Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

It's more than just money. To me, the money is a symptom of the real issue.

The real issue for me was the culture that exists in my birthplace. It just isn't welcoming to nerds or rich people. It doesn't lend itself to ever becoming developed.

When I compare and contrast to the New World: I find a much more welcoming culture that encourages personal progress. And not only are nerds welcome, but all sorts of productive folk. It's absolutely no surprise to me that the US is outperforming the rest of the world economically to a comical degree.

It's not only fact that in Western Europe I could earn a lot more. But also that I don't have to deal with massive corruption. I don't have to deal with feeling I have to be constantly on guard. I don't have to deal with failing education. I don't have to hide who I am in fear of being ostracized by society. (even if for that point we made a lot of progress - but still, why wait endlessly while I can get it right away somewhere else?)

That being said, I wouldn't use the US as some bastion of progress. Technically, we haven't progressed much since the 70s? 80s? outside of GDP going up, but that's just a number on a chart. Most of us today could go back to the 70s and live not much different than now (compared to the any earlier decade). It's mostly a side effect of being the world's reserve currency.

There is an insane wealth gap. People always seem to be stressed. There is plenty of food, but quality isn’t great. We don’t even need to start on healthcare and housing and college tuition. Then there is gun violence. Women’s rights are going away slowly too.

Sure, developing countries have lots of problems too. I suppose each person has to decide what kind of problems they are ok dealing with?

Sad part is - most of these problems are man made. Even sadder is that just a few dozen people seem to be the cause for most problems

Is it that they don't agree that "the New World [...is...] much more welcoming [...of...] all sorts of productive folk"?

Your unexamined prior is that this is a bad and unsustainable thing. It was always thus.

> People always seem to be stressed.

They really aren't. Americans are extremely happy and relaxed compared to where I'm from.

> We don’t even need to start on healthcare and housing and college tuition.

I think we do. Healthcare in the US has more red tape and expense than would be optimal, but the actual outcomes are still good. Keep in mind some caveats:

- US healthcare spend drives a ton of medical innovation that then benefits the rest of the world

- North America is going through a Fentanyl crisis that's cutting life expectancies

> Then there is gun violence. Women’s rights are going away slowly too.

This is a problem but not with the economy.

What problems do you think people in the United States have that people in Mexico don't? Of this list you gave, most of them seem to apply to people in Mexico.

Relative wealth gap in developing countries dwarfs that of the developed ones.

Source: Personal observation.

Centuries prior they had a global slave trade going on. The wealth of the West is build on colonialism.

Culture just reflects the underlying material conditions that people live in. There is nothing inherently superior about Western culture. Wealth is cumulative and first mover advantages are strong. And if anyone threatens the current hegemony, there is always the use of force.

But yes, you are right there has been a stagnation since the 80s and things are slowly changing ins favor of countries like China and India.

There is a violent crime problem in specific neighborhoods of specific cities, largely tied to gangs and the drug trade. But there is zero empirical data to suggest that it is more of a nationwide problem than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

The majority of gun deaths in this country (60-80 percent jurisdiction-dependent) are people committing suicide, often middle-aged men. Beyond that, the average gun murder is a young man with a criminal record killing another young man with a criminal record using an illegally-possessed handgun.

I'm sure you can think of a culture or policy, which you consider backwards, and counterproductive. Well, there you go.

Surely you can conceive of a more complex world than that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From General Smedley Butler, most decorated marine at the time of his death and the only marine with two medals of honor:

> I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Factories and farming took a huge hit in 1970's and 1980's due to the rise of globalization (and shift from decades of hot wars to a cooled off one) and a trade war with Japan.

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

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

In absolute terms though just look at pictures of e.g. rural Russia va Moscow.

tl;dr as of 2021 Gini coefficents, Brazil is the worst and Japan is best large nation... (there's tons of nuance missing here, but that's the basics)

I'm not necessarily intending to contradict this outright, but after having just spent a summer reading through the history of the collectivist cultures in Russia/China during the last century, all I could think of is how lucky I was not to be born into that.

So, sure, nothing "inherently" superior, but certainly comparatively superior, in my opinion.

I don't see how this invalidates the idea that the US culture is better at creating and running a great economy: Every country out there has always defended its interests in more or less muscular ways. Exactly the way you describe for the US, and much worse as well. Where are they now?

There's a faction of HN commenters who are somewhat reflexively anti-American, anti-capitalist, or both. In my experience they're also censorious by nature, and like to downvote and even flag comments which are perfectly polite, and simply express opinions they don't agree with. I consider the latter specifically to be very bad form, I vouch for comments which fit that profile almost daily now.

This has been exacerbated by the recent election, which has, understandably, upset people.

Slaves built the irrigation systems that made rice farming possible in the south. (People forget that the other huge slavery cash crop was rice).

Without the engineering and agricultural knowledge of slaves, many of the farms would have failed (and many did fail early on until the knowledge was spread around to plantation owners).

The image of slaves being from nomadic hunter gatherer tribes is a false narrative put into place by racists centuries ago.

> Surely you can conceive of a more complex world than that?

The US's short history is absurdly violent, but it also includes the US getting some of the best minds from basically all over the world to move here and build up a century's worth of IP.

Just the iPhone alone acts as a counterpoint. The world has changed massively in fifty years because of American inventions made possible by our developed economy

With all due respect I have no idea what you're talking about

Based on the data, a lower/middle class person born in PRC almost certainly has better prospects of upward mobility and avoiding poverty.

Dang has said that downvoting for disagreement is allowed. Whether this is a good practice or not is probably a personal opinion. I don’t know how you would even correct for this if you wanted to. If someone is making normative statements especially, and you disagree, a downvote seems entirely appropriate?

Frankly, I'm astonished that you aren't aware of this.

However, I'm simply pointing out that the collectivist culture of these countries in the 20th century was responsible for killing vast swathes of their own populations. My question was, of the documented horrors influenced by Western culture, which do you see as being comparative to this unfathomable death toll?

There's been 50 years of technological innovation since then. The entire fabric of society has been changed by it and has affected how we communicate and do business.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

This argument is a straw man and irrelevant. Everyone knows Africa is a huge continent and the civilizations on the coast that sold slaves captured them from a variety of other cultures more inland. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of their levels of development starting in 1500 until the 19th century. You aren't implying that before the Atlantic slave trade, Africa was a monolithic culture, would you? No, that would be absurdly ignorant

> US's short history is absurdly violent,

Compared to what? The Great Leap Forward? The reign of Alexander the Great? The last twenty years of Costa Rican history?

Bud I think you just don't like the US and maybe that's a personal problem.

How about all the mass shootings that we read about, happening every few weeks or even more frequently, sometimes back-to-back, on average, in the US? That's not violent crime? Of course it is.

>a fraction of what it was 30 years ago

And statistics don't paint the full picture, not by a long chalk, unless all you are is a bean counter. What about the personal and family and friends' trauma of all the victims and their circles? We can dismiss that as negligible, right? /s

Check these:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...

There were so many that I got tired of scrolling.

JFC.

It's built on rule of law, stability, low corruption, and good governance. Most countries lack these factors, making them stay poor.

Signed: Someone from a poor, developing country (Nigeria).

Don't forget that US has some of the most prime agricultural land in the world, which they only got for the small price of genociding vastly less developed Native American tribes (with disease doing a large chunk of the work)

Given the violent European history several centuries prior, it would be absolutely unfathomable to just come across so much land with so little competition as the US colonies did.

This resource richness (and isolation via Atlantic) is very much responsible for US wealth today, perhaps as much as the brain drain of the 20th century, if not more.

Houses are much more comfortable, energy efficient, and larger. Air-conditioned in summer, heated to a reasonable temp in winter.

Healthcare while it has become unaffordable has greatly improved.

Car reliability/safety has improved insanely. The average car now has A/C unlike the 70s.

Compute power. The average person has the knowledge of the ENTIRE world at their fingertips. But totally no progress has been made???

We have weather satellites to prepare for meteorological disasters/storms saving so many lives.

We can talk to family whenever we want, not a 5 minute conversation the first Sunday of the month.

We have vastly more free time. My family made most of their close in the 1970s. Washed by hand. Hang out to dry. Now we have a washer and dryer, a dishwasher, a microwave, an air cooker, all freeing up time to do other things.

Your comment is like the people that watch American movies white eating pop-corn, wear blue jeans and sneakers, and say 'America doesn't have a culture'.

To ascribe America's economic and technological success to the slaves is not an argument that will convince anyone, or win your side any votes.

> The US's short history is absurdly violent,

Are you sure? Have you read much history from the formative years in other countries?

> but it also includes the US getting some of the best minds from basically all over the world to move here and build up a century's worth of IP.

They moved to the US for a reason. It is a shining beacon for nerds who would like to be rich.

And so on. What kind/level of issues to put up with - I suppose that varies from person to person

There's a difference between downvoting something substantively wrong, fatuous and/or cantankerous, bad faith, and so on, and simply doing so to punish the sort of person one doesn't like for speaking their mind. That difference is subjective, but I know it when I see it. There's no need to police this, or any way to really, but I think rather poorly of such behavior and would be gratified if they would knock it off.

Like, as postliberals the CCP and Russia do not like the West not because they were once dominant empires that conquered the world, in fact they respect that. They hate the West because of their belief in democracy, in diversity, in individualism and the belief in human rights.

According to [0] there was a population decline adding up to 4 million native deaths (from all causes, including hunger and disease) over the past half a millennium.

Russia and China killed 5-10 million of their own people just in the past century. They had cannibal banquets where they quite literally ate the rich in public ceremonies. China, right now, has more than a million Muslims in prison camps, churning out gadgets for the communist economic machine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th...

If the issue is that you hate the United States, you'll always find something to criticize, and I think we'll never find common ground.

I grew up surrounded by many anti-American ideas. But when I tried to examine that place from a neutral point of view, in the proper context, after traveling to and living in many places, I found it impossible not to become a raving fan.

This isn't some topic of debate. There is well documented historical proof of slaves designing and then building the rice field levees!

> To ascribe America's economic and technological success to the slaves is not an argument that will convince anyone, or win your side any votes.

The early economic success of the country was built off of slavery. That isn't something that seemingly needs discussion. The southern part of the US was a large economic power, even by European standards of the time.

> Are you sure? Have you read much history from the formative years in other countries?

I have, and in general other countries had a lot longer to perfect being assholes. The British empire did many horrible, horrible, things, but they took awhile to work up to it, it wasn't part of their initial founding.

Leopold II was in charge of an existing kingdom when he went on a quest to be one of the biggest assholes in history.

France is complicated, because their revolutions were so frequent for awhile, and a lot of the blood shed was French.

Meanwhile in America we got:

1. Mass murder of the natives 2. Inventing an entire new, more horrific type of slavery 3. Manifest destiny, with more genocide 4. Building the Transcontinental Railroad, with Not-Technically-Slavery 5. Massive racism against the people who built the Transcontinental Railroad

> They moved to the US for a reason. It is a shining beacon for nerds who would like to be rich.

Correct, the late 1800s and then the 20th century were a major turning point. Loosely enforced IP laws allowed Hollywood to thrive (super interesting history!), and poor environmental laws and a well educated workforce allowed the initial version of silicon valley to come about (look up why it is called silicon valley, and why it is also a superfund cleanup site!).

The US being slightly-less-racist against some people helped, and the less racist we were, and the more people we invited in from around the world, the better things got.

IMHO the best move the US Government could make for the economy is to offer the top 1% of graduates from the top universities in each major country an automatic VISA and a guaranteed path to citizenship.

The 2nd best thing the US Government could do for the economy is enforce Japanese style zoning laws on all major cities so people can actually afford to live in major metros again.

Should we re-enact Prohibition, given that there are orders of magnitude more people who've been victimized by alcohol than firearms? No, that's absurd. You regulate the problem through hard, data-driven analysis, not waving the bloody shirt. Be that violent crime or addiction.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

I didn’t mention flagging, which I reserve for guidelines violations.

I can't imagine more of a hell than being forced to live a life wrapped up in bubble wrap so someone else is convinced I'm "safe."

I'm not trying to make excuses for the crimes against humanity committed in China by the colonial powers. But we need to look deeper into the root causes of historical events.

I don’t think it’s accurate to pin imperialism as a uniquely Western thing.

You'd be wrong. What I have done is read my history books, and visited historical sites all around the US and abroad.

Saying "shit was violent" isn't saying I hate this country. Saying "we fucked up and we shouldn't do that crap again" is how we improve as a people.

> This argument is a straw man and irrelevant. Everyone knows Africa is a huge continent and the civilizations on the coast that sold slaves captured them from a variety of other cultures more inland.

Go visit some southern plantations. Learn how the plantations were built.

Farming isn't just physical labor. There is engineering involved. Designing flood levees to water crops was a technology that the US plantation owners acquired from slaves who in many cases designed and built the levees used on plantations.

> Compared to what? The Great Leap Forward? The reign of Alexander the Great? The last twenty years of Costa Rican history?

Those countries do not have a short history. The US has a very short history and it has involved a lot of violence in rapid succession.

Trying to say that our success as a nation is purely because of Hard Work, Brains, and Grit, is a false narrative that will lead to our downfall if we do not actually understand why we succeeded.

Our economic success from the transcontinental railroad is because we imported near slave labor to built it, at a high cost of human lives, and then we attempted to kick many of the surviving immigrants out. That is the simple truth about the largest successful rail project in US history, and understanding how labor costs impact nationwide infrastructure build-outs is, IMHO, rather important.

The success of Hollywood is because patent laws were widely ignored on the west coast, which allowed technology to progress faster. Our failure to understand how too strict of IP enforcement stifles growth is why a lot of iterative improvements come out of China now, they can iterate faster w/o waiting for patents to expire.

Our success in science and technology is because we have been willing to allow the best minds in from all around the world by ensuring a higher quality of life in the US compared to other places. But we've taken that for granted for too long, and allowed that qualify of life to slip while other countries have caught up.

Jumping up and down shouting "we're the best!" is inane, especially while the rest of the world isn't just standing still.

But I don't think you can mention the US in the same breath as imperial Belgium. Leopold was surely one of the low points of our species. But the Brits, for all the bad things they did - including in my native country - were the least bad empire up to that point, and forcibly ended slavery.

My broader point is that certain cultural values lend themselves massively to economic and technological development. European nations got these values by random chance, and then used this economic edge to then colonize the world. How else could tiny Belgium utterly subjugate the Congo?

I personally try not to do this too much (unless something is egregiously, probably wrong), but it's a thing that I think we should just accept as a norm.

Though, my reason - or rather: my litmus test, is much simpler.

For me, it all comes down to drinkable / potable tap water. That's it. That's all I care.

As an example, I'm fine downvoting an opinion that I find morally gross or anti-social, even though others (such as the person commenting) might think it's fine, and even agree with it.

True

> The fact is that there will always be a locus of concentrated development

Also true

> and it's not because it has a special culture.

I don't think this is always true. Why can't there be cultures that are more likely to serve as a locus of fast development? Sure, there are geographic and climatic factors, but there are also cultural factors.

For all of its faults, it's great that the USA continues to be the country where the best minds from all over the world still want to move. It gives me hope for the future. Those immigrants are typically glad to be here and prefer to focus on building a better life instead of navel gazing recriminations over historical events.

Kinda like the rain forest. It's the global rain patterns that cause them. It's not that the rain forests have a special rain attracting power.

If anything, slavery was probably was a weight around the US's neck, the legacy of which we're still dealing with today.

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

That's the issue, I'm not viewing this through a moral lens. I know you believe a priori the West is essentially Good and communism is essentially Bad, because that is what we are taught in school. Then it becomes easy to find evidence that fits your conclusion, there is literally a government-backed industry manufacturing such "evidence" (USG has earmarked something like $3B purely for funding anti-China propaganda). There's no point trying to reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.

I think both systems have pros/cons, and the proof is in the pudding. China evolved out of a difficult colonial period and civil war to become world leader in many technologies.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

If you are from the US, and feeling defensive about my comment, and/or if you want to treat your people's deaths and crippling as just statistics, it's your call, shrug, and maybe also your death or crippling by gun violence some day, again, statistically, you know.

Development springs from us, it doesn’t appear out of the sky like rain.

Having personally experienced the humans in various places, I’m astonished at how differently people see and engage with the world. The difference in outcome, however, is all too predictable.

I think you're attacking a strawman here, what OP is pointing out for the faults of the West, it is still a preferable choice in comparison to the brutality the Communists performed on on their own people. It's ironic really because the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward very much is a difficult thing to ignore, if at all neccessary given that Asian Tigers that China modeled itself from, in Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan did not have to resort to such policies to achieve their wealth.

You don't want everyone to travel - many people don't have a sense of respect and "light foot" that it takes to travel to foreign places without degrading or damaging them.

It certainly seems to me like its also a strong argument that much of the US's wealth is based on colonialism or colonialism-adjacent policies, no?

> I don't see how this invalidates the idea that the US culture is better at creating and running a great economy

I didn't argue that. If US culture is/was in favor of colonialist antics and colonialism produces wealth for the US, that would actually be an argument in favor of US culture being better at producing a great economy. I would argue that the ends don't justify the means when the means are abusing far poorer neighboring countries.

I also wouldn't argue that colonialism is the only reason the US is wealthy. There are clearly aspects of US culture that are conducive to productivity and innovation that are more or less independent of colonialism.

Goodbye, you aren't worth my time.

> Food has improved dramatically.

Not necessarily. While accessibility is far better, it comes at the cost of having monocultures, mass farming, and heavy importation during off-seasons. This has made, say, the average tomato cheaper and more accessible year-round but substantially worse than the seasonal tomatoes you would have 40 years ago.

> Houses are larger...

But more and more people live in cramped apartments in big cities so that point is moot.

> Healthcare...

And is it more important that a poor 25 year-old young person with their whole productive tax-paying life ahead of them can seek care appropriately Vs the hospitals keeping 80+ year-old fossils alive with their "better healthcare". The only exception is ozempic and the likes but that didn't use to be necessary before cars killed most public spaces.

> Car reliability/safety...

By turning them into huge monstrosities and widening roads, again destroying public spaces and walkability. The only major breakthrough here is lead-free fuel.

> Compute power. The average person has the knowledge of the ENTIRE world at their fingertips. But totally no progress has been made???

I'll give you that one but it's at the cost of turning a computer into an addiction machine. I still think it's a net positive but it isn't so clear cut.

> We have weather satellites

True but now we're have much more extreme weather thanks too climate change.

> We can talk to family whenever we want...

We can but when do we? I keep in touch with family often but it definitely feels less special than how it was even in the 00s.

> We have vastly more free time...

Assuming you have the same sized family and roles. Now's your need both parents in a family to work to make ends meet for the average young person so the freed time has mostly gone to the older generation.

Overall zoomers and gen alpha definitely have it worse than their parents. And this is coming from someone with a middle class background who now gets paid well to program -everyone I know my age feels this way. The main lifestyle change we got recently is cheap travel which is amazing but the basics are definitely harder (and this is why birthrates are down).

My frustration arises from people who say that the US turned Guatemala or wherever into a banana republic, and therefore the West has zero moral worth and capitalism must be overthrown.

Yes, we absolutely mourn those who are still affected by it, and we do what we can to prevent additional deaths.

But the idea that we should not be happy about our progress is absurd.

Tourists might be annoying but scolds, killjoys, and condescending elitists are far worse.

Now, I've concluded that the West is Good and communism is Bad. Nothing a priori about it. My only prior is that I want people to be nice, rich, happy, and free.

And water pressure. It’s a decent proxy for many things.

Out of curiosity, what are the sources for this claim? I'm not disputing at all that communist regimes have committed large-scale evil (often beyond my wildest imagination), but nonetheless I'd like to verify this.

Whereas for China and Russia, it was less than 1%.

That's a big difference.

Thing is, that while what you're saying could be true, from a perspective of a person living in it - I don't care.

> [You] "But C also causes B!"

Whataboutism.

Even if it happens under a communist party, as in China?

The Chinese at some point went around the world during the Ming dynasty, sailing to Africa, etc. Found out that everyone was pretty much uncivilized in terms of technology, etc. and thought there was nothing actually out there. So later on they thought it was simply a waste of government funds to go on such expeditions, especially when everyone seemed to want to reach China instead to conduct in trade rather than the other way around. Therefore the Ming became extremely inward looking, etc. And that carried on into the Qing dynasty. But prior to that in the Song, etc. China was pretty advance. Another issue is that voyages, etc. could not be monetized. Merchants who took risks to explore the world, etc. made 100x more back on their investments, especially after the fall of the Byzantine empire to Ottomans which halted the overland silk road, forcing Europeans to find another route by sea to Asia for items they needed. The Chinese couldn't find such profits at least not in the 14th century.

Obviously this is all very simplistic, and you could easily write 1000s of pages on this topic. But to a large degree today's China is Europe of the past, where they feel they can learn from everywhere, but the West, not so much. Seems as if the two have traded places, where the West is hubristic. Thinking everyone else is pretty much stupid, and uncivilized. Although maybe mentalities of both is starting to shift again.

I, for one, will never vote for making my flights more expensive

For example, say you added a $X / mile flight tax that collected $50 billion dollars in a year. You then take that money and divide it up evenly among all tax payers. Around 200 million people file taxes each year, so that would be a $250 refund to each filer. For people who never fly, that's free money. For people who fly infrequently, they probably break even. People who fly all the time pay a lot more. You reward non-flyers and penalize frequent flyers.

But you're right. We're all selfish. I want you would stop flying because it's bad for the climate but I'm not going to stop because my personal utility from flying is very high.

People live with more square footage than they did in the past. In the 1980s a lot of people still lived in 'Hotel' style places in the city with roommates and the bathroom down the hall shared by the floor.

Keeping fossils alive? Like with your food comment, not seeing a lot of compassion for others. The general wellbeing has been lifted, sorry it's not to your liking.

Monstrosities that keep people alive. Again, huge lack of compassion in your argument. Did you know that incest was reduced in huge part by general availability of automobiles?

I mean I was a latch key kid, zoomers and alpha have it way better than we did. They can at least keep in touch with others while they are locked away at home. Sorry you don't want to connect. I still find it awesome I can call my kids whenever without having to think ahead/plan it out/coordinate, and if that call is missed wait another month.

This entire post sounds like a pitty party and not a rational comparison to reality. I was born in the 70s, live through a lot up until now, things are WAY WAY better. Yes they need to improve even more, but you won't get there with a 'the world is just crap and nothing gets better' attitude, especially when it's just factually incorrect.

Yet there do seem to be some traits that enable more "success" in at least something close to industrial, market-oriented societies. For example having a high-trust or risk-tolerant cultural values seems to have some success correlations.