Comment by testing22321
11 days ago
It can’t work in the US, because it’s not a society that works together for the collective good, or to raise everyone’s quality of life.
It’s a bunch of individuals in a dog eat dog situation who happen to live nearby.
I was just thinking about this, this morning.
In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Asian nations, on the other hand, have been very crowded, for a very long time.
This has resulted in a much more interdependent mindset.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There's really no nation on Earth that is as good at "ganging up" on a problem, as Japan. Korea and China are catching up quick, though. The US is very good at manufacturing footguns. We don't tend to play well with others.
It really is hard for exceptional people to make their way, in Japanese society, though. They have a saying "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."
Grain culture vs rice culture.
Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.
That's an interesting theory. Makes just as much sense as mine.
It’s really hard to be empirical, in these types of things.
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>In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient. This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.
I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1nbrov9/australi...
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I don’t know.
Most Aussies I’ve known are quite independent.
I really like them; maybe because we share so many traits.
Also, the US was where the British sent their convicts, until we had a big prison riot.
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Australia also has many issues the US had. Car dependence. They also don't have high speed rail despite their cities being near perfect for it.
Also in Australia the waste majority of the population arrived much later and most were always attached to coastal cities. These cities were dominated by British aristocrat early on and later the British labor movement and reflects the culture of London. Australia politically was a part of Britain in many ways for 100s of years after the US had gone its own way.
The same is true to a lesser degree for the North East Coast in the US, arguably it works more like Britain/Australia but the South and everything West is quite different.
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I think this is not a smart read of the situation. The US has built a tremendous amount of rail and other transit (eg NYC subway) back when it was an even more individualistic society than today.
In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.
You could consider other causes.
Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."
>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.
>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not...
I didn't realize the link but I agree with the decline in trust.
One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.
In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.
Most all of that old rail was done by private companies seeking to make a profit. Just like Japan. Look at nyc subway building rates after it was publicly owned. Almost zero expansion. Contractions even.
I agree w that and disagree what the person's I replied to dumb premise.
Same in The Netherlands. There are companies that buy plots of lands near existing rail just to massively screw over the government if they ever want to expend rail. Double digit million euro deals over small patches of land.