[benterix]

> And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.

Oh I'd love a heated argument over that! And I'm sure plenty of Americans, including a lot of protestants, would disagree with your conclusion, too.

On a more meaningful note, wouldn't it be wonderful to have an amalgamate with the best of these worlds - including sharing, socializing, addressing elders properly etc. and not littering.

[rayiner]

I’m from the subcontinent, so I’d love to live in a place where families stay together like India but has public order and good governance like Massachusetts. Where is that place? Good governance (stable, efficient, low corruption, free—not just in the formal government but across society’s institutions) and public order is a luxury reserved for a handful of the world’s population. Basically Scandinavia, a few states in the U.S., and the Anglo countries (UK, AUS, CAD, NZ). Where else? Japan and Singapore come close, at the cost of pretty top-down management of the population.

And for places that don’t have order and good government, progress towards those things is non-existent. People in my home country of Bangladesh have spent their 55 years of independence doing everything they can to remain poor and dysfunctional. They just held sham elections (again) after overthrowing the government (again). And the guy in charge of the sham elections was a Nobel Laureate lauded by the international community.

So I’m much more afraid of the few islands of prosperity regressing to the global mean than I am aspirational about trying to have it all. I’ll endure donuts cut in half and running out of food at potlucks in return for order.