Mostly the curse of the first mover, with a dash of corruption for spice.
Part of it is "the curse of good enough": the US has had good credit-card style infrastructure for over a century and digital infrastructure since the POTS days. Part of it is that we lost our appetite for anti-trust in the 80s. Part of it is that the price structure of this infrastructure has wormed its way into everything in a way that is difficult to undo without causing high-visibility inconvenience for low-visibility benefit. The good-enough is the enemy of the good.
I think it's mainly because they aren't forced by regulation.
Germany is another first mover with decades old banking systems and standards. German banks also dragged their feet supporting SEPA Instant or they added additional fees so that barely anybody wanted to use it.
Then the EU stepped in with regulation: If you support classic SEPA transactions, you also have to support SEPA Instant for the same price (which is almost always free for retail banking accounts). And suddenly banks did.
Yes, this could be fixed with regulation -- but whoever did the regulation would have to contend with angry fools complaining about how "the government took away my credit card rewards!!!" for years and of course the credit card companies themselves would stir and amplify those voices as much as possible.
> the price structure of this infrastructure has wormed its way into everything in a way that is difficult to undo without causing high-visibility inconvenience for low-visibility benefit
I think the “recent” change allowing merchants to pass along the credit card fees is a step in the right direction.
I think a lot of people would still choose fraud protection for the extra costs, though.
The US also has incredibly pro-consumer regulation over credit cards, compared to most of the world. There is no such thing as "not protecting your card" as a way for the bank to get out of paying for credit card fraud. Legally, you are liable for the first $50 of unauthorized charges, and that's it (though most cards will cover all of it).
> The US also has incredibly pro-consumer regulation over credit cards
Not to take away from your example, but I was under the impression that transaction fees charged when using a credit card in the US were significantly more than in say, the EU?
Australia recently capped credit card fees. Yes, it has lead to a decline in credit points/cashback but in the end it's leaving more money in your pocket.
Payment processors and banks lobby for control over this.
As usual, a service/product is bad because no one is allowed to create a better alternative, this is an almost universal rule.
Specific to this case: the government is included in the list of parties not allowed to make it better.
Mostly deficiencies of the political system: regulators see themselves, call themselves and act like "watchdogs", whereas in other countries financial regulators act like shepherds and lead the market. Hence in this country relatively minor players with interests not exactly aligned with the general public can hijack the process. That's what we are witnessing.
Others have pointed out that we do have this and there are some reasons it's not the same scale as credit card infrastructure, but I'll just observe there's a cultural difference
We've had a billion discussions on Hacker News about payment rails and it's invariably always a European incredulous that Americans can't/won't do a digital payment instantly and for pennies. These Europeans are typically operating with a mental model where they have cash in a bank account and every transaction gets funded from cash on hand.
Americans - for better or for worse - want longer cycles to pay for their charges and many want rewards for their spend. I don't think it's uncharitable to describe those who pull out debit over credit during a transaction as lower income and higher credit risk than those who prefer credit. (Europeans will decry that this is Americans living beyond their means. Maybe! Maybe.)
But when it comes to business, I've never understood this argument from Europeans. Invoicing works on net-30/60/90 terms. In B2B payments you could reduce payment cost by doing invoicing with instant low-cost payment in 30 days, but incur a different "cost" in cash flow management. Credit card payments are a risk-based financial product that does a magic trick of arbitrage for merchants between a service/good sold and payment received as a net-30 invoice to the cardholder, and you should expect to pay a fee for that. An economy where businesses need to pay each other immediately out of cash-on-hand is less dynamic and less efficient than one where all that cash flow can get smoothed out via payment intermediaries. (Money you have to keep on hand for bills is not being deployed doing other things in the economy - this is inefficient!)
For C2B payments, this is probably a helpful and lower-cost innovation over debit rails. But credit is a different product, financially and culturally, in the United States.
Banks earn money on card payments and pay (via explicit fees or implicit fraud liability without compensation) for interbank transfers, so without any external forcing function (market or regulatory), it seems pretty clear to me why they prefer one over the other.
I've signed up for or seen the contracts for several payment processors across several companies. Rack rate for ACH debit starts at $0.25/trx and goes down to sub-penny at scale. Returns can be high though ($2 per, going down as well).
Edited to add: that's not a defense, I *loathe* ACH. It's a negative-reporting system which is such a pain to deal with.
My understanding is that sameday ACH does not cost extra (from a network perspective) than regular ACH, it's just that some shitty banks apparently like to charge extra for it.
Outside the AI summaries, I couldn’t easily find the sources. But a couple of different sources say same-day ACH is 5.2 cents per outgoing item while overnight is 0.35 cents.
What I can say is the Fed has draconian rules for pricing its services. The services cannot be subsidized but must be priced to recover costs, including a return on capital similar to what a private payment system (ie from the Clearinghouse) would expect.
I read it as the sending institution pays 5.2 cents to the receiving institution per item, on top of the 0.35c/item + 0.1c/item same-day surcharge for a maximum of 5.65 cents/item before volume discounts.
Our federal representatives are mostly incompetent and technologically illiterate. When a large project does materialize, the funding is wasted on contractors who actively scam the government.
In most part of the world, the government just force the bank to join the payment system and restrict how they charge the customer.
In the USA, no single regulator have that power. Basically only congress can do something like this.
The us Congress ain't famous for being fast, you know.
The Fed prints a fraction of a fraction of the actual money in circulation. Private banks in practice control the money supply. As such, they want to maintain their monopoly.
The countries that have innovated the most in regards to automated payments are the ones trying to escape US influence: look at PIX in Brazil, BRICS pay, etc...
In America, the payment system is an oligarchy, they protect their own (the bankers), what need is there for innovation when they are making a killing out of the current inefficiency?
The one place where the US haven't been slow is in stablecoins, making them dollar donominated, to ensure the monopoly the US dollar has on international trade stays strong. That way, when the US has a crisis, they take down the rest of the world too, to the joy of non-US countries.
Venmo, CashApp, Apple Pay, and Zelle are free for person to person transactions and you get the cash in your account the following day.
I’ve never been in a position where I needed a cash transfer to an account the very same day, I have tens of thousands of dollars of credit available so there’s very little need for immediate transfers, at least for me personally. I do virtually all of my spending on credit cards so I have up to 60 days to pay the loan back without interest.
Ever buy something from a rando, or split the bill with a colleague or friend?With real time transactions, you can confirm that you actually received the money immediately.
Zelle is ACH, everyone else uses card processing rails. It's not the same as real instant transfers between banks. There are middlemen involved that don't need to be there.
Absolutely fascinating and very important topic. My 2c is that there is a very low bit rate link between the conscious and subconscious mind that can be made a bit faster by the practice of meditation. Re why snake and not ring my theory is that the subconscious thinks in primal terms.
Highly recommend 'The Code Book by Simon Singh'. Simon also runs a math circle online called parallel circles from the UK, that is free to attend and is fun for kids.
Isn't it likely that inference providers like Anthropic continue to capture more and more of the share of labor as revenue? Everything up makes sense for a year or two as we automate more and more labor, but at some point unemployment will drag the whole market down. It's difficult to see it working out any other way, unless we come up with something like a token tax.
It always has been the case that some new labor skills emerge, but that only has to be wrong once. And given that how it's always worked is that the new skills used brainpower to make centaurs of people, to use Cory Doctorow's term, that might not happen this time.
Many of the reactions are some version of 'pissed off', which I totally understand. This reaction stands out and resonates with me:
> With these AI-generated papers, I feel that we, as a community, are not applying the same standards of quality and rigour. They can simply release multiple 100+ page papers claiming to have solved this or that problem, often with redundant arguments, unclear logical structure, multiple dead ends, and strange or unsettling terminology — in other words, slop. And we are then expected to go through it, check it, clean it up, simplify it, and explain what is actually going on. This comes at a considerable cost to us in terms of time and effort, while they can simply move on and slop-bulldoze the next conjecture. And, of course, the credit remains theirs. In some sense, we are willingly contributing to our own demise.
I'm not a mathematician, so I didn't even try to read it. But if it is unreadable slop -- then why should we (humans) believe it is correct? And why should professional mathematicians labor through reading it?
I was really quite surprised that they'd parade around 722 manuscripts with only less than half (or really, close to only a third) of it being machine-checked. It's genuinely equivalent to the overconfident and blind drive-by PRs in software that people here should be well familiar with, and those are not exactly the hallmark of quality usually. Quite the curiously dangerous game to play when you're trying to scoop an entire field of study on an industrial scale as powerplay.
Or it's a touching show of openness. They're not in this for the ego-boost, they're sharing data on how things are working. Naive of them to expect gratitude, I guess.
It's only any of these things to the extent their unverified proofs end up correct. Otherwise, not only is it naive indeed, it is out of touch, an insulting waste of time, and mistaken. Hence why I find this a curiously dangerous game to play. Nobody treats this as the "scientific process" they're trying to frame this as, where manuscripts can just be redacted. If they genuinely believe in that framing, they're even more naive and out of touch than one can possibly imagine.
Seems to me like we need to create a credible threat to the AI of mad (mutually assured destruction)? This is what addressed the question during the Cold War of “will nuclear weapons kill all humans” (if historical documentaries and movies are to be believed). Coordination between governments or corporations to limit AI is a hopeless strategy — because it is a classical example of prisoners dilemma / tragedy of the commons. We can see it hasn’t worked for climate change.
Anyone know of this (MAD) is being seriously thought of?
This has it backwards. The Victorian elite had a high standard of life because they had an empire that funded their decadent lifestyle - at the expense of their colonies! They were cushioned from negative consequences of their be debaucherous lifestyle.
Such macro effects exist today as well, in certain countries, that enjoy exorbitant privileges.
A focus on STEM is how a up and coming nation builds itself — innovation, and making something the world wants, rather than subjugation or rent seeking.
The ancestry of the Victorian gentry can be traced back to the late medieval period (and some to the Norman conquest), many centuries before Britain had an empire.
The wealth of the merchant class also predated empire by centuries; the empire grew out of a series of alliances and partnerships of both ot these classes, via the landed gentry successfully co-opting mercantile wealth (e.g. see what happened to the East India Company).
Victorian era was the time when Britain had consolidated its empire in the east and fruits of industrial revolution were ready. I guess that lowered the incentives for innovation. In contrast, Britain made some good scientific progress in the run up to WW2(and the war also expedited some of it, Alan turing's work for instance).
Missing the forest for the trees. Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.
Britain had wealth from colonies and maintained an empire with very few people and no computers. The British elites were on an entirely different level to the spanish ones, which is the point of the article. Great Britain had an extremely capable and educated bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.
> Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.
I disagree with this, I don't consider "expensive wars with other European powers" to be debauchery.
Losing the entire Spanish Armada [1] was a very expensive mistake, but the reason the Armada was lost was because the Spanish crown wanted to invade England over religious differences (England being Protestant, Spain being Catholic), not because they decided to throw a huge boat party and got so drunk they accidentally sank everything.
Much like the wars of the French crown which would end up so hurting the country financially that they caused a revolution, the wars of the Spanish crown also had a rather unpleasant effect on national finances.
> bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.
It's not obvious that's what happened. When the industrial revolution started the British empire was still pretty much ad-hoc and in large part privatized and not administered by the government directly (of course the East India company was not exactly an independent corporation). The British Empire in the way we understand it now wasn't really a thing until the mid 1800s or so.
1. Empires do not generate wealth, they cost wealth. Or rather they do not generate an economic surplus (the wealth available to the central government via taxation that can be used for whatever the government/elites want). A nation of 10 million will have more economic wealth than a nation of one million, but most of that is needed to keep the 10 million alive and to maintain the infrastructure and pay the local police to keep everyone in line, etc -- only a small fraction of total wealth can be effectively taxed by the empire and spent on arbitrary stuff like increasing the size of the Navy. That is what I mean by surplus.
A nation starts out with an economic surplus (here, I mean a real surplus, not a surplus of silver, but of real wealth) and they use that surplus to get a big army and go conquering. And each time they conquer, a part of that surplus is expended until they reach their maximum extent.
If this was not the case, we'd have a one world government, where the bigger you get, the bigger your surplus and no one can compete with you. But that is not what we see, what we see is that empires expand until they can't afford to keep expanding. Why did England give up its colonies? Because after WW2 it had too many war debts and couldn't keep subsidizing those colonies -- they were too expensive to keep. Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy. You can look at the trillions the US spends on foreign wars, which far exceeds the economic benefit we get of waging those wars. You can argue, for example, that we got some oil from Iraq, but we still have to pay for that oil, so whatever discount we got on oil comes nowhere near the cost of invading and administering Iraq. That is how all empires work -- France was always better off, financially, just paying market rate for whatever minerals it could get in Africa than the massive resources it spent on trying to control and build infrastructure in Africa. Same thing for England. It doesn't even come close, when you add up the cost of the British Navy and colonial administration to whatever discount it got on raw materials over paying the market rate. Same thing for Rome, etc.
2. The situation with Spain was about financial wealth, not real wealth. They discovered huge silver mines in their colonies and were awash with silver. That dumping of money 1) created massive inflation, and 2) caused Spain to run a huge trade deficit, destroying domestic industry, as the Spanish currency was basically overvalued. It was this economic destruction that leads people to think Spain became lazy and stopped producing. They didn't become lazy, but with so much free money causing such high prices, Spanish industry could no longer be competitive with industry elsewhere. This is called "Dutch disease" as the same thing hit Holland and you also see it in the US with our overvalued currency. So you do not benefit, in terms of real wealth, when you dump a bunch of money on a country. You need just the right amount of money -- too much and you get inflation, too little and you get deflation. There is an optimal amount of money for an economy, and Spain exceeded it.
3. Many have studied the reason why England led the industrial revolution, and it is not a majority view that it had anything to do with the colonies. Most point to things like the availability of coal, development of financial markets, and of course the fact that a lot of the steam engine stuff was invented first in England.
1. War costs wealth not empires by themselves. GB created an empire, because their technological and intelligence advantage was so high, the amount of war needed to get it was small. By intelligence I mean the conquering of India by exploiting its cast system. The colonies were simply civilizations that were out of date and had a huge informational disadvantage. WW2 changed that as it was so expensive it bankrupted everyone but the US.
> Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy.
The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption. It is what is bankrupting the US and what bankrupted the Romans. They stopped having kids, spent their time partying and tried to make up for it by importing and relying on barbarians.
2. Yes. But the state did not recognize the trap or simply did not care because it was not interested. I'm not exactly a historian, but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.
3. All of which are a result of an educated, effective elite and bureaucracy.
Competent leadership is the difference between El Salvador now and 10 years ago. It is the difference between Singapore and Malaysia. Both countries are a result of pure force of will of competent leadership.
1. You need to pay for civil administration
2. You need to put down rebellions, which means staffing it with troops/police
3. You have to build and maintain infrastructure
4. You have to protect the empire from foreign invasion -- e.g. Julius Caeser needing to fight the Helvetii
5. You have to pay bribes to local notables to be loyal to you
Let's take a look at Rome in Palestine - it had to constantly put down rebellions, build an enormous temple and civil infrastructure, man the area with troops that need to be paid, fight off invaders. Pay off all sorts of locals.
And yes, a big part of that is military expenditure, but the role of the British Navy was not primarily to enlarge the empire but to preserve the empire, protect shipping lanes, etc.
> The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption.
This is a moralizing view of history, and things just don't work like this.
While civil administration, police, courts, infrastructure and army all do cost, wealth, I would argue that they also help to create it.
It's a lot easier to create a software company when you live in a world where the power station cannot be held for ransom by bandits, where everyone is educated and speaks a similar language, when there are laws governing the creation of businesses, a financial system, backed by the government, which enables trade to happen easily, etc.
For example, the Roman Empire, in unifying the Mediterranean, led to a large increase in trade - you can estimate shipping volume across the Mediterranean by counting shipwrecks, and the period of ~0-150AD when the Empire was at its peak had a much higher volume of shipping than preceding and following periods.
I think of administration, police, legal and financial system as something like a capital investment - a bit like buying a widget producing machine - you spend the money/effort/resources on it because you expect to get more out of it than you put it.
Corruption is objectively negative. The east indian company not generating wealth is objectively wrong. The roman and british empires were not the same and the roman one required way more war to maintain.
> but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.
Spain wasn't even a really country until the 1700s it was a collection of states ruled by the same monarch but each of them had their government apparatus and elites whose interests didn't exactly align with that of Castile or the king all of the time. That's just in Iberia, the Low Countries which in the early 1500s were effectively the economic and political centre of what we think of as the "Spanish Empire" caused even more issues and ended up being a huge money sink.
I do not think they are tech geniuses, but the original statement was not limited to tech "geniuses". Overwhelming majority of STEM people are not geniuses.
But Musk specifically is/was admired and supported by STEM people and culture. He was untouchable for years. Tech people share ideologies and ethical values of Zuckenberg, Musk, Amodei, you name it. Tech educated people spent years developing those philosophies and defending them.
I watched the announcement video [0] and found it strange that they cut off Prof Soai during the last question — he was trying to understand whether he was being asked for his favorite molecule in the context of autocatalysis or in general.
> When children are older, they take care of their parents and grandparents.
This is a core value in many eastern cultures. I'm not trying to put down western cultures - only pointing out a difference - I do not believe it is a core value of western cultures (i'd love to be proven wrong of course).
Also, when children grow up and move away, or immigrate to a different countries, this produces problems to the ageing parents.
AFAICT this is a value in most cultures in all directions. I think "the west" invented pensions, social security and medicaid (or whatever you call it in your country) so parents nor children had to plan on caring for the elderly when they had trouble working (and with white collar jobs, that may be a long time).
Multi-generational, western (American) guy here: caring for the older generations is a core value to everyone I know and to me. We just don't _have_ to. My mom has money, can drive, owns a nicer house than I do. So, it's really only for 'values' that I check in on her and handyman for her whenever I can. In fact, for the latter, I cause her more problems than I fix.
Your mom (not you specifically, but the average person's) is being provided for by the collective, ie currently working-age people's pension contributions. She, as a worker, paid taxes in her own working age, and financed stranger's parents' lives, and now the new generation does the same for her. It's a many to many relationship, while the old style arrangement was more point-to-point. The children did the literal manual work to keep their parents fed and cared for, while now they pay some strangers to do it, using their pension.
This is factually accurate - I agree with the description. But I think this new system makes it sound like the ageing parents only need financial and mechanical help -- (handyman etc.), what about emotional support? No, I don't think phone calls cut it. Humans did not evolve to live far away from their kin.
> what about emotional support? No, I don't think phone calls cut it. Humans did not evolve to live far away from their kin.
Children don't choose to be born. Once they reach adulthood the parents are owed nothing. Ideally they were such good parents that the kids want to maintain contact.
Workers should spread the cost of elder care because so many are living long with serious limitations. It's like insurance against otherwise devastating burdens.
> Children don't choose to be born. Once they reach adulthood the parents are owed nothing. Ideally they were such good parents that the kids want to maintain contact.
There's a really good scene in the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy) about this:
Absolutely. Most people don't realise that the biggest problem old people experience is loneliness. My friend, an only child, came back to India from the US, to personally care for his parents once he realised they were too old to care for themselves properly and needed support.
Western societies aren't behaving the way they do around family and care issues because they have a grand plan, but because they don't have one.
In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence.
The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.
Most the young people I meet are quite cynical about the future, affordability, the existence of any pension at all, or the retirement age rising above the life expectancy or something like that. But simply there are a million things to be worried about. Like they are also worried about the climate, about AI and jobs, maybe about other things too.
Personal context: I am an American of European descent, with most of my ancestors having arrived between 1880 and 1950 (pretty solidly "Western"). Extended family is broadly well-off enough to not be financially in need in retirement.
Observation: Sooner or later, all of our family's elders have wound up cared for by a mix of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Even those who didn't have children. We're an ornery bunch, so quite a few stubbornly insisted they didn't need anyone, yet eventually they did. Care often came at an inconvenience to those providing it, but one way or another, in one form or another, care was given. I can only think of one person from my extended family who wasn't cared for by the younger generations in his final years.
Speculation: The average number of children in my extended family hovers around three, and most of us are in a few geographic clusters (not the same city, but still a cluster). Perhaps if the average litter was between one and two, and/or we were more spread apart, we may have slipped into line with that stereotype?
This isn't about some fundamental East/West attitude difference. From time immemorial it was like that in the West too, the change came with the late 19th century and mainly the 20th century when government took on the role of caretaker with pensions, welfare and various government transfers, reducing interpersonal dependencies, and allowing more atomized lifestyles.
I don’t see it as a big government intervention that drove the change. I think it was a big change in housing availability and the suburbs. This was driven by WW2 victory and the industrial production machine. Making housing affordable available to small families.
The same thing happened also in Europe which didn't have that type of suburbia, nor necessarily that sort of WW2 win. These social changes were a slow ramp, not some single event changing things. It was in part technology, in part state centralization capacity via administration development, in part ideologies and philosophies etc. Both socialism and capitalism pushed against traditional kin and clan structures in favor of universal platforms (markets, or universal co-ownership). But already the Church laid some of the foundations of all this. And then the church also weakened as a slow erosion and social norms were markedly more liberal in e.g. the 19th century than in the 18th and so on.
Europe had the weird circumstances of being destroyed both families and buildings after WW2. They also experienced the Marshall plan of rebuilding. No doubt there is no simple answer to how we got here. The move from agrarian society to industrial society also had an effect. I just have a hard time applying a motivation to a government. I can see it as a by product.
It's not really west vs east. It had been a core value in "western" cultures too, and is changing in "eastern" cultures as we have this discussion.
The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting.
It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.
What isn’t mentioned in monideas’ comment is that it is women who do the caring. The change has to do with women being able to not do that. Of course, this might also mean that they might not have a daughter-in-law to take care of them, but if it’s me, I would also choose to avoid that caretaking role.
Assets and income were passed down patrilineally, and hence women were expected to fold into their husband’s family and become the primary caretakers (unless super rich and they had servants).
The problem comes when the government forcefully takes resources from young workers and gives them to old people. You can’t choose independence when young and also choose to depend on someone else. That is trying to have your cake and eat it too, hence all the fretting about unsustainable pension systems around the world.
Economies of scale make the commercial services more efficient. Similarly to how my grandma cannot compete in keeping chickens and selling eggs against a huge agricultural corporation, for a working-age person to stay at home and care for their parents is less economical than if this person performs some specialized work at a job, and there are a bunch of other, trained employees taking care of several old people e.g. in a retirement home.
It may have some social functions that get lost, but it gets outcompeted by scalable, specialized, formal-economy alternatives.
Also industrialization made many tasks possible to do alone. With washing machines, microwaves and TV dinners, people can live on their own indefinitely, while this simply wasn't possible before in a farming and manual labor context where you constantly had to ask for and to provide help getting things done. Like building a house, slaughtering a pig, doing field work etc.
To some extent, yes, it is unfortunate that Western culture has abandoned that cultural value.
However, it's also been incredibly liberating to a great many people.
When it's a cultural value to take care of your parents when they are elderly, to the point of shaming adult children who refuse to do so, it lends itself all too easily to abuse. And there are a lot of abusive parents out there. This is particularly true among queer people, who have only recently (generationally speaking) been able to be out in a widespread manner.
Furthermore, for the current generations of elderly and their children, the chances are higher than ever that the elderly parents have much, much more in the way of resources to take care of themselves than their children have.
The atomization of our society is a genuine problem, and we need to find some good society-level solutions for it. But socially demanding that children care for their parents, no matter how awful those parents were to the children (or still are!) is not something that we should bring back.
But we in the U.S.A. have cast off the chains of interdependence, and adopted the Enlightenment ethos of rugged individualism and consumerism that defines American values. Who needs grandparents, or husbands, or family support when we can train and pay mercenaries to care about us! All praise, glory and power be to our Constitution!
The obvious book recommendation here is: Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
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