> It's a common trope on here to lament on how the Anglo cultures don't value family ties strongly enough. I'd argue not overly valuing family ties has been a big competitive advantage of the Anglo cultures for centuries, eg. moving for opportunity (improved social mobility), ability to connect with outsiders, couple pairing across cultural/geographical boundaries, prerequisite to a high trust society, etc.

That line of reasoning is just plain sad. It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."

What makes it specially sad is how anglo culture's economic advantage spawns from the outcome of WW2, not this misplaced sense of sacrifice.

Well, that's a very self-defeatist attitude. I can see how it can make someone sad.

Why are you calling that Anglo-Saxon culture? You're clearly talking about the US, not the UK or France... You're not even talking about the whole US, or the majority, just the culture in the larger cities. Even within the US it isn't the people that were born here who traveled the farthest and learned a new language for an opportunity. This whole conversation is a surreal extension of what can only be one person's early career in the Bay Area, someone who by very unlikely random draw doesn't have any Chinese or Indian coworkers.

"anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire. The outcome of WW2 elevated America, there's no relationship there to broader anglo culture.

Quite a stretch to jump to "everyone might be miserable". Immigration from Latin American and other non-anglo countries is on a scale where it shapes American and British domestic politics, difficult to conclude that those immigrants are searching for the misery of anglo cultures that they can't find at home.

> "anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire.

I think you're trying too hard to muddy the waters by creating a definition for "anglo" that does not match reality or any use of the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Americans

Even within "European Americans", nearly half has an ethnic origin that is classified as German, not English.

Another important aspect is immigration and naturalization. The bulk of high-skilled R&D specialists who turned the US into the technological powerhouse that it is aren't exactly Mayflower descendants. It's immigrants and first- and second-generation. So it's very hard to argue about "Anglo" thins with the extreme reliance on immigration and descendent of immigrants to play the roles that made all this progress possible.

A few points:

- German and other NW European cultures share the family atomization characteristic of Anglo-Americans

- Anglo as a term stems from England. England is named for the Angles, a Scandinavian/Germanic tribe that invaded Britain a long time ago. The term Anglo-American reflects the seminal English influence on American culture.

- The English and their descendant culture, America, basically invented the modern economic world and it predates WWII by a long time.

The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.

>The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.

How so?

The word "anglo" is so fraught that I think it's probably less useful to try to argue about what it means than it would be to just leave it alone.

I'm actually here to point out that the U.S. had the world's largest GDP as early as 1890, or as late as 1913, depending on your source of data and how it's estimated. So, WWII isn't the origin of that. We can now argue about whether GDP is a good indicator, but before doing that I'd ask for a better one (with historical data) to be suggested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...

Someone else? My brother the US median income is miles ahead of everywhere else.

Income alone is not a good measure.

>It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."

Aren't Scandinavian people statistically the happiest? That's not anglo culture.

Admittedly Anglo culture took a lot of influence from the scandinavians (due to Viking conquest etc). I think some of the cultural tenants we are talking about probably did come originally from Scandinavia.

Isn't the suicide rate highest in Scandinavian countries and lowest in South Europe?

The more sad people kill themselves, the happier is the average survivor?

In a static population sure. Over decades?

Britanica did a video on this: https://youtu.be/ldvQOnvc2Io?si=9R1IHMfS0i7RhB8s

Different cultures also define happiness differently. For the scandanvians, happiness stems from contentment and balance, American society tends to link it to consumerism and material success.

US had world’s largest economy well before WWII. It initially took first place in 1880 before going back and forth until 1900 when to firmly took the lead for a century. https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-did-united-state...

It was a huge country with lots of natural resources like oil, gold, coal, etc.

> What really needs to happen is we need to figure out ways of facilitating friend formation/maintenance in this brave new world of the internet and atheism. We are going to need some new social technologies to really combat this.

I wonder how in your opinion atheism enters in the picture? My first guess (of your reference) is that certain religions frighten people into remaining in a marriage they would otherwise not be in. My second guess is that religion fills a social glue role by virtue of getting people together to worship or do other community things.

In my own opinion, part of the problem is that we are not atheist enough, and we still believe in the god-mandated union of a man and a woman, properly enclosed by walls, to bring forth children, as the only way worth living. Yes, there are pockets of resistance to the idea, but too little and too late. By far and large all parents out there are pressing their children to marry and have kids, so that there are grandchildren to fill those golden years. And there is mass media of course, which by far and large does the same. But I suspect that, left to their own devices, a lot of young people may choose to stick to their childhood friends of their same sex or otherwise, and employ one of the myriad ways humans can achieve sexual fulfillment. And since I'm on the topic, our species had sex for bonding long before it had religion, language, and the Internet. It's a pity that after the agricultural revolution and the newly found greed for land, God declared that technology suitable only for establishing property rights and for growing the military might of the tribe.

> their children to marry and have kids, so that there are grandchildren to fill those golden years

Which seems to benefit everyone long-term, though (on average/societal scale anyway). I mean what alternatives are you suggesting?

Communes? State run child breeding and education facilities?

If your issue is with monogamy, well that has proven to be the most stable system and seemingly facilitated most of human progress (at least in the more successful societies).

> a lot of young people may choose to stick

You do have a point, it's certainly not necessarily optimal from the individual perspective. Problem is that most alternatives might not be sustainable over several generations so they just die out.

Probably not exactly what you're thinking about but e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

I think your second guess is what was meant. Doing church things is a social occasion, a place to meet people and make friends.

From the perspective of my original comment, more than anything church is just a formalized social occasion. Repeated social contact, and proximity seems to be critical to friendship formation.

Wasn't commenting on family formation etc.

This is going on a tangent, but I would like to point out to you that Atheism is itself a religion: It's a belief in no god(s), a belief in refuting god(s).

I'm Japanese, we (Japan) consider ourselves Non-Religious when we choose to celebrate newborn life at Shinto Shrines, weddings at Christian Churches, and funerals and graves at Buddhist Temples with no dogmatic attachment to any of them as an institution as we go through the motions in life.

There's a healthy enjoyment of Christmas involving cake and Kentucky Fried Chicken in there, too.

Thusly, I always find it interesting/amusing that Atheism is usually positioned as the anti-religion in the West when really it isn't.

I'm going in a tangent too here :-) . One can say that atheism (with lower case) is a lack of religion. And then there is the meaning you suggest: Atheism as a belief in refuting god. That one is not a proper religion, but more like an ideology. Or maybe it is a religion in the sense that it can be used as a moral cornerstone.

More than playing with words, not believing in god may be one of three things: irrelevant, a disadvantage, or a door to a better world. It is irrelevant if you observe the rites and traditions of your society anyway, e.g. if you celebrate newborn life at Shinto Shrines, and weddings and Christian Churches, and Christmas, and if your passing through this world does not intend to play with those "immutables". It's a disadvantage if you find yourself in an ostracized minority or simply disconnected from your neighbors. But it may also be a door to a better world if you yourself or your neighbor are gay, or if you yourself and your neighbor are medical researchers trying to understand why people age, or if you yourself and your neighbor are fighting for the rights of women in some dark corner of the world.

An atheist may write books where gods, angels and demons play with humans, and find it amusing and delight others with it. Or they may enter a church and find it pretty and feel empathy for the pain that move people to worship in such places. An atheist may come to terms with their irreverent faith on that pain not having to be an eternal part of the world, and may try to do something to change it.

I think the parallel many draw is that atheism is taking a position of certainty on the question of a God. And that certainty is based largely on personal belief as any evidence for such a question will inherently be weak.

To me agnosticism would be more the absence of religion, because the absence of religion doesn't imply any particular opinion on the existence or not of a God. One can believe there might be a God without embracing any religion.

The idea that someone can be without “religion” is very odd. The word “religion” is generally worthless as used, as for most people, this is merely some vague sense of what was called “religion” in their particular experience. But a coherent common characteristic, as it were, is that it is a worldview with a highest good. Everyone has some kind of worldview and some notion of a hierarchy of goods, usually something absorbed from their environment.

So it is pointless to speak of whether you are “religious”. It makes more sense to ask how you are religious. It is far more interesting to discuss the merits of your religion or other religions than to go around pretending you don’t have one.

The first isn't atheism, it is agnostic - no religion and not looking for one, but open to it if you can convince them your religion is right (which you can't because they are not interested in the topic)

Atheism is defined as the absence of belief which is essentially what OP said.

The fact that we are open to changing our mind if theoretically presented with strong evidence does not make us agnostic.

You’d probably also accept that sun is made of cheese if presented strong enough evidence but don’t call yourself agnostic about the topic given your current knowledge.

Atheism is the position that God does not exist. An atheist is someone who therefore says “I believe that there is no God.”

It is not a mere lack of belief, as agnostics can be said to lack belief in God as well. People who are simply ignorant of God also lack a proper belief in God, but this is not atheism, only ignorance. They simply have not come to terms with the subject and therefore have no position on the matter. An atheist does, however unsophisticated it may be.

This view that atheism is simply a lack of belief in God is common among the intellectually challenged New Atheist crowd and would have been ridiculous to the much more intellectually substantive atheists of old, like Neitzsche (who, btw, while an atheist, found it a horrifying thing; the other classic atheists could be described as world-weary rather than insipid, parochial, middle class triumphant).

For someone concerned with the lack of intellectual seriousness of the New Atheist movement, you seem especially committed to ontological realism. Is there some compelling argument I've missed?

That aside, "atheism" can obviously mean both things—with regard to a belief or the endorsement of an "existence" proposition. In the case of atheism/theism, the belief part plays a substantial role—it distinguishes between B(~p) and ~B(p), the strong and weak positions, respectively.

There are other ways besides ignorance or agnosticism to arrive at ~B. For example, if my view is that ontological claims can't be propositions, then obviously I can't have beliefs about them one way or another. Or I could reject all supernatural claims out of hand. Why would you insist that one take a firm position on whether "God" specifically "exists" or not? Isn't atheism just a consequence of these views?

To put it plainly, logical consequences of other views can make one an atheist just as much as rejecting p outright. One needn't explicitly endorse or reject every mystical metaphysical claim out there. That would be a bit silly, just as it's a bit silly that we've inherited a special word for "atheism" in the first place.

In practice though, unless you're in the Richard Dawkins camp, it's a distinction without really a difference.

The Richard Dawkins camp is pretty large (or maybe just vocal?) on the internet though and so the difference is important.

I vote vocal.

Atheism is not a religion but the single belief that there is no all-powerful sentient being organising the human world, which is a staple of Western religions. The corollary being that anybody believing in God is delusional and/or manipulative. This usually stems from the realization that religious leaders are abusing their followers, using cognitive dissonance to force people to do things that run counter to their most basic interests while serving parasitic power structures.

Unfortunately atheism has the side effect of weakening the social constructs that organized religion brings. Not being a religion itself, it does not prescribe any replacement rituals.

The Japanese stance you describe would better be described as agnosticism, the belief that God's existence doesn't matter. This allows to mix and match existing rituals and beliefs into a coherent whole and puts the individual back into the driving position. It's a very sane way of handling fragmentation of belief and what I believe more people should be doing.

What you’re describing isn’t really agnosticism. Agnosticism is about not knowing if gods exist, not about thinking their existence doesn’t matter.

The mix-and-match approach you’re describing is seems more closely related to religious syncretism.

Once one admits that God's existence is undecidable, s/he can either live in fear of both possibilities or live free of both possibilities. Having no use for unfounded fear, I personally much prefer the latter option. God, if it exists, is irrelevant. Any spiritual activity I perform is for my own benefit and for the good of those around me, never for the consideration of a possible being that couldn't be bothered to manifest itself and make clear what its moral rules (if it has any) actually are.

It could be argued by the religious that in some cases they did manifest(according to their beliefs), and there's actually an excess of copies of the rules if considering the amounts of the Quran or Bible printed.

Atheism is not a religion – it’s simply the absence of belief in gods. Religions involve organized systems of practices, rituals, and doctrines, none of which apply to atheism. Not believing in something doesn’t make it a belief system, just like not collecting stamps isn’t a hobby.

Atheism has a large component of refute the existence of God, make practice of region hard for those who are religion and so on.

There is the I don't believe in God and I'm not interested in anything more. However there are a lot of vocal Atheists who have turned it into a religion with practices, rituals and doctrines around proving there is no God and thus I elevate that to a religion.

You can choose where you want to be.

You're describing a fictitious brand of atheism, one that I -- surrounded by friends and family who are atheists -- have never observed.

Atheists simply don't believe in any gods. Lowercase "gods", it's not exclusive to the Christian God, which a specific god we also don't believe exists.

> rituals and doctrines around proving there is no God

Please provide evidence to substantiate this claim.

Their rituals involve quotes of Noam Chomsky or Richard Dawkins anytime region comes up. Noam Chomsky and/or Richard Dawkins wrote their doctrines which they accept without question.

Maybe that isn't you, but it exists.

This is not reddit nor 4chan.

> but it exists

A religion without gods can exist, and trying to prove God does not exist can be a hobby, but Atheism does not mean either of those concepts.

Japanese are massively superstitious (as are most peoples). That's not quite the same as religion but it's somewhere in the same side of the spectrum.

I would question this thesis.

First, “religion” is not an especially good word in practice, as what people call “religion” is highly varied, enough so that the set of assertions that hold for all of them is exceedingly small and increasingly banal such that it ultimately becomes synonymous with worldview. The vague feeling of what religion is in most people’s minds is highly informed by caricature and parochial experience that is then overgeneralized.

But in the specific case of Catholicism, superstition is, in fact, recognized as sinful precisely because it is irrational (and thus opposed to human nature and the human good) and often rooted in a desire to control what is not in scope for human control or ought not be within the scope of the desire to control. Think “spells” that are meant to control others or palm reading meant to tell you your future or rituals that are supposed to alter your luck like throwing salt over your shoulder or believing that black cats bring bad luck. All these are regarded as irrational in the sense that they have no rational justification, no causal efficacy, or trade in bogus notions, but also conspicuously evil when they entail the desire to objectify and manipulate other people. (These, in turn, are said to predispose their practitioners to malicious influence, as ill will and irrationality are weaknesses that predispose a person to that.) Faith, properly understood, is not the nonsense the popular culture or Hallmark movies tell us it is (i.e., wishful thinking), only either a rationally justified trust or reason supplemented by some kind of divine act. The divinity of Jesus is an article of faith, but the existence of God is not, as it can be know by unaided reason. In any case, the point here is that genuine faith is not a matter of superstition, even if in practice superstitious people often live out a superficial ersatz of faith.

Now, if there is anything that is magic-adjacent in terms of intent and the desire for control, it is the Baconian view of science, not something like Catholicism. Modern science grows out of the Catholic tradition as a sustained enterprise in the sense that Catholicism takes the nature of man to be essentially “rational animal”, and because God (vis—a-vis the Second Person of the Trinity) is seen as essentially Rationality as such (Logos) and the world the fundamentally and fully intelligible creation ex nihilo of God. Baconian science, however, places less emphasis on knowing and greater emphasis on power.

For me, "religion" generally means "belief in invisible people/spirits/beings that have influence on the world". Superstition is a superset of that that includes the subset of "belief in ghosts/spirits/souls aka, invisible people/spirits/beings that have influence on the world". The majority of Japanese (and probably most other cultures) believe in "ghosts/spirits/souls that have influence on the world" but most Japanese might not a few special all powerful ones (eg: "God").

> but I would like to point out to you that Atheism is itself a religion: It's a belief in no god(s), a belief in refuting god(s).

This definition of atheism is non-standard, and dilutes the meaning of "religion".

Let it be noted that almost all atheists will disagree with you that it is a religion. Not all of them, of course, because atheism isn't an organized movement with a doctrine which states what is and isn't "true" atheism.

It's not a religion, though, by any reasonable definition of the term.

The Japanese traditions and customs and social systems you describe are really the part of “religion” atheism lacks. There has been no successful attempt to recreate the social bonds and community of religion in an atheistic context.

> It's a belief in no god(s)

That would be better stated as "no belief in gods". The vast majority of atheists in non religious societies aren't spending much time thinking about how there are no gods, or reading up on how they should believe there are gods. They just aren't thinking about it at all, it isn't something they work at.

To steal a quote: "not going skiing isn't a hobby".

I think the point is that secularism doesn't give you 'instant friends' like religion does. Secularism doesn't have shared culture or common experience to bind people.

For example, there's a 0.5 mile street in the town I grew up in that has 13 churches. This was an area settled by people from around the world, and the churches enabled them to have an immediate extended family when they showed up.

No one said that the religious belief itself is the important factor, and your first guess of it enforcing terrible marriage is insultingly reductive. Your second guess only comes close. It's literally the church, the meeting place where you see the same people every week. Kids meet other kids, adults meet adults. If you think that every person in the building actually believes what the pastor says then i think you have not been to most American churches. The shared belief is a part of it but can be easily faked if necessary. The entirety of social life from the church is the proximity. The vast majority of friends made from that proximity do not spend even half their time together speaking about the church or the belief, especially the children.

Sure, the church has problems, as does religion. All that's being said is that church is the last great, high trust, free, "third space" in America. The fact that it houses a religion is related but not central to that fact.

When I go back home to South GA, I see first hand the majority of people in my own extended family believe everything the Bible says literally as well as people who I went to private Christian school with.

People who marry and live in the same home with their biological children are by far the happiest and most successful by all kinds of measures.

So, people moving away is not new and not surprising, and happens all over the world, it's basically the main driver of urbanization. What's new was (rich) people moving "back" (to suburbs for the American Dream, and nowadays to have kids).

Though it's better than what used to happen - which was lots of kids, and high infant mortality, plus poverty driving kids to find jobs in cities, where bad living conditions and factory work awaited them. (And in the 20th century company towns around mines and factories.)

People growing up, flying out of the family nest, and finding friends was a normal part of late teenage years. What's new on top of that is more people are trying to do it again in their 20s after higher education, and again after settling down to have kids, and ...

The good news is that we have the social technology of ... affordable safe high density cities, with parks and high-rises (plus the obligatory blackjack and hookers too!) ... where people can be next to their new and old friends at the same time ... oh my!

Also https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-myth-of-the-loneliness...

> So, people moving away is not new and not surprising, and happens all over the world, it's basically the main driver of urbanization. What's new was (rich) people moving "back" (to suburbs for the American Dream, and nowadays to have kids).

Actually, no. It is a very recent phenomenon, and never experienced before at this scale in the history of mankind.

Even at the current scale, this is what the data shows:

> Nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-pla...

Sorry, do you mean they are not moving away or not moving far or ... ?

About 4 million people moved from rural areas to a town in the 19th century in the UK.

Many people moved to "the new world", etc.

Of course most moves were short (simply "one level up" on the density ladder).

"""

The working-class intercounty migrant was young, literate and skilled; the median distance travelled was 59 miles. Regional migration pathways are described. Rural workers moved more frequently than urban workers, but urban workers travelled a greater median distance than their rural counterparts

"""

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...

""" ... only 29% of heads of households in 1871 had been born in Manchester and 12% originated from surrounding counties, 32% were long-distance mainland migrants, coming from as far afield as Scotland and East Anglia. """

https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/migration-cities/0/...

So if 80% are staying withing a 100 miles, 20% moving more is not that far from the 32% in the 19th century.

It's easy to blame the decline of organized religion, but it curiously coincides with the same time-frame in which the car was invented and modern suburbia sprung up. Having to move to allow for a family is definitely a new and worrying phenomenon.

My gut feel is that having to maintain close family ties and living with parents until adulthood are an adaption to poverty, poor social mobility, and low trust society. People will rationalize it but given opportunity they'll act in the exact same way as the rest of us (just look at urbanization in China).

Thanks for the article, wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the loneliness epidemic is a statistical artifact of bad data.

I suspect close family ties and living with parents was the default throughout human prehistory. Our Hunter-gatherer ancestors were probably not leaving their tribe behind and moving away. It's only since the industrial revolution that people have been leaving their birth family behind en mass.

I think in any low trust environment where social mobility outside the group is poor, sticking together based on blood lines probably was the default for sure.

However I think there's plenty of evidence that migration and intermingling between tribes occurred frequently. If only as social practices to prevent inbreeding. Probably a bunch of bride kidnapping sadly but also young males leaving to seek opportunity isn't an exclusively modern phenomenon.

> also young males leaving to seek opportunity isn't an exclusively modern phenomenon.

True but as far as we can tell it was usually (if not entirely exclusively) done through the same social networks that existed locally [unless you were leaving to murder/rape/rob people]. Unless they really, really had to you only moved to another city/location because you had a cousin, uncle etc. or someone else there you had some ties with. Outside of organizations like the church or the army (and even then) a complete outsider was at an extreme disadvantage (relative to today).

From what I can tell (though this varied by culture!) free first born males stayed with the parents. Females were often traded to other tribes (both as war spoils and more peaceful ways). Free second and later sons often discovered the family land couldn't support them and their older brothers families and left looking for anyplace to live (often resulting in war which in turned eased population pressure, though sometimes a city job existed though they were worse than farming until the industrial revolution). Slaves of course had no control of where the children went. The sexism above was real, though how is manifested varied from culture to culture with some worse than others (sometimes it was the oldest female who stayed home).

Genetic diversity requires someone leave their family and join a different one. How that happened varied but nearly every culture recognized siblings having children together resulted in deformed kids and thus developed a culture to prevent that. Every culture includes other animals.

>Our Hunter-gatherer ancestors were probably not leaving their tribe behind and moving away.

It is like literally what they did - more than ever after and before.

As far as I understand the recent decline in the numbers is that people stopped lying about which church they don't go to. Because church-goer numbers are stable.

What happened during the last century is ... complicated. For one thing religion was never really that organized in the US. (Maybe except in Utah. But that's also relatively new.)

I think simply WWII, and the post-WWII economic boom (plus the GI bill), plus then the heating up Cold War slowly but surely transformed society. For the new generations the various Christian belief systems offered by churches were simply not a real option.

People got an appetite for different answers whether be that science or pseudoscience based. Cults and other ideology-based groups filled some of the vacuum. (And of course the counterculture eventually and then after Vietnam and the race riots came the backlash. The Southern Strategy, which platformed evangelicals, but as a political group, not as organized religion. Basically emptying out the spiritual part, etc. And of course it still works.)

It’s a trend that’s a few centuries old at least. The French and Indian War was partly caused by Americans who didn’t have enough land to farm to support a family moving west, and the British trying to stop that was one cause of the Revolution, and then the whole of 19th century American history is a combination of farmers moving west because the east was full and immigration from Europe largely driven by the farmland of Europe being full. Before that almost everywhere was stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium and if you couldn’t support a family in your home, moving away would just make it harder.

>The good news is that we have the social technology of ... affordable safe high density cities, with parks and high-rises (plus the obligatory blackjack and hookers too!) ... where people can be next to their new and old friends at the same time ... oh my!

No such cities exist in the USA

Except for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Madison, San Antonio, Buffalo, Memphis, …

> Memphis

They said safe my guy

And yet somehow tens of millions of us manage to live in them.

It's amazing what people will adapt to. A friend of mine living in Minneapolis said you can't lock your car in her neighborhood, otherwise someone will just break the windows to get inside to look for things to steal. One night, her husband forgot and locked it out of habit, and before the next morning one of the windows was broken.

That anyone chooses to live like that baffles me.

There is no perfect place to live. Everywhere has trade-offs, and I bet we could both come up with 100 things more important to our quality of life than whether you need to lock your car door or not.

That the American left is allergic to draconianly prosecuting property and nuisance crime a la Singapore is not an indictment of urbanism in general

You have no idea what a "safe" high density city is "where people can be next to their new and old friends" if you think any of the cities you named meet either of those criteria.

> In Anglo cultures kids aren't usually moving away from home until they are at least ~18 years old. This is not a factor in teenagers feeling isolated.

I grew up in a Midwestern shithole.

My older friends leaving, and knowing I was was going to leave too, didn't help.

what is your definition of "high trust society". I don't consider the USA a high trust society having lived in Japan and Singapore. In Japan and Singapore, I trust that others won't steal my stuff. I trust that I won't be mugged. I trust that my packages won't be stolen. I trust that my car will not be broken into.

In the USA and Europe I trust none of that. I've had cars broken into 5 times, bikes stolen 5 times, car stolen once. Reports of people stealing packages. I know I can't trust people at a coffee shop not to steal my laptop while I go to the restroom. Friend have had wallets stolen stopping to take a picture. etc.....

This means I trust no one in the USA or Europe. So to me, the USA an Europe are low trust societies.

The USA is a large place. I've had bikes stolen (last case 40 years ago - the bikes were left outside unlocked for 5 years and only once were any stolen), but that is all from your list. In every place I've lived some of my neighbors never locked their doors when they left. I have always known people who just leave their keys in their car when they leave it. I lock my front door, but the garage doesn't have a lock and there are some expensive things in there.

Which is to say I find the US is a high trust society where I live. I know there are other places where things are much worse.

The US is slowly (rapidly?) devolving into a low-trust society. What used to be pockets of low-trust are spreading rapidly by my estimation.

It's been sad to watch it slowly get worse every year.

It goes for all things, not just petty/street crime though. Everything from business owners not prioritizing doing good work and building local reputation, employees slacking off as much as possible, investors demanding extreme profits at the expense of everyone else, corporations shipping out entire towns worth of industry to foreign countries, on down to actual crime itself.

It certainly wasn't all roses in the past - but it's a marked change from even my youth. Civic engagement is easy for anyone to see, and that would also be such a symptom.

The U.S. is an extremely litigious society. Even when Lincoln was a young professional, he had the frontier job of… attorney. So there’s something to that which bares examining when discussing how trust gets built and reinforced in American culture. (Probably something about settler culture and property rights and the only way to resolve disagreements about it via the law.)

One wonders how much of the high trust was a product of the immense prosperity unlocked by industrialization, some ameliorating reforms during the Progressive Era that mitigated the excesses of the Gilded Era, the New Deal, and postwar victory.

Have you also noticed all the recalls on pretty much everything we eat? Huge sign that people are not working.

People not working? WTF? It's the direct result of deregulation/self-regulation of the food chain. When the inspectors work for the food processing company, they don't have an incentive to find problems.

You'd think companies would value not killing their customers and market forces would take care of the problem, but, empirically, that's not how it has turned out. Customers are too far from the source; the incentives for fucking off are too high, and too frequently the food processors get away with it. Big-L Libertarianism is not compatible with safe food and medication.

America has always been a low trust society when it came to “others”. Jim Crow was the law when my still living parents were growing up.

They literally didn’t trust people to drink from the same water fountain

My also still living father born in 1945 in the south didn’t live under this after the 60s or so. So how do you explain the gap for the last 65 years?

Just have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/trust. The Anglo countries are all well above the global average (but admittedly East Asia and the Scandinavians have us beat). I'm super impressed by how high trust China is tbh. Apparently, since the recent increase in surveillance (and ability to police petty crime), a lot of folks don't even bother locking up bikes etc.

FWIW the only Anglo country left in the EU is Ireland.

I don't trust that data (haha, trust). how do they ascertain trust? By asking? It might be true that Scandinavians claim they trust their neighbors but those are places where your stuff will get stolen, packages get stolen, you don't leave stuff on a public table to use the restroom if you don't want it stolen. In other words, you can't actually trust people. They list Japan as less trusting, even less trusting than that USA. But, actions speak louder than words. You can trust others in Japan. You can't trust others in LA, NYC, SF Bay Area, Seattle, Chicago, and other major metropolitan areas of the USA (the places where everyone lives.)

So, it seems like their methodology doesn't actually match reality and is why I don't trust their results.

Trust is not just petty crime. It's everything from crime to business transactions and more.

I might leave my laptop on a table while I use a public restroom in China, but I sure as hell trust a business partner far less than I would one in the US on average.

Cultures differ greatly in how trust is assigned and expectations. There are areas in Eastern Europe I would walk through a dark alley at 3am in the 'bad' part of town and not think twice about it. But I sure wouldn't trust their police force to not be corrupt and expect a bribe if they hassled me. The reverse holding true in a major city in the US.

Having lived in Asia I disagree it's a "high trust" society. I also see it described as "less individualistic and more concerned about the group".

What I observed was a deference to authority. Harsh government punishment for anti-social behavior is accepted and seen as the "role" of the government. While people in Anglo countries might protest against unfair government action, in Asian countries it's much more rare. People in Singapore grumble about how the government might punish behavior, but they keep those conversation to their family and close friends.

In terms of trust or concern, it doesn't extend much beyond the immediate family unit in Asia. I would say respect or concern for strangers is higher in Western countries Many people in Asia are happy to rip off others in Asia (if they think they can get away with it), but even the deadbeat cousin gets money from the family because "it's the right thing to do".

Yeh Japan surprised me in that trust survey, perhaps the question didn't translate well. On a general basis they seem to trust each other even less than most western nations.

Very hard thing to measure.

Might teenagers feel less isolated if they had family around though? I grew up with tons of cousins my age and that was always a part of my social life. Doesn’t matter that I wasn’t 18

> In Anglo cultures kids aren't usually moving away from home until they are at least ~18 years old. This is not a factor in teenagers feeling isolated.

But it’s more than a single generation thing. If you live for 18 years in a family that has only recently put down roots in a new place, you won’t have family around, unlikely to have as many family friends around, etc. Community will likely be sparse and colder.

You essentially get a generational social debt put onto kids, over and over. It appears that cohesion is lost, pro-social behaviour decreases, focus on less social activity increases, and so on.

In the American South community is as easy as picking a church and going to your kids public school sporting events.

Are there problems, of course, like all societies. But it's easy and it works.

Same thing works in Philadelphia.

This presupposes both an interest in religion and organized sports.

>This presupposes both an interest in religion and organized sports.

Sorta but not really. Lots of people just fake it for the community aspects.

With this mindset you likely wouldn’t live in the south anyway as you’d end up miserable. Just like a southerner living in CA.

At least w.r.t. the latter point, you shouldn't need to be interested in sports to be interested in your kid's sporting events. Spoiler: nobody likes t-ball, but they do like their kids enough to go to the t-ball games anyways.

dancing grannies is definitely not a result of social technology haha, but yes, old people culture in china is top tier

I think coliving is going to come back into vogue.

I wish it would. Perhaps it will with rising costs of living and housing.