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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 —
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
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.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
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?).
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.
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.
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.
14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult not just bodily (that happens on its own for most), but also socially and psychologically. Seems unwise to just assume "rebellion" will do all the work here. Many anecdotes of young adults either being infantile or throwing themselves in the deep end of adulthood after being stifled during formational years.
Regarding rebellion, the whole theory of teenage rebellion as commonly understood has struck me as wrong recently. Most teens aren't universally rebellious, they copy who they are around - and if they're around peers, they will copy the most charismatic and loud of those peers, hence the whole "peer pressure" thing. Parents call it rebellion but in fact it's just a transition of primary authority.
I'd say we had a rather good discussion on this matter here. I agree with @coffee_enjoyer - teenage rebellion is very much real in the sense that when the average teenager encounters a grumpy old man or woman who wants to block him/her from pursuing sex, partying and fun in general while at the same time lacking any authority to actually control the supply of sex, alcohol and drugs, that old Boomer will only get laughed at.
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This process is broken (particularly for boys) across the West regardless of urban form, although I agree car-dependent suburbia doesn't help. [Things would be different if a teen could run a beater car with the income from a Saturday job and some DIY shop time on Sunday afternoon - I don't know how realistic that ever was in the US, but given the cost of insurance for teen drivers it probably never should have been.]
Wasn't it standard in the US before 1990 or so for high schoolers to perform as part-time workers most of the crummy jobs that were later given to illegal immigrants?
Teens did work more, and that was a good thing in terms of the transition to adulthood. I don't think they did the jobs that are now being done by illegal immigrants. Teens couldn't do seasonal agricultural work or heavy construction unless it was in their own family or a close friend's business. The classic teen jobs in the 1990s UK I grew up in were seasonal tourism-related work, waiting tables, and retail, which AFAIK are now more likely to be done by undergraduates. Some older teens did warehouse work or entry-level office admin, but that tended to be restricted to the summer between school and university.
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This is a non-factor if insurance isn't mandatory, but it means the old pay higher rates to subsidize the young and not the other way around, so naturally that's a non-starter today.
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So where did I claim that "rebellion" will do any work? Scans comments I wrote. Apparently nowhere, which is good as I remember writing no such thing. I did wrote that some cultural limitations on sex and drugs puts limits and boundaries how far teenage rebellion will push them. In more concrete terms, in today's day and time and culture, teenagers are prone to experiment with premarital sex and mind-altering substances. I believe it will be a more innocuous experience in a low population density moderately high trust suburbia. Part of maintaining that includes that adults consider topics of sex and drugs uncouth instead of interesting conversation starters with random young adult males (which was the original complaint upthread).
I can agree suburbia is neither the ancestral hunter-gatherer or agricultural environment. Neither is any of available alternatives. Are megacities more conductive for social and psychological growth to adulthood? Until recently most people lived their whole lives in small rural communities with population far below Dunbar's number. Cities were not really comparable to modern cities in size, and in their modest size were disease-ridden population sinks, meaning, they were places where many people went to die childless. Fertility ratios in modern Western urbanized areas suggest cities are still population sinks when we have solved disease with indoor plumbing and antibiotics.
Suppose many kids are bit bored and more than bit sheltered in sterotypical suburbia. If they stay bored for more than one week, I'd say that betrays only emptiness of mind and lack of creativity, and I am uncertain how city life would help with it? What precious experiences are there to be found in a big city that kids will miss out on if faced with few boring teenage years in suburbia? High culture? I propose that only minuscule percentage of teenagers in places like NYC frequent or obtain value from the Met or MOMA or access to university tier libraries or any other similar venue. Perhaps some highly successful people can find a super enriching bubble for raising children in a big city, but that is very select slice of population. Hard city life? I suppose most kids can and will survive and be "hardened" through a stereotypical hard city high school experience (humans are quite adaptable and have survived in quite shitty societies). Still I'd rather avoid such environments if I can, because I do not think that is the civilization I want my kids to grow in and consider as "normal".
History of literature is full of artsy authors complaining how stifling small provincial towns and then later suburbs were for more than a century now, and yet they remain popular and sought after localities. Seems likely to that most people who seek out the artsy vibrancy are exceptional people, and very few who seek it achieve anything of note with it.
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It's a rather important period for psychological development and social maturation though.
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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.
I don't see why it should be a selling point of inner city childhood that you "get" to become that sort of unnaive(?) hardboiled(?) person with lots of adult-tier "life experiences" before you are an adult.
I do have many things to sneer at about American parenting practices, suburban and urban alike, including ability to handle various social situations, but I am restraining myself not to rant about them as I don't see the concept of suburbia (detached houses, low population density, boring by standard of single young adults) as the culprit.
Certainly I can see it would be nice to bring up kids in a nice city with "high culture" and civilized people and such, but current available cities are bit lackluster in that regard.
I have hard time believing this lack of memories is a feature of American exurb. Perhaps it was just you?
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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.
I don't think there is such a thing. Normally, both privileges and responsibilities get gradually added as someone gets older. Things like having to work to pay rent are adult responsibilities, and people in that age range rarely have that responsibility. And I'm sure you can name privileges that someone just below 18 has that someone at 10 doesn't.
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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.
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.
This is the key problem with American suburbs. Zoning laws make it impossible to build anything other than houses in suburbs, and there's no public transport because US zoning is designed around cars.
In the UK, suburbs have pubs, shops, schools, parks, churches, and buses to get to denser areas if you want. We get most of the upsides (our houses and gardens are smaller, to be fair) and few of the downsides.
If only we could build more of them...
As someone who's pro-suburb, I like places with human-scale mini-downtowns – usually just one street – with those kinds of thing, and I would heartily support linking them with one another, nearby towns, and the city with buses. But the nearby city gets to define our mass-transit policy, and they want jobs downtown with commuter links to hollowed out bedroom communities, so that's what our mass-transit policy supports. The suburbs that maintain their own characters do so in defiance of the city and of transit.
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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.)
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.
...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.
If we're cherry picking just the nice suburbs, we're gonna have to cherry pick the nice urban neighborhoods too.
In my suburban neighborhood, the nearest park is nearly a mile away and requires crossing a five lane state highway. That park is about 150 feet square.
Correct. Where do you think you find such adults? They move to the suburbs.
How old are you and where are you from? The situation is very different today. I know there are young kids on my street because I see them with their parents, but they do not play outside. My parents live in a neighborhood a few teenagers on the block and they are similarly never seen. The suburban reality today is phones and extracurriculars.
Assuming "bikeable" means that you can get somewhere you want to be, I wouldn't be so sure. The suburban housing division I grew up in was bikeable in the sense that you can bike around the subdivision and the streets are pretty quiet, but if you even wanted to get to the mall you'd have to bike on a 45MPH road without a bike lane. Urban cores don't even have roads with speed limits like that these days.
Obsessive helicopter parenting is not exclusive to the suburbs though. To the extent you see self-actualizing children unsupervised in urban areas, it's packs of young teens popping wheelies on bikes or terrorizing theater-goers. It's not like most kids growing up in the big city are spending their weekends taking the bus to the local art museum or enjoying restaurant week. They're either sitting inside on their phones or getting into the sort of trouble I doubt you really approve of.
At the same time, it's not like all suburban kids are hermetically sealed behind their parents' property line. They ride their bikes to their friends' houses, hang out at the park, explore the woods behind the housing development, etc. Living in the city isn't singificantly more stimulating than the suburbs if you don't have any money to spend on cool city things and the bulk of your leisure time rounds down to "loitering with your friends" regardless of where you live.
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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.
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.
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