Arthur Kroeber

So I lived in China more or less full time until 2015.

And then I started doing half and half after that.

Now I principally live in New York.

One of the things that always struck me when I would come back from China is – to the U.S.

is just how much grassroots cultural activity you have all over the United States, right?

We have a very distributed sort of system of sort of cultural activity here.

And in China you have –

a few sort of big cultural hotspots where things happen, and then it's all kind of placid, right?

So the sort of the variety of experience that you have in the U.S., I think, is still unrivaled.

And, you know, I think you were talking earlier about there's still this huge discrepancy of

between, you know, the average income in China and the average income in the U.S.

is partly a reflection of that, right?

It's still, on average, a much poorer society in the U.S.

than the U.S.

And so the surplus that's available for people to do stuff that's interesting but not sort of economically productive in a narrow sense, that space is much – still a lot smaller.

And it's not just political –

Repression that's doing that, it's kind of like – it's a combination of the level of income and just like the ingrained social structures.

Yeah, let's not take those lessons.

Those are very bad lessons.

Right.