7 ms·

Look, I'm all for attacking American exceptionalism, it's a delusion I've personally been trying to shake for my entire adult life. I just have issues with thi

by hx8 3y ago

Look, I'm all for attacking American exceptionalism, it's a delusion I've personally been trying to shake for my entire adult life. I just have issues with this particular study * The metric is PPP Per worked hour. I don't think PPP is a great measurement of productivity. There are many factors that impact PPP that have nothing to do with productivity. * In the US we work more hours. We defiantly work so many hours that we are past the diminishing returns of peak productivity hours. Here on HN we sometimes debate if our workers overall productivity would increase if we lowered the amount of working hours. * Growth is a weird factor in economies. It's easy to grow when you aren't at the top. Smaller economies can reach 8% growth by importing techniques and technology from more advanced economies. The most advanced economies usually grow at about 2% because they have to invent the new stuff to be more productive. * The US' population is much more diverse than European countries. Our geographic, cultural, and ethic diversity creates unique challenges and not all of our boats are rising equally. I think it's likely we are leaving a subsection of our population behind economically and this is showing up in the population numbers. Of course this is a serious problem, but it doesn't necessarily indicate the median US worker should be worried about a European taking their job.

talideon 3y ago
> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries. People in the US keep saying this, but it's never been clear what the basis of it is. I've rarely if ever gotten anyone to get beyond saying that Europe of full of old, well-established nation states, but that's basically assuming things are the same here as they were in the 1950s. Would you care to expand on this?
- chaostheory 3y ago
  In short, immigration has been a big part of the US since it was born while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. Sadly, I don’t feel a large portion of the European population realizes this given all of the backlash. Tbf most people in the US and Canada don’t realize that the age depopulation bomb is happening either or they would also be more open to immigration.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    > while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. This is plainly wrong. There were always migration waves within Europe depending on conditions and political changes. Borders that you cannot cross are a very recent invention, and even since then there have been waves out of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece to name a few. Even if you somehow consider the EU as a single country, there was significant immigration after WWII, during the reconstruction. That’s when you got the Gasterbeiter in Germany, the Windrush generation in the UK, or a lot of African immigration to France (also resulting from the war of Algeria and decolonisation). Immigration is not a new thing anywhere.
    - chaostheory 3y ago
      That still doesn’t compare to the sheer size and scale of immigration to the US where immigration started at the very beginning in the 18th century, and not just in the modern era. Immigration controls were also just as terrible as Europe in prior decades in the US, and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism and assimilation. Looking at the data, it looks like the EU didn’t even really start ramping things up until around 2010. I’m not even sure the EU can even beat Canada’s rate of immigration. Your populations are still largely homogeneous
      - dieortin 3y ago
        > and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism And yet you’re still far behind?
        chaostheory 3y ago
        Not on racism. We’re more or less even if we’re being honest. We’re just not hypocritical about it. we also clearly do a much better job with assimilation.
- smugma 3y ago
  https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222 About half of Americans (59%) are not white and it’s still becoming more diverse. Quick Google search shows Italy to be 92% white, Sweden 86% (80% Swedish!), France 85%, and England 82%.
  - PabloRobles 3y ago
    Diversity goes beyond skin color.
    - throwawayyy9237 3y ago
      This is an important point. Take a look at Switzerland with four different official languages (five if you include English for many official settings), something not found in the US.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      I bet that sounded good in your head, but if your country is +80% people who have lived there for generations you are lacking in diversity.
      - kergonath 3y ago
        There is no need to be condescending. Plenty of visibly white people living in a given European country are immigrants. There are flows of people within the EU as well, it’s a big place with a lot of different countries. Quantifying cultural differences is a bit of a fool’s game, but to me it’s not obvious that e.g. Poles or Hungarians are much closer to Spaniards than Moroccans are to the French. Skin colour is just an indication of actual diversity, which includes many other factors.
        badpun 3y ago
        Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards share a thousand-long common history of being part of Christian Europe, under Roman Christianity. That was the leading and unifying cultural force in Europe up until the XX century (with common philosophy, Latin as the lingua franca, obviously with shared religious beliefs etc.). Moroccans and the French don't have anything that ties them that strongly.
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  I agree with your diversity point. As Americans, we don't realize how diverse some other places are. Places in Europe. Places like southern africa and Brazil. I know it's just anecdata but when I first started traveling when I was younger, I lived in Europe for a bit. I can tell you I definitely thought there were nations that were as diverse, (if not more diverse than), the US. France, for instance, is extremely diverse. Not everyone white is Christian. Maybe because of old colonies? I don't know? Not sure. But the place was so diverse that it was striking to a young American from the upper midwest. I've come over time to realize that our diversity in non-normative, but nowhere even close to unique. There are more diverse places out there.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    Diverse in comparison to the upper Midwest is a very low bar. France is a monoculture.
    - bilbo0s 3y ago
      If you lived in France, you would know how off target that comment is. The entire cultural issue in France is that so many of the people are not living as a monoculture. Maybe many Americans aren't appreciative of the subtle differences between a Colombian, a Pole, a Costa Rican, someone who is Jewish, and a Spaniard. But in France, all of these they dump in the same bucket. White. But they will all live in France inside of materially different cultural contexts within their homes and communities. Just like the US. Only difference is they are counted as white in France. In the US, the Colombian, the Costa Rican, and the Spaniard are "other" so to speak.
      - c0pium 3y ago
        I did, for years. This is the type of viewpoint I would expect from someone who has never lived in an actually diverse country.
- c0pium 3y ago
  Western Europe is about 85% white. The US is about 60% white. It’s not even close.
  - diggan 3y ago
    I think diversity is much more than just the color of someone's skin. People from Sweden and Spain are very different even if both would be considered white, and if you have a 25%/25%/25%/25% group of Swedes/Spanish/Ukrainian/Icelandic, I'd still consider the group diverse even though all of them would probably be called "white".
    - c0pium 3y ago
      That’s a pointless argument, by that metric everywhere is infinitely diverse.
      - diggan 3y ago
        Huh? Would you consider both Iceland and Spain as infinitely diverse and on the same level of diverseness?
      - badpun 3y ago
        Poland is literally 95%+ ethnic Poles (many of whom have their ancestral roots outside of Poland, but that was centuries ago - they consider themselves Poles now). It's not diverse at all, not "infinitely diverse".
      - taway1237 3y ago
        Not everywhere, but certainly Europe is. I think you're focusing too much on the ethnicity and ignore the really important things like cultural and thought diversity.
deelly 3y ago
> I don't think PPP is a great measurement of productivity. Of course there is a fluctuations, but I don't think that statistical value (per country) is meaningless. > In the US we work more hours. And this is an issue of this particular study because... ? > Growth is a weird factor in economies. It's easy to grow when you aren't at the top. Are you really sure? Does poor people or poor countries tend to grow significantly faster than developed one? > The US' population is much more diverse than European countries. Citation needed.
angra_mainyu 3y ago
> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries Having lived in both continents I can tell you this is absolutely not true, particularly in Western Europe. Large Western European cities/capitals are usually a huge melting pot of locals, foreign Europeans, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Easterners, Central Americans, South Americans, South Asians and East Asians. Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority, highlighting how multicultural Europe can be. Go to some of the largest German cities and you'll feel like you're at a UN meeting. > I think it's likely we are leaving a subsection of our population behind economically and this is showing up in the population numbers. Well, this is unfortunately a human problem and I'm not entirely sure if there's a solution or if it could be mitigated. I like UBI as a concept and I do think it would be enormously beneficial for humanity as a whole, but I'm not sure if it's feasible.
- detritus 3y ago
  > Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority Citation, if you are able? For sure London has a majority of people who are not 'White English', but I'd be very surprised to learn that 'White Everyone' is a minority here.
  - angra_mainyu 3y ago
    You can google "X white minority", I recall reading some papers on it when I was going down an immigrant assimilation research rabbit hole (I'm an immigrant so it's a topic that fascinates me). https://bamproject.eu https://bamproject.eu lists some cities along with data (e.g: Malmo, Amsterdam, etc).
- nojvek 3y ago
  UBI as a concept sounds nice on the surface, but it's second order effects lead to inflation and economy is mostly back to where it was, just with higher prices. It's been played out multiple times as govts hand out stimulus money. UBI is easy - give people money. It solves demand problem, but not the supply problem. I'm a much bigger fan of UBS i.e "Universal basic supply". Every legal citizen gets a minimum of supply for food, shelter, healthcare, education, water, electricity, transport. That requires innovation production and supply chain of goods and services. Humans can't eat dollar notes to survive.
rich_sasha 3y ago
For better or worse, econometrics defines productivity as GDP per hour worked. Then, PPP-adjusted GDP per hr is not much of a leap, and arguably mildly better.

by hx8 3y ago

talideon 3y ago

> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries. People in the US keep saying this, but it's never been clear what the basis of it is. I've rarely if ever gotten anyone to get beyond saying that Europe of full of old, well-established nation states, but that's basically assuming things are the same here as they were in the 1950s. Would you care to expand on this?

chaostheory 3y ago
In short, immigration has been a big part of the US since it was born while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. Sadly, I don’t feel a large portion of the European population realizes this given all of the backlash. Tbf most people in the US and Canada don’t realize that the age depopulation bomb is happening either or they would also be more open to immigration.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. This is plainly wrong. There were always migration waves within Europe depending on conditions and political changes. Borders that you cannot cross are a very recent invention, and even since then there have been waves out of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece to name a few. Even if you somehow consider the EU as a single country, there was significant immigration after WWII, during the reconstruction. That’s when you got the Gasterbeiter in Germany, the Windrush generation in the UK, or a lot of African immigration to France (also resulting from the war of Algeria and decolonisation). Immigration is not a new thing anywhere.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    That still doesn’t compare to the sheer size and scale of immigration to the US where immigration started at the very beginning in the 18th century, and not just in the modern era. Immigration controls were also just as terrible as Europe in prior decades in the US, and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism and assimilation. Looking at the data, it looks like the EU didn’t even really start ramping things up until around 2010. I’m not even sure the EU can even beat Canada’s rate of immigration. Your populations are still largely homogeneous
    - dieortin 3y ago
      > and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism And yet you’re still far behind?
      - chaostheory 3y ago
        Not on racism. We’re more or less even if we’re being honest. We’re just not hypocritical about it. we also clearly do a much better job with assimilation.
smugma 3y ago
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222 About half of Americans (59%) are not white and it’s still becoming more diverse. Quick Google search shows Italy to be 92% white, Sweden 86% (80% Swedish!), France 85%, and England 82%.
- PabloRobles 3y ago
  Diversity goes beyond skin color.
  - throwawayyy9237 3y ago
    This is an important point. Take a look at Switzerland with four different official languages (five if you include English for many official settings), something not found in the US.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    I bet that sounded good in your head, but if your country is +80% people who have lived there for generations you are lacking in diversity.
    - kergonath 3y ago
      There is no need to be condescending. Plenty of visibly white people living in a given European country are immigrants. There are flows of people within the EU as well, it’s a big place with a lot of different countries. Quantifying cultural differences is a bit of a fool’s game, but to me it’s not obvious that e.g. Poles or Hungarians are much closer to Spaniards than Moroccans are to the French. Skin colour is just an indication of actual diversity, which includes many other factors.
      - badpun 3y ago
        Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards share a thousand-long common history of being part of Christian Europe, under Roman Christianity. That was the leading and unifying cultural force in Europe up until the XX century (with common philosophy, Latin as the lingua franca, obviously with shared religious beliefs etc.). Moroccans and the French don't have anything that ties them that strongly.
bilbo0s 3y ago
I agree with your diversity point. As Americans, we don't realize how diverse some other places are. Places in Europe. Places like southern africa and Brazil. I know it's just anecdata but when I first started traveling when I was younger, I lived in Europe for a bit. I can tell you I definitely thought there were nations that were as diverse, (if not more diverse than), the US. France, for instance, is extremely diverse. Not everyone white is Christian. Maybe because of old colonies? I don't know? Not sure. But the place was so diverse that it was striking to a young American from the upper midwest. I've come over time to realize that our diversity in non-normative, but nowhere even close to unique. There are more diverse places out there.
- c0pium 3y ago
  Diverse in comparison to the upper Midwest is a very low bar. France is a monoculture.
  - bilbo0s 3y ago
    If you lived in France, you would know how off target that comment is. The entire cultural issue in France is that so many of the people are not living as a monoculture. Maybe many Americans aren't appreciative of the subtle differences between a Colombian, a Pole, a Costa Rican, someone who is Jewish, and a Spaniard. But in France, all of these they dump in the same bucket. White. But they will all live in France inside of materially different cultural contexts within their homes and communities. Just like the US. Only difference is they are counted as white in France. In the US, the Colombian, the Costa Rican, and the Spaniard are "other" so to speak.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      I did, for years. This is the type of viewpoint I would expect from someone who has never lived in an actually diverse country.
c0pium 3y ago
Western Europe is about 85% white. The US is about 60% white. It’s not even close.
- diggan 3y ago
  I think diversity is much more than just the color of someone's skin. People from Sweden and Spain are very different even if both would be considered white, and if you have a 25%/25%/25%/25% group of Swedes/Spanish/Ukrainian/Icelandic, I'd still consider the group diverse even though all of them would probably be called "white".
  - c0pium 3y ago
    That’s a pointless argument, by that metric everywhere is infinitely diverse.
    - diggan 3y ago
      Huh? Would you consider both Iceland and Spain as infinitely diverse and on the same level of diverseness?
    - badpun 3y ago
      Poland is literally 95%+ ethnic Poles (many of whom have their ancestral roots outside of Poland, but that was centuries ago - they consider themselves Poles now). It's not diverse at all, not "infinitely diverse".
    - taway1237 3y ago
      Not everywhere, but certainly Europe is. I think you're focusing too much on the ethnicity and ignore the really important things like cultural and thought diversity.

deelly 3y ago

> I don't think PPP is a great measurement of productivity. Of course there is a fluctuations, but I don't think that statistical value (per country) is meaningless. > In the US we work more hours. And this is an issue of this particular study because... ? > Growth is a weird factor in economies. It's easy to grow when you aren't at the top. Are you really sure? Does poor people or poor countries tend to grow significantly faster than developed one? > The US' population is much more diverse than European countries. Citation needed.

angra_mainyu 3y ago

> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries Having lived in both continents I can tell you this is absolutely not true, particularly in Western Europe. Large Western European cities/capitals are usually a huge melting pot of locals, foreign Europeans, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Easterners, Central Americans, South Americans, South Asians and East Asians. Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority, highlighting how multicultural Europe can be. Go to some of the largest German cities and you'll feel like you're at a UN meeting. > I think it's likely we are leaving a subsection of our population behind economically and this is showing up in the population numbers. Well, this is unfortunately a human problem and I'm not entirely sure if there's a solution or if it could be mitigated. I like UBI as a concept and I do think it would be enormously beneficial for humanity as a whole, but I'm not sure if it's feasible.

detritus 3y ago
> Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority Citation, if you are able? For sure London has a majority of people who are not 'White English', but I'd be very surprised to learn that 'White Everyone' is a minority here.
- angra_mainyu 3y ago
  You can google "X white minority", I recall reading some papers on it when I was going down an immigrant assimilation research rabbit hole (I'm an immigrant so it's a topic that fascinates me). https://bamproject.eu https://bamproject.eu lists some cities along with data (e.g: Malmo, Amsterdam, etc).
nojvek 3y ago
UBI as a concept sounds nice on the surface, but it's second order effects lead to inflation and economy is mostly back to where it was, just with higher prices. It's been played out multiple times as govts hand out stimulus money. UBI is easy - give people money. It solves demand problem, but not the supply problem. I'm a much bigger fan of UBS i.e "Universal basic supply". Every legal citizen gets a minimum of supply for food, shelter, healthcare, education, water, electricity, transport. That requires innovation production and supply chain of goods and services. Humans can't eat dollar notes to survive.

rich_sasha 3y ago

For better or worse, econometrics defines productivity as GDP per hour worked. Then, PPP-adjusted GDP per hr is not much of a leap, and arguably mildly better.