For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion.

An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.

The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.

That’s a rather tall argument given that the US is currently experiencing historic income inequality [1].

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...

America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.

On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.

Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.

Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.

In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:

A field exists and produces 1 unit.

A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.

America has a genuinely crazy side.

No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.

There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.

The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.

I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.

The Republicans are now a party of insanity.