This is a amazingly US-centric essay, and sadly, one that lacks much substance (for the type of claims it's making). There wasn't anything to back up the claim,

This is a amazingly US-centric essay, and sadly, one that lacks much substance (for the type of claims it's making). There wasn't anything to back up the claim, except the one example on calendar (which pretty much is NOT culture). Firstly, a quick fact-checking: depends on how you do your survey, English might not be the most used spoken language in the world, and in some cases, not even close. There are somewhere potentially around 1-1.2 billions Mandarin speakers. And if I'm not mistaken, there are around 800-1billions English speakers in the world. I'd also like to note that your main thesis is a hypothesis at best, and definitely not an "important truth". Not yet, as of today anyway. Culture existed for a reason. It was not entirely historical accident that the Eastern and Western culture was different (I believe it's partly due to the farming method at the start of agriculture). With that in mind, it's only possible to have a mono culture if the living situation everywhere on Earth is the same. And until we can actually do terraforming, I don't see it happening. (After terraforming? I'd rather not guess). Remember the picture of the worldmap that note half of the world is living in a circle [0]? Even something as simple as most of South-East Asia living in cities would make a drastic different culture than sub-urban America. I've been thinking about culture and social norms, my conclusion was that they exist as a way to make dealing with other human easier: we human if left alone all have different preferences in too many things. And if as a group, everyone has to guess how everyone else want things to be done, it just take too much effort. That's also why I think when the group is small enough, or if it's a 1-on-1 situation, social norms don't mean much. Since human ourselves is extremely unlikely to suddenly become homogeneous (5000 years from now, if we a group of human randomly, half of them will probably still put the toilet paper roll differently than the other half), it's more likely that there will be even more culture than the past, not less. If once culture were limited by physical distance, that won't be an issue in the future. It's more likely than not I'm similar to thinking and belief of other HN-ers than my fellow countrymen - and likewise for other HN-ers. Finally, efficiency isn't the only goal to be optimized for human/ society. I'm not even sure if that's the main goal or not. Likewise for happiness - we're not all utilitarian, are we? [0]: http://io9.com/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-population-lives-inside-t-493103044 http://io9.com/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-population-lives...