Starting with Detroit ....
Posted on 05/31/2012 4:31:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
RUDESHEIM, Germany -- This week I am leading a military history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe's current economic crises by just ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.
Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.
Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and make it nearly impossible to immigrate there.
So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?
To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages.
Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later Renaissance Venice and Florence.
Instead, culture explains far more -- a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back Southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers save and produce like workaholic Germans to even out the playing field of the European Union.
But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, in comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.
I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard -- but often accurate -- politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.
Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 p.m.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?
To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic -- or is it better characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism and tribalism?
The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.
There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the postmodern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.
A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany -- and do not believe that they should have to -- take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.
I agree. You get up, you work, you clean up after yourself, it’s basic responsibility.
Or, you blame everybody else for your problems.
P.J. O’Rourke’s “Eat the Rich” asked a similar question, why some countries are rich and others poor. These disparties cannont be explained away by simple explanations like access or lack thereof to natural resources etc, and ultimately hinges on economic policies and freedoms. Case in point: Hong Kong versus the Republic of Congo.
Hey, to be fair to the other thread, THIS is a great comment!
The cleaner these public restrooms the better the society; the corollary was also true.
Based solely on natural resources the people of Uganda should be able to hire Singaporeans as domestics. Singapore has essentially no natural resources except fishing waters. It is one of the wealthiest nations on earth; Uganda is another story.
VDH ping. A history lesson that explains our world today.
In one word...BRILLIANT!! Examples..Japan and Germany after WWII. Bombed back to stone age and see them today. South Korea also.
Varied culture in USA. Check the record of various parts of the USA and the aftermath of terrible NATURAL DISASTERS. Some places show a sad but resolute determination to re-build better than before. Some places descend into recriminations, wailing and seeking to place the blame on “THEY”.
However, it is NOT politically correct to point this out, so I apologize. (Fingers crossed behind my back)
Yeah, or just follow the rules posted in our kindergarten:
USE KIND WORDS
IGNORE MEAN ONES
SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU
PLAY FAIR
CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF
SHARE
Tacitcus, a Roman, said the Germans were “tribal savages”? Maybe I’m part Cherokee?
Thomas Sowell has published a book of essays on culture. It is called “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”. It is an eye opener.
One chapter is on the amazing growth of the dairy industry in the USA after the arrival of German immigrants to the Midwest, esp. in Wisconsin. He noted that there were more dairy cows in the south, but that those farmers never built barns for their animals, and had never devised any way to preserve the milk/cream from their cows. Within a few years of the German dairy farmers arriving, they had established Creameries, and how to distribute fresh milk and butter to further distances than within only a mile or two from their farms. They also made cheese and sold it. They marketed their products, etc..
Sowell’s book is a collection of how culture is an indicator of future prosperity. He also writes that those groups who are hard working and are successful, are often resented by those who are not so diligent and goal oriented. Right now, we witness this in the success of Korean immigrants and the animosity that is heaped upon them by the black community.
It’s a wonderful book. Everyone should have a copy of it in their library!
How exactly is a nation split between ethnic French, Italians, and Germans, that has four official languages, and that has been near evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants throughout its history, homogeneous?
“How exactly is a nation split between ethnic French, Italians, and Germans, that has four official languages, and that has been near evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants throughout its history, homogeneous?”
It is homogeneous in the sense of being populated by white, west Europeans. Probably very few Amish or sand rats there.
“How exactly is a nation split between ethnic French, Italians, and Germans, that has four official languages, and that has been near evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants throughout its history, homogeneous?”
It is homogeneous in the sense of being populated by white, west Europeans. Probably very few Amish or sand rats there.
Oops. Sorry for double post.
Something I’ve occasionally wondered: The lands of the Hun, the Franc, the Gaul, the Lombardi, etc., are supposed to have been inhabited by filthy, disorderly, uneducated barbarian subhumans, and were conquered by the irresistable Romans due to their discipline and superior organizational skills. But today we see the German states as industrious, clean, orderly, and meticulous while the Italian states are by nature lazy, corrupt, and disorganized by design.
Is there any possibility that the history was written by the victorious Romans, and that they played down the civilizational skills that the northern tribes already had in spades? After all, they never conquered today’s Germany.
I HAVE thought that the northern cultures became dominant because they always had to work twice as hard as the southerners - both to eat and to stay warm.
In Jamaica, they have the most third world culture you’d ever want to see. Nobody has a dime. But nobody is starving either. Because the land is so fecund that you can literally pick your meal off the tree. Same with south India—no money but you can harvest your crops four times a year.
VDH should write about our cities.
Starting with Detroit ....
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