On which country is superior and which one(s) is not...

Along the line of the blog debates at Sydney Morning Herald posted yesterday, on whether US is superior than the rest of the world, I sometimes find myself looking at the situation and debates like an outsider looking in, and find most of the arguments so narrow-minded and the views so limiting.

This brought me back memory of a radio talk show On Point on WBUR at Boston (NPR) very recently, hosted by Tom Ashbrook. The guest was Milton Friedman (the newly minted Nobel winner who also just recently died, as we all know), to present the view that Americans should be grateful that they're in America, since the economy is in great shape, yada yada. It's funny how 99% of the call-ins from audience pounded him on where the heck the great economy is that he's talking about (since most of them have experienced unemployment and layoffs or know of someone who experienced that), and that no, Americans *do* long to be in old Europe, even though economists like Friedman would not have endorsed it.

In a way, economists are like war generals. They have to look at things on a very macro sense. For one thing, I would not have expected Friedman to study every individual who suffers from unemployment or layoffs, particularly in the face of global competition. (Much like war generals discussing deaths and maims as merely collateral damage, to make it impersonal.) But to hear it in person from Friedman, of how after he's presented with overwhelming evidence that people do *NOT* enjoy being in America (what with the insecurity in jobs and health care and growing wealth disparity), and how he would give the "yeah, but..." like statements to these people, and tell them in their face that what they're seeing is wrong (cuz that's not what the economists are seeing), it's just so surreal. Maybe it's another political incorrect statement to make, but I find it (and him) very clueless in a way. To quote the Freakonomics perspective, economists like him are just not looking at the right kind of data to draw conclusions.

I couldn't help myself, and I called in to voice my view while Robert Reich (the former Labor Secretary under Clinton) was still on the line. I told them one thing that I see: I grew up in Hong Kong, and there is no other place in the world who can claim to be more capitalist than this tiny place (so, quit the BS that America is capitalist and old Europe is not, since this is all relativity). I saw in first hand, how during the British rule (regardless of the seemingly undemocratic rule back then), the British colonial government did a very good job at taking care of the basic services (infrastructures like airport and cargo terminal, public housing, public education, basic universal health care), and let the private market handle the rest. What I see in US is that, the federal government fails miserably in almost all fronts. Public housing is a shame; funding to education and health care are cut, in the name of either state government issue or private market efficiency. It's just obvious that the federal government drops the ball (for the Bush administration, this is all deliberate anyways), and push the responsibilities to the states and individuals, which are overwhelming. And for those basic services that are not supposed to be very profitable, obviously no private market is stepping in unless they can demand a king's ransom. Reich jumped in, and agreed that that's spot on. For Friedman, he gave me the usual yeah-but response. All in all, I'm just very disappointed in him. (I don't care if he has a Nobel or not, the disappointment is all the same.)

This brings us back to the Sydney Morning Herald debate, which I mentioned that it's just a matter of relativity, of whether Australians (or the rest of the world) envy Americans, or vice versa. As much as alot of Americans don't want to hear it, US is still a place people want to come, but they don't envy US at all. They (legal and illegals alike) just want to come, make enough bucks, and go home. If they have envied US so much, they would have stayed rather than wanting to leave, mostly. And most Americans long for the laid back lifestyle of old Europe and even Australia. There is just alot of sour-grapes when people (on either side) talk about the other country, and how their own country should be considered more superior.

It's really quite amazing to observe, really.