Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
People in Europe are satisfied, I think, more with experience, and smaller but higher quality items, than are Americans. Americans don't see much value in sitting in a cafe and just burning an afternoon. They aren't interested in driving a sensible car (they like Mercedes, but they don't want to own one for 15 years... they'd rather get a new, bigger gold-packaged SUV Benz every three years).
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People respond to incentives. Europeans drive more sensible cars, because fuel taxes, regulation and space make it impractical to do otherwise.
We could change the incentives here too, if we had the political will. We do not because, as that excerpt describes, we see "freedom" in our bad incentive system. We're all worse off for it - big SUVs are deadly beyond their environmental and spacial wastefulness - but fuck you I got mine.
