Social comparison theory is the idea that our satisfaction with what we have isn't an objective measure, but is actually based on what we see other people have. Young people generally seem to have an innate desire to leave their hometowns and seek out what else might be waiting out there for them. When you add in globalization and media influence exposing them to what looks like a "better" life with more things, it's not surprising that they've seen ~9% of young people leave Bhutan.
The other question is, what will happen if Bhutan does increase their financial wealth as well as their happiness? Will they then see a net influx of people through immigration, looking for the lifestyle Bhutan promises? And will those new people be able to maintain the culture Bhutan has cultivated?
It sounds like the concept of Gross National Happiness is a successful one, on its own, but it brings new challenges that couldn't have been forseen originally. That doesn't mean they can't solve them without giving up their core values.
The best people leave the country because the can earn orders of magnitude more money in the developed world. This is why countries like the US keep being so successful while developing countries stay poor.
It is just the rational best decision for a young people to try their luck abroad and earn more money that they could ever dream of in their home country. Why shouldn't they? Idealism? There is nothing wrong with striving for a better life, it is what moves humanity forward.
Offering great and free education will always backfire for developing nations.
The solution is to either keep the population ignorant, hamstringing their education so they are less useful abroad and implementing a strict censorship regime so they don't get "corrupted" by the West or well force them to stay.
We saw that all play out in the Soviet Block. There is a good reason there was a wall.
I think the fairest solution is to NOT make education free but instant offer a deal of having to stay in the country and work for X-years in the profession one has been trained in by the state. Once they get older and settle down they are less likely to leave anyway.
Being a developing country just sucks. There is a reason most never break the cycle of poverty.
It seems to me that the smartest people would be far more motivated to leave a country where they are unable to find other people like themselves to collaborate with.
And they'd be far more likely to come back in future and reinvest their overseas earnings in a country that they felt warmth towards than one that had forced them to play life in hard mode and was actively hostile towards them.
Yes. I've seen it like this in a LinkedIn post:
CFO to CEO: What if we train our people, and they leave?
CEO to CFO: What if we don't train them, and they stay?
That’s what the top end hedge funds do with seven figure starting compensation.
A country can't live off a few expats making it big. It doesn't need investors so much as it needs doctors, good administrators, good managers, good financiers, good builders, good plumbers and so on.
Sure, this requires money, but just coming in and throwing money at a country dominated by idiots won't make anything better, it will just lead to corruption. Idiots in positions of power actively discourage better people coming in even more so than a lack of resources. It's one thing to take a low paying job to hope to improve conditions for your parents and extended family. It's another thing to fight with a boss who has no idea what they're doing but still thinks they're better than you every single day. Plus idiotic regulations from others like him in other places of the administrative state.
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.
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.
Tourists might be annoying but scolds, killjoys, and condescending elitists are far worse.
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.
> [You] "But C also causes B!"
Whataboutism.
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.
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'.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Based on the data, a lower/middle class person born in PRC almost certainly has better prospects of upward mobility and avoiding poverty.
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?
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.
Whereas for China and Russia, it was less than 1%.
That's a big difference.
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."
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.
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.
Even if it happens under a communist party, as in China?
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.
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.
I don’t think it’s accurate to pin imperialism as a uniquely Western thing.
Surely you can conceive of a more complex world than that?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anything, slavery was probably was a weight around the US's neck, the legacy of which we're still dealing with today.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
I'm sure you can think of a culture or policy, which you consider backwards, and counterproductive. Well, there you go.
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.
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
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.
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?)
Thing is, that while what you're saying could be true, from a perspective of a person living in it - I don't care.
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.
And water pressure. It’s a decent proxy for many things.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Relative wealth gap in developing countries dwarfs that of the developed ones.
Source: Personal observation.
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)
In absolute terms though just look at pictures of e.g. rural Russia va Moscow.
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.
And so on. What kind/level of issues to put up with - I suppose that varies from person to person
Is it that they don't agree that "the New World [...is...] much more welcoming [...of...] all sorts of productive folk"?
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
I didn’t mention flagging, which I reserve for guidelines violations.
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.
This isn't necessarily the case, even with brain drain. Remittances (financial transfers from migrants to family and friends at home) can actually represent a large percent of GDP for developing nations, upwards of 10 or 20 percent.
As far as brain drain goes, I don't think there's much point in fighting it. Cities like Singapore and Dubai demonstrate that you can quickly build a city/country people want to live. Why shouldn't Bhutan have to compete with the rest of the world to attract young, talented people? They should! And they can do fine at it, they just have to prioritize it. And from the article, that's exactly what they're doing.
Money is only second or third factor that pushes people abroad. People leave countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh to escape rampant and total corruption, hooliganism, lack of safety and security. Then come better roads, better infra, less traffic, etc.
When you call 911, the police actually come. An ambulance actually arrive. In India, police first find if the perpetrator is from the local ruling party or under a local crime lord. They come only if the answer is negative. Then they push the perpetrator for hefty bribes. If they pay, again, no case. If they don't pay, you are at the mercy of local courts, which will give you justice in, say, 25 years.
In India, there is no basic human decency allotted for you. Only government officials of very high rank, hooligans, political leaders enjoy treatment with respect (like the Mafia).
Nothing to say about horrific roads, horrible hospitals, poor hygiene, and everything else.
And things are worse in Bangladesh, Pakistan.
When we think about going abroad, we are trying to escape these. Money comes later.
Income in the same economic strata in India will give you maid, cook, driver, car, nanny, all- not accessible to you in Europe or the USA.
If someone is not going abroad from India, it's either because they can't or they don't want to leave their aging parents behind.
Since you're forced to stay here, why shouldn't we abuse you? What are you going to do, run away?
I remember in secondary school, my deeply patriotic teacher asked us who wants to emigrate. And she deeply condemned us for it, calling us leeches that stole from the country. It was obligatory education! We didn't even had an option to choose by then. And also, my parents also could say that yes, they paid for it in their taxes.
Ironically, this ends up being one of those things that contribute towards the desire to leave.
the problem here is that you're directly equating earning more money with a "better life"
once you have enough to have your needs met, then earning multiples times that doesn't make your life better; at that point, "better life" is much more impacted by other factors than money
Just look at Musk and his startups - I bet he's very glad to have that 200 billionth dollar, because now he can have the space program he always wanted. This wouldn't have been possible in the third-world country where he grew up.
I assure you South Africa is third world by any measure. The GDP of SA (a large country with tons of resources and a population of 60m) is roughly on par with that of the Toronto metro area (population 7m) or the Phoenix metro (population 5m). It's middle income... and it probably will ~always be.
None of this really matters though - what Musk has done in the US (like it - or him - or not) was only possible in the US.
About your example of living in San Jose, California, USA vs Mexico City: Where would you prefer to live? Where do you think the schools, hospitals, economy, and social safety net (retirement, etc) is better? Sure, the houses may look similar, but San Jose is objectively rich by global standards and Mexico City is middle income.
The term “third world” is a good and very descriptive one.
I dunno, I'm really more bottlenecked by time than by income. >50% of my household income goes to savings, so I could comfortably buy more things, but I'm already backlogged on dealing with the things I've already purchased.
I guess the obvious answer would be to turn some of the money into more free time, but I've already picked all the low-hanging fruit there, so the remaining options are considerably higher effort/cost.
There's a reason people take huge risks to flee to the West, including traveling on unsafe boats, crisscrossing areas controlled by bandits, or crossing the environmentally harsh Darien Gap.
you missed this part
A working class US American probably has a higher standard of living then an upper-class entrepreneur in Bhutan.
There's always emigrating after you make your pile.
If that system breaks down, even for developing countries, it's worrying. For example Canada has a highly educated workforce with mobility, and has hamstrung itself by disincentivising productive investments, instead overvaluing real estate to the point where people entering the workforce now might not see a path to owning even a small condo by their 40s, unless you have a particularly rare and valuable skill, luck, or money from parents, which isn't a high prospect for the circulation of financial prosperity.
So we're just subsidizing U.S growth at this point, and so are many other countries, even though we and many immigrants would (often but not always) rather live here, either because this is where our lives are or this is where the vibes are, which is tough to reconcile if there's next to no economic opportunity inside the country.
This happens on a micro level as well, my home city's highest prospect is basically moving to a different city; people can be highly educated there, but unless you're going back into the academic system and your highest goal is basically getting a mcmansion (but probably not an actual mansion) you're gunna have to go elsewhere. Electricians probably do just fine though, nothing against that, but it's not really a force for innovation.
Source: I am one of those people that could leave but decided to stay.
nonsense; this is how developing nations become developed nations. peolpe seem to forget that Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, HK were all "developing" nations not too long ago
unfortunately developing countries make it impossible for smart people to stay due to corruption and small market/economy
Yes, but there are many things wrong with equating "better" with "more money" without sparing half a thought to introspection.
I don’t see the point of giving out tons of foreign aid when we’re just going to pull the rug out from underneath of them anyway.
My parents are from Sri Lanka the former leaders family filled up the cabinet and ministry positions. They put forward wonderful plans like banning fertilizer imports. I think we need to accept that they're their own worst enemy here
But then we hoover up all the people who could conceivably do the stewardship, perpetuating the cycle.
"FatFIRE promotes abundance. The goal is to have enough funds to enjoy freedom and flexibility when you retire early."
But sometimes the education is mandatory, inefficient, and it sucks. Then the people who want to leave the country would be required to pay a lot of money for something they didn't want and that wasn't worth it.
Basically, any country that wants to prevent their people from leaving could just assign an absurdly high cost to its mandatory education, and say: "hey, anyone is free to leave, they just need to pay us more than they will ever make".
> It is just the rational best decision for a young people to try their luck abroad and earn more money that they could ever dream of in their home country. Why shouldn't they? Idealism? There is nothing wrong with striving for a better life, it is what moves humanity forward.
I rather believe that the central reason why they leave is not because of the possibility of earning much more money, but because the existing country keeps such people on a short leash with respect to implementing their ambitions. In other words: if you want idealistic people (who stay in their country), better ensure that the country has a culture in which such idealism does not backfire and make such people's life harder.
From some point on, yes, because the modern world was born on many past such idealists. Fetishising material goods and materialism as a whole are a very big explanation for the mess we're now all in at the civilisational level.
It's worse than that:
> 9% of the country's population, most of them young people
Young people want adventure, but all their homeland is offering is contentment. They need to account for the desire for opportunity in their GNH metric.
These exist at the same time as other farming families who were trying to escape to the big city or other countries in search of employment and better life. The latter category is larger than the former, but still it all depends on outlook.
Medieval subsistence farmers had to bury half of their children before the age of 5.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but what struck me is that your comment would fit seamlessly into a text from the DDR regime, when it was still alive. (You know, the former communist republic of East Germany, which needed a wall to keep its citizens within the socialist paradise)
I'm not saying that this makes your comment wrong, I'm just wondering what this means with regard to former communism.
Bhutan has very strict immigration laws. You basically need to be employed in a government scheme or make a huge investment in the local economy to immigrate.
The real issue is Ambitious kids. Not the ones who have enough looks, contacts, knowledge, skill, intelligence, creativity and imagination to meet their goals but the ones who don't.
Materialism exploits such people more than anyone else. It tells them Donald if you are not admired, respected, loved just work hard, don't stop, keep grinding, keep hustling, accumulate material wealth, accumulate status, accumulate luxury goods and you will get the affection, respect, admiration and love you crave. Its pure bullshit.
This is the stuff that has to stop. We have to take care of these people better and channel their infinite energies into things beyond consumption and materialism. Its the hardest thing to do cause they are an extremely annoying group to deal with constantly craving attention, praise, sympathy and love. But thats the only path to a better, healthier and sustainable society. No Free Lunch.
if societies historically cut down those who wanted change and put their energy into finding better ways to do things, we would still be hunting and gathering.
i don't want to share a world with people who believe the ambitious, creative, and industrious should be cut down from their full potential.
Today's world is happy to sell shovels to wanna-be gold diggers ain't truly ambitious, creative nor industrious. But first educational system and propaganda industry makes it look like this must be the goal. Then the modern economy runs them into the ground.
Whose who're truly ambitious/creative/industrious/etc will go for it no matter what society tells them. Even in the darkest ages of soviet union those people found ways to live up to their ambitions. But those who ain't may find ways-of-life which suits them better.
I'm also not sure that mass emigration should be seen as an existential threat. Many developing economies have very successfully leveraged emigration and remittances as an engine of economic growth. If Bhutan can modernise into a more open economy, those young people could start returning home with the skills, experience and capital to do great things.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
https://www.nsb.gov.bt/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/1...
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2024/03/11/a-stron...
The early North American colonists had the same outlook about life among the Native Americans. However, is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists, but colonist defections to the tribes were a common occurrence, more among women than men.
Why? For all that talk of "upward social mobility and a better life", people figured out the Native Americans were _happy_ living in harmony with nature, and the women who escaped realized they had more personal freedoms with the "savages" versus the high-and-mighty Europeans who sold them on the good life at the colonies.
Upward mobility and money still aren't everything, despite the pressure those forces put on the world to appear so.
I have heard and quoted this for years, but I'm actually questioning whether it is true now. It just seems unbelievable when you think about it, and sort of feeds the "noble savage" trope. Out of hundreds of thousands or millions of Native Americans, there MUST have been some youth, at least one, seduced by the promised of western culture and voluntarily left their tribe and moved to a city or something. It just makes for a better story the other way around. Whether this was documented is another matter I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Occom The first indigenous Presbyterian minister
Here's another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Colbert A native American fought for Andrew Jackson and eventurally retired and set up a cotton plantation.
Among the first things western men did native peoples was rape the women and spread disease. Word spreads fast when it comes to those things.
Also, Captain Cook documented problems with his men raping and spreading disease on _all_ his travels. He lamented he did not have the power to control his men, and weighed disciplining them against facing a mutiny half a world away from a court that could do anything about it.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Colu...
What happened is that European disease created massive pandemics that killed most of the American Indians. No one was seduced by western culture, because, in general, American Indians had a better standard of living than the European colonists.
Where I live, (in Massachusetts,) the remaining American Indians integrated into European settlements because so few of them were left. I know its different elsewhere in the American continents; you can find out more if you read 1491 and its sequel 1493.
He wrote Sun Chief, an autobiography which is a fascinating, candid and surprisingly easy read. Higly recommend!
https://archive.org/details/sunchiefautobiog0000tala/page/n6...
There are many such instances, most famously Pocahontas. As far back as the 1600s there are records of Native Americans studying at Harvard. We just don't typically frame integration into the culture and institutions of a colonial power as "running away".
The Native Americans weren't ignorant of the advantages the European settlers possessed, and many did attempt to reform their societies along European grounds. They just tended to do this as a society-wide endeavor, rather than individual people running away to live with colonists.
The wiki link itself talks about how they continuously had their land stolen, the deer population they hunted for food was almost made extinct by the colonists, and a general attempt to claim ownership and sovereignty over their land in a way that was in line with how the European powers viewed ownership.
well, yeah, they had their land forcibly taken away from them so had to change their way of life
it's also unclear how much some of the social structural changes by the Cherokee was by choice or pressure from invaders to become "civilized" (i.e., pyramidical government structures, individual land ownership, etc.)
there's no indication that, generally speaking, Native Americans saw European societies as a "better life" -- in fact, quite the contrary. More powerful technologically and militarily, yes, but that's a separate matter altogether.
Bhutan vs the West is a huge difference in comparison.
GDP is not a good measure of whether people have their needs met or not, doesn't factor in COL
> in a poor country with very limited opportunities for upward mobility
on the other hand, with its economy growing and an open-minded leadership, opportunities for enterprising young people would generally be greater
> youth unemployment rate is 16%
to put that in perspective, that's about the same as the EU
Is it really that hard to imagine? For someone not flooded by continuous stream of advertisements about how far better would be their live if they could buy the next crap the wonderful market planned with obsolescence included, it’s not that hard to imagine the lake of "upward mobility" as a barrier to live happily.
The nobles that walk around with their kids might be animated with pervert narcissism and enjoying poor people looking at them with envy, but they are certainly not their to suggest plebeians should strive at obtaining the same kind of wealth they want everyone to think they enjoy.
Also nobles more often than not have their own existential threats and fears. It’s not like going up the social ladder is a certain path to more serenity and happiness.
That is wrong because of the word buy. Political ads are not convincing you to buy anything. The nobles don't want the result, but the plebeians still see their wealth and want it.
> Also nobles more often than not have their own existential threats and fears. It’s not like going up the social ladder is a certain path to more serenity and happiness.
I 100% agree with this. However from the point of view of the poor it looks much better (I tend to agree with them even though I'm closer to the rich end - like most people reading HN)
My own (non-native) sense of the meaning attache to advertisement is matching the first one given in Wiktionary:
> A commercial solicitation designed to sell some commodity, service or similar.
And from there, I can perfectly see how it might lead to a metaphorical use, but just aptly as in "politicians want plebeians to buy their bullshits".
> I'm closer to the rich end - like most people reading HN
Do you have statistics about that? By the very essence of capitalism, most people are despoiled at the bottom of the pyramid. I get that those winning the Silicon Valley lottery can end up with millions in their bank account, but how do we evaluate the percentage of readers of HN that are in the higher end of the incomes percentiles ?
I don't mean that I feel like the poorest person in the world, to be clear, especially if we can agree that money income is a poor proxy to measure how lucky we are in life.
> "Gross National Happiness acknowledges that economic growth is important, but that growth must be sustainable. It must… be balanced by the preservation of our unique culture," Tobgay said. "People matter. Our happiness, our well-being matters. Everything should serve that."
> Every five years, surveyors fan out across Bhutan measuring the nation's happiness. The results are analyzed and factored into public policy.
> "Gross National Happiness does not directly equate to happiness in the moment. One happiness is fleeting, it is emotion, it is joy," Tobgay said.
Perhaps when you or I have a hard time imagining them being happy, its more our imagination's fault than anything! I know there is no escaping cold hard capitalism, and a "happiness index" is a little cringey, but I don't think any situation would preclude their intentions here. Other than that, its up to you I guess to believe or not the data instruments (and the people) that are saying they are happy!
https://www.unicef.org/bhutan/press-releases/national-blood-...
[1, 2] = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365897933_Potential...
[3] = https://www.bbs.bt/national-blood-lead-level-survey-reveals-...
- Lead paint
- Water supply
- Lead in cookware
- Lead in spices, especially tumeric, where leaded dye is used to make it more yellow
- Industrial airborne emissions
Leaded gasoline used to be on that list but not anymore. Not sure about the specifics in Bhutan.
If you'd like to help prevent lead exposure in countries like Bhutan, the two charities I know about are Pure Earth and LEEP. Not sure if they have Bhutan programs.
Behind Bhutan's Shangrila facade is a discriminatory policies favoring Buddhists & Drukpa culture remain in place as do discriminatory citizenship laws and restrictions on civil, religious and linguistic rights.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gisa55/why_d...
Well, designed by his company which is called BIG.
I always find it weird that people name-drop famous architects as if one person could design a city or even a single large skyscraper. That doesn't happen with other industries.
> Bhutan is fifth among countries holding BTC, after the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bhutan-cashes-33-5b-bitcoin-0...
(Mistake in title, they've cashed out only $33 million, not billion.)
It takes a lot of AI data center to derive a billion-dollar profit, which is the value just of the Bitcoin which Bhutan currently retains. Seems fairly economically productive to me.
Though, with university free, if Bhutan has good, solid universities and produces students in reasonable numbers, since the country appears to be a highly literate english speaking one, I could see them leveraging that to raise the economy by founding outsourcing firms etc.
What I can imagine, is that many (youngsters) may rather prefer a more “modern” life with McDonalds and iPhones, particularly if they are able to actually achieve it.
Which one is better? I’m not going to comment. But I do want to add as a closing statement that the country (and people) were absolutely amazing. I’d definitely love to go there again if I can, the mountains are pretty much magical and the people really friendly. I hope they manage to succeed, socially speaking.
I've had many people say the same to me about Nepal, ignorant of the high youth unemployment rate, the corrupt politicians, the complete lack of any basic infrastructure (schools, transportation, electricity, etc.) in some areas, or the astronomically high number of people leaving to work as migrant labourers in countries that are the absolute worst in the world when it comes to labour rights.
None of these problems are visible to you as a visitor. This is especially true if you stick to areas that are heavily trafficked by tourists which tend to be rich enough to cater to their needs.
I think tourism, especially in countries that rely on tightly controlling the experience, can tell you very little about the function of the country itself.
Fully agree. Much of these observations were from peering out of the van we were in, or casual chats with our guide/hotel employees etc. Coming from Mumbai, there were some “telltale” (If you can call it that) signs. For example do people heat the house, or do they only heat themselves? If home heating, is it electric or burning wood or some other fuel? A lot of homes reminded me of the chawls and 2 storey tarp “kuccha” homes.
I can’t really describe what Bhutan is like, but I did enjoy learning about Drukpa Kunley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drukpa_Kunley
People being forced to work in call centres, speaking a foreign language, sounds like a kind of neocolonialism and hardly a recipe for happiness.
I think if you’re taught your whole life to seek happiness, a younger generation could largely look curiously out into the world as a source of happiness. In the western world, when you poll any population of people asking what they are “passionate” about Travel is always going to be a top ranked answer. It brings people joy, exploration is an innate curiosity of humans. So, my guess/hypothesis would be they are looking for happiness as they’ve been raised/conditioned to do.
> According to the World Happiness Report 2019, Bhutan is 95th out of 156 countries.
Not to mention its ethnic cleansing of the non-Buddhist population. There are definitely other things that have higher priority on the government's agenda than people's happiness.
Wait a second...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/10/72-of-ame...
Interesting how a process based on the will of the majority can also be disapproved of by the majority.
There's a reason that when we (anyone, really, but even the US) let the policy nerds set up a democracy somewhere else, they usually don't model much or any of it on the US. The system's not been regarded as especially good, as systems of democracy go, since not later than the early 20th century, as it became clear that not only does it have serious problems, but some of those are extremely resistant to repair.
> The system's not been regarded as especially good, as systems of democracy go, since not later than the early 20th century
The Supreme Court was recognized as super-dangerous at the founding and the solution some of our much-revered founders provided was "I guess we can just ignore them when they do really bad things?" which definitely seems not great.
Lack of a defense against gerrymandering is extremely bad, but file under things that jettisoning FPTP would largely fix without further specific action. The many ill effects of FPTP are why it's so bad.
There's some evidence that common law significantly increases the overall cost of government administration over continental systems of jurisprudence, though that's a more-recent and developing area of potential weakness.
Democracy has a fascinating "self-refuting" quality to it.
Plus both of those two parties' leadership-class agree it's a bad idea, because it would weaken their parties and their personal power, so will tend to propagandize against such measures.
If we take "a healthy interpersonal relationship between people with mutual respect, self-knowledge, and strong communication skills" as a model, we can see how two or more people continually grow into the kinds of lives they want to lead by working together, and that's the kind of democracy I'd like to have.
Obviously, this doesn't scale. But that doesn't mean we just give up and take the lazy, clearly bad option. We ought to evaluate the situation we're actually in and adapt.
I mean, FPTP is obviously bad, but if we're being honest, we should expect a plurality if not majority of people to be unable to recognize a bad decision even when it's presented to them as such. We know that if you run enough emotionally-triggering ads and you will get supporters of virtually any idea - this is basically the concept of manufactured consent. And I think our society can't really evolve in a healthy way until we accept that more widely. (By accept, I mean "beware of", not "exploit".)
If you want a program to run efficiently and give you good results, you don't just keep taking lazier and lazier approaches and delete functions you don't understand. You carefully refactor. It's a continuous process. That's what we're supposed to do with our democratic institutions, but unfortunately, we're stuck focusing on specific outputs so much that we can't even understand the root problems.
People wanting to have their cake and eat it too, or to impose rules on others but themselves be excepted from it is nearly universal. In any case it's extremely common.
This is just the nature of what we are, and so much trouble comes from pretending otherwise.
The real question is how do you protect people from themselves?
IMHO, freedom must contain the freedom to choose "bad", or make mistakes. "Bad" is in quotes because it's only certain to be bad from the perspective of the person considering the problem, you or me in this case. Maybe the people will be well served by "bad" decisions, able to learn from them, or be happy in ignorance, or who knows what else.
I think it's parallel to giving children autonomy. The more you protect them, the more you prevent their growth as a person.
In general, the biggest problem with any kind of democracy is preventing it from dissolving into a cycle of people voting to, basically, oppress and/or rob their outgroup neighbors for their own benefit (with outgroups themselves created or redefined over time to provide for new targets).
> This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.
It certainly is, because society has consequences over the individual.
People cannot be free to damage you: it is not «protect[ing] them from themselves», it is "protecting yourself from them".
This is for example the justification used to ban books. Certain books, when read, give people incorrect ideas, and we need to protect them from themselves.
That some people may have had a position (and that is also to be shown) that coincidentally overlaps with something that be confused as related to the above changes nothing (of the truthfulness of the idea).
it was "Protect[ing people] from themselves[? ... Certainly[], because society has consequences over the individual".
It means, "no, it is not a good idea to let them be liabilities: the consequences fall on you".
You see that the point is not plainly "protecting people from themselves", and the closest cone of interpretations of that, right?
> Be aware they will
An where is the problem? That is duly! Society is based on reciprocal interaction AND correction! Of course everybody is supposed to contribute.
Education.
In an education system people are taught to think, and given intellectual keys, and material for thought. The values imparted are the natural ones, consequential (e.g. "work, or no results") - not factioneries.
There is no rational process for deriving values and morality from first principles. Science is about what is, not about what should be. Democracy therefore can't be derived from facts of nature alone. You can only reason from true things to other true things, not from nothing to something. There is no reasoning your way from physics to how a state ought to be run.
Your mention of sharing the same ideas or not was already clear before, and it does not matter, because beliefs are lowly things hence not part of this game. You are talking about arbitrary ideas taken as "values" - no, those were not in topic.
You are clearly taking 'education' with a meaning that is completely different from the one intended.
Repeating: «In an education system people are taught to think, and given intellectual keys, and material for thought». The educated will assess, being enabled to an ability of properly assessing. This also means: there is no "doctrine", the educated has its own judgement. Whatever is doctrinal has no part in education, but for material for dissection.
And yes, there are «process[es] for [in some way] deriving values and morality from first principles». As explicitly mentioned before, students for example will be shown that results come from well spent effort: that "well spent effort" is a value. They may be brought to experience that persistence enables them towards results: that grit is a value. That such quality requires resisting cheap gratification: that control is a value. They will receive the information of ancient wisdom, from Gilgamesh on, through Aesop and on, and on, and on, and they will have the nourishment to form the basis of wisdom. It is very clear in some twisted behaviour that some people never met very basic ideas, that instead in some cultures correctly are told to children very early. You give people facts, they will learn from them - wisdom very much included.
(I will not discuss about Science for brevity, and I do not know why you would bring "Democracy" to the table.)
But anyway, the discussion over values was not original in the discussion, it was proposed. The original point was: people empowered to take decisions can make bad decisions, with catastrophic results. How do you protect people from people: you educate them, so that they can take better decisions through better intellectual qualities, hence better judgement.
It's clearly a good solution from the perspective of that speaker - more people would vote the same way they do, so the "right" people would get elected, "right" policies would happen and so on.
Meh, if this avoiding the "definition of good" is really the problem, then the likes of Putin and Xi and Trump will fix us. They clearly think they know exactly what's good for everyone, and are willing to do most anything to achieve it. Doubtful they will make the world a better place, but who knows. I guess we'll find out.
Because to me it appears that you just give the "ignorant" peoples power to someone else, and if your goal is to keep being a democracy, then this sort of power redistribution is almost certain to screw your system over in the long term.
Are you not worried in any way about needing to answer everything with "no"? Is this a discussion or are we here to be told by you what the truth is?
> Are you not worried in any way about needing to answer everything with "no"?
No, I trust you with understanding the sense. (It's not a need, it just works in formulation.)
And your vision is perfect, while everyone else's is flawed? How lucky for you. No need to present arguments, just let us know what you see, and that what you see is the "very hard obvious truth".
Have a little self-awareness man.
Yes, surely it is a very good position - but it's not just plain luck, it comes from lots of training.
> No need to present arguments
The argument is there, you missed it: "If you do not find X a «hard obvious fact», try arguing for the opposite".
[0]: https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/12/04/more-educa...
Sure, we would rather not see our kids die from all the dangers of the outside world. But they won’t thrive an bloom if we confine them in a padded basement.
* Under monarchy, one person is chosen to rule "at random". Under dictatorship, there is a competition where the most ruthless person gets to rule.
* Under monarchy, the people believe the monarch rules by divine right. Under dictatorship, the dictator rules by fear.
* Monarchies are more stable, meaning the ruler can plan with a long time horizon. Dictators are more likely to siphon resources while the siphoning is good, since they fear a coup.
* Lacking popular legitimacy, a dictator is forced to consider the self-interest and loyalty of their underlings. This leads to extractive and regressive policy. See this excellent video explaining the game theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
* Under monarchy, criticism is kept in check while maintaining rule of law, via lèse-majesté laws which make it illegal to criticize the monarch. Under dictatorship, criticism is kept in check via repression. That same repression makes the dictator less popular, which triggers more criticism, and thus more repression, in a doom loop.
Monarchy is an imperfect system. A lot comes down to the person who is "randomly" chosen to rule. But I do wonder if monarchy should be considered an option in countries where democracy has been consistently dysfunctional and the population is poorly educated -- Haiti perhaps?
Most successful democracies were monarchies at some point in the past. Maybe it's just a phase of development a country needs to go through -- in order to achieve mass literacy and civics education, if nothing else.
Dictatorships tend to fall into chaos when leadership changes, and the current leader tends to remove any potential leader replacements to remove threats to their authority.
I'm not so sure about that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_of_succession
What about enforcing the "at random" part by implementing monarchy as sortition with one person?
The distinction between lese-majeste and vaguely defined dictatorial "repression" is also unclear. You seem to imply that the latter is generally outside of the rule of law, but this isn't necessarily true - dictatorships absolutely can and do have actual laws similar to lese-majeste etc on the books, and in a stable and long-running dictatorship, consistent application of such laws is how most repression is implemented. Conversely, monarchies don't always have rule of law, either - indeed, autocratic monarchies are defined by the notion that monarch is above the law and can disregard it with impunity, including to punish subjects for things that aren't technically illegal.
In pre-industrial societies, having a king was considered the mark of a developed state. The king was seen as a divine or semi-divine figure. Democracy popped up every so often, but it had a tendency to end in chaos, enhancing the legitimacy of the nobility.
It's only in the past few hundred years that we've seen a reversal, where democracy is now considered the legitimate form of government. The lack of legitimacy is a big problem for dictatorships, and creates the need for repression.
There's also an adverse selection problem in modern times -- since 'everyone knows' that democracy is the more ethical form of government, those who volunteer to be dictator tend to be unethical.
I don't think she says anything about democracy at all. It doesn't seem to have been common in pre-industrial times.
It's why I can't look as a Bhutan as a good place. Bunch of hypocrites pretending to be saints.
"A Bhutanese team is collaborating with experts around the world, seeking investors to help build the city, the cost of which is likely to run in the billions. The city will have its own legal framework modeled on Singapore's and will run on clean hydroelectric power, with the hope of drawing technology companies, especially AI."
I like this sentence in particular, which showcases an admirable pragmatism:
"When we say we follow the principles of Gross National Happiness, we do not mean we are happy with less… We also want to be rich. We also want to be technologically high standard."
There has been some buzz around charter cities lately, particularly Prospera in Honduras which has been seized by the government. Bhutan seems like the perfect place for this kind of experiment because it is peaceful, politically stable, and English is taught in schools.
There's a chance that we see more city-states like Singapore, Dubai, etc. These places offer something the US can't: social orderliness. Bhutan seems intent on preserving its national identity, which is also draw. Conversely, Dubai (and Neom, if it actually gets built) strike me as a bit soulless.
It is also one of the sources of the Shangri-La myth, it would be cool if they actually called a city that (China technically renamed Zhongdian Yunnan to Shangri-La, but that is very much a gimmick).
They will be back, especially when they have children
I am an interal migrant to a small city in Aotearoa (Ōtepoti) and it is striking how many people grew up here, left as youngsters, and came back to have children
Bhutan is not a basket case, it sounds like a good placecto raise a family (as is Ōtepoti, why I am here).
Exciting for Bhutan's future
Ask the Lhotshampa (ethnic Limbu, Gurung, and other Janajatis) who were ethnically cleansed by the Ngalop majority 20-30 years ago.
It's a banana (tsampa?) monarchy that only exists as a buffer between India and China, and it's entire economy is basically owned by Tata Group (who owns and manages Bhutan's hydroelectric dam used for exports) and Indian construction companies (who build all the roads and resorts in the country).
> Bhutan, which is about the size of Maryland, was largely isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. The kingdom was so protective of its unique Buddhist culture that it only started allowing foreign tourists to visit in the 1970s and didn't introduce television until 1999.
Bhutan can save it's nature and have cities. It can't retain its people without giving them better economic opportunities.
>Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay believes it is ironically the success of Gross National Happiness that has made young Bhutanese so sought after abroad.
They are 95th place for GDP.
125th place for HDI.
I wouldn't even consider working on 'happiness' with the numbers that bad.
Bhutan's balance of trade appears to be entirely negative. So the country is getting poorer.
Their GDP numbers are 5% growth every year? That seems impossible.
3% unemployment and 65% participation rate.
Lets call it a ~4-5% inflation average or worse.
6.8% interest rate, while never ever being below 6%? So they target what 5%? So its not that GDP growth at 5% is impossible. They are essentially saying they havent had gdp growth in decades, they are hiding a major depression?
In the last 10 years Bhutan has doubled their money supply, while population is leaving? LOL incoming government collapse.
government debt to gdp is ~130%. 100% is the magical threshold you're not allowed to cross. If you're the federal reserve and Tbills reputation might allow you to go above 100% like the USA in 2020... but Bhutan has no such ability. They likely cant cross ~40% if i were to estimate.
Major deficit spending across the last 25 years.
Sales tax of 50%
Income tax of 30%
>Bhutan was, and is today, largely a subsistence agricultural society. Many families still live in multigenerational farmhouses.
I'd be leaving as well. Nobody is seeking Bhutan people. The bhutan people are fleeing the inevitable.
Bhutan is about 20% debt/gdp from a venezuela level collapse. If by some magic they dont collapse there, they are about 40% from a greece like collapse.
Bhutan is already about 10% higher than the Sri Lankan collapse.
Fleee Bhutan while you can.
maybe familiarize yourself with the country at a deeper level before throwing out recommendations based on a few select metrics which may or may not be that relevant (GDP in particular is not a good metric)
Perhaps there's more analysis for you personally but when I look at those numbers.
30% poverty, 20-40% unemployment is coming. identical to their peers in similar financial situations.
I dont need any further analysis. What other 'deeper' facts do you want to look at?
How about a huge one I didnt even add.
Firearms per 100 people, places Bhutan about 196th in the world. They arent even a free country. Flee asap.
More firearms per people equals more freedom?
This has to be one of the worst rationales I have read on HN. Not an easy feat.
And I really struggled to post this while avoiding some harsher words. Also not an easy feat.
LOL. This is either Onion level sarcasm, or a seriously warped view of what constitutes freedom.
But at least it made it easy for me to discount your other points.
No human except monks would choose such a life.
I think it's possible that some of them have beautiful lives anyway, but tough, no doubt. I've been to some similar villages in Ladakh
A pool in the garden is pretty fun on summer days, I imagine! It's cool to see the Niagara Falls, or the Norwegian fjords. Or visit a friend in a foreign country!
Leaving Bhutan for Australia and the US (often on a Refugee visa) is extremely popular in Bhutan nowadays [0]. If you live in the Bay Area, there is a large Bhutanese (as well as Nepali, Indian Tibetan, and Himachali) diaspora in the East Bay.
> Their GDP numbers are 5% growth every year? That seems impossible
They are a large energy exporter who exports much of their energy to Northeast India and Bangladesh.
That said, most infrastructure is owned and operated by Indian conglomerates like Tata Group or Indian SoEs.
> Bhutan is about 20% debt/gdp from a venezuela level collapse. If by some magic they dont collapse there, they are about 40% from a greece like collapse
The Indian government will prop up Bhutan no matter what. Several of India's forward deployment bases are located in the country, and it is critical for defending much of Northeast India from China.
If Bhutan gets even the slightest bit wobbly or shifts direction, India would probably "absorb" Bhutan the same way it did Sikkim in 1973.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bhutans-jobs-woes...
I wish we could hear from actual Bhutanese people rather than look at statistics. I suspect the reason people leave is more complex than this.
Government: "we're doing such a great job, people want to leave."
That's the conjecture, or is it more comedy?
I do think the government optimizing for happiness doesn’t equal optimizing for fulfillment, which isn’t always the same thing.
So people leave, despite perhaps a generally good happiness vibe. It’s like people who leave a Western European country for the US, because they feel their home countries can’t provide the experience they’re looking for.
Then again, it’s perhaps all a facade
The fact that people are leaving in droves tells you all you need to know.
Unless the argument is that people are happier when imprisoned.
I’d be more interested in what young Bhutanese people have to say. If it’s economic opportunity they seek then it can be dealt with locally (and they seem to recognize that), if it’s something deeper that would also be very interesting to know.
Humans aren’t as rational as some like to believe
You'll sooner be bashed for gratuitous drama.
On topic: people both need meaning and creature comforts. No meaning, they'll wait for death; no comfort, they'll move, that was the brain is there for.
This must be very much true of the US, too, then, and has been for a long time? Its trade balance is negative to the tune of tens of billions.
Quite true. The key difference here is that the USA is a reserve currency and those advantage give them far more breathing room in the balance.
But the USA isnt without the same consequences. The USA could be much wealthier per capita if they had a president who planned to put big tariffs in place.
AI with an hydroelectric power supply? That's optimistic. At least the power-consuming part of this would have to be somewhere.
Personally, I kinda feel like people probably have perverse psychological impulses that cause us to make ourselves unhappy and discontented unless there's certain specific external constraints to control those impulses. Modern technology, in its quest to remove all constraint, eagerly removed the necessary ones.
It's sort of like fitness: way back, there was no such activity as "exercise," because everyone got enough as a matter of course (e.g. by farming, hunting, walking everywhere). Now no one has to do any of that, "exercise" is a new chore that requires willpower, so we're all getting fat.
Many people seem to think this would be a utopia, but I suspect on reality there'd be a mass epidemic of suicide, drug abuse, and so on.
It's not about having external constraints, but about having a purpose in life. Of course one could create a purpose but endless hedonism is far more tempting. The history of ancient emperor's, who could have or do essentially anything, and how they approached life is a clear example of both sides of the coin. The only difference between Aurelius and Calligula is one created an artificial purpose for himself, and the other simply indulged in the pleasures of life as an end in itself.
Replicators a la Star Trek tech and availability would save a lot of lives and bring happiness to billions of people.
If the gov made it all legal tomorrow, are you going to run out and buy some?
Probably not, right?
That being said, heroin is one of those things that are genuinely dangerous to try. It's so easy to become addicted to the stuff, and the costs to society are so high to get an addict clean, that one has to at least consider the pros and cons of prohibition. In an ideal world, all consenting adults should have the free choice to ruin their life if they wish, and perhaps in a post-scarcity society this is what we should allow everyone to do. But while resources are still limited, heroin addicts (and by extension opiates) create a lot of negative externalities. Personal freedom is all good, but where does it end? Should a person be free to ruin the lives of others when they cannot get their fix other than to rob people? And when someone is getting withdrawal symptoms, they have no more free will, they'll do anything to avoid that suffering.
It's tricky to say what would be the marginal increase in heroin users if it was easily available. I agree with you that rational people with well balanced lives and a strong safety net in terms of family and finances are unlikely to go out and buy heroin. People who are bored, in a bad spot, depressed, etc... might just go out and do it if all it takes is a short walk to the nearest shop.
IDK about capitalism, but people seem to like it because it creates a dynamic society with internal competition, which is the kind of society young people want to immigrate to.
Young people don't want to live in a "utopia" where everything has been solved for them. That's the problem described in the article.
I remember reading someone who classified activities like exercise "surrogate actions" or something, but their point was that it was bad only because they aren't useful in modern society but that the impulse to pursue challenge like this is natural.
I think the Bhutanese are a bit cynical about 'gross national happiness' which was invented on the fly by one of the kings.
Honestly, that's kind of irrelevant to my comment. My points were to 1) decry a kind of obnoxious schadenfreude and 2) posit that our society is likely to lead to unhappiness because of it's focus on individual choice and technology to make various things "easier."
I do respect Bhutan for trying to take a different path, and I suspect they erred by not excluding enough (e.g. allowing the cancer of social media).
> Every five years, surveyors fan out across Bhutan measuring the nation's happiness. The results are analyzed and factored into public policy.
Or are you asking whether the results of the survey can be trusted?
There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
However Keynes goes on to say the "only" option is to hitch our wagon to these psychopathic criminals, regardless of where their rocket toboggan is going, without consideration of alternatives, nor of Regulations (such as mentioned by Adam Smith) or even holding higher standards of conduct to the Mammon-addled, in order to better blunt some of their more charming aspects.
"The love of money" .... "semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease".
People like making money. Not just weirdos but most people. My gran used to sell things at a stall and give the money to a Donkey charity, Keynes himself made money in the markets and used it to build a theater in Cambridge. It's a normal thing and not usually pathological.
I wish them good luck however happiness does not put food on table.
Turns out that inventing a specific measure of happiness that makes your country look more favorable than it is doesn't change reality.
> Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
I'm not that up on George Bernard Shaw but there is now a World Happiness Report published out of Oxford, not far from where he used to hang out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report