Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America | Hacker News Reader

Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America

markmanson.net

16 pointsjjchiw9 comments

So this topic has come up lots of times before. I did a search:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28thi...

Here are links to the results, some of which have significant discussion, and not all of which are identical to this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4231219

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4235171

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5156029

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633838

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037848

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6313386

Wow so many of these points are just plain wrong (not all of them, but about half of them). This is not meant as an America bolstering comment, but rather as a myth of myths busting comment.

America is a big deal around the world simply because it represents such a large portion of the world's economy (1/4 by GDP) and military power. Its cultural influence due to Hollywood and the music industry is phenomenally large. Its cultural influence is further bolstered by American fast food and mega brands (Coke, Apple, Michael Jordan) which have penetrated even the farthest reaches of the globe.

As a comparison, take the next two largest countries in the world by population: Indonesia and Brazil. If you go to some random other places... say China, France, South Africa, etc how many American people, places, companies, and movies do you think people will know versus Indonesian and Brazilian?

And Americans, like most rich countries, are relatively well off. When 1/2 the world lives on $2/day or less we're doing pretty well - as is everyone living in a high income country.

You might have misread a bit. I believe the author is trying to point out that people in other countries don't think about America on a daily basis. They just go on about their lives trying to make a living. Even with the consumption of products which originated in America, people don't really care where it came from.

Wooden chair is pointing out that daily is not a good benchmark. People do not think of any foreign country daily.

A more targeted way of discovering which country is the most prominent worldwide would be to have people list the 5 countries that they think about the most often, weight the responses based on their rank in the list, and tally them up.

People's home country and neighboring countries would be on top, but asking people from all over would smooth that out. The top scoring answer should be geographically neutral.

I disagree openforce - I think the point of the author's piece first and foremost was to be provocative; not to speak about people's day to day lives. I dispute some of the provocative claims he's making.

Ugggh

Care to elaborate?

Presumably the complaint is the article is shamelessly pandering to twenty-something college educated people who are already aware of America's shortcomings.

The article isn't at all meant to persuade anybody, it exists to pat people on the back who already believe those "10 Things Most American's Don't know". But not the reader obviously. The reader is too cool, it's those other Americans who are uninformed and stupid, you see.

Please get this crap off the front page. We have enough pandering bullshit that gets posted daily.

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