In undergrad one economic history prof basically argued America is just a wider bell curve you overly onto the Canadian bell curve. Left side of the distribution you might consider immigrating from USA to Canada because of the wider social net, very far right side of the bell curve you might do the opposite since the ability to generate and keep economic rewards is much higher in America. Obviously a simplified argument but it sort of makes sense. If you look at Mary Meekers appendix, a good chunk of founder CEOs are foreign or second generation foreign born.
This comment makes no sense at all. The threat which freedom of speech is designed to protect us from is not attacks on exceptionalism, but oppression and control by the hands of a dictatorship. It matters nothing if you feel you're exceptional or you just happen to disagree with anyone in power over any subject, be it critical or irrelevant. What matters is that no one should have the right to deny you the ability to freely express your ideas, because that would represent control over all aspects of your life and existence.
Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” If exceptionalism is a mirage, freedom of speech incurs a cost on a country for no gain. Ceteris paribus others without that drag will have an advantage.
Is your correction supposed to be an improvement? I mean, the statement "If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech isn't competitive" makes even less sense. It makes no sense at all to talk about freedom of speech incurring a cost. There is absolutely zero cost in not persecuting anyone for having a different opinion.
Of course there is. If anti-vax and anti-mask advocates could be silenced by the state, public health would improve in the short term.
Freedom of speech is effortful to maintain. It takes effort and self control for a society to tolerate opposing views within itself. Forgetting this risks the freedom itself.
I think this only holds if you take a deeply communitarian outlook, which is somewhat difficult to mesh with a belief in the value of the exceptional individual.
I value freedom of speech for the same reason I value other freedoms, for the boringly baseline and everyone else, as well as for instrumental reasons - briefly, freedom is its own good because humans are wired for it; and suppression of speech leads to broken, damaging government.
In any case, small clarification - I do believe that exceptional people in the sense we're discussing exist. But they are far rarer, and the Superhero CEOs we're talking about are not those.
Right until the moment we saw how America (society and government) handles pandemics and school shootings.
Even a decade ago, what you said would have been true but now in the medium term, I'll pass :-)
It's a pity.. such an incredibly beautiful country.
This is well written. Thank you.
If you believe in the exceptional, or believe you are exceptional, America will draw you to it. If you don’t believe in exceptionalism, America looks like it incurs costs for no gain. The Chinese system in contrast looks balanced.
I believe in exceptional people. Almost every measure of a variety of skills has long tails. In most cases, those tails are developed through working at a skill and are not the sole product of innate talent. Incentivising that development thus makes a civilisation more capable.
But I’m not so wedded to this belief as to claim it the only way. If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense: there are no special thoughts which, if extinguished, are unlikely to recur for a long, long time.