The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013) (opens in new tab)

Reagan did a lot of damage to the perception of what government should do and how citizens need to hold it accountable. Instead he described it in terms of being inherently bad, which is demonstrably b.s. but the country pretty much bought it as evidenced by his election, the ensuing cut in taxes, the near total stop in investments made to large scale private and and public infrastructure spending, and a shift to hoarding wealth rather than keeping it moving so that everyone benefits from it.

How do Eastern European countries fare then? How about China?

For each of the items you list, I can see it going the direction you describe, or instead going the other direction, with government stepping in only after individuals were clearly not taking care of the problems. How do you propose that we can tell which direction it went?

Do you really suggest "having a big family" as the way to survive health problems and retirement? Because that's how it works in some (e.g.) SE Asian countries, and life there can be very harsh indeed if you strike adversity and don't have family to care for you. Some people are infertile, or have lost their children.

Not to mention that simply populating the world with more and more people is kind of environmentally short-sighted. I'd rather have the government bulk buying my meds, and lighten my overall footprint on the planet, rather than harking back to ancient times when there was little or no government, and family was everything.

Certain African countries are strongly individualistic. The state is too weak to help or punish anybody. Infrastructure crumbles, crime and slavery abounds.

You seriously don't want to visit let alone live in a country that lacks collectivism.

But we can all plainly see that this is completely wrong, and people do do all that.

Trust, empathy, bonding, etc. are going to be a lot harder when someone's identity, life experiences, and circumstances are completely foreign to your own. I don't think it makes cooperation impossible, but as a practical matter it means we're more likely to need huge, complex institutions like the federal government to mediate cooperation. People also seem less likely to want to cooperate or sacrifice their resources for others who are nothing like them.

One way societies have historically dealt with this is to close their borders, beat the shit out of internal nonconformists and, if they remain unrepentant, torture them to death in the public square by lighting them on fire. Subtler variants persist; for example, the official government's indifference to vigilante enforcement actions ranging from bullying (Japan) to beheading (Saudi Arabia).

It seems clear to me that our culture of welcoming and celebrating differences is more just and causes better outcomes for more people, but it does mean that we aren't all in the same boat.

Evidence: who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House, I could go on and on. We celebrate the idea of something we actively argue against in daily life.

There's also some weird connection between extremes of claiming to value individualism and idolizing authoritarianism that I won't claim to understand, so I could be completely wrong on all of this. I'm not positive that extremes of individualism are a death knell for cooperation...but I don't find the idea unlikely either.

In the case of hurricanes, it's only because of government intervention and subsidies that people build in imperiled areas. Flood insurance mostly subsidizes more wealthy people to the tune of $3B/year. They would likely not choose to live in imperiled areas without the subsidies. Is it really a social good to promote the building of dwellings in places where it is likely the dwellings will be destroyed every 20 - 30 years or so?

Having seen the devastation of Katrina in MS first hand, this seems like a remarkably poor choice of things to subsidize and promote. In fact, when we were there about a year after the storm, the only people who were helping the people who were left were voluntary associations. The government had pretty much pulled out.

Tocqueville wrote extensively about associations and their beneficial impact on society. You should give his book, Democracy in America, a read. Here's an intro: http://www.learningtogive.org/resources/philanthropy-describ...

In fact, the "greed is good, corporations are people, etc." mentality that promotes selfishness as a vice is a major plank of one of the main political parties of the US.

My parents tell a story about how in the 1950's, my grandfather built his house himself. One day after work, he came to the site and his neighbors were at work helping out on it. Of course, he was an immigrant living in a relatively homogeneous ethnic community. So, maybe small communities took care of their own, but in the post-drug, post-industrial economy small communities aren't diverse enough to handle the load.

We've entered into an era of unprecedented government surveillance and power. We have agencies such as the DEA, NSA, homeland security, etc that wield enormous power over the lives of Americans.

Also the welfare programs are significantly more pervasive now. You have subsidized farming, subsidized food, subsidized business, subsidized housing, a subsidized economy.

At this point, aren't we all just living off the hand of the federal government? Isn't that by design?

If 60% of the people vote to tax everyone and use that money to bomb the moon, the remaining 40% are going to feel coerced into supporting it.

The government forcing people to support things is not leading by example at all, because any other organization would be breaking the law if it tried to force support. How would you feel if the local church just started taking 30% of your income?

You can't say that we as a people are being generous when we're only doing what we're doing to avoid massive fines or imprisonment.

If the collected money is then put to a purpose you don't like, or is incompetently managed, what can you do? Nothing in any realistic sense.

If you would have liked to have been generous with the money instead, too bad.

As an aside, tax rates are pretty meaningless. Revenues are at record levels.

The real question is why wouldn't civic qualities decline.

You can look at this on an economic lens - people don't need to depend on familial relations as much because of money.

You can look at this with a racial/ethnic lens - more genetic variance reduces cooperative behaviours (see Charles Murray).

Then there's the libertarian version you've heard above.

Then there's the social lens - people have become atomized by individualism in their manners, social conditioning etc.

I like to think there's a non-relativistic way in which all of them are true, sometimes some of them more at certain times than others, but that they are models of the same phenomena.

Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention?

Depends on your value of "we."

There is certainly lower solidarity/interest in public life among the straight white landowning Christian men from good families who used to participate in things like freemasonry and Rotary.

On the other hand, both the left and right have been adding previously marginalized demographics to their constituencies and platforms.

I don't think there's any less solidarity going around. My intuition is that more people than ever have their voices heard and interests represented in public life. But rather than one line of solidarity across the center of the political spectrum, we now have two disjoint lines reaching from each party's center to what used to be its marginalized fringes. (Not just in ideology, but in identity).

We also just aren't in this together so much anymore. The rise of coastal cities means the country is increasingly split between (at least) two totally distinct patterns of geography, economics, culture, built environment, and lifestyle. The correlation between population density and vote share on the latest electoral map is staggering.

I need to see some very solid evidence before I change my assumption, which is that people have always felt this as they get older, because we romanticize our memories of youth and we are uncomfortable with the societal changes that younger generations inevitably introduce.

It seems to be the result of a successful PR campaign on behalf of economists like Milton Friedman and the wealthy elites who stood to gain from it. The 1973 oil crisis was a tumultuous time, and so it was a ripe time for a new ideology.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...

Club politics is generally tiresome, few people join a tennis club or hackerspace to play politics, they want to play tennis or make things.

And yes, there are lots of men with shortcomings, physical ones, that have rendered them out of the modern dating pool whereas in the past they would have met an equivalent woman. That's no longer the case as that equivalent woman can demand a much higher quality man -- there's an unlimited supply of men to pick from.