>Cultures like this may value things like "familial harmony" more than "individual prosperity".

In the article, it was stated that there is a relationship here. Children are much more likely to be successful in live if their parents were married.

>the author [..] would attribute everything bad in society to the decline in things she holds valuable. It's part of the definition.

No, that's just a strawman.

It's the definition of "successful" that I'm arguing against. It presupposes a lot about what the purpose of culture is/should be.

This is spot on; cultures don't exist in a vacuum. How much of the success of the 'bourgeois culture' of the 1950s was due to the exploitation of other cultures?

Some things are zero-sum games, or at least don't scale to everyone getting the same benefit.

I guess zero-sum is not the correct term; there ARE ways we can improve the sum total quality of life in our country and planet, but we have to really think about what it would mean as the plan scales to everyone.

While I'm inclined to think that personal choices are a more powerful predictor of outcomes than race, I agree that we don't understand cultural dynamics well enough. I think this is all the more reason we should pause before accusing someone of white supremacism, etc.

> But the author does make a critical conservative assumption by implying that economic output is a proxy for "value".

I think she made a critical assumption that "ability to create economic output" is a proxy for "ability to lift people out of poverty". I consider that statement to be much more reasonable than its negation.

I don't think that's a great proxy. Just because a group has high economic output and an ability to lift people out of poverty, it doesn't mean they will. The rising income inequality in the US (without a desire to increase social welfare programs) coupled with the fact that the US's economy is still growing would seem like a counterexample.

Let me try to clarify what I meant. If a culture can enhance the culture's members' ability as individuals to create higher economic output, then that culture is probably more able to lift individual members out of poverty. Or, if you prefer, it gives the individual members better tools for lifting themselves out of poverty.

I'm not claiming that it will do better at taking care of the poor. I'm claiming that poor members of that culture will be better able to help themselves.

Could you clarify your argument? It sounds like you're saying something to the effect of "The author is just upset that life is better for people with different attributes than her; no one can legitimately hold her point of view". I don't think that's what you mean, but I want to give you the opportunity to clarify.

I'm trying to say that her argument simply isn't very interesting :)

Look, the only people who think America was better off in the 60s/70s are the ones who benefitted from the systemic discrimination inherent of that era. It's perfectly reasonable for them to feel that way, and I'm not even saying I blame them for feeling left behind. Is America actually better off today? It depends who you ask.

It's just not intellectually very interesting to talk about. All she's doing is imposing cherry-picked aspects of her chosen value system as objectively "better" while ignoring the whole point that any definition of "better" relies on a subjective personal value system to begin with.