http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bt.dk%2Farticle%2F20081029%2Fnyheder%2F81029033%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en

(The Danish Prime Ministers son, the leader of the happiest nation on earth, wants to become an American citizen)

If they weren’t connected, there wouldn’t be 300K people escaping France to Britain alone. Sarkozy had to campaign in London to reach them! As Hammer points out, family attachments vary and they vary all over the world. I think some of what you’re seeing is family attachment and some of the immobility comes from sheer lack of economic opportunity. In Russia we had city passports and government assigned housing. Everyone lived and died in the same communal apartment. When the practice was abandoned after the fall of communism, people began moving from areas with relatively less economic growth to places with more – leaving behind kin, friends, and ancestral homelands

The point I want to make clear – the European attachment to kin and hometown has very little to do with the economic model. There are a lot of people – at least a lot of bloggers – who would gladly import a good amount of Reaganomics. Does Vaclav Klaus ring a bell? Sadly he is an exception, not the rule, but this approach nevertheless exists. These two things aren’t quite connected.

Yoshi,
I know for a fact that many sorts of crime are either glossed over, or not really considered “criminal” in Asia. My wife is from Hong Kong, and the stories she can tell of the busses and subways would make you store your daughters in a steel drum before allowing them out of the house.

We are a nation of immigrants! Moving away from kin is natural to Americans. Besides, moving away from people doesn’t mean you don’t see them and they aren’t a part of your life. It just means that your mother-in-law is too far away to meddle!

That’s only because they’re bitter that they got themselves into two giant wars in the twentieth century that they couldn’t finish without America. Bet they never mention their brutal colonial empires, eh? And what’s so good about destroying individuality? Seems like a high price to pay for fewer cliques.

Don’t forget that it’s illegal to price goods below cost, advertising sales in your shop is illegal and in some parts of Euroweenieland (I used to live there, I earned the privilege to be childish) it’s illegal to even have a sales except for government mandated sales for all stores at certain times of the year.

As for your sentiment that ‘kin is life’, that is something some Americans do not share. Many do, but many others are defined not by their family, but by their professions. I think one of the reasons for this is the disgust Americans have for familial/inherited positions. The thinking is, if you are defined by your family, you can never rise above that family, an organization you had no say in joining. You can’t change your family; but, you can change your job. If you are defined by your job (which is not tied to your family) than you can rise and excel based on your merit and hard work, not based on whether your father was a janitor or a prince.

@yoshidad: many issues (like crime) get glossed over in the politically correct, “we’re all the same” mindset of today. Some cultures have a much greater respect for the law than ours do, have less violent crime, etc. Some of this stems from economic issues, but some exist just based on the history and structure of that society. For this reason, it’s far more difficult to compare nations on non-economic issues than it is on economic issues.

Legalized (or decriminalized) drugs is something we often hear about in the U.S., and Amsterdam is always referenced. What is always overlooked though, is the demographic and societal makeup of the Netherlands. It’s not so much to say that decriminalized drugs won’t work here, but you certainly can’t say that it will work and hold up the Netherlands as proof.