Stardate 20020824.2130

(Captain's log): A reader I won't identify (for reasons which will become obvious) writes from the UK about his impression of Americans:

Finally, why do Europeans think americans are dumb? One thing that hits me in London is the inexperience of a lot of the americans we see with city life. If you've used the London underground, you know we have a lane system on the escalators, where you stand on the right, and walk on the left.

American (and Japanese) tourists invariably block the system. Worse, a party of them will get off an escalator, walk 10 feet and _just stand there_. The locals will stop, try to get round, and being that much closer to the escalator, are much more likely to be hit by people behind.

I'm sure most of these people are simply cow-farmers from the Dakotas, or wherever, but how often are MIT or Stanford grads are going to come to Europe in large numbers? It's actually bad enough that you can identify the groups which will block the transport system in advance by the way they dress.

Want to eliminate the stereotype of the dumb yank? Teach the cow-pokes how to use escalators would be a start.

If I knew where to find any, I'd work on it.

I think maybe we have the classic effects of a self-fulfilling stereotype going here: my friend sees Americans acting in a fashion he doesn't like, assumes that they must be farmers, and uses that to conclude that the average American is a dumb shoveler of cow manure. (Actually, they usually use front loaders for that.) I don't think he recognizes the circularity of his logic; he evidently didn't bother engaging any of them in conversation to discover where they really were from or what they did there - which is a shame, because Americans are friendly people when they're not treated with condescension or disdain, and I think that three or four such conversations would rather surprise him.

The reality is that the vast majority of American live in cities or their suburbs, and only a small number of us are employed in production of food. According to the 2000 census, nearly 226 million of us live in metropolitan areas which have 50,000 people or more. That leaves about 50 million for the entire rest of the country including the farms, but actually most of those live in smaller towns rather than in farm houses or cow barns, or sleeping out on the open range with the herds.

84 million of us live in metropolitan areas of five million people or more, a number greater than the population of the UK.

Out of a population of 177.5 million who are 25 years or older, 11.5 million had an Associates degree (a 2 year degree). 28.5 million had bachelor's degrees. Nearly 16 million had advanced degrees. Another 36.5 million had attended college without earning a degree (including me, because I dropped out). Overall, over half our adults have attended college, though it must be admitted that most of them didn't go to Stanford or MIT. However, I do hope my British friend realizes that just because his nation only has two first class universities that it doesn't mean we only have two. There are at least a few others which have world-wide reputations, like Jane Galt's alma mater the University of Chicago, or UCLA, or RPI, or maybe even Harvard. (Actually, I could easily list thirty more of comparable reputation. Princeton and Yale and Caltech spring to mind, for instance.)

Of course, the question is what they're using that education for. The census found about 130 million people employed, broken down as follows:

I might mention that with regard