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I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:
I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.
I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.
I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.
But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.
Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.
This is a question I ask myself almost every day.
For now, I want to push back slightly on the wealth/GDP comparison. I've posted before about my struggles in thinking about it. The numbers show Americans are at median higher in per capita wealth and GDP, but it is difficult for me to square that with my personal experience actually living in the US vs East Asia. In a phrase, it feels like when I'm in the US I'm always paying more for less. Food tastes worse, interactions with a service workers feel worse, I'm shaken down for tips even on take-out, public spaces are covered in literal piss and shit, public transit is garbage, there's lower trust, principal-agent problems seem to play out with a high rate of defections, etc.
If GDP is the sum total of all money flows, how should I feel about getting paid >3x while I'm also having to shell out >2x for everything but it's all worse. PPP is supposed to account for this, but I don't think it quite captures the full picture, particularly the part where everything is lower quality. Every transaction in the US will nickel and dime you to death. In comparison, I generally feel a much greater utility surplus in places like Japan.
When Japanese waiters just do their job because it's culturally expected while American waiters drag their feet and still whine about 20% tips not being 25%, that's not captured by GDP.
When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues and still put full effort into quality just out of pride in their work while American restaurants are tacking on random surcharges and skimping on ingredients, that's not fully captured by GDP.
When the city can just delete most of its trash cans and citizens will still largely refrain from littering while Americans are paying several full time salaries to pick up dog feces, that's not fully captured by GDP.
When restaurants don't have to pay for security guards because crime rates are low, that's not fully captured by GDP.
In the thread I linked above, someone gave the example that his wife could increase national GDP by getting a job and paying a nanny and a housekeeper, etc. instead of being a stay-at-home mom. The sense I get is that similar things are at play in every aspect of society and the US culture is one that lies on the former extreme in almost all of them.
Edit: It was pointed out that I went a bit off on a tangent. To get back to your question, my main thoughts comparing US and East Asia are that 1.) The productivity gap isn't as high as the GDP numbers would suggest and 2.) The advantages and disadvantages largely emerge from cultural differences rather than systemic ones. If I were to reduce it to a principal component, I'd put it along a "trust" axis, with East Asian inefficiencies arising from cultural rituals that may or may not be needed to maintain this trust while American inefficiencies arise from the constant defections in the setting of low trust. Given how difficult culture is to change I don't see much opportunity for a Hegelian sublation between the two but if there is one, I'd wager it'd be easier for East Asia than the US, simply because trust is far easier to maintain than it is to build.
Is that net positive? Trash cans seem like a big win in terms of efficiency. It sucks to have to lug around dirty plastic wrappers until you get home, or to have to return your trash to whatever specific store you got it from. And Japan has lots of things that produce plastic waste. It's interesting that this might be one of the times where having some lower social trust people around might improve QoL, since it would force trash cans to be installed.
I'm also not sure Tokyo's great restaurant prices are a feature of social trust. It probably has more to do with density and sheer demand which makes the economics work. But then, cheap and practical fast food arguably started in the US, it just seems to have become much worse at it recently, which is weird.
Personally, I never found it much of an inconvenience. There are trash cans at every place you can buy food and most train stations. Convenience stores have seating and even microwaves to eat when you buy. Vending machines have attached bins for bottle/cans. The only time you'd need to carry your trash around is if you were eating in the middle of walking, which isn't something I personally do much and is culturally frowned upon. I don't think it's a big QoL hit, but others may disagree.
As for restaurant prices, the economies of scale effect certainly contributes. One of the interesting things about many East Asian cities is that it's often cheaper to eat out than to cook at home. Even so, many of these restaurants are almost certainly not maximizing their profit margins in the face of their demand.
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... Is that good? Not hiking their prices doesn't eliminate the scarcity, so people still end up competing to pay in time waiting in queue, which just burns value in the form of time rather than exchanging it in the form of money. American companies reducing quality when they get big is very common and quite bad though.
From a GDP perspective, absolutely. From a utility perspective, maybe? As a hypothetical, I would obviously benefit monetarily if I worked for an extra hour and put 95% of the net earnings towards skipping an hour-long queue, but sometimes I don't really feel like working that extra hour and would rather stand in a queue reading random stuff on my phone.
I also think more generally that matching prices strictly to scarcity doesn't always improve society-wide utility. Often times you end up restricting to a clientele that has more money than genuine appreciation. Is there really more societal value if most die-hard sports fans end up watching from home because they were priced out by richer people who are there largely because they value money less and wouldn't really care if their conspicuous consumption were directed elsewhere? Obviously true from a monetary perspective, but I still tend to believe that there's more to utils than pure cash flow.
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People in the United States have more wealth in other measurable things, though (cars, firearms, computers, square footage of living space, etc.)
I think that the United States is a very big and very varied society, and ultimately on the whole it's not as high trust as e.g. Japan, but it is higher variance. And higher variance arguably means more wealth, since innovations that improve QOL and increase wealth are unusual.
The other thing, though, is that the United States basically got unrestricted access to an entire continent and rode out essentially unscathed a very formative moment in industrial history that saw much of the rest of the world absolutely obliterated (including Japan) and so it got a significant head start in a lot of ways that matter.
True, the geography has helped a lot, but the fact that the US rode out the troubles of the first half of the 20th century almost unscathed and Japan didn't is not necessarily a variable that is independent from the differences between US and Japanese culture. It is possible that had Japan had a more US-like culture in the 1930s, it would never have become dominated by delusional imperialists who then got the country flattened in a war. Indeed, such a Japan would probably have never become isolationist and fallen behind the West to begin with.
Similarly, it is hard for me to imagine that a China with a more US-like culture would have stagnated under a Qing dynasty for centuries and fallen enormously behind the West in technology, then after a brief period of civil war replaced the Qing dynasty with communists who mismanaged the economy to the point that millions of people died as a result.
Of course this is all highly speculative, the reality is that there is no way to tell for sure one way or another.
If Japan had a more American culture, in just one way, Japan would have seen very different outcomes in WWII. If Japan had simply chosen to be less racist then they would have obtained a different outcome.
The USA in 1941, which was certainly a more racist society than today, nonetheless was able to field a half million Mexican and Hispanic soldiers, and more Native Americans served proportionally than any other group, most famously in the Navajo code talkers who were used specifically against the Japanese.
Where by contrast, the Japanese made enemies even of the anti-European independence movements within the areas they invaded almost instantly. If the Japanese had been capable of articulating and implementing the vision of the Greater East Asian Co Prosperity Sphere, they would have been able to tap the manpower and resources of Korea, Manchukuo, and South East Asia far more effectively. Would that have put them at parity with the United States? Not necessarily, but it also would have allowed a slower pace of war that would not have necessitated involving the USA in the war as quickly.
Of course, such a society would likely be less mono-ethnic, and hence according to most here less high trust etc today.
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Hmm, a lot here.
I think the United States was pretty close to being destined to ride out World War Two unscathed as long as nobody hostile developed a nuclear weapon. I think that's pretty much the only way CONUS gets more than a scratch. It's just very hard to do damage from across the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, and we only managed it on the one hand by taking a bunch of islands within striking range of Japan (and there aren't many of these on the Eastern American seaboard) and on the other hand by having England conveniently right there.
(This isn't the same argument as "the United States was destined to win the war in the Pacific).
Similarly, I'm not sure anything about Japan's technology would have saved it from being stuck between the United States (with 2x its population) and the Soviet Union (with nearly 3x its population).
But I do agree that a slightly different culture would have kept it from getting bombed out of World War Two and made it more competitive in the postwar era - a Japan that doesn't lose World War Two is at a minimum a major regional power.
I also think, FWIW, you probably don't get US culture without US geography. I think crossing the Atlantic and Pacific had a strong filtering effect on Americans that persists to this day.
(Incidentally there is imho a huge underrated and interesting question about long-term space colonization, as imho space colonies are likely to be insanely productive due to founder effects, but may also be prone to regimented thinking.)
On this note, I've always thought that one of the greatest advantages the US had was in being able to construct its constitution with significantly reduced baggage/inertia. Trying to reform the US constitution today seems essentially impossible. My hope is that if space colonization ever works out that a new set of founders with foresight manage to take the chance at a fresh start at put together an even better constitution for the modern era. It would be a fun discussion to hear what people would want explicitly included.
With any luck(??) we'll get Archipelago In Space, which could be very interesting on a lot of different levels. IMHO the US Constitution is very good ("working exactly as intended") but it was a some what unwieldy compromise because it had to accommodate certain geopolitical realities. That may be less true for SPACE COLONIES than any other civilization before (although I am not sure I would place money on it).
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Tens of millions!
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Japan’s culture was more similar to that of, say, Theodore Roosevelt than you think. Like America, they had a sense of Manifest Destiny: that they were a uniquely blessed people with a uniquely excellent culture (which compared to the rest of Asia at the time they really were) and that it was their destiny to civilise their neighbours and then the world.
Two big (relevant) differences are:
In short, I think that a big part of why Imperial Japan didn’t survive the 20th century and America did was out of geopolitics rather than cultural differences.
(Obviously other cultural differences existed, I am not saying that America had its own rape of Nanking or anything silly like that).
The United States was taking "soft" diplomatic action against Japan before they attacked Pearl, both in terms of an oil embargo and in terms of sending mercenaries and weapons (the "Flying Tigers") to China to fight against them. I think that by 1941 they
I am not an expert into Japanese thought, so perhaps there was much more than this. But that seems sufficient to me, if that makes sense. [Edit to add: the Flying Tigers arrived in China before Pearl Harbor but did not see combat until after. It's unclear to me how secret this was/if this played any part in Japan's thinking, but the oil embargo was, of course, no secret.]
I would add (while still oversimplifying; Japanese history is not my strong suit) that there was a strong internal rivalry between the army (who wanted to fight the USSR) and the navy (who wanted to fight the US/UK). The army faction sort of got their wish in 1938-9 but blew it by being defeated by the Soviets (General Zhukov won his first big victory there.) and were in turn discredited in favor of the naval faction.
This scene depicting that battle is hilariously inaccurate in some ways (No, the Japanese weren't using Kamikaze trucks; they had tanks, planes, and artillery of their own.), but the moral of "Oh fuck, the Soviets have more tanks." was true. Unfortunately for Japan, America had just as much overmatch in ship and airplane production as the Soviets did in tank production.
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Japan also never believed they could outright defeat the US. The idea was that Pearl Harbor would give them 6-12 months to build an empire and defensive perimeter around the Japanese home islands, coupled with a mistaken assumption that the US would be willing to negotiate peace with them after seeing how much work it would take to defeat them.
Well, I know Japan had a plan to defeat the US navy in a decisive battle, but I agree that's different from the outright defeat of the sort they ended up receiving.
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Bit of a tangent, but imo the question in your first point is answered by colonialism not being a historical grudge at that point. The US had the Philippines, the UK had India and burma, the Dutch had the islands, France had Indochina, Russia was moving south. China was in pieces and looked like it was ripe for taking.
From a 1930s Japanese perspective it looked like they were getting crushed between the western powers and were going to be deindustrialized into another colony by economic warfare (like the oil embargo). Defending hadn't worked for anyone yet, so... Banzai.
There's an interesting question of how willing the US would have been to let Japan beat the other colonial powers. But US expansion sure looks like the most immediate threat to Japan, so it was probably impossible.
Thailand was never colonized. It was also, weakly, a member of the Axis during WWII.
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I agree with everything you’ve said here, but I still feel like you’re not answering OP’s question in the spirit it was intended: could we have all those nice things without ~everyone spending needlessly excessive hours in the office?
In theory, I think the answer is yes. But as the great Yogi Berra once (apocryphally) said, in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice—in practice, there is.
Hmm, let me give it another go: I think parts of the United States do have those things. From what I can tell, those places typically have older and wealthier populations that have lived there for a long time and that have a sort of set culture. Larger American cities aren't so much that way (in fact they are often celebrated at not being that way!) Even where I am (American Southwest) the restaurants don't have security guards [that I've noticed] and you can get great service (although it's a little hit or miss) even in the poorer/more rural places.
Japan is an aging culture, I don't think it's surprising that it's more considerate even all things being equal (which they aren't, Japan was already a culture known for having a code of polite behavior and America has always been known as being a straightforward place, except for the South.) I think (although I could be wrong) that cultural churn is destructive to polite mores. You can see how America, and particularly American cities, are full of cultural churn:
I think a large part of politeness is having to live with the consequences of your actions. Even in a large city, one without a lot of "churn" and upwards mobility means that neighbors know each other and live next to each other for years or decades. But America is wealthy, and people are always moving in, moving out, and mostly moving up and away, and so there's not as much incentive to be civil or polite or not to litter. (Although maybe stuff like that is literally just a question of whether or not you catch and punish the X% of the population that litters, I dunno.)
There's the saying that everyone in America is a temporary embarrassed millionaire, and I think that attitude makes more millionaires, and fewer polite waiters and careful ramen chefs. In other words, it's hard for a constantly moving culture to settle around a distinct set of mores. (But I've never been to Japan, so I'm on thin ice making comparisons.)
I'll assume "simply eliminating blacks" is purely hypothetical and not an expression of desire, but combined with "the malign influence of their degenerate culture" it's pretty clear you just want to sneer at a race you dislike. You are free to argue against the Civil Rights Act, but do so without waging the culture war.
You’re right, this was unbecoming of me. Next time I’ll think twice before drunkposting on a Saturday night
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Setting aside the ethical problems of "simply eliminating blacks" I have a few thoughts on this:
Firstly, I don't live in a town with a lot of people of that persuasion and I still had to pick trash off of my lawn this morning, presumably because someone somewhere (probably not a black person!) littered and it blew its way over to me. On the flip side, if you go to certain places, particularly in the Deep American South, you'll find a lot of black people who, as far as I can tell, care a lot about civility and dignity. (You can also find plenty of things to complain about if you're so inclined).
Secondly, about 15 years ago, I went to Rome (the one in Italy) and was not super impressed by the sorts of QOL OP was discussing - there was a lot of smoking and, IIRC, a fair amount of graffiti, although it's been a while. (It also just seemed civilizationally dead but that's another story). Now, something else I noticed in Rome is that Italians are not black (unless you're going with the original Ben Franklin idea of black wherein anyone who isn't a German, Briton or Swede is at least a bit swarthy).
In short: no, I don't think black people are the malignant heart of all problems with civic society.
Italians are not black (but can I enter an Alford plea on "swarthy"?), but Franklin found that they, along with also the Germans (except Saxons) and Swedes were also swarthy. As well as the Russians and French. Perhaps a problem with his "double spectacles"?
If you read the literature of the time, it is striking how even people from the next county over could be considered "dark," "swarthy" and "foreign." Hence the whole discourse about Heathcliff in the latest version of Wuthering Heights (Brontë describes him as "dark" IIRC, the implication being that he's probably a Gypsy, but somehow the new woke interpretation is that he was a Person of Color and Mr. Earnshaw found a little black boy on the streets of London).
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Aha, I must have misremembered the Swedes. But yes his diagnostics are comical by the standards of today's discourse, although I think it makes some sense (basically white people are Anglo-Saxons and close kin). I really wish we had his final verdict on the Irish (who are, as I understand it, the literal palest people in the world).
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