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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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The gulf countries have very good (for them) immigration and worker policies. For the life of me I can't understand why the west shouldn't implement it. It causes almost none of the problems the other states have with migration.

Can you elaborate on this point? What is the key difference in their immigration policy and why does it work so well?

They import labor, keep it segregated for low skill, make settlement impossible, citizenship out of question. For high skilled - it is slightly better - you can get permanent residence. This way they manage immigrant population 10 times their native. And don't have cultural issues.

Even for a modal liberal, it would at least be prudent to see how generative AI and related advances in robotics play out over the next five to ten years before committing to heightened mass immigration.

I envision immigration policy in 2040 as a kind of charity that allows for a handful truly capable third-word individuals, maybe like @self_made_human, to be lifted out of the post-automation mad max hellscape (it won’t actually be that bad guys come on) into the bright shining UBI abundance temple of America. (“Wow, Metaverse QVC says it’s just 10 UBI dollars for a drone-built white picket fence house with an air-conditioned dome in rural New Mexico! Deflation’s running wild this year”).

Open borders is an extreme and unworkable solution, but large scale, orderly immigration is both workable and popular over a long term basis.When your society's experience of immigration is law abiding, productive citizens, people tend to like immigration.

30% of Australia's population are first generation immigrants. 48% have at least one parent born overseas. It is no coincidence that we have very harsh policies towards illegal immigrants - those strong border protection policies underpin the public support for our large scale immigration program. People notice when the immigrants are making society worse, even if it's not polite to. They also notice when immigrants make society better.

I think being a relatively isolated island continent helps a lot with maintaining that policy. It's a lot harder to refuse someone when you have a land border and you can see the poor masses longing to get in, which is why most western nations have out of cowardice tried to outsource the job to Central American or Middle Eastern countries that have fewer qualms about kicking people out by force. It also seems to me that Australia has relatively few immigrants from populations that restrictionists like to complain about e.g. Hispanics, Arabs, Africans (black Africans to be precise, I know there's a lot of Afrikaners in Perth), so that may have something to do with its success as well.

I don’t think this is accurate. I recall Australia having a big rift over “boat migrants” from various SEA islands. No idea how these presumably biased numbers stack up to the other immigration processes. Some history. Judging by the Guardian thinkpieces I see, it’s still at least a little salient.

Even at the peak of illegal boat arrivals, asylum seekers were always a fairly small minority of immigrants. But it was indeed highly salient. How we handle illegal immigration was a major point of partisan conflict from at least 2001 (maybe earlier) to 2013, with the media loudly and clearly taking the left wing "humane" side of the issue.

It ended because the right decisively won the argument. First John Howard was successful in winning support for his position that "We will decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come" - a message that mixed support for immigration with an orderly process. He implemented the "Pacific Solution" of offshore detention which stopped the boats but was routinely decried as cruel and inhumane by the left. Then, when his time in power eventually came to an end after 5 elections, Rudd finally gave the Labor faithful the kinder, softer approach they had long wanted.

And the boats came back. The kinder, softer approach led to years of people drowning on our shores as they tried to make the voyage from Indonesia in shitty fishing boats, the immigration system being overwhelmed as people showed up without visas or passports or any documentation at all, and policy paralysis as the Labor government found itself caught between its principles and beliefs on one side and harsh reality and public hostility on the other.

In 2013 Abbott swept to power in a landslide after relentlessly attacking Labor for its failures and promising unequivocally that he would stop the boats. We were treated to regular media pieces about how his plans were needlessly cruel, would provoke international incidents, and couldn't possibly work.

But... they worked. The boats stopped - much more quickly and decisively that even I as a strong borders believer had hoped possible. And the trauma of that period to the left was such that even now, with Labor back in power, they have decided it is better to just concede this issue entirely than risk allowing that same chaos and electoral punishment to happen again.

I think those are mostly the same policy. The issue for me is assimilation— making good Americans out of whoever actually comes in. But if you’re bringing in 40% of the population from elsewhere, such a project is impossible, the ability to just teach people the language, let alone our culture, if you’re bringing in that many people is a crazy amount of resources.

I mean, we're up to 30% and we seem to be doing alright. You can test people on their English proficiency as a part of the screening process (and we do). People pick up the local norms quickly. We get a few more soccer players and Indian restaurants than we otherwise would, but basically people fit in just fine.

Like, what's the problem we're supposed to be running into here?

Legal immigrants need atomization to some degree to assist assimilation (which makes their new life more difficult). The alternative is some degree of ghettoization where they will join an ethnic community that allows them to resist assimilation, even as their new life is easier due to the support such communities provide.

As you've said, the more you bring in, the harder it is to prevent congregation into an ethnic bloc.

There is no substitute for generation of new workforce – whether young people or robots. Debate can only be had about a) the timeline for supplementing people with robots (and, seeing as robots are a software problem, it's wild to me that people look at e.g. Midjourney evolution in the span of 1.5 years and believe this won't move as well as a human in a decade; yes it is the same problem) and b) legitimacy of austerity strategies and, perhaps, as the trendy folks put it now, degrowth. Even Zeihan, much as I loathe him, points out flaws of even highly successful attempts to weasel out of this predicament. Canada imports skilled immigrants, at like 3% of the nation annually now. Is this sustainable? How many skilled Chinese and Indians are out there? And how many Filipinos do you need to replace one Tsinghua graduate in lifetime tax contribution? But Phillipines, too, has only one big batch left; their TFR is 1.9, and given that these trends appear to accelerate for later comers, it's very probable they'll collapse to 1.2-1.5 in less than 10 years. How many countries can hope to do better than Canada does attracting useful immigrants?

I am not sure how seriously and charitably people peddling immigration as a long-term solution should be taken at this point. They seem either in thrall to a bona fide population replacement conspiracy, trying to do maximum damage in the limited time left (thus I suspect they'll side with AI doomers), or just looking for lost keys under the lamppost, suggesting more of the same to policymakers who are unwilling to hear anything else and perhaps unable to pursue it.

I do not notice them actually calculating net expected contribution of immigrants using any realistic trait distribution analysis (of course this is HBD stuff but you don't even need to explicitly acknowledge HBD, tracking results of previous batches and controlling for selection effects would do enough). It's just appalling, condescending arithmetic – here, Europeans (avg age X), here, young Kenyans (avg age X/2); promise old white farts they will be tended to (if perhaps with a bit of ethnic contempt) in their retirement homes if they vote for importing the latter into cities their nonexistent grandchildren could have kept running, mix and blend. Can this promise be borne out? Of course this is just Kirkegaard, the racist pedophile etc. etc. The question is, how do respectable experts like Dr. Myrskylä conclude something radically different from the same research?

What really gets under my skin, though, is how fertility collapse and its implications are suddenly mainstreamed only now. To be specific, I think it started around 2020, with the BBC headline Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born. You don't say?

"That's a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline," researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC.

"I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognise how big a thing this is; it's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganise societies."

Strange how demographers took ages to notice that the dreaded «population bomb» had its fuse all pissed over by modernity (Ehrlich was very persuasive with his deep voice, I guess). Strange because all the way back in 2004 (and based on much older data), there's been a book The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by one Thomas P. M. Barnett, American geostrategist. It said, for instance:

THE FLOW OF PEOPLE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POPULATION BOMB

When I turn fifty, I will worry about my PSA, or my prostate specific antigen. But at forty-one, I worry about my PSR, or what the United Nations calls my potential support ratio. My personal PSR is currently projecting out at 1.5, meaning my wife and I have three kids we hope will be willing to support us in our old age. So if Vonne and I split Emily, Kevin, and Jerome between us, we'll each end up with 1.5 persons working on our behalf after we reach sixty-five. … By the time our planet reached the third millennium, our PSR dropped to nine to one. That's not too bad, primarily because Globalization II (1950-1980) involved only a fraction of the global population (America, Western Europe, Developed Asia). But the decline is accelerating.

My wife, Vonne, and I are in the process of adopting a baby girl from one of the poorer, interior provinces of China. We're not doing this to raise our personal PSR, but it will incidentally have that effect, and in so doing we are—in a tiny way—setting in motion the migration that will have to be repeated millions of times in the decades to come as the Core's population grows older much faster than the Gap's: the movement of people from there to here. This great shift defines the first of the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance.

Sometime around 2050, humanity will begin to depopulate as a species. That's right. In about five decades the world will reach a turning point that, in past ages, would have frightened us if we were able to understand its significance. But in the middle of the twenty-first century, the fact that we'll begin depopulating as a species won't seem scary (though it's never a bad idea to keep a close watch on those damn, dirty apes!), and we should welcome this turning point, even as it presents us and the globalizing world with a task of immense proportions.

What's so amazing about this upcoming reality is how, for decades, all we've heard about from the experts is that overpopulation is the real threat, and how we'd all eventually be eating soylent green or at least some indigestible tofu. I don't know how many frightening educational films I was forced to sit through in grade school, all of which suggested the world was simply going to suffocate under the crushing weight of all these people! Instead, I'll probably live to witness this amazing turn of events, a culmination of tens of thousands of years of effort on the part of humanity to grow its numbers and—by doing so—come to dominate the planet Earth.

…My parents had nine kids, but those nine kids have only begotten eleven kids so far, and except for the international adoptions, my siblings and I are pretty much done. That reduction-by-generation effect is spreading across the Core right now, but the trend will not reach much of the Gap until late in the twenty-first century. At 2050, the UN predicts, the forty-nine least-developed economies will still feature fertility rates above the replacement value of 2.1, meaning much of the Gap will still be growing even as the global population peaks. … Too many of the two billion young will be in the Gap, while too many of the two billion old will be in the Core. Someone will have to turn us over in our beds when we're old, and our population trends simply aren't providing that someone.

most Americans should expect to retire in their mid-seventies, not their mid-sixties or—God forbid—their mid-fifties. The news, unfortunately, looks a lot worse for insular Japan and xenophobic Europe. If America has its problems with immigrants, what with bilingual education and all, our issues pale when compared with those of the rest of the Old Core. Europe already has its share of right-wing, anti-immigration politicians exploiting people's worst impulses, and Japan has such a dismal record of accepting immigrants that the Land of the Rising Sun is heading toward its sunset at warp speed. According to the UN, Europe is likely to let in about 300,000 immigrants per year between now and 2050, when it really needs to let in something in the range of 1.5 million each year if there's any hope its PSR won't drop below two to one by mid-century.

And so on. I like to quote that book. Barnett is a honest-to-God ideological Globalist, so one gets the feeling he'd have cheerfully advised for replacement migration on some pretext even if he were convinced as I am of the promise of automation. But at least he provides evidence that we had decades to discuss alternative plans, and instead we debated (in English, of course, not in Swahili) whether not having a baby is the best way to cut carbon emissions .

yes it is the same problem

No, it is a financially different problem for the exact same reason that hardware is different than software. Software has infinite do-overs at malleable speed. Hardware has to work in reality. Sure, after enough refining, ML will be able to manufacture a complete car. But how many attempts would it have to undergo first? Even ignoring the iterations on the manufacturing hardware itself, how much money would you have to spend on materials and energy in your tens of thousands of attempts to teach the ML how to manufacture a car? And then there is the political cost. What defect rate will people be willing to put up with from entirely autonomous robotic manufacturing? Almost certainly, it will be a lower rate than what we put up with from humans. Especially if it is from a black box like current ML.

Hardware has to work in reality.

No. High-fidelity simulations in MuJoCo and such suffice for the most part, and other kinks will be ironed out with learning on fleet data.

There is no need to solve end-to-end manufacturing first, we already have hardware overhang with robots, they will walk and indeed run soon after ML grants them decent cerebellums.

It depends on how you’re doing the iteration. It seems perfectly plausible to do 99% of the ML in a good physics engine (where doing as many iterations as you want are essentially free) and only switching to the real world once you have a system that is pretty good at making cars.

To me, increased immigration seems like a no-brainer,

Do you mean this in the sense that you would have to have no brain in order to support it?

The situation being presented makes more of a case for immigration flows to immediately go into reverse, rather than the opposite. If age ratios are changing and adjusting like this, why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers who will drive up real estate values, drive down wages, create "bad school" zones that represent an additional hidden cost to family formation(amongst people who you would want to form a family), etc. Even if you give the pro-migrant cause as good of a hearing as the data suggests, the nature of it as a short-term fix means that it isn't actually a worthwhile answer to the problems in question - just kicking the can down the road.

why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers

This is the first time I've heard this claim. Is there empirical evidence to support this?

I think he’s referring to the cost of housing in the US making children unaffordable. A lot of millennials and zoomers can’t afford kids at all.

This claim has always sounded like an excuse to me, because I have only ever heard it from people who are middle or upper-middle class, while families much poorer than theirs both in this country and abroad are somehow able to raise multiple kids.

They're able to buy iPhones as well, doesn't mean they can afford them.

The cost of raising a child in the middle/upper classes is substantially higher than that of raising a child in the trailerpark, and the sort of middle/upper-middle class people who you generally want to reproduce care enough about the quality of life of their prospective children that they're going to want to be able to provide more. If you don't care about getting your kid into a good school in favour of prioritising your fentanyl habit you're going to be less effected by what's happening than someone who wants to make sure their kid has a chance at making the ivies, and more likely to have unplanned children to boot.

That's all true, but "I am unwilling to have a child if doing so means compromising on a middle class lifestyle for them or me" is not the same thing as "I cannot afford to have a child." Having known people whose parents gave them away to another family as children to keep them from going hungry, this is not a trivial distinction. We'd also be better off if those same prospective middle class parents were willing to make more economic compromises for the sake of raising children, as those children will turn out more or less the same regardless of which school district or extracurricular activities they're in.

Parents almost universally wish to make sure that their children have at least the same if not more opportunity than they do - and to be perfectly honest given the state of a lot of lower-income and migrant-heavy areas, I think it does actually become a matter of great significance if not life and death to the children in question and hence their parents. School districts might not manner to the degree that some parents believe, but they absolutely play a big part in future life paths and connections. Do you think telling prospective parents "Look I know you say you don't have enough money to afford a home in a good area, but why aren't you willing to move to Detroit? The money you'd save on mortgage repayments would allow you to have an extra kid!" is actually a viable idea? A lot of these people in the middle class have a galaxy of commitments and ties connecting them to their current locations and ways of life - you can demand that they all move to the barrios and start pumping out babies, but that just isn't a real solution in the world we live in.

If you do actually have the power to force these people to have and then raise their children in environments deeply hostile to future success in life, you would be better off using that power to reduce pressure in other ways. Cutting off migrant flows, child-raising and child-rearing subsidies, muscular enforcement efforts against migrant-induced wage suppression, etc. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled and ways pressure can be applied that make trying to forcibly adjust and manipulate the psychology of family formation to make them "more willing" to reproduce strikes me as a total non-starter. That said, a sudden collapse of society and plunge into a dark age would also convince these people to reproduce, but I think there are other consequences to that approach which render it a bad idea.

Do you think telling prospective parents "Look I know you say you don't have enough money to afford a home in a good area, but why aren't you willing to move to Detroit? The money you'd save on mortgage repayments would allow you to have an extra kid!" is actually a viable idea?

Moving to an inner city slum is not the only alternative to trying to live in the coastal elite bubble. There are dozens of smaller cities and towns in flyover country that have both a much lower cost of living and lower crime than the major metropolitan areas. Many of these are college towns that don't lack for quality schools and access to cultural or intellectual amenities either e.g. Ames, Ann Arbor, Athens, and that's just the A's. All it takes is giving up the conceit that anyone who doesn't live and work in New York or California is a miserable failure, but many of my peers seem to believe this deep in their bones.

At the end of the day though, I don't care much for or have any confidence in large-scale social engineering projects, so I'm not approaching any of this from a policy angle. Whoever ends up reproducing themselves gets to own the future, whether that's native-born Americans, Guatemalan immigrants, Hasidic Jews, or GPT-bots, and whatever opinions I have on which of those outcomes are better or worse are immaterial.

More comments

I'm actually collecting evidence on this and writing a longer article, because it is something that strikes me as intuitively obvious and I can identify multiple causal mechanisms, make theories that accurately predict what's happening... but I haven't actually finished yet, because dealing with all the confounding factors is really hard and it isn't like I can just have a control USA built in the Pacific and let it run for 80 years. That said this has the caveat that I'm talking about immigration of largely low-skilled workers, the kind that's actually happening in western countries. If you had nothing but a constant stream of nobel prize winning norwegians then obviously you'd have a different impact. Also, while you can look at the fertility rates of countries experiencing high migration flows and the data supports my argument... it also supports all kinds of other arguments, so caveat emptor.

But if I had to summarise the main thrust of the argument...

  1. Migrants place upward pressure on housing prices, both by driving up demand, being able to tolerate worse conditions than natives (even shithouse western accomodation is better than the average for a lot of immigrant-sources) and by the creation of migrant "ghettoes", which effectively take even more property off the market for natives and hence driving up prices. Housing affordability is a big concern when it comes to family formation, because most people don't want to have several children when all they can afford is a two-bedroom apartment.
  2. Migrants are a net drain on resources - when you look at the studies performed in the Nordic countries, and I believe even in the USA, most migrants are ultimately a financial cost to the country that hosts them. They consume more in public services, are responsible for more policing and enforcement costs, in many cases have cultural requirements that impose even further costs (translation, islamic prohibitions against dealing with women/strange men). These resources aren't just conjured up out of the ether ex nihilo - they're paid for via both taxes and inflation, which means that average, individual natives are worse off than they otherwise would be... and financial insecurity is a big culprit when it comes to delaying family formation, especially when the presence of these migrants makes getting your children into a "good school" even more expensive than it otherwise would be.
  3. Migrants place downwards pressure on wages. This is the main reason that large businesses want to import them, and why extremely rich people like Mark Zuckerberg think bringing in more migrants is such a great idea. Migrants are usually accustomed to far worse conditions for far worse pay, and hence are usually willing to work much harder for much less compensation. This doesn't sound too bad until you remember that a lot of first world nations have fought for and enacted a lot of labour policies which benefit workers - bringing in migrants from places with even more economic inequality means that they'll be grateful even for a bad job in a first world nation and willing to go above and beyond the call of duty. This ultimately harms the lower end of the native labour market the most, and I think most analyses of the economic impact of migrants look solely at the effect on large indicators like GDP etc rather than working out exactly who benefits and who does not. Additionally, this further emphasises the importance on investing heavily into one's children, to make sure they don't end up in an increasingly vicious and competitive low-skilled work environment.
  4. Bad behaviour - there's no way to really empirically study this, but there's a lot of conflict associated with bringing in migrants that can't really be measured that objectively. What was the impact of Rotherham on family formation among people in the area? I freely admit to needing to assemble more evidence on this front, and it is rather difficult (good luck getting funding for this study in western academia!) to study given just how personal it is. That said, while I believe this is one of the least impactful in raw numbers(unless you live in France maybe, but it isn't like the natives there don't burn the place down regularly anyway), I don't think just ignoring it is a good idea either. I'd also throw the generic damage to social capital in this category too.

So when you bring in large numbers of migrants you make property more expensive, you drive down wages, you take away resources from people who are looking to start families and at the same time impose additional costs on them. Economic uncertainty and housing availability show up as factors fairly consistently in all the studies on family formation rates that I've seen in the west - and even the people who support increased immigration tend to agree that immigration has these impacts (they just usually think that the boost to GDP is worth the costs imposed on less well-off individuals in my experience). I freely admit to not having done all the work on establishing causation etc yet, but it is something I'm working on.

The idea that we can just replace the population with other people is ludicrous. A nation is like a family, just because someone does the dishes and is pleasant doesn't make them a part of my family or mean that they can live there. France is a nation and a people, not an economic zone. There are countries that are nothing but administration of an area of land and these countries tend to be unsuccessful. Countries created after colonialism as nothing more than lines drawn on a map by foreigners concerned by 19th century geopolitics are terrible. Not to mention that we are giving up our history, culture and our way of being to save a government program.

Furthermore, every country is now in serious resource overshoot. Our consumption is wildly unsustainable. The population of humans is several times higher than what it was when we lived sustainably and each human consumes far more. Population reduction has benefits, cheap housing and nature. If you ride through rural Europe on a train you will barely see any real nature. You will mainly see urban sprawl and agriculture upheld by mountains of petrochemicals. Exponential growth in the number of humans isn't sustainable at all. We have witnessed a collapse in insect and bird populations over the past decades. Forests in Europe are largely gone and high intensity agriculture wrecks the land it uses.

You may have a point for France, but for America at least this is hilariously backward. It denies the whole founding purpose of the USA.

May I remind you:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Nations can be built and can thrive based on more than just ethnicity or “family” as you call it. It’s been done before, to more success than anything else in the history of the world, and we can do it again.

That plaque was written by a Jew to promote 'multiculturalism' - you're not proving the point you think by raising it

Why, not. In my view Jews are some of the best immigrants to join America, they’ve made the country incredibly great, and arguably won the second world war and established American hegemony. I can’t think of a better example of the strengths of multiculturalism.

Millions of dead Russians conscripts demand a recount!

arguably won the second world war

This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move

That poem was written by a jewish immigrant 130 years after the country was founded and about 300 years after it was settled. The US wasn't founded as a multicultural experiment but rather as a WASP country minus the british monarchy. The US is great where it isn't diverse. It isn't South side Chicago that makes the US great.

Maybe you can, but you won't.

The American nation, as far as I can tell, was founded through the melting pot, a ridiculously patriotic education system and culture, no social safety nets, and an unsettled frontier. You have literally none of those things now, and neither does anyone else trying to sell immigration as the solution.

Maybe you can, but you won't.

Such strong faith that it’s impossible to assimilate, yet again the greatest nation on earth achieved that status through immigration.

Obviously, it’s challenging. I am the same recipe that worked in the past won’t work today. But as many have pointed out, there have been multiple waves of American immigration, it’s not like there was one unique situation that led America assimilate a bunch of immigrants that will never exist again.

You misunderstood, I'm not saying it's impossible to assimilate, I'm saying you will not take any of the steps necessary to do so.

The idea that we can just replace the population with other people is ludicrous. A nation is like a family, just because someone does the dishes and is pleasant doesn't make them a part of my family or mean that they can live there.

My Dominican wife is family. My half-Dominican children are family. My Fijian-Indian sister-in law is family.

My Dominican wife is family. My half-Dominican children are family. My Fijian-Indian sister-in law is family.

That's nice, but it doesn't actually address his argument. Yes, there are things otherwise unrelated people can do to join a family (like getting married, as you helpfully point out), and there are things otherwise unrelated people can do to join a nation, but this isn't anywhere close to what's being proposed with regards to immigration.

What specifically does, say, a Filipino need to do to join a Western nation? Why can't they do that?

I don't feel like the people around me whose families come from Vietnam are any less Australian than someone like me whose family comes from Britain.

What specifically does, say, a Filipino need to do to join a Western nation? Why can't they do that?

To me, they need to commit to propagating the culture of their new home rather than their old one. That means not hanging out with other Philippinos, it means speaking almost exclusively the language of the country they immigrate to, and raising their children with the same mores and customs as the natives.

In my experience, this is very rare. Learning new languages is very hard even when you have the time and money; it’s difficult to get by at first without help from ethnic support groups; and without introductions it’s hard to get into new social circles as a foreigner. The children also tend to feel isolated and retreat into their ‘parent’ culture (where they don’t fit either).

I say the above as someone who tried very hard and failed. I’ve only seen it happen successfully once. For this reason I’m very skeptical about the viability of integration except for minute levels of immigration.

N.B. It’s also much harder if you and your children are visibly different from the people around you.

Learning new languages is very hard

It depends on the language, but... not really? Especially if you're surrounded by the new language. Unless you don't accept anything below the native level.

The one I learned is infamously difficult, which might be clouding my view. The problem to my mind is more that even if you learn quite quickly, a lot of stuff is front-loaded. Banks, rent, making new friends… if it takes you six months to get properly conversational, chances are that you’re already hanging out with a bunch of foreigners who helped you out and it’s easier to deepen your relationship with them than cut ties and start fresh.

Again, I didn’t go Europe to Europe so it’s possibly different. But even my pretty-fluent European friends say that speaking English is more of a strain than speaking their own languages, and they get most of their news & entertainment from home.

What specifically does, say, a Filipino need to do to join a Western nation?

Loyalty, understanding and acceptance of the nation's language, culture, and traditions, some knowledge of history wouldn't hurt either.

Why can't they do that?

Where did I said that they can't?

I don't feel like the people around me whose families come from Vietnam are any less Australian than someone like me whose family comes from Britain.

I'm a European immigrant to another European country. I've been here for about 10 years now, and in my opinion it would be ridiculous to pretend I joined the host nation. You might say that if I have kids, they'll be more a part of this place, but:

  • I'm skeptical. Other immigrants tell me that their kids don't belong either here, or back in their parents' country of origin.

  • I'd probably be more or less actively working against it. The values of the country I'm living in are weird and foreign to me, and I wouldn't want my children to adopt them.

Maybe Australia and Vietnam have so much in common that these issues don't come up, or maybe you filter out the non-Australian-like Vietnamese, but to be honest you're making it sound like there isn't really that much to being Australian other than holding a passport.

There's a lot to being Australian other than holding a passport. As is always the case with culture, not everyone embodies every aspect of it and there's plenty of similarities that can be found in other countries and cultures, but these are a sample of things that I think of as being distinctive elements of aussie culture:

  • sports crazy, particularly AFL/NRL depending on which side of the Barassi line you live on. Cricket is the unifier, it's kind of everyone's 2nd favourite sport.
  • giving your mates shit in a way that is friendly but would cross a line in some cultures.
  • being relaxed about things in general, "she'll be right".
  • a sense of being in it together, that both inspires people to help each other out when needed, and makes people resent those who are seen as letting the side down
  • highly egalitarian - no one thinks you're special if you've got a lot of money or status or whatever. One of my favourite examples is a bloke interrupting the prime minister's press conference to ask him to get off his lawn. Not in a hostile way or anything, just not a big deal.
  • oddly authoritarian - not in a hierarchical way, but in a "why are you being a pain and not following the rules like everyone else?" way. If you get done for something, serves you right for being a dickhead.
  • coffee obsession. I don't drink coffee and it's really socially awkward sometimes.
  • a strong aversion to accepting favours without "balancing the books" in some way.

Thing is, it's not actually hard to pick up these sorts of things. People do it easily and naturally. You sense the mood and attitude of the people around you and match it.

Sorry to double-post, but I wanted to separate my thoughts and make debating easier.

I don't feel like the people around me whose families come from Vietnam are any less Australian than someone like me whose family comes from Britain.

But would Australians a hundred years ago feel the same? There seems to be a runaway effect where mass migration dilutes the culture of the host country. This makes people less protective of their increasingly-globalised culture at the same time that it reduces the demands on immigrants, which leads to more mass migration, and so on.

As has been remarked about America here a few times, ‘integration’ is as much about the host culture becoming indistinguishable from immigrants’ culture as it is about the reverse. Good news if you like immigration, bad news if you like the old culture.

But would Australians a hundred years ago feel the same? There seems to be a runaway effect where mass migration dilutes the culture of the host country. This makes people less protective of their increasingly-globalised culture at the same time that it reduces the demands on immigrants, which leads to more mass migration, and so on.

A hundred years ago we had the White Australia Policy. So no, people back then would probably not have felt the same.

Beyond the racism, other things have changed too. Back then we saw ourselves as an extension of Britain and a part of the empire, more than as an independent nation. We have developed our own national identity in the intervening time.

What would you say is the national identity of Australia in modern times?

In addition to what I said in another reply, you can add:

  • beetroot in burgers
  • vegemite
  • fairy bread
  • meat pies
  • trying to con tourists into thinking drop bears are dangerous
  • paying 0 attention to soccer for 4 years and then religiously getting up at 2am to watch the socceroos in the world cup
  • giving everyone a fair go
  • hating tipping
  • calling mates cunt and calling cunts mate
  • not valorising or glorifying war, but seeing ourselves as very good at it

To me, increased immigration seems like a no-brainer, similar to Bryan Caplan style open borders.

No-brainer, huh? Look, I can see how someone can claim it's net-positive, I can even see it being a no-brainer in the "given the challenges ahead, this is our only way out" sense, but it's the pretense that there's absolutely no cost to it that makes this argument feel like it's nothing but pure mockery at this point. Add all the anti-natalist memes going around, and it starts looking like a conspiracy.

To me, increased immigration seems like a no-brainer, similar to Bryan Caplan style open borders.

The issue here is that immigrants and as we see from the article even nations where the immigrants come from are affected by the same demographic issues that afflict the western countries. A young 30 years old immigrant will require pension in a few decades for himself. So at best, you only kick the can down the road - you are not really solving the underlying issue of too few children being born. To the contrary, you are introducing foreign religious and cultural elements into your country, so when the resource scarcity will hit in those 3 or 5 decades later down the road, you will have much more linguistically, religiously and culturally divided country than it is now - all possibly creating tribal blocs to fight for resources.

Now maybe you envision perpetual system where your country is attracting immigrants at the expense of all the other countries that in turn have their natural demographic collapse made worse by economic emigration. But again even at best if you assure 100% perpetual assimilation of this mass foreign immigration into local culture that produces country where people want to move in the first place - this is not a global solution, but rather very localized workaround. If this is what people mean by solving demographic crisis, then my "solution" to Climate Change is to move north to Canada or Scandinavia and live comfortably while the rest of the world boils and descends into Mad Max dystopia. There, climate change solved, it is nobrainer.

The last gasp of the europoor

For years, I've been treated to a steady diet of smug elitism coming from effete liberal Europeans laughing at obese, gun-toting and bible-thumpin' Americans. This reached its crescendo during the George W. Bush administration, took a lull during the Obama years and was resurrected after Trump took office.

The American was an ignoramus, a loud-mouth, a religious fundamentalist and irreversibly stupid. Hopelessly inferior to us sophisticated and cosmopolitan Europeans. Did you know half of Americans don't even own a passport? Most don't even know a second language!? Ha! And don't get me started on their healthcare, their gun crime and all other sorts of social pathologies. America, you see, is a third world nation masquerading as a first world one.

But as the years went by, these smirks felt increasingly hollow. The economic distance - and with it, standard of living - between the two major partners is growing wider by the day. A young French econ professor at Wharton lays out the bad news over just how deluded his fellow Europeans are on this question. Prominent FT columnists have noted the same.

Yet, perhaps there is still time to save the last shreds of honor for us poor Europeans. For one, the gap in PPP terms doesn't seem to be changing much. Europe has been behind for a long time. In terms of total GDP, the situation is much the same. Another aspect is that Europeans tend to work fewer hours.

While some of these arguments may have some validity, they all feel like desperate excuses. I for one am very much happy to see the insufferable elitism of Europeans slowly being wiped off our collective smug faces. The uncouth and primitive barbarian across the ocean turned out to be smarter and harder-working all along.

Perhaps this can also lead to a more pro-capitalist liberalism in the US. For much of my upbringing, liberal Americans were typified by folks such as Michael Moore and his obsessive admiration of the European welfare state. Colbert's snark about the embarrassing Red State American always felt like an underhanded way to gain favor with declassé elites across the ocean. Ann Coulter's observation that liberal elites in the US loved soccer because it is European surely hit closer to home than many in the media were willing to admit.

Of course, there is still some amount of liberal American simping left in the bag. This is perhaps most obvious whenever there are discussions on urban policy and the words "walkable city" invariably comes up. (To be clear, I actually think Europe gets this part better than the US).

Outside of an increasingly narrowing set of areas where Europe still outperforms, we are slowly witnessing a reshuffling of the deck. The old illusions are slowly coming undone and reddit-tier arguments about the US being a third world hellhole are convincing fewer by the day. At long last, after years of insufferable and unjustified smug elitism, the europoor is finally unmasked as the sham living on a lie that he always was. And I couldn't be happier.

This is a crappy post that reminds me of this guy. While I banned @Astranagant for personal antagonism (and to be clear, this was a continuation of a pattern, not just for insulting you), you don't seem to have much to say here beyond cackling triumphantly at "effete liberal Europoors."

We are frequently accused of not modding people for posting low-effort culture war sneering if they use enough words. Well, you used a lot of words, but this is just low-effort culture war sneering.

you don't seem to have much to say here

Then I did not succeed in trying to point out that there's been an unbearable sense of superiority among a certain segment of Europeans, and as an European myself, I'm not sure if this counts as "boo outgroup bad" given that it's essentially self-criticism. The post also tried to weave together a narrative how US liberals like Michael Moore spent much of the first decade of the 2000s trying to glorify Europe, and how the latest developments may try to undermine that. Perhaps if I had made clear that I was European, people would have been less offended. Many responses assumed I was American.

So I am not sure if I agree that there isn't material to mine here, though I will agree that using low-effort slurs like europoor was probably a bad choice of words and I'll try to keep that in mind going forward. It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek way to open the conversation but clearly it didn't land.

You did this.

Europe might enjoy kneecapping itself, but the final nails in it's coffin are gleefully driven by it's American "allies" undermining its industry, blowing up its infrastructure and hosting war at its gates.

This is why I always get tired when Americans complain about euro contribution to NATO and then turn around and destroy any local military industry that might compete with them. Remember those Australian submarines? Remember the F-35? You wanted this. You wanted benign clients. Well you got it.

Ultimately, even the suicidal elites we have are propped up by you and only survive because of organized cultural warfare that you use to stop us from wandering outside of your control. You even bullied the Swiss out of neutrality for God's sake.

We certainly hold the shame of losing, but I have no illusions as to whom is responsible for our demise.

But to turn around and claim that the blame rests solely on our refusal to adopt American customs sufficiently? What a joke.

Don't France, Germany, and the UK all have rather robust arms industries? Those Leopards and Challengers aren't made in the USA, after all.

They have arms industries. They don't have robust arms industries.

How many Leopards were made, ever? How many Abrhams? And how many of each do you think could be made if a full ramp up was announced tomorrow?

The franco-german successor MBT has been on hold since forever, and it's not even clear if it will be made. And the Brits have been giving up on tanks altogether.

Europe has real militaries don't get me wrong, but it can't fund a serious war (nor fight it for very long) and the industry is focused on maintaining capabilities on tight budgets rather than mass. There's a reason we were and are reluctant to send hardware we can barely afford as it is.

Not really.

They have some arms industries, but it's very small scale production compared to the heyday of industrial warfare. The production lines aren't mothballed but repurposed after the run is done, so when you want some more, it takes a lot of time to set it up again.

Challenger 2 stopped being built 20 years ago mind you. With Leopard 2 there are spare parts problems iirc and so on.

Aren't France and Germany major arms exporters? Esp on a per capita basis?

They are. On a per capita basis France's arms exports are larger than America's.

Not really, we can design arms, some of them are also pretty good, but building them in any amount of scale is not possible right now.

You did this.

Well, "we" as in the US elites did this. "We" the broad populace of the US did not. I personally would be happy for you guys to roll your own way on all matters foreign and domestic. It would be good for the American soul to have real competitors and not just fake ones.

Economies of scale (average costs fall as output increases) means that the US has strong military reasons for insisting that nations which it defends buy US military equipment.

Of course it does. Rival castles must be destroyed. Though this is usually sold as NATO standardization.

I understand why the Americans crushed Europe. What I don't understand is why they then turn around and act surprised that the Europeans aren't successful. It's not like this is fooling anyone but them.

Frankly American diplomacy has really been puzzling me lately. They don't seem to care or realize that they look like assholes on issue after issue. There always was such a tendency but it's now reached weird degrees. Biden calling Xi a dictator right after making efforts to open back dialogue is but the latest in a series of boneheaded moves. The peak of which was probably their handling of economic sanctions that has opened a big breach in dollar supremacy.

I for one am very much happy to see the insufferable elitism of Europeans slowly being wiped off our collective smug faces. The uncouth and primitive barbarian across the ocean turned out to be smarter and harder-working all along.

The average European doesn't care or think about you at all. And rolls his eyes when told how much you lot work.

Which is good for you, if Europe understood America's role in its affairs, we'd get a few of our own bin Laden figures.

elitism coming from effete liberal Europeans laughing at obese, gun-toting and bible-thumpin' Americans

You ever heard about the yellow vests? How do you think they feel about their own 'elites', the people who tell them that instead of paying for gas they should buy an e-car ?

third world hellhole are convincing fewer by the day.

There are no places in Europe as dangerous as the heavily black US cities.

reddit-tier arguments

Your entire post is boo-outgroup, in this case railing against the type of European who has a Ukraine flag in bio and uses twitter.

They're largely not present here at all, hence I'm calling the target seletion for your screed into question.

The average European doesn't care or think about you at all. And rolls his eyes when told how much you lot work.

I don't see this at all.

In my experience, Europeans are absolutely obsessed with America. They listen to American music, they watch American movies, and they follow American politics to the exclusion of their own.

I'm not sure how this reflects on Europeans. You could see it positively or negatively. Positively, as Europeans having a greater curiosity or knowledge of the greater world. Negatively, as Europeans feeling insecurities about their position in the world relative to the United States.

From a practical perspective, the obsession makes sense. European culture is downstream of American culture moreso than the opposite. Trends that start in America, whether obesity or rap music, often make their way across the pond. Europeans should be obsessed with America, just as people in Tennessee should be obsessed with California. What starts there comes here, more often than not.

and they follow American politics to the exclusion of their own.

While I agree that American politics often spills into Europe (see the BLM and Women's marches), I think this is taking it too far. People in Europe are invested in the really big changes in America (e.g presidential elections or important supreme court cases) and to some extent the gossip and scandal surrounding individual politicians (though I could say the same for the Royal Family).

They neither know much of nor care about anything smaller than that, even if objectively the goings on in a state of tens of millions are as important as the goings on of a European country, but the smallest details of domestic scandals are regularly found on the front page of European newspapers. I've been living in France for the past few months, in April even if you avoided every newspaper and TV station you'd still hear about Macron's pension reforms from the man on the street.

Young Europeans will often know who JFK or Reagan were but will draw a blank on Mitterand or Helmut Kohl, unless they come from the country of respective leader. So I am not sure if @jeroboam is wrong here.

Interestingly, I've often found much higher name recognition for someone like Thatcher, but that could also just be an offhand sign of the status of English as the lingua franca.

I mean just being fair here I don’t think not knowing all of the previous leaders of your country is that unusual. Most Americans would struggle to name 15 Presidents of our 46. And of those who could, outside of really important leaders and events could not tell you what happened during the terms of those presidents. For most people, history is trivia, good to know, certainly, but doesn’t affect daily life in any real way.

unless they come from the country of respective leader.

Sure, they'll know a bunch of US presidents specifically and not many leaders of other European countries unless there's good reason to (e.g the Irish have always had to pay attention to British politics). Still, while America is the exception to the rule of knowing very little about foreign politics, domestic politics will still take the prime spot.

In my experience, Europeans are absolutely obsessed with America.

You should provide some data, such as EU music charts.

Here’s a list of international George Floyd protests, including Europe. Can you provide a recent European event of similar scope that inspired similar levels of protest in the United States?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_George_Floyd_protests_outside_the_United_States

Do you think any of these protests was attended by more than a few hundred people ?

I’m not certain. But even if the numbers are low, I have never seen even a small wave of protests in the US over a police killing in another country. Nearly every country in the world imports US culture war to some extent or another.

There's not much more to say here than 'duh'.

Of course people, if we use the term very loosely, in provinces are going to ape trends from the imperial center. Fortunately it's limited to trendy & leftist university students.

Okay. So European culture is downstream from American culture. There was nothing to argue about because you agree and you’re just cranky and rude.

Regular decent sized protests, especially on or near college campuses, happen in response to Israeli police or soldiers killing Palestinians. I cannot think of another example.

I considered this, but the scale of that conflict is on a completely different level and it’s also tightly connected to US foreign policy. But I agree, it’s the closest corollary.

Here’s a relevant new top-level thread about American culture war in Europe: https://www.themotte.org/post/576/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/118884?context=8#context

Why are Hungarians fighting about Pride month (an American invention based upon events that happened in the US)?

Having spent several months in Europe, the dominance of US music seems so obvious as to not need explanation.

But here you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Hot_100_Singles

The European Hot 100 Singles was compiled by Billboard and Music & Media magazine from March 1984 until December 2010. The chart was based on national singles sales charts in 17 European countries:

Most number-one singles

Madonna (17)

ABBA (13)

Michael Jackson (10)

Eminem (8)

Britney Spears (6)

Boney M. (6)

Elton John (5)

Rihanna (5)

Whitney Houston (5)

Beyoncé (4)

Kylie Minogue (4)

Robbie Williams (4)

Shakira (4)

Adding all those up by country we get

USA (50)

Sweden (13)

UK (9)

Germany (6)

Barbados / USA (5)

Australia (4)

Colombia (4)

This is just the top acts, obviously, but the US is so incredibly dominant that I don't feel the need to do a deeper dive.

This is not a particularly good way to show European music charts on this particular topic, actually, since the question is whether people in whatever country listen more to American music or their own country's music, and these charts aggregate around the common denominator, which is American (and, historically at least, UK) music.

According to this article I managed to find, Finland's most streamed songs in 2022 were:

  1. BESS – Ram pam pam

  2. JVG – Amatimies

  3. Ramses II – Villieläin

  4. Gettomasa – Shamppanjadieetillä

  5. Olli Halonen – Pohjola

  6. Harry Styles – As It Was

  7. El Migu - Erilainen

  8. Isac Elliot – 20min

  9. T Swoop – Mon Ami

  10. Pihlaja & Etta – Bändäri

Harry Styles is the only non-Finnish artist, and at least if we go by titles most of these are in Finnish. Predictably markets for music in Finnish are pretty sparse outside of Finland.

Here's the most sold music artists of all time in Finland. As one can see, the top 10 is entirely Finnish (and, apart from Nightwish, sing in Finnish), and Finnish artists take up 41 spots from the top 50.

Then again, Finns might have expectionally domestic tastes, but assuredly almost all of that, apart from Nightwish and HIM which managed to break abroad, would be utterly unfamiliar to non-Finns, and similarly, say, Dutch or Portuguese domestically popular artists would be unfamiliar to pretty much anyone who didn't make a specific effort to get to know them.

Thank you for validating my choice to stick to listening purely to established 80s artists.

The only one of these songs I might have heard was Ramses II - Villieläin, since someone posted it on Facebook. Can't remember at all how it went, though.

Then again, Finns might have expectionally domestic tastes, but assuredly almost all of that, apart from Nightwish and HIM which managed to break abroad, would be utterly unfamiliar to non-Finns, and similarly, say, Dutch or Portuguese domestically popular artists would be unfamiliar to pretty much anyone who didn't make a specific effort to get to know them.

I don't think so. It's similar in Sweden with 8 of the top 10 singing in Swedish and 9 of the top ten being Swedish artists, Ed Sheeran being the only foreign artist making the top 10.

And this is Sweden, a famously xenophilic country.

What starts there comes here, more often than not.

This, exactly. It's absurd and ridiculous when our local progressives start parrotting the American talking-points that don't fit at all into the local context, but this is where we are now.

This is pure anecdote; but the main problem I've seen for working class types during my time in Europe was rent and durable goods.

Every other thing is cheaper and of much higher quality than what is available in the US. Eg, a loaf of bread in Parris is .79 cents; the same loaf of bread in the US is either 4.99 or can't be bought at all; eat this dogfood instead.

This seems to be across the board for food, cloths, services, the whole shebang.

On the other hand, Europeans seem to make less money.

On the other other hand, Ya'll work a LOT less, like a lot a lot less.

On the final hand, once you get above US 70k purchasing power equivalence, ya'll seem to pay quite a bit more in taxes.

I'd like to see a breakdown of what the actual differences on the ground are instead of the theoretical economics of it, but I don't trust any of the breakdowns I've seen. Either conservative "European mothers eat every second child to prevent starvation" or librul "Non gmo locally produced by women owned businesses Milk and honey rain from the sky twice a day and three times on weekends."

I doubt it's true for that bread now.

Even in Czech Republic a loaf of bread is now 2€.

The inflation due to the Ukraine war was pretty brutal. Milk went up 50%. Eggs. Vegetables, etc.

The only thing that stayed low is pork, not sure why.

Nice.

Yeah, Us here in the USA aren't seeing much compared to how it around the world. Hooray for hegemonic dominance!

It's too bad our food is so bad though. I really don't get it. We have all the ingredients to make good shit, we just choose not to. To pick an example: I did maintenance and installations for grocery store food service equipment for a while, and it's all top quality steam injected ovens. The dudes that work in the bakeries are sometimes Simpsons squeaky voice teen but usually are at least kinda interested in making something food like.

Flour is flour, salt is salt, yeast is not yeast but even the boggest standardest breadmachine conditioned yeast can make something good.

I can only conclude that it is bad on purpose.

It's too bad our food is so bad though. I really don't get it. We have all the ingredients to make good shit, we just choose not to.

Good to know that it's not just me being a foreigner, someone in the US also agrees that for some reason US can make good food but chooses not to.

I have to ask though, why is US chicken so bad? Was it always this bad? Is it because you guys bred those enormous hypertropied chickens?

No, the muscle chickens can be good!

They obviously aren't as good in slow cook/stew situations, but as bulk protein they are excellent.

Again, it is pure choice. We could marinate this chicken in something acidic with salt aromatics/spices to encourage flavor penetration from aromatics and improve texture and flavor at a cost of basically free at scale because we use those same ingredients in the coating before frying and we need to wash and dry the chicken anyways before breading, or we could make it bad because we don't actually give a shit and want you to suffer.

"due to the ukraine war" is pretty speculative I think. There is the confounding factor of Covid money from the sky programs.

Energy prices are through the roof, that not enough ?

Instead of buying Russian gas at reasonable prices, it has to be imported liquefied.

IIRC, the price has about doubled.

Well that's a policy choice no?

What event prompted the "policy choice" to stop importing Russian gas?

This is like the people who blame covid for things that are the result of government responses to covid. They are not the same.

While I agree that it isn't technically the Russian's fault, I don't think the EU governments actually had a choice in this matter - other than the choice to get deposed and replaced with a leader more compliant to US interests.

A choice imposed on Europe by USA. Not much of a choice, really.

No one cared about Ukraine in NATO in Europe. Every major EU country was against it. Americans pushed it through in 2008.

Yet here we are.

Getting ever chummier wiith a stupid decaying empire that is angling for a air/naval war with a country that has 230x the shipbuilding capability and many times the industrial production and actual industrial policies.

NATO was now supposed to be in Japan, too.. I can't see it as anything else but US conspiring to get Europe involved in a future war.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1678299275703484418

I mean, two of the largest producers of grain in the world went to war with each other. That seems like it ought to have an effect on bread prices. Not sure about dairy/vegetables, though.

It probably is still true because France practices price control for bread.

From a rhetorical perspective the upheaval of the great American man in the face of European bullying would mean a lot more if the European bully had been a product of anything other than American hegemony.

Outside of that I'm not sure if there exists any reality to the US vs Europe dialect anymore. Both have moved so far away from any defining baseline. It's like looking at two sports teams as they were 20 years ago compared to now. Neither team resembles what they once were to a point where I feel like there is no sense in cheering either team on anymore. I might as well cheer on a clothes hangar given that all that's left are the symbols and uniforms. Sorry but I am not yet prepared to accept a Chinese civil war by proxy in the math Olympiads as a serious expression of anything 'American' or 'European'. No matter how genuinely they salute their flag.

But insofar as there is a reality, and insofar as it has any relation to rhetoric, Europe has lost a lot of the advantages it had. But I'd be hard pressed to call that a win for the US.

unattractive styles such as short hair

You take that back!

As for the state of the cities—yeah, things probably were best in the late 90s or maybe mid 2000s. But something happened in 2008, and it wasn’t a demographic transition.

I am curious as to why you think we’ve hit peak dollar. There’s still a lot of room for chaos in the rest of the world. None of our economic competitors do a very good job pretending to be a safe market. China’s got its protectionist holding companies, and the Euro is…the Euro.

Though I agree that generally women look best when leaning into traditionally feminine styles, I think short hair looks pretty dang good on some girls I know.

It has to do with face shape.

An attractive ~20 year old woman can make anything look good. She would likely look better with long hair. Demi Moore was cute in Ghost, but she was still better looking with longer hair.

Whenever someone gives me an example of a girl who supposedly looks good with short hair, they're just giving me an example of a girl who would look better with longer hair.

The homicide rate did not begin rising in those particular cities until 2015. And it continued dropping in NYC and Los Angeles.

And from what I’m seeing it turned right around and declined for as many years as it grew. It wasn’t until 2020 that we jumped past the halcyon days of, uh, 2007. Same for general crime.

I’ll buy that there was an ideological shift post-recession. Not so much for “demographic trends.” The Hispanic and Asian proportions have grown. That’s hardly the driver for abolishing police, though.

Mestizos and Asians are not as crime-prone as blacks, but they don't create cities that are optimal for the enjoyment of white people.

The cores of most Latin American cities don't seem all that different from their antecedents in Spain and Portugal; there is more crime and sprawling slums around many of them of course, but recent events in El Salvador show that that can be fixed. Plenty of westerners seem to love the urban planning in places like Japan or Singapore as well. Given American population densities, we will not see any Tokyo-style megacities for the foreseeable future, but I fail to see how getting a Sapporo or two (a city that was built in consultation with American engineers in the late 19th century and looks the part) would be sub-optimal.

Those cores weren't designed by or built for Mestizos...

No, but they were built by Mestizos for a white overclass, which is the same thing we would get in the US even for the most extreme possible levels of immigration, except that some of that overclass will be Asian as well.

Is San Salvador now as nice as Copenhagen?

To me, yes. Copenhagen is flat and boring and the people are (by my American standards) standoffish, rude, and lazy. San Salvador also has much better food and it isn't dark half the year (I should note that while I have visited Denmark, Sweden, and many South American countries, I have not been to El Salvador specifically). That's not to say that much of the architecture in Copenhagen or Stockholm isn't jaw-droppingly beautiful, and they are definitely places I might choose to live...if they weren't inhabited by Scandinavians.

＞You take that back!

I can understand pixie cuts, but I will admit to finding the haphazardly-shaven or buzz-cut-esque haircuts common in queer circles to be bizarre and unattractive.

Also the…jewelry. Why nose rings?

I can understand pixie cuts, but I will admit to finding the haphazardly-shaven or buzz-cut-esque haircuts common in queer circles to be bizarre and unattractive.

Kind of signaling, maybe a little countersignaling. I like the aesthetic.

The pixie cut is precisely what I had in mind.

I don’t really see the appeal of nose rings, either. My girlfriend has one, but I feel neutral about it at best. Shrug.

My intrusive thoughts immediately jump to tugging at them with a string.

On the other hand, I'll cop to finding the "alt girl" look quite attractive, even knowing the, uh, baggage it tends to come with.

Full sleeve tattoos, nose rings, piercings, weird shaved on one side of the head haircuts, and rainbow dye colours. Kids these days!

Let's face it, we're just old 😁

I do think those kinds of things make you look ugly be you man, woman, or other, but 🤷‍♀️

I'm young, and I'm not a fan of any of that. Admittedly in conservative circles where it's relatively uncommon.

I'll bite the bullet by saying not only do current fashions look bad, but the fashions from when I was kid in the 90s are embarrassing to look at now and Americans were much worse dressed in the 90s than were Americans in the 60s and 70s.

Americans in the 60s and 70s.

The era of gingham, elephant flares, and cheesecloth? Not to mention polyester and rayon everything? I think we have different memories 🤣

FWIW, I originally had this thought after an evening looking through family photos and it seemed to me that the people in the photos were better dressed in the 70s and than in the 90s or 00s. Yeah, the clothes could be a bit cheesy, but the clothes were more colorful, worn with better fit, and everyone was generally less slovenly.

I present you the fashion icon of the 1970s.

One of my pet peeves is the way any unfavorable judgment of an aesthetic trend is treated as a consequence of the critic being old. I grew up with these trends and have hated them for my entire life.

I think am in rough agreement (though I cannot assume how willing you would be to "trade off" economic prosperity for a more difficult-to-quantify social and individual wellbeing).

In my view, a comparative advantage in economic power means jack shit to me when my options are to spend that wealth living in a city full of people I loathe for various reasons, or live in a rural area full of people I loathe for various reasons; most of those reasons have to do with continuously-declining standards of basic physical fitness, though in the case of cities (even some medium-sized midwest cities) I also struggle with constant pressure to kowtow to the left-wing zeitgeist.

With the current trajectory, I am left having to choose between (please pardon the hyperbole, but I am now speaking even deeper from the heart; to put a fig leaf of Motte-ness onto this rant, look at these CDC stats: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html) living alongside painfully dull and severely obese ambiguously "conservative" rurals whose only redeeming characteristic is a radical "live and let live" attitude that at least leaves me unmolested but who as a result are also bereft of care for the appearance of themselves or their property, or else living in close-quarters with packs of (also increasingly obese) vipers caught up in masturbatory, self-flagellating purity spirals driven by self-serving crybullies and useful idiots.

Suburbs I exclude from possibility as, like the scoffing masses referenced in Lovecraft novels by their traumatized protagonists, I refuse to even credit suburban life with serious consideration. This is not borne from mere meme: I have multiple acquaintances who regaled me with HOA horror-stories that make city-dwelling sound downright pleasant.

Please forgive me for being uncharitable, but as an outlier in all sections of the modern United States social landscape I am frustrated with it.

I'm sort of in the same boat. I live downtown in a big American city, and I know I should probably get out before it is too late ...

Where America does seem to still shine is in the richer outer suburbs, where everyone has nice big homes, yards for kids to play in, cars that can easily get you anywhere, space to do all sorts of outdoor activities from swimming in lakes to hiking, and where it is still quite safe and orderly.

I know I'm a broken record on the matter, but I want to once again highlight the quality of life in small cities and big towns throughout the American Midwest. Places like Duluth, Madison, and Cedar Rapids are genuinely fantastic places to live, work, play, and raise a family. When all factors are considered, I will put these types of cities up against any place in the world for overall quality of life. Each of the complaints you register in your post are quite true about the United States more broadly, but don't resemble anything I see around me in my daily life - my city is walkable, bikeable, filled with upwardly mobile, fit professionals, has very little crime, tons of great food options, and so on. All of the perks of outer suburbs are present, plus the upsides of a decent-sized urban core (sports, concerts, art, festivals).

One of the great things about the US is the variety of different places one can live with the same passport. I can live and work in Miami or Austin or Denver or LA or the rural gulf coast or west Texas or north Arkansas, and I don’t need anyone’s permission to do so. A lot of these places are truly incredible and many of them have fantastic companies to work for even if you want to live somewhere rural and do something relatively normal and corporate. Being able to live in rural Arkansas and work for Walmart, for instance, is an incredible opportunity for anyone that wants a chance at a corporate exec income and lifestyle but to live in a cabin in the woods.

Being American feels like infinite opportunity.

The problem is that the non-Americans dreaming of escaping to have their very own American Life are not imagining "Sigh, if only I lived in Duluth". They want the movie version of America: the hustle and bustle of the big city, the thrill of fast-paced life with exotic cultures and nightlife and new people to meet and museums and art galleries and it never rains in California and the city that never sleeps and you work hard but you make a ton of money and live the good life.

I don't want to traduce self_made_human, but I doubt they're dreaming of living in a 85% white suburban enclave where you bring Perfection Salad to the monthly community potluck and the big event of the year is the Magic Smelt Parade. Yes, doubtless this is unfair to Duluth, but this is the attitude you're struggling against. People want the movie version of America.

I don't want to traduce self_made_human, but I doubt they're dreaming of living in a 85% white suburban enclave where you bring Perfection Salad to the monthly community potluck and the big event of the year is the Magic Smelt Parade. Yes, doubtless this is unfair to Duluth, but this is the attitude you're struggling against. People want the movie version of America.

An overall improvement from where I am currently, but you're correct in that it's not my aspiration per se, just something I could see myself settling for when it's time to be family man.

I would ideally live in the Bay Area if I could, I'm a rat through and through, and it's a lovely place, most of the time.

If not, there are plenty of acceptable cities and towns in both red and blue states I can dwell amicably in.

I lived in Madison and did not like it. It's expensive, full of entitled overeducated people, entitled state politicians, and entitled and officious bureaucrats, it's poorly policed, and they elect actual communists to local government. Outside the University and the Capitol areas it's generic suburban sprawl with little to recommend it other than a few decent parks. North Shore of Milwaukee is also expensive, but I feel you like you get what you pay for at least. The city government is all liberals of course, but they're mostly old, and understand that the point of their existence is to keep big city problems away.

Going off of your point about urbanism, what has always galled me is how much more beautiful European cities and frankly people are compared to their American counterparts, knowing the difference in wealth. Some of the few things Europe has left going for it (in purely material and aesthetic terms, of course people have an attachment to their own culture/language/etc.) are gothic cathedrals and a lack of visible homeless drug adicts or morbidly obese people walking around in public spaces.

It's pathetic that the richest country in human history can't close the gap on these things when you consider how far ahead the US is by any other measure. We could build our own Vienna or Paris if we wanted to, but all we can manage is Las Vegas and Disney World. When it comes to small towns and rural areas, the only place where the manmade environment hasn't depressed me has been New England (crossing from Massachusetts into upstate New York and seeing the contrast in what the small towns look like feels like crossing the iron curtain into some post-industrial wasteland).

On pretty much any other topic I will happily argue against liberals who romanticize Europe, especially when they're immigrants ("If you think Denmark is so much better then why did you choose to move here?"), but I have no counter on this one.

what has always galled me is how much more beautiful European cities and frankly people are compared to their American counterparts

Old European cities have their own problems. Visiting Florence, I was struck by how little greenery there was on the streets. Yes, the city is old but it's also mostly just narrow cobblestone streets. One nice thing about having had your city ruined during WWII is that it gives ample space to redesign streets in a way that living in an openair museum doesn't, because there is little resistance to demolishing some shabby commiebloc.

Many of these older Italian and Spanish cities also allow cars on these narrow streets, which is less than pleasant. The solution ought to be to limit cars, but that would also require better public transportation and you can't really do much given the narrow width of these streets. Cities which grew big in later periods (e.g. Copenhagen) don't have the same problem as these old Italian cities do, given that during the 1800s the idea of boulevards became popular and even non-boulevard streets became wider.

It's also worth noting that just adding bicycle lanes isn't the only issue, planting new trees and adding greenery requires space too. That's why many Eastern European cities have added a huge number of bicycle tracks and general greenery in their inner cities in recent years, but you don't get the same activity in old Italian or Spanish cities because of these inherent limitations. As a result, they may be pretty at first blush but often feel sterile.

US cities are absurdly car-centric, yes, but generally speaking it is much easier to remake a street that is too wide than too narrow. Once buildings, especially old buildings, are built it is very hard to reshape a city due to "historical preservation" NIMBY:ism. Removing a few lanes is trivial by comparison. So while progress is slow in the US, the potential for fast improvement is there.

Oddly enough, I had the opposite experience when crossing from Connecticut into New York about ten years ago. While New England is nice, the whole thing (lower New England at least, Vermont, etc. is different) feels kind of fake. If I drive to a small town in a rural area, I want it to feel like a small town in a rural area and not a hip part of Pittsburgh (my hometown) transported to the mountains for the benefit of urban emigres. Most of Western Massachusetts and Connecticut is like this. Stately farmhouses with plaques bearing the date of construction and grounds so well-maintained they couldn't have seen any real agriculture for decades. The whole thing broke down when I was in the northwestern corner of Connecticut and I stopped to get breakfast. I had hiked off the AT that morning and was looking for a nice greasy diner and I didn't care how much I paid. The town was handsome and I asked a man on the street if there was a place to get breakfast; he said there was a place right across from where I was and I thanked him and headed there. On my way in I noticed a bookstore near the parking lot that I planned to check out afterwards. I ordered eggs Florentine for 12 bucks, pricey but I wasn't complaining, and was not given the Hollandaise-sauce extravaganza I was expecting but a couple of coddled eggs and a few pieces of baguette. I wasn't anywhere close to full. As I went to check out the bookstore I saw the sign more clearly and noticed that it was a rare bookstore "open by appointment or by chance". There's something off-putting about a small, rural town where one can buy a rare book but can't buy a can of baked beans. As soon as I crossed into New York the whole scene changed and the towns had real businesses like hardware stores and banks and transmission places and the farms smelled like cow shit and it felt like a place people actually lived and not some glorified resort.

That's sad to hear. I didn't get to spend much time on the ground as I was passing through, so I could have been mistaken, but it seemed like an encouraging sight compared to the parts of the rust belt that I'm more familiar with. I imagine the most picturesque places will always end up as overpriced tourist traps given the economic incentives, but I'd love it if we could raise the bar enough so that everyone had something nice to look at. Basically, more Americana aesthetics and fewer unremarkable strip malls.

it felt like a place people actually lived and not some glorified resort.

That's the trouble when you're making your living from tourism, everything gets turned into the service of "what will attract tourists?" "what kind of unique selling experience can we provide?" and of course "how high can we hike the prices to milk the tourists?". You price out the locals or they are all part of providing the services to the tourists and summer visitors. We get it in Ireland, too.

Any locals probably drive twenty miles to the town with the big box stores and that doesn't depend on tourists in order to buy their tins of beans or a good greasy filling fast-food meal.

But you miss the point here: it's not about GDP numbers, or even general economic strength. More generally, Euro-elitists smugly enjoy a sense of superiority over things like crime, urbanism, healthcare, which isn't really directly related to GDP growth, and more about systemic factors directly rooted in US life—not easily gotten rid of with a bigger economy.

Also, insufferable? Maybe, but Americans often exhibit similarly chauvinistic behaviors too... bashing western Europeans over their cowardice and pacifism is a pretty popular trope, especially virulently in the 2000s hysteria over Iraq ('Freedom fries' and posters like "Now Iraq; Then France": there was a lot of butthurt back then)

And that's to say nothing of criticism of other, often poorer nations...

it's not about GDP numbers, or even general economic strength. More generally, Euro-elitists smugly enjoy a sense of superiority over things like crime, urbanism, healthcare, which isn't really directly related to GDP growth, and more about systemic factors directly rooted in US life—not easily gotten rid of with a bigger economy.

Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism. That's the preferred way to explain disproportionate shares of black criminality in society. Hence the implication that white Americans are in effect partly to blame for this state of affairs due to their past and present sins.

It's not even elitism that's intelligent, which would be arguing that the US should police violent people more harshly without regard to race, so it comes across as fairly meaningless. Europe's lower crime rates are an accident of history (few imported slaves) rather than an inherently superior system.

So my contention is that even in areas where there are reasons for Europeans to be objectively smug over Americans, the way it's done is often incoherent and displays ignorance of the root causes of US dysfunction, such as crime in this instance.

As for healthcare, that is partially about income too. While I am no expert on healthcare, I think the meme that a large proportion of Americans are just one paycheck away from medically-induce bankruptcy has been disproven countless times yet it keeps resurrecting itself. I'm not sold on the idea that Europeans have better healthcare than Americans. If you look at the amount of innovation in the US healthcare system, nowhere in Europe does there seem to be any equivalent. Perhaps only Switzerland comes close in per capita.

You do know that American white homicide rates are sky-high by European standards?

Not really. Lithuania is nearly twice the level of white Americans. US white numbers are above the EU median but nothing unheard of, and certainly not "sky high".

Isn’t Lithuania’s murder rate an outlier in the EU? I agree that sky-high might be a bit of an exaggeration, but US white homicide rates would be shocking in most of Europe.

Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism.

Nah, the narrative is more often about guns.

From a perspective outside to both - Australian - my experience of both continents was that the natives were generally very friendly and kind, but both also had a tendency to be intolerably smug in some way.

In America, it took the form of the unthinking, automatic assumption that America is the best place in the world, that everyone else seeks to be like them, and then on some level there was this patronising belief that everyone else should be flattered to be noticed by America. Americans firmly believe that they're the greatest in the world, and they like hearing that repeated by others. Americans also like to deign to offer other countries their recognition and sympathy as if we should feel grateful for it. There's this whole underlying belief that the world revolve around America, and no comprehension that other people may not feel that way.

In Europe, it took the form of an only-partially-buried condescension, and the sort of bitter resentment that understands that they need foreigners, but that they ought to be on top of the relationship. It's often very visible when it comes to language, but even in the UK, every now and then you come across the sense that they are the centre of civilisation and on some level we're still just a bunch of unwashed colonials who've gotten inflated opinions of ourselves. I can remember people on the continent saying 'merci' or 'grazie' with a tone of utter contempt, or I can remember people snottily saying 'in this country...' before explaining something in a way that makes it clear that they consider every other country to be not really civilised.

Americans are smug in the infuriating, un-self-conscious way of people who know they're the superpower. Europeans are smug in the quiet, bitter way of people who know that they ought to be the superpower, but aren't.

They can both be quite ugly.

However, to be clear, none of this invalidates the many wonderful people I met or wonderful experiences I had in both regions, and the majority of memories I have of each continent are very positive and happy.

The American was

Is.

an ignoramus

Thank you for demonstrating that this is still true.

a loud-mouth

Thank you for demonstrating that this is still true.

and irreversibly stupid.

Thank you for demonstrating that this is still true.

And don't get me started on their healthcare, their gun crime and all other sorts of social pathologies. America, you see, is a third world nation masquerading as a first world one.

I can't help but notice that you don't actually address any of these.

  • -38

@MelodicBerries post isn't much more than sneering about "effete Europeans," but this response is just pure personal antagonism, and since you've repeatedly made clear that you don't care when you're told not to do that, you get a one-week time-out this time.

I spent a distressingly long amount of time thinking that the US and the EU were peers, or that most people can be truly equanimous between them.

Then I saw that an electrician in the US often outearns a UK professor/doctor/senior engineer, owns a bigger house, has more cars, and can enjoy the breadth of half a continent, and a proper continent at that.

So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped and gasping for breadth, with elective surgeries having waitlists months long, and if I wanted to have my ADHD diagnosis ratified, I have to settle for a two year waiting period for an NHS shrink, or spend upwards of 800 GBP like 2rafa said was typical for even a teleconsult from a private consultant.

Everything is smaller, and often just a bit shabbier there. Even I, someone who lives somewhere barely acceptable to modern sensibilities, can clearly see that and plan accordingly.

Even I, someone who lives somewhere barely acceptable to modern sensibilities, can clearly see that and plan accordingly.

Are you planning to live in the Midwest or in one of the large coastal cities? There are shabby, run-down, neglected, dying on their feet parts of the USA as well.

Everybody wants the life they see in the movies and on TV. Reality is different, be it Europe, Asia or America. The point about absurdly cheap oil prices is part of all that; Americans have cheap energy, and they need it, because of the size of the 'proper' continent and the dependence on cars to get you to work, etc. If you're that electrician, you need the cheap energy to run your house and your cars and your truck and everything else, hence the memes about America going to war for oil. If the people of the US had to pay comparable prices for oil and energy as over here in Europe, there would be huge upheaval, protests, and maybe even a bit of economic collapse. You can live in the hot areas of the country because you have air conditioning, and you can run air conditioning becaue your energy prices are cheap, and your energy prices are cheap because your government ensures they are, and your government ensures they are because your entire economy is built around cheap energy.

All this is not to blame or mock America, just to point out that there's a lot of underpinning the life we see on the surface, just as in other countries. In our own countries, we know what's going on below the surface level. When we look at America, we're looking through the lens of decades of movies creating an image in our minds.

Are you planning to live in the Midwest or in one of the large coastal cities? There are shabby, run-down, neglected, dying on their feet parts of the USA as well.

I can hardly afford to be all that picky, especially since I'm hellbent on Psychiatry if I manage to match into it.

In an ideal world, I'd go to the Bay Area and find my fellow rats (and then form an enormous ratking through Aella's orgies), but even if I ended up in one of the more rundown parts of the nation, I expect to have some degree of geographic mobility when I'm done with the residency.

At the end of the day, energy is still cheap there. Why does it matter if things would get worse if it isn't likely? There's no real risk of that that I can see, the fracking boom did great things for domestic oil production.

A great deal of what we consider progress hinges on the availability of massive amounts of energy, and cheaply. The amounts involved have been getting larger and usually cheaper, and a graph of wealth compared to energy consumption is quite linear from what I recall.

It's a massive flex to build a city or golf club in the middle of a desert, and I'm all for humanity telling Nature to go fuck itself, we're here to terraform at scale.

It's a massive flex to build a city or golf club in the middle of a desert, and I'm all for humanity telling Nature to go fuck itself, we're here to terraform at scale.

Well yeah, as long as you have resources to burn. But do we? And it gets to a point where "yippee, I can waste water in the desert" is just showing off for the sake of it. I mean, for those to whom this is impressive, great. But I'd much rather (for instance) that something was done about the coastal erosion on a local road in my locality, which any day now really is going to topple into the sea because the soft earth of the cliffside is being eaten away.

But again, this is not to say that you're wrong or dumb. If the Bay Area is your dream of the Earthly Paradise, I hope you get there one day. Me, I like where I am and even if given a free ticket to the Big Cities wouldn't take it. Each to their own.

Desalination at industrial scale has gone from being a pipedream (heh) to now making Israel a net exporter of water. It's only getting cheaper, and if there's one thing we're not running out of, it's sea water.

Good luck finding a place you like, or saving that path. I don't think my preferences are anything but my own either!

If the people of the US had to pay comparable prices for oil and energy as over here in Europe, there would be huge upheaval, protests, and maybe even a bit of economic collapse

Prior to the Ukraine war, I was under the impression high energy prices were government policy enforced by taxation, no?

I hate to break it to you, but I know someone who makes more than a UK starting doctor selling cell phones part time in the US with no degree (~$60k).

That's it, I'm going full Ted. The Industrial Revolution and it's consequences have been pretty great for humanity, it's just that us non-Americans are missing out on the fun :(

Good sales people earn a ton of money everywhere. I had a buddy who made 80k+ 15 years ago working part time selling insurances, while being severely alcoholic.

I had another buddy who worked part time selling fish oil from a stall in the subway who made 50k+.

Don't compare salaried work to commission work.

Come to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where you can make way too much money as a private urgent care doctor seeing new patients daily. No need to Ted out.

I never liked him anyway. I like modernity, and would kill myself living in some tiny ass shack.

If I match into Psych, the pay is certainly not half bad, so I'd have to be in pretty dire straits to consider working in urgent care. Far more stressful, but I know people who thrive in such situations, whereas I'm just gritting my teeth and counting dough.

So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped

I agree with your point generally, but the NHS is a really unfair thing to saddle Europe with. It really is socialised healthcare, and it works as well as communism usually works. Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.

The rest of Europe is better. Germany for instance has normal GPs and also compulsory health insurance a bit similar to Obamacare. That produces some overservicing because everyone is finding ways to milk the insurance companies, but overall that better than the communist underservicing you get in Britain.

The only nation I have any authoritative knowledge on in Europe is the UK, but I get your point.

While I'm fond of the idea of free public healthcare, a country needs to be very wealthy indeed to provide it at a quality equivalent to what you can get from market rates in a private setting. They will need at least an implicit idea of cost-benefit, since there many interventions that work but have 5 or 6 figure price tags. I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.

Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.

Or as I'd put it, if you're getting sick, you better aim to be really sick if you want something done about it in a timely manner. Around the point where the ER doctors need to triage you first so their metrics aren't screwed by you dying on their doorstep.

I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.

But in practice it is the sin of the American system to overpay for treatments because of what amounts to public pressure (as manipulated by those who stand to profit). The NHS is actually quite good at denying costly treatments, at least by the standards of 1st world healthcare systems.

I could very well be wrong, but I'm under the impression that most of the massive spends come from insurance companies.

Yes, that increases premiums for everyone else, but the US is wealthy enough to take it. I'm unsure what facilities are available to some poor uninsured bastard (literally poor) who catches a particularly unusual type of leukemia and would need 6 figures in treatment with dubious outcomes. Surely the government doesn't foot that bill, and said person dies on the street or in a hospital instead?

If it's people paying out of pocket directly or indirectly through insurers, that's a different matter in my eyes, albeit not that big a difference. At least the Americans break in new techniques and drugs, and the price eventually drops to something cheap enough for the rest of us.

(I agree with your points, this is all additional commentary, and commentary I'm not sure on)

I'm ignorant, but I think hospitals are obligated to treat people?

you better aim to be really sick

But not the sort of really sick where you need a scan to find out that your illness is life threatening.

I have a cousin who only found out about that when she flew back to her 3rd world homeland to get treatment.

There used to be a meme that if UK was US state it would be third poorest state. I looked at 2021 numbers and with UK's GDP of $46,500 Per Capita (Purchasing Power Parity) it would actually rank as literally the poorest before Mississippi with $47,190 and West Virginia with $53,852. The US GDP is $70,250

Many people talk about welfare state in Europe, but even this ranks hollow mostly because people do not understand that US is 51% richer than UK. So even if USA had half the spending on welfare as percentage of GDP compared to UK, it would still be on par in absolute amount.

Some of this does seem to culture warry.

And I have a different thought is this actually controversial or just a truth everyone knows and you just built a strawman?

There was a period when this was less truthy and I’d guess 1980-2008. And then Europeans did have a bit of looking down on us as close to economic equals and better lifestyles.

Since then two big things happened. Shale oil happened making America no longer a petro beggar and a big terms of trade change when you’re not shipping off a few billion a day to import oil and big tech took off. I think shale oil is extremely underrated for boosting American wealth.

Also, everyone in the world sees Americans middle/lower class. We export voyeurship of that. Americans see pretty European capitals. I assume there are more but off the top of my head I only know of two media properties that show Europeans underclass. Trainspotting I forgot the whole plot but something something Edinburgh and Heroin. And Gomorrah shows a lot of Italian slums in Naples and poverty. Poverty America doesn’t have with white people.

Passport stuff anyone smart realized at some point going to France from Germany is just going to Pennsylvania from NY and same with languages.

I assume there are more but off the top of my head I only know of two media properties that show Europeans underclass.

'La Haine' is a good one for the French context.

The British have a fascination with their underclass. 'Fish Tank' was decent iirc and there are a load of Cockney gangster movies, movies about racists in the 1980s and more recent stuff about the migrant descended underclass. For the second and third ones the film 'This is England' and the first season of 'Top Boy' were pretty good.

America has a white underclass. The difference in wealth manifests in the middle classes, so a doctor or department or region-level manager or independent tradesman in the US is quite a lot better off than his counterpart in the UK, who makes less money, is less likely to have a car or big house.

Do we? Do we have white people living in projects like naples with violence etc? We have poor people in West Virginia that do too much heroin but without crime or projects.

Someone else replied with this

https://www.boredpanda.com/roleplaying-4th-of-july-larp-poland/

That’s what the west of the world thinks our poor white underclass looks like. It’s not the same as the stuff seen in southern Italy.

You know euro crime rates are way lower than American white crime rates, right? Same for illegitimacy and divorce.

There’s lots of 100% white trailer parks full of dysfunction and welfare fraud. It’s not something unique to Italy.

People are pushing back on this point. But media wise America shows a lot. I don’t know anything like Gomorrah in America and public housing for whites. Maybe it’s just media. But usually America shows more.

We have Appalachia. They do a lot of heroin etc but crime isn’t a problem. Like white corner boys don’t exists but Italian media showed that in Naples.

Because they’ve been inducted into drug gangs. Americans are the most down to business people in the world, even when it comes to crime.

We do have gangs. These gangs are LARPers. Claims of gang membership from the white underclass in Appalachia are the number one way to separate the wheat from the chaff so far as who is a legitimately dangerous criminal and who is a degenerate with delusions of grandeur. These 'gangs' rarely create many social problems in Appalachia relative to other, more serious criminals.

The murder rate per capita in Napels is about a quarter of the white American murder rate.

everyone in the world sees Americans middle/lower class. We export voyeurship of that.

This is a good point. The export of shows like Jerry Springer in the 1990s and later exposés of how poor whites (derisively called "trailer trash") live their lives gave an unfounded impression that America is far poorer than it actually is. In a way, it's inadvertently proving US cultural dominance.

It reminds me of 4th of July LARPing in Eastern Europe. Yes, it's actually a thing and as you can see, many are going for the "redneck living in a trailer aesthetic". Which is ironic given their own position in the world's income ladder.

I think shale oil is extremely underrated for boosting American wealth.

US energy prices are absurdly cheap compared to the EU, even before the 2022 war broke out. I'd also add that the US is the world's largest magnet to top talent from all around the world. It's often the very high-end who are driving prosperity and everyone else is just sort of going along for the ride.

The export of shows like Jerry Springer in the 1990s

Have they actually been exported? I'm probably the poster boy for thorough Americanization via TV, and I have never seen Jerry Springer, only heard about it second hand. When we imported reality TV, it was usually through adaptation.

It reminds me of 4th of July LARPing in Eastern Europe. Yes, it's actually a thing and as you can see, many are going for the "redneck living in a trailer aesthetic". Which is ironic given their own position in the world's income ladder.

I have never seen anyone miss the point this badly. You never heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Their position on the world's ladder (and status is a lot more relevant than income here) is probably why they sympathize with, and LARP as Rednecks to begin with.

Their position on the world's ladder (and status is a lot more relevant than income here) is probably why they sympathize with, and LARP as Rednecks to begin with.

The people who do it are usually liberals, and I doubt they feel sympathy for their LARPing targets. It's a form of mild mockery, the way some kid might dress up as an English aristocrat snob and fake an exaggerated accent. There's an underlying sense of poking fun at your target, but fascination might not necessarily be excluded either. People are complicated.

Have they actually been exported?

There was plenty of daytime Jerry Springer when I was growing up. This was early 2000s. But Jerry Springer is really a red herring. US cultural dominance over Europe is near-total. Virtually every European knows about the redneck, trailer trash stereotypes etc. You don't need Jerry Springer for that.

The people who do it are usually liberals, and I doubt they feel sympathy for their LARPing targets. It's a form of mild mockery

Well, I don't want to go all "source?" on you, and in fact I won't fight you on this if you lay any claim to any sort of knowledge on this event, "I know a guy who went there", or even "I know a guy, who knows a guy..." will suffice, but how do you know? That's not how this reads to me at all.

In the article is a quote from the LARPing group’s own self-description:

"Our LARP explores the mythos of the American Dream - or more so the Broken American Dream. Players experience human stories, portraying characters with unique backgrounds. They face their daily life and the issues that come with it. Some are universal or similar to the ones in Poland (such as struggling to provide for your family or combating addiction), and some are specific to the U.S. (such as reliance on private health care or the prevalence of firearms). We wanted to create an immersive experience about facing those hardships both as an individual and as a community, about making impossible choices, about finding your place in your small homeland.

Emphasis mine. Whether it’s outright mockery or something more sympathetic isn’t so easy to tell from just the article (the quoted description makes it seem the latter, the donut-wielding cop provides evidence for the former), but even if the LARPers talk about the universality of the American redneck struggle, I still don’t read this as an identification with redneck culture itself. And it’s certainly not a celebration.

Yeah, the Polish redneck LARP thing seems like a normal case of intercultural fascination, rather than mockery. In Nordic countries there's a whole subculture who take their visual cues from American rednecks, and they certainly don't do it as a mockery.

I've seen a fair amount of cases where Euros are obviously engaging in what within European contexts would be harmless joshing or cultural exploration, so to say, with American cultures, and Americans then get genuinely angry and start ranting about why the smug elitist Europoors (who are a lot poorer than Americans, yes, if one actually participates in American online forums it would seem impossible to not learn this fact) hate Americans despite being a lot poorer than them.

(who are a lot poorer than Americans, yes, if one actually participates in American online forums it would seem impossible to not learn this fact)

I think the scale of the gap is still missed on many, and if you do bring it up people just assume ruinous healthcare and tuition costs level the playing field.

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I'm weirded out by drywall. I always thought people were fucking up their fists by punching a hole in the wall, and then I learned it's practically paper-mache compared to good solid brick and cement.

No wonder you people make regular noise complaints, there could be an orgy with loudspeakers going on next door and I wouldn't notice as long as we both had windows shut.

Well I don't need to break out the hammer drill to put a picture up on my wall. Also the noise issue can be solved by having a house instead of an apartment.

I've found Europeans get really weirded out when you tell them about drywall.

What, are they still using plaster and lathe? It's admittedly thicker but it takes much more labor to put up. Drywall is perfectly fine.

  1. Garret Jones broadly disagrees that it’s “just the top end”. He thinks average intelligent matters a lot.

  2. Regardless of whether American energy prices are “cheap” or “expensive” one big thing is it’s basically all internal now. Even if oil was $1000 a barrel that money goes from US citizen to US citizen and the profits etc are taxed. It doesn’t increase the trade deficit if energy goes up or down in price.

Not even just Jerry Springer and trashy lower class. They see Homer Simpson. Average middle class silly dude. Americans see Paris but only the good parts not their suburbs where they rioted.

It reminds me of 4th of July LARPing in Eastern Europe. Yes, it's actually a thing and as you can see, many are going for the "redneck living in a trailer aesthetic".

The weight gives them away. They're all at least 50 pounds underweight, or 30 pounds over if they're going for the methhead look as #3 might be.

It reminds me of 4th of July LARPing in Eastern Europe. Yes, it's actually a thing

On a quick glance all I found points back to some people setting up a theme park for people to roleplay in. Expansive tickets, fewer than 100 people, a lot of photos. I assume this is not really your threshold for something being 'a thing', and at least in my experience, 4th of July does not register for people in Poland beyond the mentions of it in the news.

People like what they like. If you want to make a ton of money, go to America. If you want Big City living, go to America (for a few coastal cities).

If you want other things, stay in your own country or go to a different European country.

There's good parts and bad parts about life in every land.

Americans and Europeans who prefer America, fine.

Americans and Europeans who prefer Europe, also fine.

While I love a good bashing of smug Europeans I do think comparing the two land masses as a whole doesn’t make a ton of sense. IMO you need to get to the level of comparing finance employees in NYC vs London or a tech employee in Berlin vs SF.

The variety of people/lifestyles in both places is so vast that comparing averages doesn’t do it justice.

For example most of the European complaints about the US (healthcare, crime, weight generally speaking, food quality, no PTO) simply don’t apply if you are a high earner/have wealth. I’d imagine there are similar blind spots about Europe that Americans miss when comparing averages.

By American standards you don’t have to be that high an earner to dodge those issues, either.

Absolutely, and there are a staggering number of high paying jobs in this country. Travel nurses can pull in $150-200k here and that’s a very attainable job.

Call me too proud for my own good if you like, but if I wasn't so butthurt at the very notion of going from being a doctor to a nurse, I'd consider that.

The hours are quite bad and the work is onerous, but money is also money. In the UK, doctors have to do nursing tasks that even their Indian brethren think is an utter waste of their time or talent, so the delta isn't that big. At least they don't have to empty bedpans.

American nurses are too highly paid to be changing bedpans- that’s a CNA with 6 weeks training, often company paid for.

And yet the median household income is not even half of the lower bound of that estimate.

The median nurse salary is slightly above the median household income.

Presumably there are reasons people are leaving this supposedly "very attainable" money on the table.

Of course, some people prefer pornhub and PlayStation, but if your willing to work there are tons of higher paying jobs that don’t take a ton of effort to get. Travel nursing & big 4 accounting come to mind as attainable 4 year degrees for most of the population.

Some people don’t want to chase the $$$’s but that doesn’t mean it’s not an attainable option.

"some people"

Presumably the median person isn't a lazy bum and would like the 40% pay raise from just being a regular nurse (without any travel, decent working conditions and ironclad employment security) would earn them. I don't think this is as attainable as you think. The median salary is probably what it is for a reason.

One component of this is that US households are highly degenerate. We have insane levels of single parenting, and old-age divorcees relative to Europe, which does a lot for the median household income. For example, if you restrict yourself to households of married parents with children, the median jumps from $70k to $100k. We also have huge underclass which pulls the median down substantially.

Well yeah, travel nursing is what it sounds like- plenty of people are willing to take a lower but still perfectly respectable salary in exchange for not living on the road.

Just saw a post on Reddit about a bartender at a dive bar in Seattle making $65/hour (mostly tips) and I believe him. Assuming he can pull 30 hours/week, this would put him around 95th percentile of French workers and with fewer hours worked even.

Money really does grow on trees here on the West Coast. Business minded? You can charge $200 for 90 minutes of "mobile detailing" which basically means vacuuming and washing someone's car. Get 20 appointments per week and that's 200k a year, which is nearly 1 percenter wages in France.

making $65/hour (mostly tips)

There's the rub, though: it's dependent on tipping culture. If you're making up someone's wages by tipping however much percentage, then you're not really getting the 'cheap price' for drinks, meals, whatever.

I don't know if people are starting to resent it, or the gradual upward creep (it was 15%, now it's 20% or whatever next) of expected acceptable tips. I do think if people are finding that discretionary spending has to be tightened, they're not going to tip as well or maybe even at all.

But it's different over here; tips are a voluntary thing, not expected to be priced in as part of your going out. Although a lot of places are starting to include "service charges" which again, you're never sure if they do share that with the staff or the owners just keep it as profit.

Remember the injunction against the Biden Administration working with social media companies to censor dissenting views? The conservative Fifth Circuit has stayed it. As predicted, too sweeping for conservatives.

As predicted, too sweeping for conservatives.

But this isn't even that, is it? According to your link, it is a "temporary hold on an issue of great importance until a panel of the court can consider the motion for a stay on the merits." So, they haven't yet considered the merits of the injunction, nor its scope, have they?

Well they must have considered something. What are the standards for temporary holds anyway?

There is a 2022 article on the subject here


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