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An entertaining, informative read, and I agree with 60+% of it. I'm still going to nitpick the stuff that I don't think is correct. Also I read the piece on his

An entertaining, informative read, and I agree with 60+% of it. I'm still going to nitpick the stuff that I don't think is correct. Also I read the piece on his front page via HN last year, about how it's literally impossible to scale a consulting business past a size of 1 employee, and thought- good, entertaining writer but a bit of an exaggerator: I don't believe that overall US tax rates are the same as Western Europe, sorry, especially as he seems to add in every line item that he can find (excise tax, etc.) Aside from the fact that European income tax rates are consistently described as significantly higher- there's a 20-25% VAT to consider, yes? To be fair if he lives in California I can see how it's approaching European rates. I also do agree we get less for what we pay for. The US does have a huge problem with most of the best jobs & human capital being concentrated in a very small number of cities, and I agree that this does contribute to high rent/real estate prices. (And some people are determined to maintain this system because of some handwavey idea that this is a desirable state of affairs). But you can definitely have a quality lifestyle in a tier 2 US city with a professional career, and I'd suggest everyone- immigrant or native- who thinks the Bay Area/LA/NYC/Seattle/Boston/DC are too expensive to move. You don't have to live in an area where the average house price is $1-2 million. Suburbia is dreadful and has been criticized in the US for decades & decades now, but it is definitely not true that the vast majority of Americans live in a suburb. I share his desire for walkable, medium-density cities. The US legal system is also extremely bad/overly punitive, but I philosophically disagree with whatever he's trying to say that judges or prosecutors should have more discretion in the interests of a higher ideal of 'justice'. Way too much to fit into an HN comment, but rule of law societies should be procedural/formal/rigid- when we give government functionaries broad discretion to use their subjective 'judgement', they're just or more likely to abuse it and be unfair, racist, even more punitive, etc. (This is in no way a defense of how over-criminalized the US is, but the solution is to change the laws- not gives judges & prosecutors more arbitrary, discretionary power and hope that they choose to be nicer with it)

abalashov 7y ago
Your critique is appreciated and taken constructively! I also readily concede this wasn’t a quantitatively rigourous research study. I would say that some small amount of exaggeration—as long as it doesn’t amount to material misrepresentation or outright counterfactual statements—is highly necessary for engaging writing, and both that and entertainment in general are key rhetorical devices. Slight exaggeration can put the contours of something in sharper relief when illustrating a broad idea. It’s hard to do good human interest writing while spending half one’s time qualifying statements or labouriously reminding the reader of the empirical proportions of things to other things. A portrait is not a photograph. As the author, it’s not for me to say whether I hit the spot on “entertaining and informative, but a bit of an exaggerator” for everyone, but I can tell you that’s what I was going for in both articles you read. So, thank you — I think? :) In view of the foregoing: 1. I agree that overall US tax burden is lower than Western European tax burden; my intended point wasn’t at all that it’s equal or higher, merely that a) it’s not _so_ much lower, an order of magnitude lower, or anything like that, and more importantly, that b) given what difference does exist, the much larger difference in government services and social safety net does not correspond. I think this point could have been easily lost had I spent time on a more comprehensive of tax rates, or belaboured tirelessly that US tax rates are, in the end, somewhat lower. 2. I don’t think I lavished excessive attention on the living cost structure of major cities. The point was instead to explain to hypothetical immigrants where a lot of Americans’ money goes, no matter where they live, including in most tracts of “Middle America”, “flyover country”, “Omaha”, whatever you want to call it. I live in Augusta, GA myself nowadays (which, for all intents and purposes, approximates a kind of “Omaha”), having lived in Atlanta for ten years and in Athens, GA for a good chunk of my adolescence and adulthood. Much of what I said in the article still applies, I think—the criticism of vacuous suburban layout more so. I don’t know quantitatively whether “most Americans live in a suburb”, but I would readily and decisively say, on the strength of extensive experience living in and travelling around the US my whole life, that “most places in America conform to suburban layout”. They really do. Some Americans seem to want to quibble with the idea that Irving, TX, or Alpharetta, GA, or Bethesda or whatever are “suburban”, but in terms of the critical lens here, they absolutely all are. The places I have been to in the US that don’t conform to the Standard Suburban Layout are exceptionally few—so few that they can be individually enumerated—and the overwhelming preponderance of US “municipalities” and “communities” do. 3. The procedural emphasis of American jurisprudence definitely corrects for a lot of deficits in the venal systems that preceded it, and there are certainly two sides to this argument.
- hash872 7y ago
  Thanks for the response! 2 is my personal hobbyhorse right now, so I was probably overeager to tie something only kinda related back to it (I'm strongly against this idea that all of our technical/financial/cultural elites should live in like 5 cities, and view it as a disastrous national policy). As it relates to the suburbs, honestly, you've probably seen more of the US than I have so you're likely correct. I personally grew up in a rural setting here, so I spent the afternoon thinking about how that relates or doesn't relate to what I guess suburban living is like (we were more isolated but I don't recall feeling lonely, parents would take us over to a friend's house for the day to hang out, etc.) But I was considering the sociology of rural, suburban or urban living, not sure I have any grand proclamations yet

abalashov 7y ago

Your critique is appreciated and taken constructively! I also readily concede this wasn’t a quantitatively rigourous research study. I would say that some small amount of exaggeration—as long as it doesn’t amount to material misrepresentation or outright counterfactual statements—is highly necessary for engaging writing, and both that and entertainment in general are key rhetorical devices. Slight exaggeration can put the contours of something in sharper relief when illustrating a broad idea. It’s hard to do good human interest writing while spending half one’s time qualifying statements or labouriously reminding the reader of the empirical proportions of things to other things. A portrait is not a photograph. As the author, it’s not for me to say whether I hit the spot on “entertaining and informative, but a bit of an exaggerator” for everyone, but I can tell you that’s what I was going for in both articles you read. So, thank you — I think? :) In view of the foregoing: 1. I agree that overall US tax burden is lower than Western European tax burden; my intended point wasn’t at all that it’s equal or higher, merely that a) it’s not _so_ much lower, an order of magnitude lower, or anything like that, and more importantly, that b) given what difference does exist, the much larger difference in government services and social safety net does not correspond. I think this point could have been easily lost had I spent time on a more comprehensive of tax rates, or belaboured tirelessly that US tax rates are, in the end, somewhat lower. 2. I don’t think I lavished excessive attention on the living cost structure of major cities. The point was instead to explain to hypothetical immigrants where a lot of Americans’ money goes, no matter where they live, including in most tracts of “Middle America”, “flyover country”, “Omaha”, whatever you want to call it. I live in Augusta, GA myself nowadays (which, for all intents and purposes, approximates a kind of “Omaha”), having lived in Atlanta for ten years and in Athens, GA for a good chunk of my adolescence and adulthood. Much of what I said in the article still applies, I think—the criticism of vacuous suburban layout more so. I don’t know quantitatively whether “most Americans live in a suburb”, but I would readily and decisively say, on the strength of extensive experience living in and travelling around the US my whole life, that “most places in America conform to suburban layout”. They really do. Some Americans seem to want to quibble with the idea that Irving, TX, or Alpharetta, GA, or Bethesda or whatever are “suburban”, but in terms of the critical lens here, they absolutely all are. The places I have been to in the US that don’t conform to the Standard Suburban Layout are exceptionally few—so few that they can be individually enumerated—and the overwhelming preponderance of US “municipalities” and “communities” do. 3. The procedural emphasis of American jurisprudence definitely corrects for a lot of deficits in the venal systems that preceded it, and there are certainly two sides to this argument.

hash872 7y ago
Thanks for the response! 2 is my personal hobbyhorse right now, so I was probably overeager to tie something only kinda related back to it (I'm strongly against this idea that all of our technical/financial/cultural elites should live in like 5 cities, and view it as a disastrous national policy). As it relates to the suburbs, honestly, you've probably seen more of the US than I have so you're likely correct. I personally grew up in a rural setting here, so I spent the afternoon thinking about how that relates or doesn't relate to what I guess suburban living is like (we were more isolated but I don't recall feeling lonely, parents would take us over to a friend's house for the day to hang out, etc.) But I was considering the sociology of rural, suburban or urban living, not sure I have any grand proclamations yet