Living outside America

I feel like the majority of his "areas of impact" that living overseas has had on him could have just as easily happened if he had stayed in America, but moved to a city with some more diversity. It's more about growing up and making friends with people that think differently than you than just transplanting yourself.

> Our government is broken, but generally the US lets problems get really inefficiently bad, then overcorrects, so I hope that will happen in the next 20 years.

That's something as an outsider living here in since around last December I've noticed. Your government is quite broken. But it somehow still works. (Paradox, I know!) For instance, the healthcare bill that was recently passed largely solves the textbook problem of information asymmetry in the health insurance market. It almost didn't pass, but it did. Same seems about the immigration laws - although they are yet to be "fixed". It's a country where, ironically, a "professional news organization" like Fox News exists at the same time with with a "comedy" show like the Colbert Report.

> Unless something major changes, the American focus on consumption will eventually erode our influence around the globe.

That's a quote from the original article. I don't quite see how consumption is wrong. Especially, since from what I see, consumption here in the US is based on the idea of buying things that solve problems. That give people the incentive to invent tools to solve problems. Trust me there are a lot of countries where they don't like to spend money at all (consume). There are everyday problems there that aren't solved because tools invented for them will not be bought. Your quality of life is stagnant if "buy only bare minimum" is the model you want to follow.

> I felt it would be too overwhelming to go to a new country by myself and also deal with a foreign language [...]

Monolingualism is such a loss to the world.

Really, primary thing I dislike about the US (relative to other countries) is that we have a huge (and growing) underclass, just like in places like Brazil and Mexico. We need to shrink (ideally, eliminate, at least as a multi-generational thing) that group (there's no single solution -- but blindly cutting down the successful would be worse than what we have now. Some combination of better education and healthcare is part of it, and I support negative population growth in the world in general and the US in specific.)

US foreign policy is a bit too interventionist for my taste, but I'd prefer it to pure pacifism. A better-armed UK or France is probably a reasonable compromise for that. However, most US foreign interventions (except Iraq) aren't that horrible for most citizens (and even Iraq wasn't that much worse than Iraq 1991-2003 or 1980-1988) of the foreign countries, certainly compared to invasions and occupations by other countries.

Opening Note: Personal views- Practicing Jewish most of my upbringing, now agnostic by choice

"If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room."

As an 18 year old American, active in American politics (I've done minor campaigning, father is a US History teacher), this is utterly strange. A politician that was not some denomination of Christianity would be, most likely, completely unable to win a Presidential election. And that's even if they were a religion the Christian majority feels close to, such as Jewish. If they were Muslim, or so help them atheist, they would stand no chance at the White House.

I recently had a friend of 6 years from the UK come and visit for two weeks, and we had a number of discussions on cultural differences. When he mentioned that the majority of people in the UK were not religious, I was dumbfounded. I (foolishly) thought it was everywhere as it is here. In my community at least, to openly question the existence of a God is a social faux pas. I have an interesting perspective having been on both sides of the coin, but in the end it scares me as much as it scares you. The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.