As a first step, assimilation may mean not being on social media. The awfulness, at least on some platforms. I posted the other day about the rhetoric of "flower power"(for those who remember), which was, at the very least. all about love, not hate. And long hair and no washing. And doves and that peace symbol.
I mean, this is sort of a straw problem or an online generated problem. The sophisticated and successful parts of this country — CA, MA, NYC, Houston/Austin - seem to bop along fine with large immigrant populations and organic integration around shared things with non-zero but also non-dangerous levels/frequencies of sectarian strife. The groups that have elected to not participate in the broader culture (hello, Satmar!), are mostly allowed to do that and it is mostly not a big deal because it is mostly a not very attractive choice.
A metaphor I always liked is the boat at anchor, where the surface is the broader culture and the anchor is to the specific culture (and the boat is the person). Maybe the first gen has a very short anchor chain, maybe it is moored to the specific culture and barely travels, but as time goes on the anchor chain gets longer and longer and the boat can drift further a field and it is a choice whether or not to keep the anchor at all…
Have you considered that your upper class experience with your upper class ethnic friends is drastically different from what most americans experience regarding inmigration and the communities they create?
I live in New York City, chock full of working class immigrants for a century. Everyone born in the US becomes assimilated in the same way that Noah’s friends did growing up.
I will continue to maintain that multi-generational lack of assimilation is a largely fictional problem. Assimilation is a generational given. A Mexican-born laborer may never seem fully American, but his kids born in the US will. Second-generation immigrants are often invisible to people having this debate because they don’t stand out. They largely do not have accents, nor look or dress distinctively, and are fluent in American culture.
Someone correct me if I'm confused here, but it seems to me that the heart of assimilation lies in identifying with the core American story.
Losing our roots and finding a new home on this continent has defined us as a people from Plymouth to Ellis Island to Matamoros. America IS a story of immigrants--economically hopeless, politically oppressed, religiously persecuted minorities--leaving their homeland and making a new one in the American landscape.
People become American once they've survived this lost-and-found experience and have identified with the STORY.
Conservatives cling to the epic-heroic version of the national story. For them it's all pilgrims and cowboys--protestants building a city on a hill and pioneers making their way west--both searching for a bit of land to raise a family unmolested by godless big-city hordes.
Progressives push the tragic-anti-heroic version of the narrative. For them it has all been one big story of violence and exploitation, a theft of indigenous land and an assault on the immigrant's distinctive culture.
In short, both political parties have twisted the story to serve their agendas; they use it to define THEMSELVES instead of to build the country. It is the mythic counterpart to the destruction of America's political moderates and centrists.
This one hits close to home, Noah. My parents were Vietnamese refugees and they made sure we learned English before anything else. As a kid I just wanted desperately to fit in, to be American, and they understood that meant meeting the culture halfway. Nobody forced them. They chose it.
I think about how different that experience looks in parts of Europe, where assimilation is either demanded in ways that feel like erasure or rejected entirely, and both paths seem to produce the same resentment.
Conversely, it also begs the question of what the standard for being American even is. When people like Matt Walsh look at Texan names and can’t see American ones, that tells you the framework itself is broken. Who gets to define what American looks like?
I wonder how much of successful assimilation comes down to that choice being available vs. being demanded. Because the moment it becomes a demand instead of an invitation, something breaks.
This doesn't seem like "meeting the culture halfway" at all. What demands did your parents make on the native population on account of respecting Vietnamese culture? My guess is the answer to that would be none at all, which is exactly the number of demands you are allowed to make when you show up in a country you are not from. There are Vietnamese immigrants in my city, and I don't have to worry about it because they do not show up and demand that I adapt to Vietnamese culture. This is why people have no problem with Vietnamese immigration. Muslim immigrants behave very differently.
Haven’t you argued that we should self-sort into subcultures online? What’s so different about real life? I grew up in Iowa. It was well-assimilated… and soul crushingly bland. I’ve now lived in both coasts and appreciate these immigrant neighborhoods. They add color to life and, as far as I can tell, are not tearing apart the American fabric except inside MAGA minds.
(That said, I don’t think assimilation is something that policy or social forces “decide” to enforce or not. It’s just a thing that happens inevitably with the passing of generations.)
In any case, what even is the mainstream anymore? Coastal (white) urbanites view hinterland (white) MAGAs with contempt and vice versa.
All nations tend to have a unified culture. Empires do not. If you want a fully multicultural America with no assimilation then laws would have to change, since laws are downstream of culture.
Sharia law is used in parts of the UK where Sharia councils can offer religious advisory or arbitration groups. People volunteer to use these courts and agree to the arbitration, so it’s not that onerous.
Nevertheless I don’t see any multi cultural advocate for extending this to criminal courts but shouldn’t they? The laws of the US are rooted in Anglo Saxon legal system and are highly secular, so agreeing to them is assimilation. Other countries do have parallel legal systems for different religious minorities. Indonesia has formalised Islamic family law courts, not just agreed arbitration, for Muslims - civil law for others, and in Aceh criminal law is sharia, including canings.
If non integration means anything, it means having your own courts.
What I had in mind was more prosaic behavioral matters, e.g. culture war complaints that East Asians grind too much in school and thus are insufficiently American. But this is an interesting topic so I’ll give my thoughts.
I see Western law as 90% a technology (in the economists’ sense) and only 10% downstream of culture. British legal systems are functioning fine in India and (Chinese-dominated) Singapore, so that’s at least two major civilizations that make use of it. (India does have religion-specific civil laws for some cultural matters like marriage but criminal law is uniform.) The demand for separate criminal law seems to be specific to Islam, and, well, they’re wrong. This is just a slippery slope argument and I don’t see why a line can’t simply be drawn.
Aside: What’s so bad about empires? Nation-states were a 17th century European solution to a contemporary problem (namely, their propensity for killing each other over trivialities). Now they suffer from continent-wide economic deadweight loss and have spent half a century trying to construct a suprastate.
What bad about empires is the killing was usually caused by the imperialism. Actually modern nation states are from the 19C and generally tied to the rise of democracy.
Not sure the Canadian salad bowl should be dismissed so trivially.
While the people are pushing back against high immigration, especially in a "build nothing" housing environment, when I visit it feels like their multi-culturalism works pretty well.
I do see a strong sense of Canadian identity and unity, overlapped with separate cultural identities and behaviors.
Well written, Noah. I agree with you, but there is at least one issue that we need to wrestle with: language. I've always felt that we should establish English as the national language, and that demonstrating a level of proficiency in English should be a requirement of citizenship. I'm persuaded of this simply by practical reasons. not ideology.
That is all well-put and constructive. But consider also the destructive effect of the economic inequality in the U.S. where half the households in the country hold less than three percent of the wealth. In a culture imbued with the idea that everyone is personally responsible for their place in life, that degree of inequality drives people into postures of defense and resentment. For many reasons, immigrants, who are people who choose to be here, rather than simply born here, should be welcomed, much the same way as religious converts are highly regarded by the faithful.
There was an interesting conversation between David Frum and Fareed Zakaria on the David Frum podcast on the Atlantic. They are both immigrants and talked about a range of issues - why they became immigrants and then naturalized citizens, their experiences over time, their perspectives on what is happening in this country politically and socioeconomically regarding immigrants, the differing views of their kids as second-generation "immigrants." In the end, they both make many of the same points you make. Their conversation is worth a read.
I think the asymmetry in your Muslim example is doing more work than the post admits. Asking Muslims to tolerate Prophet cartoons or eat around pork is a real religious concession. Asking non-Muslims to stop reading mosques as invasion is mostly a comfort adjustment. Those are not equivalent costs, and that mismatch is exactly why "changes from everyone" sounds more balanced than it is.
That matters for the empirical claim that the gentle melting pot was working before Trump. Pew's Muslim surveys show reported discrimination rising from 40% in 2007 to 43% in 2011 to 48% in 2017. That's not an argument against assimilation as a goal, but it does suggest the baseline was shakier than the post implies. I wrote up the argument here: https://noahpinionot.substack.com/p/the-melting-pot-has-always-had-a
If the real position is "immigrants should expect hatred unless they make themselves maximally convenient," then we're no longer talking about a gentle melting pot. We're talking about a hierarchy with nicer branding.
And some of these aren't exotic demands anyway. Letting people avoid pork or not treating mosques as civilizational beachheads is a pretty low bar in a pluralist democracy. The point isn't that immigrants shouldn't adapt. It's that adaptation gets described as "shared" even when the costs are mostly running one way.
Yes, it absolutely is a hierarchy as are all things built by humans. Same as how when you start a new job you learn the way they do things there, and not the other way around.
You have weaseled your way out of the point by reversing the situation. "Letting people avoid pork" was never the issue. Nobody would even notice, let alone care, if anyone doesn't eat pork. Jews don't eat pork and it never caused any problems. The issue was that Muslims demand that other people don't eat pork as to not be around it. IMO we are being too soft by not putting any immigrant making such a demand on the next flight home.
All immigrants have had resistance in U.S. when they came over first. Seems to be human nature.
Integration requires honoring the rules of law from the host country - wherever you migrate to. That isn’t too much to ask.
UK and some other EU nations have had difficulty assimilating Muslim immigrants. One reason may be the sheer amount that came in over a short period. Another is the Muslim combination of law and religion. When you go to a host Country, you agree to abide by the host Country’s laws. That appears to be the central conflict.
Similarly, our immigration system was broken from 2020-24. Clearly our system takes a long time and that process has to be addressed. But to let in unvetted folks or to have folks overwhelm a system (housing, medical) or to have crime increase as a result - that’s not right either. Too many folks were let in unvetted over a very short period.
And it had the effect of turning the general population against them. Not to mention those who are still on public assistance and are openly mocking our systems with fraud (see Minnesota Somalia debacle).
As to who gets to come in? That is the decision of the host Country. I would hope that people who are ambitious, who have a place to go and who have lined up work would be allowed in. Many immigrants are entrepreneurs. They come at great risk.
THAT’S who we want.
The system worked - our population grew, our entrepreneurs increased and crime over the years did not increase as a result of immigrants (long-standing study showing immigrants have lower crime rate than the general population; that changed in 2020-24 when the vetting process was relaxed - although it’s tough to distinguish between crime increase due to relaxed policies versus new criminal elements, it is true that killings went to decades low number in 2025 with capture and deportation of unvetted criminal elements).
So while you may worry, Noah, the U.S. will be OK. Integration means following the laws of the host Country. Customs are kept (most groups have their own Holidays to celebrate) and as long as our process helps those that are willing to work and contribute to society (can’t come just to go on welfare) we’ll grow. Expect that those that arrive understand they follow the host Country’s laws and regulations. Improve the process and let time take care of the rest.
Noah have you ever read Bret Devireux's blog post My Country is Not a Nation and, if so, what do you think of it? You seem to have very different opinions on what constitutes the American "nation", or whether such a thing exists.
Good piece. However, I think you are making Muslim immigrants way too big of an issue. Minuscule percentage of the population and many are educated professionals and not millions of poor arrivals as in Europe.
A town I used to live in did have a kerfuffle over the building of a mosque, though a neighboring town found a good lot for it, and this town also has a Sikh temple and a Hindu temple (and, of course, Jewish temples, a JCC and numerous Catholic and Protestant churches). The town that fought the mosque in their bucolic/revolutionary era town square would have also fought an evangelical mega church tooth and nail.
I’d say the bigger problem America has is a Latino culture competing with the “American” one. No need to mix and assimilate when your former culture has reached critical mass. The US needs to control and limit immigration but also needs to insure that there is a good mix of entrants globally and not a mix based upon on who can walk here.
This column had me thinking of my Anabaptist ancestors (the Mennonites and Amish) who came to Lancaster PA in the 1700s fleeing persecution in Europe based on William Penn's guarantee of religious freedom. I'm on the "assimilated" branch (most or all of my family had left the Mennonite religion about 100 years ago) living as a modern American who speaks English rather than High German/Penn Dutch, pays $30K a year for health insurance, struggles like 40% of us to stay on the right side of the obesity line, spends too much time doomscrolling about our seemingly collapsing country, and worries about how my children will find their way in this complex modern interconnected economy with ai job loss fears etc. Meanwhile the Amish today pay no health insurance bills (they do take up alms to pay for neighbors who need care), have only a 4% obesity rate despite spending zero on fitness memberships and exercise contraptions, have longer lifespans, and according to one pretty interesting study they have a happiness level equal to that of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Who's better off?
As a first step, assimilation may mean not being on social media. The awfulness, at least on some platforms. I posted the other day about the rhetoric of "flower power"(for those who remember), which was, at the very least. all about love, not hate. And long hair and no washing. And doves and that peace symbol.
I mean, this is sort of a straw problem or an online generated problem. The sophisticated and successful parts of this country — CA, MA, NYC, Houston/Austin - seem to bop along fine with large immigrant populations and organic integration around shared things with non-zero but also non-dangerous levels/frequencies of sectarian strife. The groups that have elected to not participate in the broader culture (hello, Satmar!), are mostly allowed to do that and it is mostly not a big deal because it is mostly a not very attractive choice.
A metaphor I always liked is the boat at anchor, where the surface is the broader culture and the anchor is to the specific culture (and the boat is the person). Maybe the first gen has a very short anchor chain, maybe it is moored to the specific culture and barely travels, but as time goes on the anchor chain gets longer and longer and the boat can drift further a field and it is a choice whether or not to keep the anchor at all…
Have you considered that your upper class experience with your upper class ethnic friends is drastically different from what most americans experience regarding inmigration and the communities they create?
I've considered it, but the truth is that I didn't grow up upper class, and a lot of the "ethnic" people I knew weren't upper class either.
I live in New York City, chock full of working class immigrants for a century. Everyone born in the US becomes assimilated in the same way that Noah’s friends did growing up.
I will continue to maintain that multi-generational lack of assimilation is a largely fictional problem. Assimilation is a generational given. A Mexican-born laborer may never seem fully American, but his kids born in the US will. Second-generation immigrants are often invisible to people having this debate because they don’t stand out. They largely do not have accents, nor look or dress distinctively, and are fluent in American culture.
Someone correct me if I'm confused here, but it seems to me that the heart of assimilation lies in identifying with the core American story.
Losing our roots and finding a new home on this continent has defined us as a people from Plymouth to Ellis Island to Matamoros. America IS a story of immigrants--economically hopeless, politically oppressed, religiously persecuted minorities--leaving their homeland and making a new one in the American landscape.
People become American once they've survived this lost-and-found experience and have identified with the STORY.
Conservatives cling to the epic-heroic version of the national story. For them it's all pilgrims and cowboys--protestants building a city on a hill and pioneers making their way west--both searching for a bit of land to raise a family unmolested by godless big-city hordes.
Progressives push the tragic-anti-heroic version of the narrative. For them it has all been one big story of violence and exploitation, a theft of indigenous land and an assault on the immigrant's distinctive culture.
In short, both political parties have twisted the story to serve their agendas; they use it to define THEMSELVES instead of to build the country. It is the mythic counterpart to the destruction of America's political moderates and centrists.
This one hits close to home, Noah. My parents were Vietnamese refugees and they made sure we learned English before anything else. As a kid I just wanted desperately to fit in, to be American, and they understood that meant meeting the culture halfway. Nobody forced them. They chose it.
I think about how different that experience looks in parts of Europe, where assimilation is either demanded in ways that feel like erasure or rejected entirely, and both paths seem to produce the same resentment.
Conversely, it also begs the question of what the standard for being American even is. When people like Matt Walsh look at Texan names and can’t see American ones, that tells you the framework itself is broken. Who gets to define what American looks like?
I wonder how much of successful assimilation comes down to that choice being available vs. being demanded. Because the moment it becomes a demand instead of an invitation, something breaks.
This doesn't seem like "meeting the culture halfway" at all. What demands did your parents make on the native population on account of respecting Vietnamese culture? My guess is the answer to that would be none at all, which is exactly the number of demands you are allowed to make when you show up in a country you are not from. There are Vietnamese immigrants in my city, and I don't have to worry about it because they do not show up and demand that I adapt to Vietnamese culture. This is why people have no problem with Vietnamese immigration. Muslim immigrants behave very differently.
I think this is still what happens normally. If you were born in the US, there’s no way you would not have learned English.
Haven’t you argued that we should self-sort into subcultures online? What’s so different about real life? I grew up in Iowa. It was well-assimilated… and soul crushingly bland. I’ve now lived in both coasts and appreciate these immigrant neighborhoods. They add color to life and, as far as I can tell, are not tearing apart the American fabric except inside MAGA minds.
(That said, I don’t think assimilation is something that policy or social forces “decide” to enforce or not. It’s just a thing that happens inevitably with the passing of generations.)
In any case, what even is the mainstream anymore? Coastal (white) urbanites view hinterland (white) MAGAs with contempt and vice versa.
Fragmented online > unified online
Offline > online
All nations tend to have a unified culture. Empires do not. If you want a fully multicultural America with no assimilation then laws would have to change, since laws are downstream of culture.
Sharia law is used in parts of the UK where Sharia councils can offer religious advisory or arbitration groups. People volunteer to use these courts and agree to the arbitration, so it’s not that onerous.
Nevertheless I don’t see any multi cultural advocate for extending this to criminal courts but shouldn’t they? The laws of the US are rooted in Anglo Saxon legal system and are highly secular, so agreeing to them is assimilation. Other countries do have parallel legal systems for different religious minorities. Indonesia has formalised Islamic family law courts, not just agreed arbitration, for Muslims - civil law for others, and in Aceh criminal law is sharia, including canings.
If non integration means anything, it means having your own courts.
What I had in mind was more prosaic behavioral matters, e.g. culture war complaints that East Asians grind too much in school and thus are insufficiently American. But this is an interesting topic so I’ll give my thoughts.
I see Western law as 90% a technology (in the economists’ sense) and only 10% downstream of culture. British legal systems are functioning fine in India and (Chinese-dominated) Singapore, so that’s at least two major civilizations that make use of it. (India does have religion-specific civil laws for some cultural matters like marriage but criminal law is uniform.) The demand for separate criminal law seems to be specific to Islam, and, well, they’re wrong. This is just a slippery slope argument and I don’t see why a line can’t simply be drawn.
Aside: What’s so bad about empires? Nation-states were a 17th century European solution to a contemporary problem (namely, their propensity for killing each other over trivialities). Now they suffer from continent-wide economic deadweight loss and have spent half a century trying to construct a suprastate.
What bad about empires is the killing was usually caused by the imperialism. Actually modern nation states are from the 19C and generally tied to the rise of democracy.
Catholics also have their own courts such as marriage tribunals for annulment. Catholics who have been assimilated for 100s of years use them.
Not sure the Canadian salad bowl should be dismissed so trivially.
While the people are pushing back against high immigration, especially in a "build nothing" housing environment, when I visit it feels like their multi-culturalism works pretty well.
I do see a strong sense of Canadian identity and unity, overlapped with separate cultural identities and behaviors.
Well written, Noah. I agree with you, but there is at least one issue that we need to wrestle with: language. I've always felt that we should establish English as the national language, and that demonstrating a level of proficiency in English should be a requirement of citizenship. I'm persuaded of this simply by practical reasons. not ideology.
That is all well-put and constructive. But consider also the destructive effect of the economic inequality in the U.S. where half the households in the country hold less than three percent of the wealth. In a culture imbued with the idea that everyone is personally responsible for their place in life, that degree of inequality drives people into postures of defense and resentment. For many reasons, immigrants, who are people who choose to be here, rather than simply born here, should be welcomed, much the same way as religious converts are highly regarded by the faithful.
There was an interesting conversation between David Frum and Fareed Zakaria on the David Frum podcast on the Atlantic. They are both immigrants and talked about a range of issues - why they became immigrants and then naturalized citizens, their experiences over time, their perspectives on what is happening in this country politically and socioeconomically regarding immigrants, the differing views of their kids as second-generation "immigrants." In the end, they both make many of the same points you make. Their conversation is worth a read.
I think the asymmetry in your Muslim example is doing more work than the post admits. Asking Muslims to tolerate Prophet cartoons or eat around pork is a real religious concession. Asking non-Muslims to stop reading mosques as invasion is mostly a comfort adjustment. Those are not equivalent costs, and that mismatch is exactly why "changes from everyone" sounds more balanced than it is.
That matters for the empirical claim that the gentle melting pot was working before Trump. Pew's Muslim surveys show reported discrimination rising from 40% in 2007 to 43% in 2011 to 48% in 2017. That's not an argument against assimilation as a goal, but it does suggest the baseline was shakier than the post implies. I wrote up the argument here: https://noahpinionot.substack.com/p/the-melting-pot-has-always-had-a
Why would it be balanced? They are the immigrants. If you show up in a new place and demand concessions, no matter how small, expect to be hated.
If the real position is "immigrants should expect hatred unless they make themselves maximally convenient," then we're no longer talking about a gentle melting pot. We're talking about a hierarchy with nicer branding.
And some of these aren't exotic demands anyway. Letting people avoid pork or not treating mosques as civilizational beachheads is a pretty low bar in a pluralist democracy. The point isn't that immigrants shouldn't adapt. It's that adaptation gets described as "shared" even when the costs are mostly running one way.
Yes, it absolutely is a hierarchy as are all things built by humans. Same as how when you start a new job you learn the way they do things there, and not the other way around.
You have weaseled your way out of the point by reversing the situation. "Letting people avoid pork" was never the issue. Nobody would even notice, let alone care, if anyone doesn't eat pork. Jews don't eat pork and it never caused any problems. The issue was that Muslims demand that other people don't eat pork as to not be around it. IMO we are being too soft by not putting any immigrant making such a demand on the next flight home.
All immigrants have had resistance in U.S. when they came over first. Seems to be human nature.
Integration requires honoring the rules of law from the host country - wherever you migrate to. That isn’t too much to ask.
UK and some other EU nations have had difficulty assimilating Muslim immigrants. One reason may be the sheer amount that came in over a short period. Another is the Muslim combination of law and religion. When you go to a host Country, you agree to abide by the host Country’s laws. That appears to be the central conflict.
Similarly, our immigration system was broken from 2020-24. Clearly our system takes a long time and that process has to be addressed. But to let in unvetted folks or to have folks overwhelm a system (housing, medical) or to have crime increase as a result - that’s not right either. Too many folks were let in unvetted over a very short period.
And it had the effect of turning the general population against them. Not to mention those who are still on public assistance and are openly mocking our systems with fraud (see Minnesota Somalia debacle).
As to who gets to come in? That is the decision of the host Country. I would hope that people who are ambitious, who have a place to go and who have lined up work would be allowed in. Many immigrants are entrepreneurs. They come at great risk.
THAT’S who we want.
The system worked - our population grew, our entrepreneurs increased and crime over the years did not increase as a result of immigrants (long-standing study showing immigrants have lower crime rate than the general population; that changed in 2020-24 when the vetting process was relaxed - although it’s tough to distinguish between crime increase due to relaxed policies versus new criminal elements, it is true that killings went to decades low number in 2025 with capture and deportation of unvetted criminal elements).
So while you may worry, Noah, the U.S. will be OK. Integration means following the laws of the host Country. Customs are kept (most groups have their own Holidays to celebrate) and as long as our process helps those that are willing to work and contribute to society (can’t come just to go on welfare) we’ll grow. Expect that those that arrive understand they follow the host Country’s laws and regulations. Improve the process and let time take care of the rest.
Noah have you ever read Bret Devireux's blog post My Country is Not a Nation and, if so, what do you think of it? You seem to have very different opinions on what constitutes the American "nation", or whether such a thing exists.
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/
Good piece. However, I think you are making Muslim immigrants way too big of an issue. Minuscule percentage of the population and many are educated professionals and not millions of poor arrivals as in Europe.
A town I used to live in did have a kerfuffle over the building of a mosque, though a neighboring town found a good lot for it, and this town also has a Sikh temple and a Hindu temple (and, of course, Jewish temples, a JCC and numerous Catholic and Protestant churches). The town that fought the mosque in their bucolic/revolutionary era town square would have also fought an evangelical mega church tooth and nail.
I’d say the bigger problem America has is a Latino culture competing with the “American” one. No need to mix and assimilate when your former culture has reached critical mass. The US needs to control and limit immigration but also needs to insure that there is a good mix of entrants globally and not a mix based upon on who can walk here.
This column had me thinking of my Anabaptist ancestors (the Mennonites and Amish) who came to Lancaster PA in the 1700s fleeing persecution in Europe based on William Penn's guarantee of religious freedom. I'm on the "assimilated" branch (most or all of my family had left the Mennonite religion about 100 years ago) living as a modern American who speaks English rather than High German/Penn Dutch, pays $30K a year for health insurance, struggles like 40% of us to stay on the right side of the obesity line, spends too much time doomscrolling about our seemingly collapsing country, and worries about how my children will find their way in this complex modern interconnected economy with ai job loss fears etc. Meanwhile the Amish today pay no health insurance bills (they do take up alms to pay for neighbors who need care), have only a 4% obesity rate despite spending zero on fitness memberships and exercise contraptions, have longer lifespans, and according to one pretty interesting study they have a happiness level equal to that of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Who's better off?