I've been able to do the first 3 without leaving (perhaps because I wasn't born here), and number 4 doesn't seem so certain.
What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US.
Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.
In some ways living abroad for a decade after school made me feel more like the US is the center of the world. I specifically looked for something as different and far away as possible, and I ended up meeting people who were learning English and familiar with the same music, television and movies I saw in college. Many of my European friends really could go weeks without seeing anything from home, but I couldn't.
That said, I was probably extremely unusual amongst my peers in thinking the US was just one of many countries when I left. Also, at that time I had thought that China would be dominating everything by 2020. Now, after having lived in China, I'm more bullish on the US than ever. Not only is it continuing to attract the smartest and most ambitious people in the world, but there's a huge demographic advantage, too. Whatever the babyboomer retirement does to the US, it will be far harder on Europe. Japan and China will be even older.
That doesn't make me doubt #4, though. Lifespans are going to increase.
I am an American living in Indonesia at the moment.
A lot of this is complicated. The US, as the only superpower (financial, cultural, and military) is not just one country among many. What happens in the US affects every corner of the planet. I am living right now in Indonesia and I see that every day. There are other countries which this can be said for, but they all are oil exporters and their impact is solely a function of those oil exports.
At the same time, I find a lot of Americans seem to think the other countries don't matter as much as they do. Consequently we have these bizarre discussions of how anti-American one country or another is, and, absent them calling America the great Satan or the like, one wonders how much of it is being intolerant of a level of dissent in foreign countries that would be perfectly allowed at home.
So the truth is very often more complicated than simple dichotomies.
The exception is that I would agree with #4. The US has a number of huge looming challenges which affect our country in a way no other country is affected. These include what I call "peak oil" (see below, not quite what peak oil theorists mean), the baby boomer retirement (this affects us differently than China or Japan, but Europe is going to feel the effects too), and a need to repair/replace much of our existing infrastructure. The infrastructure disrepair is becoming evident now, but I want to spend more time on the others.
Peak oil is usually defined as an absolute peak in production, after which production cannot rise to the same level. This is not what I mean. Instead I mean peak production relative to demand. We passed this peak in 1973 and after the oil crisis, oil supply never continued to grow in the way it grew prior to 1973. The crisis itself may have been political and the peak may be economic, but that doesn't make it any less real. Since 1973, oil production has gone up and down, but never continued to grow steadily as it had in the past.
Oil makes our economy work because it is a cheap source of energy. Unconventional hydrocarbons can help there, but they take much more energy to extract, and thus when energy is the limiting principle of your economy (and thus the primary cost), these are only profitable at high oil prices. Unconventional hydrocarbons thus act as a cushion against the sort of drastic decline we might see if we were only looking at light sweet crude. They are not a perfect substitute. And so I predict that oil production to the extent it increases, will not do so as fast as demand, and thus energy prices will continue to rise. The key driver of this demand is economic development in China, Brazil, India, and other countries. And thus any increase in production will not cause a collapse in oil or energy prices. Also note that most renewable energy has a comparatively low energy return on investment and so they are only really profitable when oil prices are high also, so they too act as a cushion. A transition from stored solar energy (fossil fuels) to current solar energy will not be economically pleasant.
The problem here is that higher energy prices, particularly oil prices, puts the brakes on all aspects of the economy and the US is particularly vulnerable. The US may already be past peak oil consumption as oil consumption has been falling off in recent years (how much is due to the Great Recession is hard to know however).
Retirement also affects different places differently. Europe and the US are likely to be hardest hit by the baby boom retiring, but the US is particularly vulnerable. In most countries in the world, retirement is not expected to be independent. When you retire, you move in with your kids, and help them raise their kids. They pay for your medical bills, and feed you, and you help them out as you can. In Europe and the US this is different. The expectation that we will have independent retirement means we have to save up vast amounts of money for that, and we also have to have programs like Medicare to provide the costs for caring for the elderly. However, the US is uniquely bad at cost control. Our public sector pays more per capita on medical care than any other country in the world and that's just the public sector (Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and state/federal gov. insurance pools). We can't control costs there and so the costs will be truly hard to bear. Entirely missing in the health care reform debate has been this incompetence of the federal government to control costs in any way.
The US has one significant advantage in all this but it is one that could go away suddenly and leave us stranded. The USD is the world's reserve currency. This means that the national debt can be eased by the US essentially printing money to get out of debt. However, if that changes, the US access to international credit will suddenly be very different and our debt will become difficult to sustain. Right now we are lucky because there are no real alternatives. The Euro was looking good for a while, but not anymore.....
tl; dr: The US has a number of significant and unique challenges which will erode our presence in the world over coming decades. How much erosion we suffer will depend on a lot of factors however.
What's interesting is to spend time living in an even younger culture, but with deeper roots, like in the Andes, or in Indonesia....
One thing I noticed in Ecuador was the level of visceral patriotism I had never seen and yet the lack of sense of "we're number 1" that is equated with this in the US. It was as if Ecuadorians said "We love our country. Let's make it number 1."
In Indonesia, it's different. The Chinese-Indonesians are afraid to get involved in politics, and the religious politics makes the Christian Right look pretty tame. Malaysia is different still, in weird and disorienting ways.
I think there's something to the not being born there that helps. #1 was a huge revelation to me (I'd like to think I'm observant and well-informed), and continues to be so to Americans I've had the opportunity to tour-guide for.
I'm really curious where it comes from. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of American mass-media? Every European knows the New York skyline and what "NYPD" and "FBI" mean.
How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?
> How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?
That only means American culture is more exported than others in many forms like movies, TV shows, etc. People like to watch American shows, American that, American this, etc. If Honk Kong and Seoul were able to export their culture as effectively you'll know about them too. A lot of people know about Paris and Cannes in the US. Doesn't mean they are "well educated" or anything. Nor the other way around.
This is true and it's true in SEAsia. In Japan, SK culture has pervaded TV and entertainment, moreso than American Entertainment. Go to Taipei and you can see the evidence of Japanese culture (well, this is two-pronged, Japanese legacy on the island as well as youth culture) along with SK culture. The only place American culture might have the upper hand in SEAsia is in blockbuster movies --but that's a minority of movies shown or seen.
In Africa, lots of the entertainment, while English language, is Nigerian English with Nigerian TV and music being very influential.
Very true. Hollywood is overwhelmingly dominant in movies in the English speaking world. Walking into a theatre here in Melbourne and it's like I'm back in the US.
(Although I will say that Red Dog was a nicely done and uniquely Australian movie.)
I'm Australian, and despite numerous cultural shifts, when you graduate the natural place to go is Europe. The thing young Aus/NZ people do is backpack around Europe.
When I was growing up, I knew a lot about the US from Mass Media, but it was pretty shallow. I saw the US as a mono-culture. When I finally visited the states that's what shocked me most - it's a diverse, complex place. In many ways more so than Europe.
I think the problem is that all the non-boring places to live in the US _are_ a monoculture, mostly due to the network. (Then again, most non-boring places on Earth are all converging to this point anyway.) The parts that diverge from the monoculture are places that would be horrible to live (e.g. the south, the rust belt, etc).
I entirely disagree there. Seattle is culturally different from LA and LA is culturally different from San Francisco, and none of them are really culturally the same as Portland, Oregon, and that's just the West Coast.
Heck, if you go to Texas, Austin is culturally different from, say, Houston.
I've lived in the Southwest, the Northeast, and the Northwest. I can say these areas are culturally different and if you don't see it, you haven't lived in enough places.
I think the big problem is that culture is largely invisible to those who grow up in it. All the little things you do, how you greet people, the little micro-dialects of the language, etc. are so second-nature that they are hard to see.
There are only 26^3 TLAs, so all of them get overloaded. I suspect you are thinking of BKA = Bundeskriminalamt, because you just mentioned the FBI.
As for Hong Kong vs Seoul, I would look for boxy Korean characters in Seoul and various Chinese forms in HK.
I'm a USAn who has never been to Germany, Korea, or Hong Kong... but I read a lot, and pay attention. Most smart people do both of those things. I suspect it's part of the definition of "smart" these days.
> Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.
"There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness."
"If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it."
"But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take. This is the atmosphere in which Nobel Prize winners are nurtured. A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents."
> Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.
Aside from the obvious ambiguities of what defines sophistication of a culture: It feels like you're begging the question to me. "Americans are unsophisticated because they're a young culture so they're unsophisticated..."
Moreover I think suggesting that an entire culture is full of optimism and youth because it's only 300 some-odd years old strikes me quite sweeping. The modern nation state is barely as old, and it's not as if Americans don't have some cultural heritage that goes back much further than that.
I didn't have a because in there. What I said was that Americans seem unsophisticated but energetic and optimistic, and that since all those qualities are associated with youth, you could compress them into one statement by saying American culture felt young.
Nor did I say that American culture has this quality of youthfulness because the US is a comparatively young country. In fact that seems unlikely to be the cause, because there are younger countries that don't have it.
I see your point, re-reading your original post. The phrase "young culture", to me, carries a heavy emphasis of literal age.
Ultimately -- and semantic quibbling aside -- I think you're right that American culture is (and by extension, typical Americans are) particularly energetic and optimistic.
I'm not sure I agree with unsophisticated, unless you mean "less formal".
Yeah. How can the US be exporting more culture than any other country, yet, have less of it? Something doesnt add up.
There is lots of influencal US culture. From rap to mcdonalds. We may look down upon it now, but all of tat will age into cherished cultural relics when they stop being relevant.
I think the point the OP wanted to make, is that the US has less dead culture, compared to say Europe.
Europeans (and Chinese, etc.) have a lot more historical culture. Entire large and well-documented civilizations which have passed. US culture is basically independent of pre-Colombian American culture, and most pre-Colombian cultures are badly documented and understood compared to the Greeks, Romans, various Chinese dynasties, etc.
You might also consider various fine arts to be "dead", in that their peak point has passed. Not sure if I'd argue that, but it's clearer to argue that specific schools of art meet that definition. e.g. I don't think anyone will surpass Bach in organ music.
Modern European culture isn't the part that's dead, it's that there are also "dead" cultural artifacts in Europe, while the US was basically a clean slate. That's a plus for Europe in some ways, but in some ways actually helps the US -- having to create everything from scratch, taking the best (well, maybe) of other cultures, is itself interesting. Look at Singapore for another example.
So pretty much the most Christian developed country in the world is free of what you term 'Pre-Columbian' culture?
Christianity is a fusion of Greek, Roman and Jewish thought.
The founding fathers of the US were profoundly Christian. Their politics of the day was largely what made sense to ex-British subjects. The revolution of 1688 affects the US vastly.
US political systems were created built on thousands of years of European History. Prior to 1492 US history is European History.
The US has altered and changed the ideals and beliefs that the people who founded it started with but it was not a Blank Slate.
Just because Jerusalem and Rome are not in Ohio it doesn't mean they affect the US any less than they do Sweden.
I meant that the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, and other Native Americans are largely irrelevant to how US culture developed (which is I think your point), not that US culture is independent of everything which happened before Europeans came to the US.
"Pre-Columbian American culture" being that of the various Native Americans, not of the world in general pre-Columbus.
(I wish I could s/Colombian/Columbian; so easy to get those confused in various contexts)
I'm guessing the dead is as in deadweight --not contributory. For example, royalty and its traditions, its cultural baggage. The British still endure what's called "the Norman yoke". That is the Normas took over a culture and imposed it on the locals. This resulted in a sharp divide between the rulers (initially foreign royals) and locals (now landless and considered lower class commoners). This division is entrenched in British culture to this day.
Well, everything from any of the previous empires, for starters.
I dont mean to suggest Europe has little culture, but unlike the states, it also has a lot of dead culture. Culture that may still inform our identity, and of which relics and remainders are embedded in the fabric of everything. Yet it is dead culture: most of us not even capable of imaging how life would be in such a culture.
That's an interesting point, but I guess that this is mostly due to the immigration friendly policies the US has. IIRC, I read somewhere in the Economist that the US is actually the only OECD country that is not going to suffer from a demographic shift. But if those policies would change, or research universities need to cut down their expenses due to budget problems, I'm not sure how long this would last. (IIRC, when Ireland's economy came to a halt, almost all foreign blue collar workers went back to their home countries in no time.)
>Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture.
I felt the same way when visiting Australia for the first time. The sense of a "Pioneer Spirit" with a vast mostly unexplored territory seems to still be there. It was actually quite infectious.
> number 4 [US not #1 soon] doesn't seem so certain.
Well, sure, nothing is certain, except that economists are often wrong. I listened recently to some 1998 academic conferences about economy and all the guys did boldly envision a slow steady growth for the next 25 years... Moreover, none of them did say a word about the East-West rebalancing, that is under everyone's pen these days. So let's not listen to them, sure.
But, still, I have the weird feeling that some people like pg and Fred Wilson have a kind of blind spot on China. It is sad because they could have more interesting things to say than economists.
Gosh, these two years money is raining over Beijing start-ups, VCs are praising founders to accept their money, every new things created in the US instantly generates tens of (shanzhai) Chinese copies. One can dismiss Chinese hot start-up temperature as artificial, ungrounded, or not fertile, or whatever, but I wouldn't understand how one could plainly ignore it.
What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US.
Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.