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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.

tl;dr, Tyler's views —

  1. Suburbs good, cars and highways good
  2. HSR/mass transit overrated (but we should still do better)
  3. America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
  4. American Healthcare + rate of healthcare spending good
  5. China pandemic response bad, America pandemic response good

Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:

COWEN: A very simple question. Doesn’t America just have better infrastructure than China? Let’s say I live in Columbus, Ohio. What exactly am I lacking in terms of infrastructure? I have this great semi-suburban life. It’s quite comfortable. What’s the problem?

WANG: America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. I’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio. I’m sure its airport is perfectly adequate. I live mostly in between Ann Arbor as well as Palo Alto. These are cities that enjoy access to two excellent airports: DTW as well as SFO. All of that is fine...

I think there should also be much better transit options within cities as well, because we are working through these subway systems built mostly 100 years ago now in New York City, which are screechingly loud. The noise levels on BART as well as New York City are sometimes exceeding these danger levels experienced by most people. I think that there should be just more options, rather than cars, as well as airports.

COWEN: Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights. The New York subway is clearly too loud, but part of the American genius is you don’t have to live in New York City. Say we did everything you just mentioned. Would GDP be more than 1% higher...Just get everyone a car, or almost everyone... I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities. What we have are the very best suburbs. Chinese suburbs strike me as really quite mediocre. They can have excellent food as pretty much all of China does, but after that, I don’t see anything to recommend them at all.

And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.

WANG: I think that my hypothesis is that China will continue to build much, much more because it doesn’t have a lot of these American notions of being super obsessed with financial measures, like profitability, as well as these other ratios. I think there is something much more common in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, where the business leaders are much more concerned about simply market share than they are about having really high profits.

COWEN: This critique that the United States is too financialized or too concerned with the bottom line, hasn’t recent experience with AI infrastructure and data centers shown we can rise to the occasion? It’s not obvious all of that will make money, but we’re going to put up trillions of dollars to do it. We’re going to do it pretty rapidly. We’re way ahead of China, certainly ahead of the rest of the world. The Gulf may end up in the running there.

On the pandemic and vaccines:

COWEN: That seems wrong to me. US underperformed by different bureaucratic measures, but what really mattered for saving lives and reopening was vaccines.

WANG: I agree.

COWEN: On that, US overperformed. China is miserable at the bottom of the barrel. They even had the Pfizer contract and wouldn’t even use those vaccines. They used their own inferior vaccines because they didn’t have a society of lawyers who would go crazy suing everyone. US, I think, in pandemic, everyone did terribly, but US got the vaccines, got them quickly, way ahead of schedule, and did certainly much better than China.

And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:

WANG: ...What I am always asking is, what if they succeed on being the global center for automotives?

COWEN: Which is likely, right?

WANG: Which is likely. They’re on track to do that. Right now, they have about a third of global manufacturing capacity. They may continue gaining share, in part because they’re deindustrializing everyone else, deindustrializing Germany in particular, as well as Japan and South Korea. The US has mostly already deindustrialized itself, so it’s not in the firing line. At some point, there will be a second China shock coming for America’s manufacturing industries. They’re going to make all the drones. They’re going to make much of the electronics.

I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?

Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.

Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).

Chinese grind 996 work weeks

I worked in China a bit. I have visited a number of times. As best as I can tell, none of my Chinese in laws work 996 and certainly none of my coworkers did. I worked more hours than the Chinese engineers.

Google tells me Chinese people are working longer hours in the past few years. Around 48 hours per week. That's certainly not taking it easy. But not greater than typical hours in my current and former American offices.

Yeah as far as I understand 996 is more about crunch/certain prestige roles as opposed to being a universal expectation of labor, also having done early-days startup grind in Australia and put in 80-hour weeks before it happens everywhere occasionally. Hell, I even know consulting friends who do it regularly despite minimal actual upside and eroding their hourly wages to something horrible.

I mean at the end of the day, the US is going to lose slower than China. The population is declining slower, it has far more fossil wealth to live on, there's more natural resources making purchasing power/GDP disconnects easier to weather, and if you think US foreign policy is disastrous- wait until you see China's. The US native white population has a pretty decent fertility rate by first world standards and the core red tribe is actually replacing itself.

Bizarre question by Cowen

COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?

WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.

COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?

WANG: Yes.

COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.

Cowen retroactively defines an attractive suburb as a sprawling American suburb. No wonder Wang is confused.

American suburbs are the result of uniquely American circumstances from the mid/late 20th century: white flight, stranger danger, infinite money, fertile population, car lobbies & cheap gas. China has little to do with these circumstances and therefore, little to do with the American suburb.

Also as somebody who lives in Asia/wander aimlessly around China fairly frequently the attraction of the Pod apartment is higher when you've got a genuine 15 minute city. I've spent time staying over in friends' HDBs in Singapore and whilst there's no personal yard, there's good access to shared utilities & minimal nonsense from apartment neighbors compared to when I've lived in the West and had to deal with potential homeless/drug encounters

Yeah in China you live in a tiny pod no matter how far from the city center you live. The pods are just cheaper (not even bigger) if the commute is longer.

Suburbs aren't even uniquely American at all. Britain invented single family homes for commuters quite a long time ago. Pretty much every country in the English speaking world (and Japan of course) understands the concept at the very least.

Landed houses do exist in China but they're fairly rare. I've seen enough random townhouse developments from the train even on the edge of big metros (though I assume the cost of entry would be pretty insane)

a yard, a car and a dog doesn't a suburb make.

To most, a suburb is best understood as a quiet and safe residential neighborhood away from the downtown core. It has limited through traffic, has easy access to the city and prioritizes families.

I had linked to Google maps of cities (domestic and international) that satisfy these requirements. Then I lost the comment. But, most don't look like sprawling suburbs. They were neighborhoods near Boston (Brookline, Somerville, Cambridge), Brooklyn (Bay ridge, Windsor terrace), SF (Noe valley, Sunset), Seattle (Wallingford, Westlake) and so on.

The impulse to move away from the chaos of a downtown core is understandable. That the alternative must look like a Midwestern suburb is where the rub is.

But if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?

The one thing Burgerland has going for it is that it’s BIG. Big land area, large population, lots of natural resources, large nuclear stockpile. Britain’s problem is that once you lose the empire all you are left with is a barren island the size of California with about 60 million people. Barring complete Balkanization and civil war, I think America can at the very least look forward to being a gas station with nukes like Russia.

Suburbs good, cars good

Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car

How much of this is a factor of American suburbs being preferable to American cities, vs American suburbs being preferable to what cities could be, eg more like Tokyo or Bergen or Reykjavik or etc?

Japanese people by and large live in single family homes and reject the pod. Look at the commuter towns around Tokyo and you'll see fields of single family houses with admittedly tiny yards.

I was surprised when I visited that there are single family houses within a mile or so of the densest parts of downtown Tokyo. They are packed close, and might qualify as a "tiny house" in other parts of the West, but they exist.

Also that the Tokyo subways (multiple systems!) are privately run.

The competition with China is asinine. It really is time for the West to look inward, abandon Asia to the Chinese (not even really that, given so many in the region have their own severe differences with them, including most of their neighbors - the Russia truces are only ever temporary, the India tensions will continue indefinitely) and resolve the ongoing demographic and political crisis, which feeds into so many other economic and social issues.

China is pretty nice now in the tier 1 cities. Sure, the Chinese work long hours, but so do many Americans (you know who works the ‘996’? New York investment bankers, hotshot corporate lawyers and apparently Silicon Valley AI startup engineers). The food is good, the societies are clean and safe. You can’t be too nasty about state policy, but the same applies in much of Europe, and even in the US you still “just” get your life ruined and yourself cancelled depending on what you said and who is in power.

In 50 years, will Britain still be British? Will Germany still be German? Will America - the America of the prosperous and peaceful time still within living memory - still be America? Trump (or Miller, I guess) was right about this. Countries aren’t soil, they’re people. The people in China 50 years from now will be the descendants of the people in China 50 years ago (by and large). Can the same be said for Europeans, in Europe or in North America?

Forget about Chinese cars and datacenters; the Chinese have rarely dreamed of world domination, they are content in their backyard and with the occasional moment of international abuse around fishing fleets and ripping off poor countries with expensive development loans (many of which backfire on them anyway). Whether America rules the world or not is irrelevant to most of its people - at the height of the British Empire, the greatest in world history, the people of the metropole worked in squalid Victorian factories and lived in disgusting, fetid tenements. Even today material conditions are much better. Plenty of small countries do just fine.

And it really is important to emphasize just how bad the demographic transition is. I would rather live under the Chinese thumb in Hong Kong than “free” in Rio de Janeiro. I would rather live pretty much anywhere in China than in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, much of Central America, Eritrea, Haiti. And yet this is what Western lands are becoming. Better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission, although in many ways even that text is far, far too optimistic about what awaits us.

better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission

Particularly as Putin welcomes millions of Indians to Russia too. Scary is the future ahead.

Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.

Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.

What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ? Is it that they are Pagans ? Is it the state of their nation ? Is it a feeling of being threatened ? Is it something else ?

I can easily pass off as 'one of the good ones' so I am not too bothered. But, I've realized that my calibration of how a section of American society viewed Indians was off by a wild margin. I am trying to re-calibrate, so an honest answer would be appreciated. Don't hold back.

As far as I can tell, the rise in anti-Indian sentiment is a Canadian phenomenon (due to their own particular failures in immigration and housing policy) that has metastasized within the online right but not within the wider American public, which still has about the same opinion of Indians (tech nerds who smell funny) as it has for the past several decades. I've spent plenty of time around 1st and 2nd generation Indian immigrants and had very few bad experiences, at least of the sort worth generalizing. There are perhaps some ways in which they are less assimilated to American culture than other immigrant groups e.g. wedding traditions, but that's about it.

I think the Indian discourse has really taken off due to increasing exposure to Indians in the workplace for white-collar workers (both through H1-Bs and outsourced teams), combined with increased abuse of visa systems that allows for lower-quality migrants to enter western countries. There is an entire industry built around facilitating Indian access to Western labor markets, often through dubious or outright fraudulent means. For example Canada rejected 74% of Indian student visa applicants in a recent crackdown on rampant visa fraud, and significantly reduced its student visa caps, particularly for low-quality degree mills that were being used as a backdoor immigration route.

The main issue I have seen in the workplace and academia is a high-trust vs. low-trust culture clash, combined with pretty blatant ethnic nepotism. To be clear, this problem is most acute among those born and educated in India. Second-generation Indian immigrants tend to have fewer of these issues, in my experience.

Grad school was an eye-opening experience. I flagged a number of cases of pretty blatant plagiarism while marking computer science work, which disproportionately involved Indian students. Most of those cases just resulted in a warning or a slap on the wrist, despite the academic integrity code proscribing significantly harsher penalties. We also had a case where an Indian student in my department likely faked a result for a paper in a pretty blatant way (his code could not reproduce the results he put in his draft) and another where an Indian student working on a textbook chapter plagiarized large sections of material from existing published resources. Both were caught before publication and handled in-house, the first guy was just told that he could not publish the paper without reproducible results, and the second was sent on remedial academic integrity training after he used the "cultural differences" defense. Sure, it's a low sample size, but the number of issues from the relatively small Indian student population was pretty jarring.

This trend continued in the workforce. One of my first jobs during college was working for an IT consultancy owned by an Indian immigrant, and it was a complete shitshow of wage violations, borderline fraud, and ethical violations that made me quit after a couple of weeks. Later in my career, I briefly had the misfortune of working for a company in the process of being hollowed out by Indian outsourcing. We would send the offshore teams requirements, and they would either send back garbage that didn't work or nothing at all. The most frustrating part was that they would often not even admit it - they would just say "yes we did the needful, the code is done" and sometimes it wouldn't even compile, or it was missing half the features required. It was legitimately maddening and I found a new job as soon as possible. Of course management declared the offshoring a huge success, gave themselves all bonuses, and presumably hopped to new jobs while the company crashed and burned in the background. I have also been in the industry long enough at this point to know that an Indian management chain is a big red flag - a few Indian employees is no big deal, but if it's 100% Indian.... I have seen some absolutely comical listings for jobs that I'd be overqualified for, but they are very clearly written with the intention of excluding everyone except the visa applicant they want to hire. The "Indian exec hiring co-ethnics" bit mentioned below is absolutely true in my experience as well, that's the one thing from the "izzat" post that really matched my experience - I have seen the demographics of entire departments change with astonishing speed with just one or two Indians inserting themselves into the hiring process.

Honestly Indians in the US should be on the front lines of demanding an immigration moratorium from India and the termination of the H1-B program. The level of annoyance and exhaustion has hit critical mass and has now entered the cultural consciousness, and I doubt it's going away anytime soon unless some significant policy changes happen.

So from my perspective, it's not that every Indian is bad - but a lot of the bad things come from Indians.

For example, a highly publicized case (warning: CBC, little better than government propaganda) revealed that an Indian student had posted a video claiming that students could use food banks as a source of free food, rather than being for emergencies. Food banks are are very much a "high trust society" sort of thing - knowing that people who are supposed to be able to pay their own way are exploiting them is something that makes us not want to support food banks, and makes our society less high trust.

Indians are also known for being much more willing to cheat the rules, often to the detriment of their host country. For example, Navjeet Singh drove through a stop sign and killed a mother and her young daughter. Investigations suggested that he had falsified his driving record, and refused to see the police afterwards. This is not the only Indian who has killed behind the wheel. Indians are also well known for bringing their racial animus to our country.

We've also had an extremely disproportionate increase in Indians, relative to other nationalities. This means that Indians, specifically, are going to bear the brunt of our ire as immigration causes an increase in difficulties for our country (most notably, housing prices).

On a personal level; I was involved in hiring and firing at a tech company. One of the employees we hired was an Indian woman with (supposedly) over 10 years of experience. Despite numerous requests for her to do things that should be second nature to a programmer (like check in her code, etc.), she was unable to produce something that even compiled after around 4 weeks of work (despite her claiming that most of her experience was in react, and me checking in daily to see if she needed assistance, provide her with sample code, etc.). When I took over the project when we eventually fired her, it ended up being around 6 components and maybe 400 lines of code (counting CSS). The biggest problem with her was her willingness to just lie - she would assure me that things were going well, she'd show me demos that were ChatGPT'd together, but never got closer to being done, etc. The whole thing left a very sour taste in my mouth.

Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.

Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.

Indians are what convinced me that there's a genetic component to filth-tolerance that's separate from general intelligence or conscientiousness. Africans in tin shacks post videos mocking their food handling practices.

Indian food safety leaves a lot to be desired, but even Indians don't wear shoes in the house which a lot of Americans do.

For what it's worth, I have no problem with Indians and I've never known someone IRL who does. Bear in mind that this place is going to be skewed towards having spicy opinions that most people don't necessarily hold, so don't take the discourse here as representative of what Americans think.

What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ?

Not-exactly-US, but yes, major source of attitude towards Indians is because ... Indians.

When company outsources to India: Deliverables are late or of substandard quality, code not fully functional or does nonsensical things. Any written documentation or communication has superfluously complicated ... overabundance... of text in Indian English style. Supposed to sound impressive, but devoid of content or meaning. When I complain, it's common they engage in blatant attempts at gaslighting me either about what was contracted or state of the work what was delivered.

At its worst, engaging with Indian contractors was like engaging with LLMs today before LLMs were a thing.

In comparison, when company outsources to Eastern Europe, quality sometimes suffers but usually it's like, outputs are decent, and if (when) they did it on the cheap and ran out of time, it is obvious what they didn't do because they ran out of time. It feels like I am talking with real people and can have a real conversation about remaining issues and how to resolve them.

When company does not only outsource, but hires one Indian executives, in few years major part of the company workforce are co-ethnics. Work experience rarely improves, except they are now in-house employees and there is no hope of outsourcing somewhere else.

It is one of the few cases of negative in-group ethnic stereotype I have seen unfold at the workplace. None of other out-group ethnic stereotypes or conspiracy theories hit the same, because usually interactions with people at work either are neutral, totally unexpected and unrelated to any stereotypes, or perhaps match the positive stereotypes.

My brother, why do you not live in India if there are no issues there? There's an infinite supply of potent human capital if only people with the drive and ability to organize and build a glittering future for the subcontinent instead of running to hang out in the West.

How about, you are Indian, think you are Indian, see others as Indian or not Indian, and act with indignance and arrogance at the mere suggestion that European people should not be ethnically replaced by infinity Indians.

To that extent I have no opinion of Indians other than they are not my kind. They work toward their own benefit and see themselves as worthy of whatever privilege they can find in any country they reside in. And that's enough for me to not want them. They, similar to every other ethnic group I can gripe about, have no reverence or care for preserving the native populations. To that extent, like jews being parasites that weaken it, and browns being locust that devour it, you would be a symbiote that slowly but surely outnumbers the organism you engage with until there's nothing left but you. Not overtly hostile, not overtly threatening, just a slow inevitability of numbers.

But those descriptive differences are all irrelevant to the ultimate point that none of these groups care about the existence or wellbeing of the organism they are interacting with. They, theirs and their needs always come first. There's no understanding of where the natives are coming from, no recognition of what they've done and overcome. It's just an infinite struggle session of browns fighting tooth an nail for any privilege they feel should be granted to them. With no recognition or respect for the needs of the other.

I genuinely hoped that Indians were just westerners with brown skin. That they could emotionally intuit and understand the importance of recognition and respect for the continued existence of other peoples. But no, Nationalism is for Indians. Ethnic pride is for Indians. India is for Indians and so to is every other country in the world. And if you disagree, how could you! Don't you understand the plight of Indians!

It's just wild to me. I can't imagine ethnically replacing another group of people. Yet the majority of the planet seems to think it's OK if they do it to others. There's just no thought or care.

Indian immigrants to the anglosphere, up until recently, were highly selected and assimilated well. In the UK it was completely taken for granted that Indians integrated well and became good citizens, and... well, you weren't allowed to talk about what Pakistanis did. Then, roughly simultaneously, the immigration gates got opened to the chandala (more in some countries than others - but Canadians post online even more than Americans per capita), extremely-online tech workers started having to deal with cheap offshore Indian teams in their companies (where you get what you pay for), the expansion of internet access in India brought a flood of obnoxious hindutva seethers onto social media, and the /int/pol/etc. style banter of the internet made hay with the worst stuff they could find from India. As far as I can tell, Indians are still viewed very positively on the ground in America, because the average American encounters highly-selected and assimilated immigrants, but the online view is seeing some serious whiplash as the most-online corners of the internet encounter the most unpleasant aspects of India all at once.

There's a good chance you've read this, but just in case you haven't:

Indians Are Hated Because They Are Dark and Can't Play Football

I find this almost comedic in its wrongness.

There are visceral reasons some people dislike Indians, it will rarely be their skin color, rather it is smell and fashion.

There are personality reasons why people dislike Indians. It is not lack of masculinity, although some people think it cricket is a little queer. Rather it is backstabbiness, the general grafty and scammy nature of doing business with an Indian, wherein every transaction is a negotiation. And once you thought you had a deal there is another round of negotiation. Its like going to a used car dealer, except for something as simple as fulfilling an order of widgets that is the same volume and the same widget as last month, or asking a junior associate to take on a project.

There is also, the ever present trash/littering issue as well.

I have.

I read it again. It's a good one. On second reading, I like how sharp and straightforward this article is. It's easy reading. Therefore it must be damn hard writing.

I agree with his theory. But I'm also a comparatively fair, sporty and charismatic Indian (if I say so myself). It places blame on India traits that my ego is shielded from.

It would be convenient for me if this theory were true. Yet, I treat it with a degree of scepticism to counter my own prioirs. But his points are all solid.

  • People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.

I would say that's a very specific type of people. Snooty urbanist types like myself sometimes call them "breeders." It works if youre a married couple, age 25-45, with young children and a steady long-term job. It does not work nearly so well for others.

For me, i grew up a place like that. I remember it being great as a kid because the yard was big enough for me to run, and my boomer parents could either leave me at home or easily drive me around town. The local public school was nothing special, but good enough.

When i became a teenager though, it was stifling. A suburban yard isn't nearly enough space for any real sports, so it just become a pain the ass thing to take care of. Everything is designed around driving, so i was stuck dependant on my parents for all transportation until i got old enough to drive. The local school was excruciatingly boring for a gifted kid. No one seemed to care about anything except work, grades, and sportsball. If you were caught outside "loitering," the police would come and forcibly bring you home. The "spacious" surban home still had thin walls and a bad layout, so we had no privacy. I, like many teens, started staying up late to avoid my parents.

When i go back there now as an adult, it seems creepy. An adult single male just doesnt fit in there at all. Everything is oriented around child rearing- for young children. Almost nothing is open at night. There's hardly anything in the way of aets, music, or culture. The social life all revolves around "the parents of my chikd's friends." Its just not a place someone like me can live.

When i became a teenager though, it was stifling.

Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan. I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults. Much better than living in a city where kids can be easily exposed to unsavory or dangerous side of adult excitement.

Nobody expects single adult males to move to suburbia. Lack of single adult men having fun is more of a feature, really.

I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults.

In college I noticed that my classmates who had grown up in New York were generally more responsible and less likely to get into the sorts of trouble that a naive suburbanite would. Now, it certainly had more to do with parenting style than the nature of the built environment, but the latter sort of kid was notable for their paucity of life experience and inability to deal with interpersonal conflict. Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.

Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps?

Well, the literal mathematical answer would be from the second you turn 13 until just the second you turn 20. So 7 years. Almost half their life at that point, and more than half of the years they actually remember.

A less literal answer is that it's all the years when an adolescent is expected to have adult-type responsibilities, but without adult-type privileges. So roughly from age 10-18, although the exact age range depends on the person and their situation. But the exact ages don't matter, we see the same pattern play out again and again and again- an adolescent is stuck living in an environment that's profoundly bad for them. It's kind of odd to me that so many parents say "I'm moving to the suburbs for the sake of my children," but don't seem to care at all about what it does to their older children.

But hey, I'm an adult single male, so no one give a shit what I think. Let the soccer moms rule society.

Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan.

Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.

boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway

It's 2025. Nobody's going to be bored, they'll just scroll tiktok if there's no point going outside except when Mom drags them to soccer practice.

Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.

From what I see, options for autonomous outdoors play in a big city are not better and usually much worse. No yard either behind or front of the house. All environments are built. If you are lucky, they are managed. Street and driveway certainly are not an option for kids to hang around, usually you hang around inside. In a nice suburb you have access to some parks, playgrounds and like. (You could say you have access to parks and playgrounds and like in a city, too, but cities get the drawbacks from higher population density.)

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.

I kind view that this structured activity craze is pushed by adult FOMO. I though myself as a bit of loner nerdy kid and yet I had spent a great deal of unplanned hanging around time in friends' places after school and during weekends, and then we got ideas. DnD campaign, transliterated some short stories to Angerthas Moria and then briefly tried to learn to speak in Sindarin, which was too much like learning languages in school, so we come up with our own language. One summer one of us got access to someones old video camcorder, so during span of two summer we made amateur home movies, with only select safe parts shown to parents (in retrospect the edgy parts were quite innocent too). Later, girls and illicit booze, but for some reason I was no longer cool for those parties. Also lot of time with nothing but books and imagination.

I see no fundamental reason why substantial part of similar class of experiences it could not be ... not exactly replicated, but have something similar in spirit. Kids have spirit of creativity if given the space and the opportunity and the means. Bookish kids will be drawn to bookish experiences. If the kids turn sportish, replace books with sports.

Regarding transportation, ideally really I'd find a bikeable neighborhood. Chances for that are better in suburbia than a city.

It's 2025. Nobody's going to be bored, they'll just scroll tiktok if there's no point going outside except when Mom drags them to soccer practice.

...I will be so disappointed if they only tiktok and don't find even a single obscure internet discussion forum teeming with political opinions I oppose. In any case, I will restrict internet access initially.

Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.

As an early millenial who grew up in an american-style suburb (in Canada), I didn't quite have the kind of feral childhood that boomers describe fondly, but I would usually just play in the streets around my block. I had an understanding with my parents that if I wasn't at home and I didn't tell them where I was going, I'd be somewhere around the block. This was from about 6 to 12. I had 3 friends living within seconds walking distance from me. If I wanted to go see a friend that lived further or go play at a park, or whatever, my parents would expect me to tell them where I was going, but in general it was more so that they could tell me when to come back for lunch/supper, or where to look if I wasn't back when I was expected.

Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.

I would go places by bike or rollerblade, or by walking when I had ample time (and suburban teens usually have a lot of time). By the time I finished high school, I would also start taking the local buses, which, while they were not an efficient method of transportation between two points in the suburbs (they would still work in a pinch, but in general having to go to a larger hub in between extended travel time by at least 30 minutes), did the job.

Then get married and become a normie.

Like it or not, society doesn't revolve around men having fun. You're not a kid anymore. I'm not sure why eccentrics should have a veto over societal development. The suburbs are great for most people; your disinterest in growing up into a normie probably says more about you than it does about society.

Then get married and become a normie. Like it or not, society doesn't revolve around men having fun. You're not a kid anymore.

Brutal.

This is a stage of adulthood that a lot of men have trouble with. Maybe an identity crisis over. Life isn't fun all of the time, and it gets more unfun with time. People grow old and die. First your parents and then your older siblings and cousins and then you. You may as well learn sooner, rather than later, that life is still meaningful and worth living even if it's not maximally fun.

your disinterest in growing up into a normie probably says more about you than it does about society.

Indeed.

I'm not sure why eccentrics should have a veto over societal development.

Who are you worried about veto-ing what exactly? There's approximately 0 veto-ing that prevents new suburban development, except for the NINBYism of neighboring suburban developments lol.

There's approximately 0 veto-ing that prevents new suburban development

Incorrect. Central planning at the state and regional level does so, through urban growth boundaries and similar growth restrictions. This isn't NIMBYs (who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them), it's New Urbanists and similar anti-sprawl types restricting single family development.

The New Urbanists are having about as much success restricting single family development as Hamas is at destroying Israel.

This isn't NIMBYs (who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them)

That's the sanewashed position. The reality is that NIMBYs are against duplexes and fourplexes too.

How much actual banning of single family homes is going on? The only thing I've seen is banning "single family zoning" which doesn't ban single family houses but bans the banning of denser options.

Yes, but,

"breeders."

He's gay. Or using gay lingo. I don't forsee a wife and kids in his future.

Nope. Utterly, totally fucking wrong. A big part of why I like cities, as a straight man, is that the dating scene is better. Good luck with your OLD apps in the exurbs though.

Ironically, i need to first move to a city to find a wife. Only then can i move to a suburb to spawn and become a normie. That's the American cycle of life.

I don't agree with the "just find a wife bro" that you're responding to, but this isn't true either. You can in fact find a nice girl (or boy) whether you live in the city center, in the suburbs, or in BFE nowhere. People do it all the time.

(If you don't mind her weighing 250lbs)

Women in cities do tend to have better physiques than elsewhere (same with the men, of course). There's also a level of achievement in cities: you have to put up with the In This House We Believe crowd a lot more, but, absolutely and proportionately, you find more people who are deeply ambitious, agentic, and capable of making an important mark on the world. The culture of the suburbs is more just finding the joy in the day-to-day, which has its own value, but some people want something different.

Then get married and become a normie.

You say this as if it is a choice.

People would probably respond better to this sort of pro-suburban stuff if it was ever written as a paean to the sublime joys of seeing your children and caring for them and making that sacrifice, instead of longhouse hectoring because "you just have to, ok?! And if you don't, I'll tell the HOA!" Urbanists and suburbanists appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can me more off-putting to onlookers.

Those joys are unfortunately not very describable.

I have plenty of friends who do a pretty good job of it. Just got to overcome the instinctive negativity bias the internet gives people.

When i go back there now as an adult, it seems creepy. An adult single male just doesnt fit in there at all. Everything is oriented around child rearing- for young children. Almost nothing is open at night. There's hardly anything in the way of aets, music, or culture. The social life all revolves around "the parents of my chikd's friends." Its just not a place someone like me can live.

Depends on what you value. Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet. If you want to go experience it in person, it's typically a 20-30 minute drive away from the suburb. You can easily manage that a night or two a week.

I accept your critique as stifling a teenager, though I don't think that's a bad thing. What exactly is the problem as an adult male?

Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet

You will live in the suburb, you will consume essential human experiences via a screen, you will be happy

lol, lmao even

I'd say its a vibe more than anything specific, which makes it hard to put into words. Almost everyone i meet there is married , has kids, and moved there intentionally to raise their kids. They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.

And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.

Why this is a problem?

thinking bit more, my first reply above was too flippant.

More charitable version: vibe of no sex and drugs is exactly the main feature. And frankly: when I was kid, there was some amount of sex and drugs^1 and rock'n'roll behind the curtains. Anti-signalling is there to establish safe limits for teenagers to rebel against, to keep it at manageable levels, because is is frickin bad sign to have that stuff overtly around when you are raising kids.

I view that there is a purpose for having different urban environments for different stages of life. Single adults are more than welcome to leave suburbia, try adult life in college towns or artsy parts of big cities or spend few years as vagabonds (and ultimately see it for its emptiness in comparison to simple joys of love, marriage and family, and see the benefits of suburban environ).

^1 mostly pot and alcohol

And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

Move to Europe.

And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

What's interesting is that most highly-cultured tier-1-city people live around 30 minutes by public transit from their local art museum, symphony orchestra, etc., but that doesn't stop them. I suspect it's partly a question of driving having a higher activation energy and commitment than public transit, and partly that, realistically, your suburb's city is unlikely to actually have good enough culture to sustain a feeling of culturedness.

Other public transit pros:

Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim

If your social sphere lives in the same area, it's much easier to meet up with people while doing any of this

You can read or do other stuff while you travel, no attention required

I can get drunk or high at the destination without coordinating a DD

I live in a suburb right now and it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city, where I can spend another 15 minutes looking for parking.

Looking at pics on the Internet is so far away from what any humans before the rise of the otaku would have recognized as "participating in culture" that I'm not even sure what you mean.

What exactly is the problem as an adult male?

OP's point is that there's no benefit to living in the suburbs as a single adult male and nothing to do. Is your rebuttal "that's not true, you can drive half an hour or more to a place with something to do, what's the problem"?

it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city

This is an exurb. You live in the countryside. You might as well own a farm.

My friend, I live in a bedroom community of nearly a hundred thousand people. This is the reality of life in the bay area.

My apologies. I forget that a disproportionate share of this community hails from the most topographically inefficient metropolitan area in the country.

yeah? where do you live, where it's a 30 minute drive to the opera house, live theater, and art gallery, or any other sort of cultural scene, but you can still buy a large suburban home for cheap? are you a time traveler from the 1950s?

But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.

A large part of the problem there is not with economists but with a different E-word. Cowen mentioned building datacenters... well, look what we have here!.

More than 230 organizations, including Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace signed a public letter urging members of Congress to support a national moratorium on the approval and construction of new data centers, citing rising electricity and water consumption.

The general problem of having engineers run a country is they're going to try to engineer things. And that's great for the public works department trying to build a sewer system, but sucks for an economy filled with independent agents. Central planning is terrible.

Central planning is terrible.

This could be read as sarcasm, since the only good Greenpeace are for is being used as human shields in mass shooting scenario.

And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.

There are many reasons for this and in my experience space is rather low on the list behind things like school zones, housing market, and local taxes/governance. Most US urban centers don't actually offer any of the features that make urban centers in other parts of the world convenient places to live (reliable and extensive public transit, housing within walkable distances to most necessities and workplaces, affordable restaurant/entertainment options bolstered by economies of scale, etc.). I can count on one hand the number of cities in the US where it's not significantly limiting to live without a car. Food options generally bifurcate into generic fast food chains on the cheap end and unaffordable fine dining on the other with a gap when it comes to places the middle class can go for non-slop on a daily basis. Why stay in a small apartment near a bus stop if I still need to own a car to get to most places anyways? Why deal with a cramped kitchen if I have to cook all of the time?

The only thing that the above reveals is that US suburbs are largely preferred to US cities (and, more specifically, by the kind of upper middle class striver who uproots from Europe/China to the US), but this does not generalize to suburbs and cities as a whole. Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.

Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.

I've got in-laws who live in Singapore in government housing, so I've spent a week or two staying over. One main issue of the HDB setup is that it makes it very hard to have more than 2 or 3 kids (arguably part of the point of the HDB system when first imposed to stop Malays and Singaporean-Chinese defaulting to ridiculous family sizes), but yeah it's otherwise a very well-designed system of '15 minute cities' and well-maintained public goods that work pretty well for family creation.

The only thing that the above reveals is that US suburbs are largely preferred to US cities (and, more specifically, by the kind of upper middle class striver who uproots from Europe/China to the US), but this does not generalize to suburbs and cities as a whole. Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.

It's a fair argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Millennials revitalized city cores and gentrified the shit out of many historically run down neighborhoods. They couldn't conjure up a world class mass transit system, but most of the ones I knew lived without cars anyways. Then they all hit 30, tried to buy a house in the burbs at the same time and the housing market chaos of the early 2020s ensued.

Also, ironically, I ended up taking a ton of cabs when I was in Singapore. It was nice, but I'm not sure I'd say it was in a different class from the American cities I like.

if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?

I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.

In the 1950s the United States had quite recently literally destroyed the infrastructure of its major European competitors and made sure that only plausible hostile industrial competitor was thousands of miles away and surrounded by friendly client states. Compared to America of 1950, China doesn't have such an advantage, it has a dramatically worse age pyramid, and a worse debt-to-GDP ratio to boot. In fact, this is even true of China compared to America of 2025. To the extent that "America in 1950" describes any country in 2025, it's, uhhh, well it's the United States.

I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.

Fair. It's not a particularly sophisticated model, but then, I'm neither a historian nor an economist. It seems to be the playbook the CCP believes in, though.

Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing

USA, Japan and Europe can make cars 90% as good for 110% the price. If protectionism is heaped on, then consumers really won't notice much difference in being denied Chinese cars. But if the floodgates are opened then there's going to be a bloodbath in domestic manufacturing. Who is gonna pay slightly more for a slightly worse car? It seems like Europe is ready to accept the deluge of Chinese cars and just let VW friends keel over and die.

With labor relations in the west as well as a smaller market (meaning smaller economies of scale) it's unlikely for westerners to actually beat the Chinese automakers outright.

New Chinese cars are about 1/4 of US prices and significantly nicer. Reliability seems roughly equal (newer cars in the US seem to break way more than 2 decades ago), but we'll need some years to tell. Either way, these $8000 Chinese electric cars are quite nice for many purposes. This is all 2nd hand though - I don't like cars much. But for heavy vehicles, you can get a Chinese fire truck for $100k instead of 1.5 million in the US. In Mexico, Chinese semis like Shacman seem to already have 1/3 market share. A mine I work with is considering buying 200 (originally 40 but they can get this many more and hire drivers for the same price as they expected for 40).

I don't see how Western industry can compete without actively improving infrastructure to drive cost reductions. At the moment, it's more expensive by pure energy expenditure to move parts around the US etc. than in China, besides higher technical competency, faster turn around times etc. For a while, I was curious whether the Great Lakes could compete with the Yellow River Delta but without immediate ocean access, barges down the rivers or canals are 1/3 as efficient as cargo ships in the sea.

US economic complexity has been decreasing and the largest Western nations aren't doing much better. I'm partly to blame, provisioning tools for extractive industries - but in the short-medium term I don't know what else small Christian societies can out compete on. @Shrike N.b. I am not a China booster (what freedom does the Gospel have there?) but coherent economic planing, growth and improved standards of living are good and emulatable. Western stagnation is recent, but deep - and in these conversations, we tend to embrace the worse possible choices; for less short term pain guaranteeing great pain later.

I don't see how Western industry can compete without actively improving infrastructure to drive cost reductions.

My understanding is that China heavily subsidizes their auto industry. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you are getting something off of the ground, but it's not necessarily clear to me that Chinese cars will be able to compete at this level long-term. The strategy here is perhaps similar to that once practiced in the US by monopolies: undercut hostile industry to kill it, then raise prices to whatever you want.

N.b. I am not a China booster

Noted, although do forgive me if I forget (I don't always track usernames well...)

Western stagnation is recent, but deep - and in these conversations, we tend to embrace the worse possible choices; for less short term pain guaranteeing great pain later.

Yes, I do think this is a huge problem. But it's not unique to the West and it's not clear to me that China's coherent planning is actually going to be a win for them over the medium and long term.

New Chinese cars are about 1/4 of US prices and significantly nicer.

Absolutely not even close. Spend a week daily driving a Chinese car and you'll see every corner they cut. Standard features in the west like vents in the back, digital climate control and lock/unlock buttons on every door aren't even standard on luxury cars in China like Audi and Mercedes, let alone Chinese brands. Even the shittiest car sold new in the US has all these features.

Of course the top tier Chinese cars can compete with western cars, but in absolutely no way are the cheap ass basic Chinese cars better than western cars.

People forget that Europe is 16% of global GDP and that the rest of the world is most of it. A huge portion of the global economy is outside the west.

Europe can either go down the war path and ban Chinese cars from the European market and risk losing Chinese parts making the price of European cars skyrocket or accept competition. Drivers in Indonesia, Bahrain or Mexico aren't going to buy a Renault with every component made outside of China that will cost far more than a current Renault when they can buy a BYD. The middle east is heavily car dependent. Losing a Chinese supply chain means European companies would be shooting themselves in the foot.

Do European cars actually have a huge Chinese supply chain? I thought most of the parts were made domestically.

Europe can either go down the war path and ban Chinese cars from the European market and risk losing Chinese parts

Are you familiar with the Nexperia affair that is currently taking place?

The EU exports about 5 million cars a year and imports 4 million. Tariffs can be adjusted and are unlikely to provoke some kind of Chinese ban on…Chinese exporters selling car components (the recent Dutch case was very different). The manufacturing workforce in places like Germany is also ageing rapidly. The car industry is just a very emotive thing. There are other far larger problems with the European economy, but they won’t be solved until either the EU falls apart or the Germans naturally reassert themselves once more.

Could you describe the problems with the European economy? And how would Germany reasserting itself or the EU breaking apart solve them?

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