US is better than Europe!

Or so say some people, at least by their actions

(Warning: The headline is engagement bait. Read below for a more nuanced discussion. Well, hopefully it is more nuanced.)

Every few weeks Twitter gets caught up in a fight when someone proclaims that Europe is better than the US, or vice-versa¹. I usually stay away from these dust ups because it’s an ignorant debate. The question is badly defined, subjective, and impossible to answer, so the fights devolve into two groups talking past each other, until someone eventually drags out a picture of Breezewood, and then for all effective purposes it’s over².

To the pro-Europe side, Europe is a cornucopia of crime-free, gothic-cathedral-having cities with great public transportation, quaint row homes, and sensible policies on guns, health care, and child care. America, in contrast, is a dystopian landscape of depressing suburbs with oversized cars, soul-sucking strip malls, and people shooting up drugs and each other.

To the pro-US side America is a land of hard-working, money-making, independent-minded people who hate being told what to do, especially by mid-wit bureaucrats with zero appreciation that human flourishing requires true and almost absolute freedom. Europe, by contrast, is an impoverished, crowded, backward, continent determined to stay impoverished, crowded, and backward because of a stubborn and stupid commitment to high taxes, high regulation, and low entrepreneurialism.

The inconvenient reality (for each camp) is that both are large diverse places with a lot of different groups living in very different ways, and so it’s close to impossible to compare, except in strokes so broad it ends up being useless.

The latest of these tweets, which against my better judgement I engaged with, isn’t that bad, because I think it gets the broad strokes correct. Which is, in the US most of your income is yours to decide what to do with, whereas in Europe a majority of it, or close to it, is funneled to a central authority that’s dedicated (in theory) to the public good.

Or, as I’ve written before, it’s about a communitarian versus individualistic lifestyle, with the US having chosen a policy path emphasizing self-sufficiency and convenience, and Europe being more focused on the communal good and restraint.

The tweet also highlights the two most striking, easy-to-measure differences between the US and Europe — the US is wealthier, at least in material terms, and has a lot more space, and so US homes end up being large enough that Europeans get either jealous, or see them as wasteful — You mean, you don’t live with your parents and grandparents in a fourth floor walk-up? You mean you have separate rooms to cook in, eat in, and even store your junk in? Wow.

There are so many other easy-to-measure differences between the US and Europe, like life-span, crime, pollution, car ownership, and so on, that makes it close to impossible to adjudicate which is better on data alone, even if you wanted to go that way.

Then there are all the hard to measure very subjective differences, like aesthetics, food, nature, and so on, that highlights that it’s a very personal decision.

Or, asking which is better is a deeply silly and flawed question, since it’s asking someone if they prefer the culture they grew up in, or a different one, and with a few notable exceptions³ the majority of people will vote for their own culture because it’s core to their identity. Humans are cultural animals, groomed from birth by the society they grew up in, to value the society they grew up in.

I’ve alluded to this cultural essential-ism before, in my essay on Thick Travel,

We humans are cultural animals, imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but who generally end up “in having lived only one.”

That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into.

As Geertz writes,

“As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This … is what we have in common.

Oddly enough, many of our subjects seem to realize this more clearly than we anthropologists ourselves. In Java, for example, the people quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”

To be human is to be American, or Danish, or Japanese, so it’s not surprising the majority of people are more comfortable in the culture they’re born into⁴.

So, why am I writing this essay, and why did I title it the way I did, other than as click-bait, especially given how often I write about what the rest of the world does better than the US, like the whole being happy thing.

Because while the majority of the world does like where they live (again, with the big caveat of destitute places), a minority does indeed reject the culture they’re born into, and choose to move, and an even larger minority dream of moving, and almost all of those who do, imagine themselves in the US.

As I tweeted in response to the above tweet, again somewhat provocatively,

Now there are things I would change with that tweet, which was attempting to compare the modal (or most common) European experience to the modal US experience. For instance, I would switch Jacksonville Beach to Jacksonville, or Houston, and Marseille to Bucharest or some other Eastern European city.

Yet, I stand by the intended larger point, culled from years of talking to people all over the world, which is, what the US is selling (space, freedom, meritocracy), has a lot of buyers across the globe, including in Europe. Or to put it another way, the rest of the world (other than academics) really really love the US. Or, at least they love the idea of the US.

Why do I feel the need to point this out? Because I don’t think it’s well understood on twitter, and certainly not in the “smart” discourse.

The reason it’s not well understood is because the people who find the US brand the most appealing are not people you hear from a lot, because they don’t have lots of money, or lots of education.

There is a big educational divide in how the world views the US, and it’s lifestyle, with the less educated being largely positive towards it, while the highly educated generally favor a more European lifestyle (walkable urban environments with smart regulation), including those in the US, who cluster in the most European parts of the US⁵.

That’s partly why I went to Phoenix, which in many ways represents the pinnacle of what the educated hate most about the US — its sprawl, its dependency on cars, its disregard for the natural elements, its ugly wastefulness, its shortsightedness that places immediate convenience above a focus on the longer term and greater good.

Now, I also famously hated Phoenix, loathed it so much that I’m still getting yelled at on Reddit, but Phoenix is growing rapidly, which shows that while I don’t like it, and you might not like it, a lot of people really do like it. Or at least what it represents to them.

As I wrote then,

Phoenix is a large grid, of mile-long four-lane sides, with shopping plazas at the corners, and an inside of twisting single-lane roads and simple ranch homes on half-acre plots. Those residential insides are the nice parts, and showing that they’re nice is partly why I’d come to Phoenix: to highlight a version of the American Dream, which, while I might not love and isn’t necessarily “walkable,” is still very appealing to lots of people. It’s what I wrote about last week, when I cautioned that walkability doesn’t necessarily translate into livibility.

This weekend I made a personal trip to Miami, where I did a ten-mile walk through the least fancy parts⁶. When I mentioned this on Twitter, I got a now very familiar push-back telling me all that’s wrong with Florida: That it’s going to be underwater soon. It’s hot. It doesn’t have any culture. Basically, it’s an unlivable gross shit-hole with a wrong approach to everything, including politics.

Yet, people are moving to Florida. In droves. And they’ve been moving there in droves for the last fifty years.

I grew up in central Florida, not the fancy part, and back in the 70s our school system was so overwhelmed with an influx of new residents from Michigan, New York, Ohio, and the rest of the north, that they shifted to an absurd system called 45-15. Each student was assigned one of four tracks (mine was B) that went to school year round, but alternating between nine week stints, followed by three week breaks, so that at any time only three quarters of the students were attending.⁷

Since college I’ve been moving further and further north, and at each stop people keep telling me I’m going in the wrong direction. Just this morning, at my local upstate NY McDonald’s, the old man table, when they found out I was originally from Florida, did the usual, “So, why in the hell did you leave?” thing.

All of this is a very long way of saying, people’s actions reveal a lot, and one of the things they’ve revealed to me over the last four years of travel is that while I might be very critical of the US, especially places like Phoenix, I’m beginning to understand that I’m in the minority. Which is helpful to remember.

The American lifestyle I’m so critical of, the lack of public transport, the selfish lifestyle, the gross materialism, the shortsightedness, the paper thin intellectually vapid bling, is very appealing to a large percentage of the world, and that should matter. How large a percentage? I’m not sure, but while it may not be a majority, it’s not far from it.

The smart push-back against this, which is something I’ve written a little bit about before, is that ok, people think they like the US, think they want to move to Phoenix or Florida, but that’s them responding to an image being sold. It isn’t reality.

Or, the people who tell me, over beers in Hanoi or Ulaanbaatar, or coffees in Belgium or Bucharest, that they want to move to the US don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into, deluded by glossy images from TV. Or it’s the grass is always greener effect.

There is certainly a lot of that going on, but the more time I spend walking the world, the more time I spend talking to people, I think the deeper answer is that the image the US projects and represents to a lot of the world, and in many ways provides its residents relative to other places — opportunity, material wealth, safety, independence, space, convenience, and lots of immediate pleasure — is a lot more appealing than what I’ve believed before, or want to believe. So appealing it breaks across cultural boundaries and life-long preferences.

That is, maybe most people really do want an American style transcendent-free lifestyle, especially if it comes with the conveniences of a huge dyer, powerful AC, two large cars, and a ranch house on a plot of land that couldn’t ever hold a heard of animals larger than rats.

The US has a lot of problems, but people not wanting to move here, isn’t one of them, and that shouldn’t be forgotten.

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Upcoming travel, updated!

I’m leaving this Saturday for twelve days in Buenos Aires.

I was then planning on walking from Birmingham to Bournemouth, but based on your feedback, I’m now planning on walking from Marseille to Lyon from May 20th to June 7th. Which is a better plan, so thank you for the input!

Then, I’ll be in Uganda (Kampala) and Kenya (Nairobi) for first three weeks of July

As usual, if you are in any of these places, I would love to meet with you, or walk with you!

Until next week!

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1. There is a whole meme dedicated to this, called “The American mind cannot comprehend this.” Google it.

2. There is something called Godwin's law, which states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

I would like Arnade’s law to be, “As an online discussion over Europe versus US grows longer, the probability of someone posting that picture of Breezewood approaches one.”

3. Very destitute places are a clear exception. Like Senegal.

Also, as I address further down in the essay, highly educated people (like myself) are less products of their culture. One of the attributes of modern education is an emphasis on valuing new experiences, and different cultures.

4. Or to put it another way, our cultural provides us our utility function and that is what we use when we decide what array of variables is most important.

5. Upscale neighborhoods in big cities, and any neighborhoods around elite colleges.

6. For Miami knowers, I walked up 441, from downtown to Opa-Locka

7. They both couldn’t, and didn’t want to out of cheapness, build new schools fast enough to deal with the demand.