A Question of Economics

Yes, everything is larger here. Not just the cars and the highways and the stores, but also the breadth of spirit. People take the time to greet and ask after one another--even if it may only be a superficial gesture--; shopkeepers and passing strangers on the street are more willing to take you at your word; and--New York City excepted--a sense of space pervades over the sense of agitated rush and scramble that is the rule in densely-populated, (over)crowded East Asia.
How ironic, then, that the whole concept is so much more concisely expressed in Chinese: 大气. I guess it was never a want of magnanimity, but rather a lack of resources to express magnanimity. If there weren't all these people around bearing down on one, if there were resources enough so that the competition wasn't so intense---it would be so much easier to be gracious and generous.
Maybe that is simply not to be. With globalization, the field of competition has opened to all 6.8 billion (and counting) for West and East alike. As questions of ecological sustainability come into increasingly sharper focus, it may very well turn out to be the case that nobody on Earth really has such a wealth of resources after all. America's generosity might well have been possible only on borrowed time.
Yet it would be a pity if these habits disappeared altogether, and humanity were reduced (once again?) to a mere state of perpetual fierce, petty competition.
We should step up the conversation. So that you might re-learn the habits of prudence, and we the habits of generosity, and that new and unexpected solutions might emerge in the discourse. So that we might both then become better, yet also fitter, people.