You ought to think about how bad every American school is at teaching and how bad every American university is at preparing and how awful every American company is at hiring and how terrible every American agency is at governing and yet despite all this we’re still #1 GDP
According to bsking, Scott Alexander has said something like "We are a nation of freaks, weirdos, and absolute lunatics and I suspect we will never fall to tyranny because of it." I can't find the exact quote, because it looks like it is behind the paywall at "Contra Hoel." Yet it sounds like him and I suspect it is largely true in any event.
I think the statements are true and largely related. This is not to discount that many sober and even boring individuals have been the backbone of American society. Yet even some of the Bagginses have a Tookish streak, and that has made all the difference. For the first statement I think the key is recognising that everyone's schools are terrible, every nation's companies and agencies are foolish, but only in America do we dare to say it out loud. Finns tell you how wonderful their schools are as do Romanians and South Koreans. Across Latin America people will tell you that their local economies are kinder, protecting the dear old street sellers of corn tortillas or the fishermen. And they are still poor.
Going further afield and relating it to resisting tyranny, it is not just armed resistance in some coordinated fashion that is the difficulty for tyrants. The wags and comedians who point out that a bunch of hillbillies have no chance of taking out a single military base are missing the point. It is the uncooperativeness, the constant nagging frustration of officials who can't get people to even stand in line properly or fill out Necessary Forms. We are cranks, we wear them down until it's just not worth the candle to make us behave. This is true of the guns as well. Americans don't have any chance of holding a crossroads near Camp Lejeune for even an afternoon, certainly. Marines out on leave would handle that without even calling back to base. But if you want to know why owning guns has a lot to do with resisting tyranny, imagine going house-to-house to confiscate them in Baltimore, Burbank, and Billings. Good luck finding people who want that job.
4 comments:
You've given a good account of what the Hells Angels are all about, I think.
Ordinary Americans might hold a crossroads near Quantico better than you think. The Canadian truck convoy just parked a bunch of trucks in the way. Turns out that's hard to fix too. There's a real shortage of tow trucks that can move a big truck, and if there's a whole bunch of them together you're kind of stuck. If they're blocking a key bridge or intersection, suddenly ordinary people have some leverage. The firearms and the trucks are similar in that way: they're real power in the hands of regular folks who don't want to be pushed around and do want to be left alone.
There's a lot to be said for that, especially when you reflect on how much of American life depends on them. If the truckers weren't freely doing their job as a regular thing none of this would work. Everything you own, a big truck brought it.
I broadly agree with both of you, but I don't think GDP illustrates the point very well. It doesn't seem meaningful to compare the economies of the US w/ its >300 million people and Finland w/ its <6 million people. Finland could have the absolute best schools, government, and companies in the world and they would never have the GDP of the US. And, if you use GDP per capita, the US isn't in the top 5.
Thomas, you are right that GDP, even per-capita GDP, is not an overarching measure of a nation's success. It is good enough for a tweet to make a point, I suppose, but not for use in a thorough discussion. The US is 5th-10th in per-capita economic measures, but many of the "countries" ahead of us are either economic carve-out regions or even just cities, and two are oil states, in which income is not generally distributed. Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, and Switzerland are also specialised cases. All of which is fine. Clever of all those folks to manage such arrangements, actually. Maybe their schools, businesses, and governments do know a little something about sitting back quietly and having outsized influence which our cranks might not be able to contain themselves for.
Hm, yes, maybe I was making a petty point, correct but not meaningful. Certainly, if we look at nations by size, we have roughly a quarter of the population of China or India and yet our economy dwarfs India's and is a third larger than China's.
I think you're on to something, but I'd like a clearer picture of it and I don't know really how to approach it. Or maybe it should just be a rough idea.
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