to donate (if a second job is out of the question), and so on.
One might also choose volunteering as an alternative to other non-working activities. The soup kitchen lawyer guy wasn't exactly going to be pulling down $100/hr watching SportsCenter that Saturday.
Govt help programs, at least in the US, are aimed more at benefitting middle class providers than the poor who are supposedly the beneficiaries.
[citation needed]
"If you tell a Dutch person you’re going to raise his taxes by 500 euros and that it will go to help the poor, he’ll say O.K., he said. But if you say he’s going to get a 500-euro tax cut, with the idea that he will give it to the poor, he won’t do it. The Dutch don’t do such things on their own. They believe they should be handled by the system. To an American, that’s a lack of individual initiative."
Last I heard, your average US charity has less than 30% of its budget met by donations.
"Gaudiani said Americans give twice as much as the next most charitable country, according to a November 2006 comparison done by the Charities Aid Foundation. In philanthropic giving as a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. ranked first at 1.7 percent. No. 2 Britain gave 0.73 percent, while France, with a 0.14 percent rate, trailed such countries as South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19409188/
That being said, Christianity was in fact the binding element that provided Western-Europe with its strong social structure that still exists today. It was not so much the Bible or morale that bound them, for most it was in fact the fight against catholic oppression that led to Calvinism and other reformations. Without support or leadership from the Vatican, protestants formed scattered social groups, in which members had to protect and support each other. In doing so they found themselves reinventing the biblical message. To protect the family, social gatherings (sunday prayers), give to the poor (prevent them from stealing), take care of the weak. Again, not as individuals, but as a group.
The US on the other hand, was formed through immigration of people who had little or no social relations with each other. The result was an individualistic society where everyone took care of themselves. However, such a system is not inately human. There is no one to take care of the inevitable unfortunate. The individual compassion that is enabled by the lack of social commitments cannot begin to pay the rent for a single mother, the health care bill of a retiree, or the school books of a poor man's daughter. As economic tides reveal the pain of individualism groups are formed.
Gradually, America is shifting towards a stronger social structure. Middle-America finds refuge for its mediocre economic opportunities in evangelical Christianity, whereas the people along the coast-lines are bounded by progressive politics. The growing schism between these groups is exemplary of the social bonds getting stronger.
This also reveals the dark side of social structure. Deep hatred between different groups. A hatred that far exceeds any individual conflict, a hatred that has led to all of history's atrocities we know so well. Yet, the social bonds are unavoidable. Man is meant to live in a tribe. That is how we evolved.
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=0...