Debatable.

Snow Crash is tongue-in-cheek. The line above is the inner monologue of a samurai-sword-wielding high-speed pizza-delivering super-hacker martial artist.

Excellent quote. While the effect of American music is huge without a doubt let me go off on a personal tangent because it's related.

I have immigrated from my homeland (first to Canada and then Malta) and I usually say "I had the bad luck to be born in Hungary but I fixed that when I could". In other words, I am not particularly fond of the country / people living in there. But it being my mother tongue, growing up there has an interesting effect: some Hungarian songs have a much stronger emotional effect than any in say English. These are not even songs I knew as a child. I am actually quite curious whether there has been scientific research in this.

Nelson Mandela had a famous quote about the power of speaking someone's native language:

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

The idea here is pretty straightforward: speaking to someone in a language they merely understand reaches them intellectually, but speaking in their mother tongue resonates on a deeper, emotional level. You can imagine now why songs in Hungarian resonate more to you than the ones in English.

I'd bet the culture that produced the singers and songwriters mattered more than the language, but how could I measure those independently

I shall follow you down your personal/Hungarian tangent...

There was a guy called Jackie Orszaczky who was a Hungarian jazz/funk musician - bass player, bandleader, and singer - here (in Sydney, Australia) who made some of my most loved jazz/funk music.

This is one of his bands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hydb0dyB9GQ

Sadly, he died about 15 years back, way too early. Fuck Cancer.

Apparently he was "a big deal" in Hungary, at least amongst music circles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Orszaczky

Update: https://reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/1fjo6f7/song_lyrics_in_... this is a very helpful comment pointing out there is, indeed research on the subject.

Markets

Markets cease to function efficiently in the presence of massive concentrations of wealth. But if by saying America is good at "markets" we actually mean the latter, then yes.

> Markets cease to function efficiently in the presence of massive concentrations of wealth

Why?

There's a fixed supply of money (ish, the real life stuff money represents is actually scarce). If wealth disparity is great that means that less money is available for working people. You can't really gain a dollar here without losing a dollar there.

The problem here is working people ARE the economy. If they no longer have the power of consumption everything crumples. Of course it's a sliding scale, but even just a bit less consumerism can be catastrophic for some industries.

Money is just a proxy for time spent, so yes there is a fixed amount because we all have only so much time.

You can make gains by new technology(printing press vs handwritten), cutting quality(cheaper inputs/materials) or improving efficiency(work cell design).

Looking at it from a view of consumerism paints a bleak picture, if you look at if from a view of social stability without a functioning economy everyone will starve since the fertilizer, DEF fluid, John Deere tractor code and everything that ties all those together are so far spread out that is has become like a spider web facing a hurricane.

The self-balancing mechanism of markets requires "skin in the game", which is to say, there must be incentive for individual actors to make wise decisions backed by the risk of loss. However, as wealth accumulates, the marginal value of a dollar decreases. Beyond a certain point of wealth accumulation, losing money is no longer a punishment, which means wise decisions are no longer systematically incentivized. This gives individual actors unilateral power to keep markets irrational for longer than wise actors can remain solvent, creating market failure.

Not the OP, but one reason is because concentrated wealth allows you to adjust the rules of the market or suppress competition. Another reason is that the market only rewards you for delivering value to people who can pay for it, so wealth concentration skews the production of goods towards a small quantity of luxury items, which lack the economies of scale for efficient production. This may still be a Pareto efficient market but not one that maximizes national wealth or welfare.

My guess is that it has to do with index funds.

Huh, how?

Singapore (for example) is better at markets than the US.