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America never does anything half-assed; instead, we make complete asses of ourselves. U-turns predominate as we can’t merely course correct but must disavow the “lies” and “conspiracies” of they who created this mess (it is never us, of course). They must pay for what they’ve done to us!
And so we get a president who promises to make our nation great again through retribution — another word for revenge.
You remember the old bit about undertaking a revenge tour?
Before seeking revenge, dig two graves.
You know, one for your victim and one for yourself.
I have a ton of respect for Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf — a Brit who often explains America better than we explain ourselves. I have followed his column for years, and had the pleasure of sharing dinner with him at some World Economic Forum regional gathering off the coast of Australia many years ago. A completely charming fellow, I must say.
So, when I saw this article, I knew this was something I wanted to dive deep on.
The short answer is, of course, yes, we pay a heavy price for our economic dynamism.
America has been attracting A-type personalities from the world over for centuries: the most desperately ambitious types set their sights on this vast incubator of wealth and technology and take the crazy plunge of coming here and starting over — an immensely challenging prospect and process.
But they come anyway.
And then they bust their hump for years, making themselves super-Americans and putting their kids on these amazing trajectories.
You ever notice how children of immigrants tend to do so well here? Like Ramaswamy or Harris or Haley (all Indians) in recent election cycles? How about our new SECSTATE Rubio (following in the steps of Madeline Albright)? It is the perfect American story: My parents came to this land seeking …
The dream that propels many immigrants to America’s shores is the possibility of offering a better future for their children. Using millions of records of immigrant families from 1880 to 1940 and then again from 1980 to today, we find that the in past and still today children of immigrants surpass their parents and move up the economic ladder. If this is the American Dream, then immigrants achieve it—big time.
Children of immigrants seriously outperform children of native Americans, and that’s true no matter where they came from (to include “shithole” countries).
Their secret advantage is their willing mobility — the very thing that brought them here in the first place:
Immigrants tend to move to those locations in the U.S. that offer the best opportunities for upward mobility for their kids, whereas the U.S.-born are more rooted in place.
They are not just moving in, they’re moving around — paying that price on behalf of their kids.
Again, so perfectly American.
And then, of course, over time, all those Type A children intermarry, concentrating their A-type-ness even more.
They also tend to congregate in innovation/power hubs, with DC being a prime example. You want to raise your kids in the most enriching and rigorous and competitive and stressing possible environment? Try Fairfax County just outside the Beltway. It’s the land of HS over-achievers on their first ulcer.
But it does work — at that price and yielding such pathologies.
As our first-born two-year-old battled to survive a two-year fight with cancer at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center in the mid-1990s, my spouse made me promise that, if she survived and we were still married (decent odds on former, abysmal odds on latter), we’d move away from Northern VA and never come back. She said, I can handle your A-type personality but I cannot stand an entire society crammed full of your worst traits.
I chose Vonne over my “Potomac fever,” and made out like a bandit!
And so we left for Rhode Island, staying there long enough to educate our growing brood in Catholic grade schools (RI is Uber-Catholic).
But then we felt the high schools were lacking, and so we moved to Indianapolis IN and got our first two kids through a fabulous HS in Greenwood — a suburb.
Then, after our second born got into U Wisconsin, we moved there to avoid paying out-of-state tuition and to get my spouse her second master’s degree. Two other kids followed Kevin through UW-Madison, the third graduating next spring (our Chinese immigrant daughter).
Work brought us to Ohio in 2022, but then I lost the job. But we stayed here in hippie-heaven Yellow Springs because the HS was so perfect for our two Ethiopian daughters — this stunningly diverse and welcoming place. But now that they get close to tertiary educational opportunities, we’re moving back to Wisconsin for their college years.
I’m not bragging. There was no plan nor any ethos other than find the best (for our kids) school district and do whatever it takes to live there.
I’m just saying I get the immigrant ethos when it comes to their kids — with three of ours being immigrants themselves.
On to the Wolf piece, which starts out with an appropriately Dickensian flair:
It is the best of countries, it is the worst of countries, or at least of the high-income ones. The US stands out for its prosperity and its brutality. This is how I have felt about it since I visited in 1966 and lived there throughout the 1970s.
Somehow, we keep growing our economy — this mini-globalization of 50 member-states who trade with one another in supreme freedom, to include the movement of money and people.
The sustained prosperity of the US is astounding. A few western countries have even higher real incomes per head: Switzerland is one. But real GDP per head in the larger high-income countries is below the US average. Moreover, these countries have fallen further behind in this century.
And somehow we keep it up.
Not surprisingly, the US economy also remains far more innovative than other large high-income economies. Just look at its leading companies. These are not only far more valuable than those in Europe, but far more concentrated in the digital economy, as Mario Draghi pointed out in his recent report on EU competitiveness. Andrew McAfee of MIT stresses that “The US has a large and variegated population of valuable young from-scratch companies. The EU simply doesn’t.
Yes, we have a trade deficit, but that’s greatly facilitated by our dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency — a “powerful vote of confidence” by the world regarding our present performance and future prospects (an enduring trust and admiration that Trump risks mightily with his trade-war instincts).
But, with the good comes the bad, like our stunningly high (for a developed country) murder rate, matched by our infamous incarceration rate.
Get this: America is the ONLY country in the world where there are more privately-owned guns than citizens.
And yet we wonder.
Prayers and thoughts for the families! [But nothing else.]
Worse, we perform so dreadfully when it comes to taking care of our most vulnerable at their most vulnerable moment: women having babies.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, maternal deaths were, most recently, 19 per 100,000 live births for US white women, against 5.5 in the UK, 3.5 in Germany and 1.2 in Switzerland. For US Black women, mortality rates were close to 50 per 100,00 live births. Child mortality is also relatively high: according to the World Bank, under-five mortality was 6.3 per 1,000 live births in the US in 2022, against 4.1 in the UK, 3.6 in Germany and 2.3 in Japan.
How can a Black woman in America be something like 50 times more likely to die in childbirth than a Swiss woman? That is simply inconceivable and yet there it is.
Also, what magic is Norway pulling off and when can we move in?
We spend far more on healthcare than anybody and yet lag significantly on life expectancy at birth (79.5 years) compared to best-in-the-field Japan (84.9).
So, Wolf asks:
Logically, it is not clear why an innovative economy cannot be combined with a more harmonious and healthier society.
[Insert the obligatory reference to amazing Nordic countries — and/or Minnesota.]
Still, right now the Europeans are wondering if that collective goodness is … holding them back?
One might hope that the scale of the US market, its relatively light regulation, the quality of its science and its attractions to high-quality immigrants are the explanations. But there is this lingering fear that the technologically dynamic society Draghi and other Europeans now seek might require the rugged, nay dog-eats-dog, individualism of the US. It is a sobering possibility.
Aimee, get your gun!
Now, the truly disheartening but accurate diagnosis of where we are right now:
Then there is a related question, which is whether the relatively high inequality of the US and the insecurity of those in the bottom and middle of the income distribution inevitably lead to what I called “pluto-populism” in 2006: the political marriage of the ultra-rich, seeking deregulation and low taxes, with the insecure and angry middle and lower middle, seeking people to blame for what is going wrong for them. If so, what made the US dynamic, at least in this age of deindustrialisation and unbridled finance, led to the rise of Trump and so to a shift to a dangerous new demagogic autocracy.
We are clearly living in another Gilded Age, where U.S. Black women die during childbirth at a stunning rate and oligarchs like Bezos and Musk can finance their own flights into space whenever the mood hits.
We clearly have an angry and scared middle class that chose Trump on the notion that he’s some Teddy/Franklin Roosevelt-like traitor to his class who’s going to correct all these systems “rigged” against the little guy.
He’s just going to do it with a bunch of extreme-A-type White male billionaires (and Ramaswamy!) who believe themselves to be supermen who can do what they want with us mediocre masses.
What could go wrong?
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