I really don’t think 99.9% of people want to pay 1K /month for health insurance or be a missed paycheck away from living on the street. Americans make a lot of money but the cost of living is through the roof and there is practically no safety net. That’s not even touching on our complete lack of social and family support structures.
Again with the wild hyperbole. The American safety net may not be the absolute best in the world but it is still far better than what is available to the overwhelming majority of people. Indeed, a huge swath of the world is far below the American poverty line. Why do you suppose so many millions of people risk their lives to get into America in the first place?
Come on. We can advocate for better healthcare and social services without going full “AmErIcA iS a ThIrD wOrLd CoUnTrY”.
It’s not hyperbole it’s reality. The US has the largest prison population in the world. It has massive problems with homelessness and violent crime. It has extreme wealth inequality. We have the most expensive healthcare and education in the world.
The reality is that the US is a harsh place to live. Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
> Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.
It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.
There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
- Why is wealth inequality a problem? If average people is relatively wealthy (which i think is the case for USA), why does it matter that some people are very wealthy? This is different than some 3rd world countries where average people is poor and some very small percentage have wealth (and mostly due to corruption / crime / political influence)
- Rate of incarceration may also mean that USA does a good job of imparting justice / catch criminals.
- Healthcare costs looks like an issue, but socialized systems also have their problems (bad quality, wrong economic incentives for doctors to improve their practice, etc.)
Wealth inequality is bad in part because the wealthy then control policy and have wide ranging impact in the day to day lives of those who are not wealthy. It’s a centralization of control.
The rate of incarceration is largely due to the war on drugs. There’s nothing just about it.
I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
> I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
I actually favor a stronger social safety net and I agree that we need to reign in inequality (because an egalitarian society of very wealthy people and very poor people strikes me as completely infeasible in the same way that a prosperous socialist or communist country is completely infeasible), but that will almost certainly mean the professional class is worse-off. Reasoning soberly about tradeoffs is imperative IMO.
> Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
Yes, and I have! What I missed most when not living in the US:
* variety of everything
* large appliances
What I missed least:
* driving/car culture
* overwork
So sadly I found I was actually a typical “consumer” who wants things that are pretty crappy for the environment (except for the car thing). I was fine with getting paid less than I would in the US because as a senior technologist, I was making way more than most of the locals and the economy was tuned to their pay.
Again, I'm not glossing over problems, I'm contextualizing them. I've been very clear about that in this entire thread. Cherry picking individual metrics doesn't present a clear picture, and I'm striving for a clear (not distorted) picture. Notably, healthcare costs don't mean much on their own, you have to adjust for per-capita wealth as well. With respect to wealth inequality, would you rather live in a country where almost everyone is below the poverty line or one in which almost everyone is above the poverty line but some moreso than others? Again, I want to reign in inequality in the US, but I don't need to invoke hyperbole to get there.
You aren't going to get a clear picture by cherry picking statistics that support your conclusion. You need to contextualize. Of course, if your goal isn't to get a clear, honest picture then we're aiming for different things and we may as well part ways now.
EDIT: From wikipedia, regarding measures of inequality:
> Gini coefficients are simple, and this simplicity can lead to oversights and can confuse the comparison of different populations; for example, while both Bangladesh (per capita income of $1,693) and the Netherlands (per capita income of $42,183) had an income Gini coefficient of 0.31 in 2010,[53] the quality of life, economic opportunity and absolute income in these countries are very different, i.e. countries may have identical Gini coefficients, but differ greatly in wealth.
Your original argument is flawed. You actually have no way of knowing if most people are “envious” of the US. That’s pure speculation on your part. We can look at numbers, if we do we see some where the US looks really good and some where it looks really bad. That’s not even touching less tangible things like culture, community and family values (all of which are extremely subjective). The US is definitely a harsh place to live in many ways. And yes, I’ve lived in other countries and traveled extensively. I’ve seen plenty of poor (by American standards) families living happily together in ways that would make many Americans envious.
In short, your claim is too subjective to be useful and is directly contradicted by multiple metrics.
The context of the thread assumes that we're talking about wealth. The original claim was something like, "in the US you must be in the management class in order to have a life worth living". I.e., we're talking specifically about wealth and not other subjective factors. To be perfectly clear, there are no metrics that contradict that the median American is wealthy by world or historic standards.
Maybe you're arguing that I have no way of knowing that poorer people would be envious of richer people; fair enough, "envious" was figurative language on my part.
