So we are sitting in a brew pub in Squamish, BC, and I look around at the crowd. I see polite young people speaking quietly, even as music in background is very loud. All are trim and fit. There are five TV sets, and at the head of the room is a huge one showing a hockey game. But of the hundred or so people there, not one is watching hockey!
I ask the waitress her opinion. I said that my stereotype of Canadians was that hockey was very, very big. She said that these were not Canadians, but rather Americans, up for the weekend from Washington. Over at the bar, she said pointing, are the few Canadians in the place, and they were intently absorbed in the game.
So many preconceptions messed up and affirmed at once!
But this one is affirmed: There is hardly any police presence up here, and people are left alone to mind their affairs. Clerks are friendly and chatty, probably the result of security. They have access to education and health care, and a high minimum wage protects them, as do unemployment benefits. Ordinary people have good lives!
The result: A relaxed country with a healthy distribution of income. The average Canadian household is wealthier than its southern counterpart. Worries are few.
British Columbia had a strong presence by the Conservative Party, but it’s agenda of intolerance of dissent and arrogant know-what’s-best-so-shut-up attitude rankled people. The recent election results: Zero seats for Conservatives. Zero! The party doesn’t exist in this province.
That, folks, is a responsive political system! Voting matters here! In the States people get frustrated with one party, turn to the other and get the same soup with a different label.
Piece of Mindful 
Fair warning Mark.
You’re being monitored. Even up there.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/canadas-privacy-commissioner-alarmed-prism-revelations-174818067.html
LikeLike
A relaxed country with a healthy distribution of income. The average Canadian household is wealthier than its southern counterpart. Worries are few.
Could it be because they are largely ethnically homogeneous from a high achieving, high trust ethnic group? Nah, must be the government.
LikeLike
If their government is so bad, and they are such a high achieving group, why don’t they have the good sense to get rid of their social infrastructure?
LikeLike
I cheer their success. Bring it on.
But when you compare households, let us be accurate. Compare Scandinavian households in Canada with Scandinavian households in the US. Compare Guatemalan households in Canada with Guatemalan households in the US, etc. When you break it out by ethnic group, the US leads. Canada looks good because they have more of the groups that do well relative to others. But Obama is working on changing that, and maybe, finally, people will quit moving here and let us develop some more wilderness areas.
LikeLike
I see all people as having identical potential. This is purely anecdotal and you won’t like the source, but in Moore’s Bowling for Columbine he was surprised that Canadians own more guns, per capita, than Americans, but only have a fraction of our gun-related crimes. He also went door-to-door and found houses unlocked. At the same time, he found that blacks were much more integrated and accepted and more relaxed. It was much easier to be black in Canada.
Again it s complex and I don’t have tremendous insight into such a large affair as a mass society. All I can tell you is that changes in latitude do have changes in attitude, as we experience it when we cross that border. As soon as we enter the states we notice buildings in need of paint, towns in need of upkeep, stressed clerks and merchants, shops that don’t produce products (nails, tattoos, judo, palm reading are everywhere). It seems the only kept-up places are interstate exits. It appears a country in depression. Canada not.
LikeLike
There are people and sites that spend quite a bit of energy analyzing the data about group and individual differences. We don’t have identical potential: the fat work horse is not going to win the Kentucky Derby, even if you train him from birth.
Estimated. Progeny. Differences : learn it, live it, love it.
When Dennis Hastert became Speaker, the Secret Service went to his home to change the locks. They found that his house had no locks.
Canada has a selective immigration policy, so no doubt they can set up a better behaved cohort of minorities. However, the stats of their First Peoples mirrors ours.
LikeLike
I am not surprised in First Natiins or people’s. That’s a culture clash. They were not money-exchange, but rather mutual support, and so their numbers don’t reflect well in our system. If they suffer actual poverty, it’s maladaptation, and I cannot imagine such awful choices, to give up a way of life where everyone looks out for one another in exchange for gutters and poverty for the most unfortunate.
But beyond that, there is more at play here than you are willing to admit. Socialism is more the nature of humans than “capitalism”, which does not even exist except in right wing economics. People don’t behave as Friedman claimed. Far from it.
LikeLike
What passes for capitalism today is another form of socialism. I am not against socialism. I know of what you speak when you talk about us taking care of each other.
But when looking at a country, I am less interested in its form of government than the capabilities of the population. You like to tout the Scandinavian countries and their social safety nets, but Norway is a well run country because it is full of Norwegians, and would be no matter what the form of government (unless too many outliers from one extreme or the other grift into power.) Sweden is a nice, well run place because it is full of Swedes. ( Alas, parts of Sweden are filling with decidedly non-Swedes, and those places suck. Do we need better government there, or maybe some different DNA?) Places like Somalia are full of Somalis, so how good can it ever be? Guatemala is full of Guatemalans, and we get the usual, wherever they congregate. You can change their government all you want; try any combination; certain basics come out. You orgasmed over Hugo Chavez, but every economic and social indice declined under his rule. Maybe Venezuela will always have a suck factor because it is full of Venezuelans, with their steady level of “human capital”. (Of course, you will tell me his efforts were sabotaged by the usual unnamed people with real power. I feel your pain.)
In short, human bio-diversity matters more than you admit. European countries from Switzerland to Sweden have different political systems, but carry a similar quality of life. It’s the people that matters.
LikeLike
If that is the case, what is it about Americans that makes us so violent, abusive, fearful, greedy, insecure and controlling? Is it one gene from one race?
LikeLike
Break Americans out by ethny, and our stats track pretty closely with our kin from elsewhere: White Americans echo White Europe’s crime rate, health stats, etc. Black Americans track with their Bantu kin; South American Indios bring their levels of fear, greed, and insecurity with them when they move here.
LikeLike
I find that statement in need of objective evidence in support. I neither doubt nor believe. I simply want your evidence.
LikeLike
The book “The Bell Curve” got me thinking about this stuff.
Then things like this:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k
LikeLike
I find it hard to draw firm race-based conclusions on that when so man other factors are in play. Anyway, try reading The Black Swan by Taleb regarding the Bell Curve. Ain’t begin to explain it as I don’t get it. I just remeber thinking his take to be counterintuitive and iconoclastic. Short Taleb: He doesn’t believe in the BC.
LikeLike
Here’s another link:
http://www.tino.us/2010/03/the-super-economy-in-one-picture/
I’m just a casual observer, but race/ethnicity is something to consider in cross country comparisons. Sure, there are other factors, but that doesn’t mean race/ethny contributes zero.
LikeLike
I guess if you were being scientific you’d first postulate that race is indeed a difference. But scientists differ on the matter, and even above science, others conclude that The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering.”
That’s a UNESCO statement from 1950 – in other words, the research you pursue may be self-aggrandizing and dangerous because as soon as we define one race as superior to another, we create superior and inferior rights, and soon thereafter the lesser races are abused, enslaved, imprisoned, murdered.
So I choose not to pursue your path, it’s fraught with danger. I was curious about the Swede doing the comparisons of Swedes in Sweden and Swedes in the US, if he had taken to account features like health care being 1/3 to 1/2 as expensive there, education as well, and if people were happier here or there. He appears to be deeply rooted in confirmation bias, as are we all, but his case is pronounced. His statement about small government and free markets is ludicrous. No such things exist here or there.
LikeLike
But we swim in a sea of racial consciousness. “Por la raza, TODO! Fuera de la faza, NADA!” Everybody is counting heads here. We’re not supposed to notice race, unless you aren’t hiring the correct number of a certain race. We aren’t supposed to notice that certain ethnic groups are becoming predominant in some areas, and if you point that out, volunteer enforcement groups swoop in to disenfranchise you. Taking it off the table of public discourse is to the liking of some groups but to the detriment of others. Why must we hit ourselves in the head with a hammer in this area?
LikeLike
No one except Stephen Colbert clams to be ignorant of race, but we all ride on the fumes of the Second World War and know to avoid notions of superiority and inferiority, as it is a deadly game. And you appear to have internalized the post-Industrial Revolution mindset of existence for sake of productivity to the exclusion of all other virtues, something that makes American life so sterile. We are awash in goods and have to be harped at constantly to buy buy buy to keep the engine running, producing a wilderness of zombies in stores looking for elusive happiness.
LikeLike
and know to avoid notions of superiority and inferiority
Well, we’ve pretty well failed this in a big way. We’re constantly hectored about this and that groups’ superiority over the basic White man: can’t jump; can’t do jobs that immigrants do; is dumber than women; must be the clueless one in a commercial; bad guy in every movie; not as stylish as teh gay.
Yes, I’m hopelessly materialistic, but you seem pretty bad: give everyone a cush union job; free top shelf health care for all; drive for a bargain in every deal.
LikeLike
We’re a cooperative species, after all, mutually supportive. I’s only a few malcontents that insist everyone is in a boxing ring.
LikeLike
We’re cooperative to an extent but mainly to those who are similar to us. Mankind has mainly been loyal to family and ethnic group (which is essentially an inbred extended family). Large scale cooperation beyond this is a White European thing, and they are rapidly going extinct. So much for that.
LikeLike
Nonsense. You make things up as you go. The kindness of strangers is a universal.
A young child was hit by a car and died – our grandson. Our daughter, his aunt, distraught, was called to he hospital. The cab driver, Arab and Muslim, could see her condition and said he prayed to Allah to help her through this tragedy. She got out of the car and headed in, and then remembered cab fare and turned around. He waved her off, saying she had more urgent problems. She asked his name so she could reimburse him later, and he said “I am everyone.”
He’s right to the 95% mark.
LikeLike
Sorry about the tragedy.
Let us not conflate general kindness with loyalty. The Vietnamese are remarkably kind people, but they are not foolish enough to use their country as an experiment in multi-culturalism. I knew some people who traveled through the Levant back in the day, and they were amazed at the hospitality. But in building a society there, “my brother and me against my cousin, my cousin and me against the stranger.”
LikeLike