MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations
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I have visited the US most years out of the last 5-10, including a trip through 25ish US states a couple of years ago. It's easy to get the impression that competing interests maintain a problematic or worsening status quo - infrastructure that has to be OK until it collapses because no one wants to prioritise the money to fix it (many roads in California are shocking). A voting system (as mentioned by @kristofferR) that makes it difficult for a viable third party to emerge. Health, education, private prison industries, etc.
There are parts of the United States that feel like they are struggling to survive - including areas that are quite eye-opening like Bombay Beach and Wonder Valley.
In Australia, we see lobbying groups dictate terms increasingly often too and I don't know that our country is better for it.
Having said that, I think it has absolutely nothing to do with the article.
Wonder Valley also has an interesting story: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-last-homesteads-o...
There's a theme here of Southern California desert wastelands.
There are larger towns and cities in the U.S. which more accurately depict the broader economic challenges the country is facing.
What the US lacks is urban poverty in the form of shantytowns. This is because unlike most third world nations, we quickly raze them when and find excuses to incarcerate the people who live there. If we were more permissive, we'd certainly have them too.
In the same way there's a lot of wealthy places in let's say Mexico City and other capitals of 3rd world countries
But today it mostly means "developing countries" (which is actually an euphemism for "stuck in underdevelopment")
Not that the US is a developing country; it was developed, and is currently degenerating. It's still very rich, though. So instead of trying to catch this in a single ill-fitting word, perhaps it would be better to simply discuss the actual issues: the rise of poverty, lack of social mobility, crumbling infrastructure, etc.
Yes, but parent compared places in the US to rural AND poor/3rd world places.
The water, sewer, and electricity work well enough to be relied upon even in the poorest most remote parts of the US. This is not so in any 3rd world country
I completely understand your point, and a rich person in the US is in a better situation than in other countries, but I wouldn't say that the poorest among the population US are _that_ much better than in other countries. My guess is that the people pushing for the view "parts of US == third world country" might be looking at the top of the list for those countries, while you and others that seem against this comparison are looking at either the average or lower half of countries considered third world.
I personally found it horrifying to see a Lamborghini waiting for the traffic light to change while a legless homeless veteran coughing up blood was on that intersection asking for food. Worst part of it though, is that once you live in that environment, very quickly it fades in the background and turns into "just the way things are". Poor people in this country have access to more goods than poor people in other countries, that's true, that doesn't mean that services are up to the task for them.
EDIT - Please reply if you don't like my comment. Just downvotes do not tell me anything. Also, please consider that I just asked questions, I made no statements and I did it that way because I actually seek answers.
If the water in Flint is perfectly fine, then please tell me and explain how public perception got so out of sorts. I would appreciate sources.
I also don't think we are a 3rd world country, but we clearly have more problems than people who believe in American Exceptionalism are willing to accept.
I don't see how a single small city whose water supply was tainted by incompetence of local water utilities is representative of the US as a whole. 99.99% of us have access to drinkable water.
Flint is not an isolated case, it's distinctive because it got bad relatively quickly due to clear mismanagement (with a big serving of partisan politics on top). How's this for a headline? "Reuters finds lead levels higher than Flint's in thousands of locales." [0] All it took was searching for "lead worse than flint."
[0] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-...
Flint would challenge that claim. http://time.com/4634937/flint-water-crisis-criminal-charges-...
If you're American and you care about poverty -- as in relative poverty -- in your country and you want to do something about it, more power to you. It's not like someone being much poorer elsewhere prevents you from caring about a problem in your country. But please don't trivialize abject poverty by implying that the American working class have it as hard as the lower classes in the developing world.
It doesn't matter what some parts of the US anecdotally and subjectively "look like", they don't measure nowhere near as poor as rural Philippines or Vietnam. Or urban Philippines/Vietnam for that matter.
In those countries, the literacy rate is around 95%. Imagine 5% of people around you are illiterate. Even in Brazil, a so-called "emergent" country or "upper-middle income" country, the literacy rate is only 92%. So 8% are illiterate; not "functionally illiterate" as in unable to correctly interpret certain texts, mind you, but actually unable to read. You cannot get a fast-food job or work as a Walmart greeter if you're illiterate! In contrast, in developed countries the literacy rate is >99%.
In the Philippines, 1 in 3 children are malnourished.[0] This isn't some vaguely defined "food insecurity" concept; it's actually malnourishment, kids being severely underweight and stunted.
In the US millions of people can take advantage of welfare benefits. So even the non-working poor in the US have much, much better living standards than the working poor in the developing world. Also, when exactly did the US bulldoze a shantytown? And so on.
[0] http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/hunger/141134-philippi...
Also, shantytowns aren't really allowed to exist in the US. They are becoming more common in progressive cities like San Francisco and Seattle, but even there the cops sweep through and make everyone leave every few months. There is no "bulldozing" because the structures are highly temporary, being made of old tents and tarps. You just don't see the multi-generational shantytowns common in developing nations.
Public benefits aren't very easy to get in the US. There is a lot of beaurocracy to work through and there really isn't any push to help people sign up.
People were talking about the US being "third world", you're clearly moving goalposts.
> Also, shantytowns aren't really allowed to exist in the US.
... so? You're essentially saying that the US government doesn't allow poverty to exist. Virtually all of the US lower class lives in places with a proper roof, proper running water and electricity. Might not sound much but the point is: there's no part of the US that is like a 3rd world country.
> Public benefits aren't very easy to get in the US.
21% of the US participates in governments assistance programs.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-97....
Also, governmental assistance varies wildly in the US. I was part of the reduced price school lunch program, but my family never received raw cash like is often conjured up by the term "governmental assistance."
I wouldn't go as far as to say parts are third world, but in terms of danger, some parts of the US are close to third world (Detroit, Chiraq, etc).
India's literacy rate is 74.04%.
That's high! 95% literacy rate isn't really worth mentioning when many countries are in the 30-40% range
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_...
If these aren't shanty towns, I don't know what is. Other Portlanders beside myself have taken to calling them shantytowns.
Of course the US wont be a "third world country" anytime soon. But it can regress closer to one than it was before.
That said, there are places in Mississippi, South Dakota, Alabama, Colorado, the Appalachia, etc. that are not that better of (if at all) than some developing nations.
Again on a recent trip this year, I met two young children that were selling shells on an island near the food market. They should have been in school, but they were not. There has been an effort by the government to get all children in larger cities to attend school. The rural areas still have plenty of children who never see a classroom.
I think the US is very far from developing countries. Yes I have seen some extreme poverty in the mountains of West Virginia, but nothing like the Philippines.
I think this is a standard trick employed by elites. That to make a very serious claim that paints USA in a bad light and then propose themselves as the "problem solver".
> The antidote, as prescribed by Temin, is likely a tough sell in today’s political climate. Expanding education, updating infrastructure, forgiving mortgage and student loan debt, and overall working to boost social mobility for all Americans are bound to be seen as too liberal by many policy makers.
At the risk of being down-voted I think the MIT economist is playing political games here. In the absence of stronger contrary evidence I would simply call him a shill.
You see a post with a title like, "Study by MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed to a Third-World Nation for Most", and you naively assume that the link will take you to... a study. By an MIT Economist. With actual data, about how the average or mean American has recently crossed some number of economic metric thresholds.
Instead, it's a book review. Really just a collection of mushy factoids (e.g. social mobility is lower today than it was just after WWII)... and political talking points worthy of a Facebook or Reddit comment (e.g. rich people are awful, and putting criminals in jail is racist).
Is the actual book a bit more data-oriented, or is the whole thing just ideological comfort food?
This is very different from third world nations where the middle class wants lower taxes and the poor vote for more spending but don't succeed.
> In the developing countries Lewis studied, people try to move from the low-wage sector to the affluent sector by transplanting from rural areas to the city to get a job. Occasionally it works; often it doesn’t. Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
The article focuses on education is a class divider that is becoming increasingly unobtainable or when obtained, burdened with debt. This is strike against social mobility. Do you buy that?
For what it's worth, I was talking about this following excerpt:
> In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector.
Yet change two words and suddenly things align again. Particularly if you take high-wage sector to be that demographic of the republican party. (Obviously this isn't exclusive to the republican party, but what's present in the party matches the form in developing countries).
Another way to look at the thesis is this: The republican party's politics and functioning/platform execution matches that of a developing country. While they aren't they only party, their views/framework have been taking over American politics since Clinton's triangulation of the 90s (and arguably since Reagan's arrival in the 80s).
The first version of something is rarely the best version, and while the US constitution contained a lot of fantastic elements and freedoms that every educated American knows about, it also contained a democratic system (first past the post/two party system) that is mathematically bound to breed divisiveness. [1] [2]
Since the American system forces people into two camps/parties based on ideology instead of the delivered results, the results suffer while the ideological conflict is enhanced.
Disagreement is a human condition, not a democratic one. Democracy is just a way to let some ideas win some of the time.
There isn't a system in the world that's freed people from disagreement. Humans like disagreement. We want to be creative, original, and unique at times. That requires setting your own path.
E.g. I disagree with you on that point, but I'm not using my hypothetical army of sock puppets to downvote every single of your comments into oblivion from now to eternity. Sometimes, US politics feels more like the latter.
I have no control over an army. I just have me and my own opinion
It doesn't have anything about parties in it at all, and leaves it up to the states to decide how to choose their electors. If California or any other state wanted a different system, it could decide to use ranked choice voting right now just like Maine chose last election.
For example, the House could decide on the laws, with the Senate only deciding whether this is an issue that belongs on the federal level at all. And maybe double checking whether the law is constitutional and in line with existing treaties.
If they do the same thing, it makes no sense to have them both.
Almost certainly. The US was doing fine for most of the 20th century.
Globalism is what has brought wages down. Globalism combines the economies of the richest countries with the economies of the poorest in an attempt to "help" poor countries. As rich countries and poor countries combine economies, they move toward economic-equilibrium, which means the people from the poor country get brought out of poverty at the expense of the people in the rich countries. This is fine for the "1%" on the coasts of the united states, but if you're part of rural America you're getting hit very hard by globalism.
It's that poor nations are not exploited by global capitalism.
Then you can look up TED talks by Hans Rosling, and the follow-up reports for UN millennium development goals.
Venezuela wasn't a poor nation to start with, but is becoming one in its urge to fight global capitalism.
You could also look at countries in Africa that don't have extensive resource extraction (compared to those that do).
But given that utilising or even tolerating slave labourers on the ground in democratic nations is such a shameful thing, it might be better to actually let DPRK be completely isolated from global economy and not allow any of these arrangements. Even if that results in more misery for the people in DPRK.
If you know of other instances of this that'd be a fascinating topic to read up on.
The pleasant, unintended side effects of globalist capitalism and economic liberalism are in fact not that much a surprise. Just look at the track record. Is it bad if good outcomes follow as unintended consequences?
Arbor ex fructu cognoscitur.
The stereotypical example of a global economic pattern is a t shirt factory providing goods for a western brand that operates in a third world country because the economic equilibrium is such that raw material acquisition, labor and transport to market costs in total are lower than if the factory was situated for example next to the brand owners head office. I don't see where a will to help someone steps in there.
> but if you're part of rural America you're getting hit very hard by globalism.
i.e. if you're part of rural America, you're being out-competed by superior market participants located in poorer countries.
It's not that unfair. It would be much more unfair to apply protectionist policies to subsidise the rural Americans at the expense of the truly-impoverished people in poorer countries.
Same thing Japan did after WWII. Works great if you can pull it off.
For example, the end of Kodak began when Fuji film infringed on their patents and the US government did nothing, still allowing Fuji to sell their film in the US.
You can look at that in two ways. The government broke up a near monopoly on print film that Kodak had, created competition and lowered prices for consumers. But ultimately it started an employer of 200K people on the path toward extinction. Yes it would have been eclipsed by digital anyway, but wouldn't it have been nice if those 200K people had their jobs a little longer?
I am personally torn on issues like this. I see the benefit of competition and globalization, but also the cost to local economies and industries.
What has been devastating for the mid-west is that the exporting of jobs was politically and financially supported. Companies would receive subsidies to "globalise".
Edit: I was a Remain voter - but I can completely why so many people were angry and wanted a protest vote. Just that I don't think the EU really caused many of the problems people were complaining about so that coming out of the EU is unlikely to actually resolve this issues.
Representatives do spend time in their own states. They also need a central place to meet. No country or system does this differently.
> The party system is also destructive - I advocate against any legal recognition of political parties and against campaign ads funded by anyone outside the state a person is running in.
I think rolling back Citizens United, which allowed corporations to donate unlimited amounts to candidates' [unaffiliated] campaigns, would be a big practical step in this direction.
Reason being that previous periods of American legislative politics were characterized by back room deals unknown to the public. This afforded politicans an opportunity to strike bargains with the opposition without having a spotlight trained on them (and being crucified in the next primary for "working with the enemy").
The check was that every 2/4 years voters still had an opportunity to toss out the incumbent based on his or her track record of results. (Admittedly without knowing how the sausage was made)
While I agree that transparency is a good thing, I'm humble enough to admit that the US legislative / election process is complex and has a lot of feedback. So the article's thesis seems plausible.
Which do you want more: non-partisan cooperation or absolute-transparency?
Except you can have both as long as you ensure factual standards for news reporting.
With the American primary election system, legislators are driven to cater to their most extreme constituents. With transparency, they can't work across the aisle AND also win a primary. At least with pork barrel, they get a tangible thing to point to while campaigning to attempt to appease constituents.
Primary elections are by party, so are by definition more extreme than general elections. A candidate must win over an average Democrat OR and average Republican, not an average across all voters.
Further compounding the problem, many states/districts hold closed primaries and/or caucuses, which limits participation to those with a strong interest in elections (either enough interest to join a party and/or enough interest to give up half a day or more of time to join a caucus).
Groups can still endorse candidates in that world, it just doesn't impact the names that show up on the ballot.
Given that I don't think we've ever had those conditions... lesser transparency for more cooperation seems a decent bargain.
Studies have shown that moderate positions need evangelists just as much as extreme positions, as people tend to cluster around the positions with evangelists. Mandating factual standards ensures evangelists at least have justifiable reasons for their positions.
You can't mandate factual reporting and still call it a free press as those enforcing the "fact" standards now control the press. You seem to think that you can't lie with facts, but it's quite easy, watch fox news they do it all day long. Free press and free speech mean just that; free and that includes lying and the supreme court has affirmed this to be true. You're talking about essentially removing the right to a free press.
They're often quite non-factual actually. And you can't call it "press" unless it's factual, free or not. You can't just ignore one factor in favour of the other.
Furthermore, you seem to be assuming quite a bit about what I mean when by factual standards. Anyone can broadcast whatever opinions they like, so free speech remains intact, but to call yourself a news organization requires satisfying stricter criteria on fact checking, data sourcing and biased presentation.
Perhaps one thing that's ignored a lot: equal time/space should be given to retractions due to factual errors. That better aligns the incentives to get things right the first time.
The solution to bad speech isn't to ban it, it's just for others to put out better news. However, people don't seek out real news, they seek out confirmation of their existing beliefs so no amount of fair and accurate fact based reporting is going to change that, they'll still seek out whatever organization offers them confirmation of their biases whether it's called news or not. Fox is popular because it lies. The audience doesn't want real news; they want to believe what they believe and have it confirmed, nothing more.
Solving a problem doesn't always mean requiring something bullet-proof. Good enough can be enough. It won't stop some people from misleading with the truth, but a lot more people will be better informed than they are now, which is an important step.
> However, people don't seek out real news, they seek out confirmation of their existing beliefs so no amount of fair and accurate fact based reporting is going to change that, they'll still seek out whatever organization offers them confirmation of their biases whether it's called news or not.
Exactly, which is why factual standards are important to classify as proper journalism. They can still seek out their confirmation, but it will be more difficult to find it, and more difficult to convince others of their distorted realities.
I don't know how, but lets presume there is some way to fix gerrymandering so that a legislators constituency was a statistically fair representation of their region/state. Then the extreme views would be canceled out and the best way to win a primary would be to win a primary would be to appeal to the moderates.
No amount of fair or unfair reporting will sway the minds of left wing or wing right loyalist entrenched in their view that their team is correct. A mix of opinions is required to get a different result on a given issue in a Democracy.
I don't know of any fair way to do it and I see the potential for abuse, but it makes want a poll test of some kind. No voting without critical thinking and a basic understanding of the issues you are voting on. But that can't work without abuse in anything like our current system. Fixing districts and voting methods is probably the best we can do until we see what problems that raises.
In the previous system, if a legislator worked across the aisle on some big project, he might get a relatively small kick-back. A new bridge, funding for a pet project, whatever. At election time, he could point to that and say "hey, I worked across the aisle, and got this thing for you!"
Now, that pet project doesn't get funded. So, at election time, if the legislator goes across the aisle, he gets crucified by more extreme opponents. There is nothing to point to and say "I got you THIS!" The only incentive is to cater to the most extreme constituents to ensure a primary victory.
Not anymore. I'm sure the last 20 years of technological advancement hasn't escaped your notice. I think eliminating colocation is an idea that deserves serious consideration.
I'm glad that our representatives meet to discuss things. If they didn't, I imagine there would be more miscommunication about what's best for America than there already is.
Having a president having to do PMQ's and maintaining the confidence of the house and senate might be a good thing.
(And this is ignoring the idea of the judiciary reading into the constitution new rights that weren't there to begin with.)
Then I actually researched it a bit, and it turns out that quite a few countries have actually moved away from FPTP. [1] That's interesting, and something to be hopeful about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Lis...
Yeah, to bring alternative ranked voting to the US, it needs to happen at the local level first, as done in Maine.
One can a imagine a situation where Democrats think the change will be safe for them and Republicans will be cast into chaos and in that same situation Republicans think they will be safe and Democrats will be cast into chaos.
Because the beneficiaries of the system get to make the rules, there is also a push to change regulations more and more to favor the two-party system.
There are other parties (e.g. greens) it just doesn't make any practical sense to vote for them.
America has an aristocracy emerging in it's political/business class, but it still attempts to have every voice heard in elections, and as a result you'll always have people who feel hardly done by attempting to rebel against the status quo.
I'm also going go take the opportunity to share CGP Grey's videos on First Past the Post voting[2] and the electoral college[3], and the issues with those. He also has videos directly the electoral college, without his opinions, if you need some background[4].
[1]http://www.bartleby.com/168/305.html
[2]http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-problems-with-first-past-the...
[3]http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-trouble-with-the-electoral-c...
[4]http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/how-the-electoral-college-works....
Are, it's impossible to have that at all points. The point is to strive for it, not achieve perfection.
If we don't strive, then with people like DeVos in charge of federal funding, public schools will be gutted and the problem worsens.
"That means the Federal contribution to elementary and secondary education is about 8 percent" - https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/role.html
It really makes me wonder what we need the Department of Education for...
According to DeVos, we need it to undermine public schooling by directing tax money to private schools.
And what goals and principles would that aristorcracy govern by? Who is deciding about the goals and who makes sure they are actually enacted?
What if said leaders decide that, in order to combat overpopulation, parts of the "surplus class" need to be removed?
The reason many people migrated to the US centuries ago was to get away from aristorcracy. So how do you avoid repeating the problems?
My point was actually this: In a better democracy the people who believed income inequality was a big problem would vote for the "Bernie Sanders Party" instead of being forced to vote for Clinton. Let's say that just 20% voted for the BSP while 31% voted for the Hillary Party.
They would be forced to govern together, and create the best solutions in order to retain or grow their parties. The constantly changing dynamic between all the different parties would in turn lead to better solutions for the voters instead of the current solution in the US - where people on the left are practically forced to vote democratic and the people on the right are forced to vote republican, no matter the job performance.
Since the US forces people into camps based on ideology instead of the delivered results, the results suffer while the ideological conflict is enhanced.
The US is not the first democracy or democracy-style entity. The US constitution was certainly something interesting and with new stuff for its day, but democracies had been around in various forms for a while. But yes, a large part of the problem in US politics is the inevitable two-parties, which engenders a 'with us or against us' mindset. I wouldn't lay the blame for 'most of the problems' on that, but it seems to be significant.
But these things are not realistic with a first-past-the-post system, so there are two large, internally divided, dysfunctional parties that "represent" a lot of people whose voices are ultimately not heard and whose interests are not represented by anyone.
Neoliberal Capitalism.
If you want representation you need to be able to meet and talk to your rep - more importantly they need to be able to acquire your vote without the need for advertising. Remove the need for advertising and you remove the need for money and the corruption that flows.
Other problems are fixable with more attention/funding to law enforcement, and yes using all the AI toys: crime prediction, drones, etc.
More law enforcement is rarely the solution to any long-term problem: that's how you end up with the East German situation where 1/4 of the population was Stasi informers.
I'd say the US is a better example of a police state than the GDR.
Well, unless they went over the wall while trying to leave.
The GDR has been synonymous with "police state" for my entire life, although it's not the place that coined the phrase. The US has colonial policing and people who believe that slavery should not have been abolished.
Apparently there were 139 wall-victims in 29 years, so less than 5 per year, or about 0.03 deaths per 100k people per year. Apparently, twice as many people died of natural causes while crossing the border.
The US seems to have about 1000 shootings by police per year [2], which would be about 0.3 deaths per 100k people per year.
So the US has 10x more police-shootings than the GDR had wall-deaths per person.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesopfer_an_der_Berliner_Mau... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
Wikipedia also seems to provide a good summary of the issue. [2]
[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Two senators per state is pretty kick-ass if you live in North Dakota.
It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.
More seriously, our problem is a metastasised federal government. Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways.
Saying everything is this way is too much. More like, a few issues such as gay rights and abortion pissed off enough church-going folk to the point they began to rally against federal government overreach.
There are plenty of other things that are managed by states. You don't hear about many differences between state and federal because they aren't contentious. States and the fed are happy with plenty of state laws.
And which laws would those be? I'm curious because the fact is a vote in North Dakota is worth several votes in New York so you're already getting far more power than you deserve in any fair system and the only issues that tend to go federal are issues of civil rights which affects the lifestyle of the oppressed, it isn't oppressing you or anyone else in North Dakota.
My experience with most rural towns is that it's like entering a time machine to 1985. When those places set the agenda, we are going to be "behind" when it comes to the metrics economists use (regardless of how relevant or misleading those metrics may be).
When it comes to letting places go their own way (like sanctuary cities, medical marijuana, gay marriage, etc.), I totally agree with you!
Nearly all the problems can be traced back to where politicians are ignoring the constitution in part or in full and thereby eroding the public protections built into the republic.
Although of course the US is also a relatively fractured country by its nature, so perhaps can't rely on a vague, shared sense of what is good and decent, in the same way as a small European country, with more or less a common ethnic and cultural identity.
The other answers remind me of my son as a toddler: FURIOUS as he explained: "It is NOT green. It is ROUND!!"
"It is not a democracy, it is a republic" is every bit as mistaken.
Read the rest at: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-a-dem...
That's like saying it's a dog not an animal; our republic is also a democracy, they are not mutually exclusive terms so please stop saying this nonsense.
In a democracy, the public could vote to do something that would be considered wrong such as stripping voting rights from everyone who likes country music. And with majority rule, that would pass and become law of the land.
In a republic like ours, the constitution governs what can and cannot be enacted by the majority. Since such an act would take away guaranteed minority rights, the constitution prevents the majority from doing something like that.
No it's not, and it's really sad and tiring such a simple concept escapes so many people. Please take a course in government and learn the difference between these things you're conflating. Republics don't have to have constitutions and constitutional governments aren't necessarily republics. Republics can be democracies or not, ours is, not all are.
Our minority rights are protected because we're a constitutional government who has protections for those things; that has nothing to do with our being a republic.
The US has an interesting constitution:
- First past the post. Such systems tend to favour fewer parties. The UK (also FPTP) barely has more than two parties. In most of continental western europe, there's considerably more, due to proportional representation. On the continent you end up having a bunch of different opinions, and you don't have to squish every issue onto a liberal/conservative axis. For instance you get socially conservative big state parties. Or socially liberal big state parties. Or socially liberal small state. And there's other axes too.
- A separate executive. In the UK even though they have FPTP, they have a government formed by the leader of one of the parties, and they "whip" the MPs to vote according to the party line, subject to various forms of sanction depending on how important an issue is. In the US, you choose two legislatures and a separate president. If they're not in agreement, it de facto entrenches the existing status quo by making it hard to change the law.
The other issue is which system to change to. There doesn't seem to be a single ideal system. IMO, in terms of the voting itself, ability to resolve an election in one ballot, limiting the usefulness of strategic voting, and getting at least close to a Condorcet winner would be the most useful properties.
I recently started to try to put together something based on five value range voting but I'm not sure it is even possible to derive a system from that which has the above properties. I haven't found any existing methods that seem to fit the above properties well, although some are much closer than others. Another option, easier in a lot of ways but more expensive, would be two ballot elections.
There is also the structural part. IMO, a parallel system has more appeal than mixed member proprotional, but it has some significant disadvantages as well. Anytime a significant change is proposed there will be strategic maneuvering for a system that benefits particular interests.
As someone else mentioned, states need to change first. The west coast in general would be a great place for that and I think Oregon may be taking the lead in political disfunction at this point (well, on the west coast at least, even though California is very innovative in that area)...
Which rules?
exactly. The most disconcerting part about the state of American politics is the focus on a predecided ideology of the other party being wrong.
proving the other party wrong is apparently worth everyone suffering over.
When each party is increasingly controlled by less people, then we now have a country where 300million people are willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of their party, with the ruling groups of each party having the interests of neither in mind.
Now youve just created an ideology of sacrificial progress in the name of a party.
There is more loyalty in this country to ones party than there is to the country and the progress of the country. The emotions and irrationality of attachment, and continual degredation of the other party just to be in the right, approaches religion.
The only thing more demoralizing than this is the fact that this conversation is continually broadcast on two news stations each owned by billionaires, who curate the "news" themselves. The biggest progress I've seen in news lately is Bill Oreily being fired for 11 pending and accumulating harrassment lawsuits. Must be nice to get paid $75million to be fired. True journalism shines through again.
It's extremely....disconcerting.
Second, actually
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation
As another comment mentioned, it's arguably greater if you include subsequent amendments.
The US Constitution has its share of flaws, but it ignores quite a bit to call it a first version.
But an abnormal period, and we are now returning to the normality of capitalism described by critics like Marx or Dickens over 100 years ago.
The distinction between "developing" and "developed" is a dubious distinction anyways especially now. "Developing" implies that liberal capitalism has a linear narrative towards something (presumably something that looks like "the west"). There's a lot of hubris in that statement, and I don't think it is supported by any evidence.
It's sort of the opposite of a favela, people left housing behind because of the lack of economic opportunity (whereas a favela is people dealing with poor housing in order to seek economic opportunity).
It looks more to me, as I had somewhat theorized a decade ago, as the emergence of a 'new medieval age' politically and economically. The US being one of the most advanced countries on earth, it seems quite logical that they would pave the way forward towards new social orders in this century. Sadly not a desirable change, but history is made of ups and downs in quality of life.
disgusting.
However the top-down approach allows corruption to be managed and ensures that important business isn't derailed because some random bureaucrat has a drug habit or is in a bad mood.
You might be interested in this article http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/08/the_nature_of_the_gri... which tries to explain the difference between corruption in first and third world countries.
I don't know if his thesis is true because I only know the third world kind. If the article is of interest to you, can you tell me what you think of part VI? Does the story with Sally at AT&T sound true? I only have experience with what the author says happens in Hungary, and that part is spot on.
A more serious answer: each country has impoverished neighborhoods. The difference between developed countries and developing ones is the magnitude of the impoverished neighborhoods.
So far I haven't seen any really big slums in Germany, for example.
Could this be a case of "I don't think that word means what you think it means"? :-)
De jure "Third World", would mean that the country is either poor, or developing, possibly industrialized[2], and rightfully such[1].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=de+jure&oq=de+jure
de jure - denoting something or someone that is rightfully such.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
"Because many Third World countries were extremely poor, and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to poor countries as "third world countries", yet the "Third World" term is also often taken to include newly industrialized countries like Brazil, India and China now more commonly referred to as part of BRIC."
"Over the past few decades since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the term Third World has been used interchangeably with the least developed countries, the Global South, and developing countries, but the concept itself has become outdated in recent years as it no longer represents the current political or economic state of the world."
3rd world means non-NATO aligned states (or communist aligned states).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
Unless the US turns communist, it can not be a 3rd world country.
If you import your population from 1800-Ireland and 1800-Germany in the 1800s, in 2017 you end up with a country like 2017-Ireland or 2017-Germany. In other words, pretty nice.
If you demographically replace the existing population (and what, precisely, was wrong with the existing population, such that we have to replace them, other than their race?) then you end up with the immigrant's country, but located here. Surely Somali in 2117 is not going to be a paradise, likewise USA in 2117 will be the same as Somalia, no paradise, thats for sure.
There is no magic dirt. Anglos taking over Hawaii didn't turn anglos into Hawaiians. Anglos taking over the midwest USA didn't turn the anglos into native americans. Likewise the replacement of native cultures with imported cultures means the annihilation of the former cultures and replacement by the invaders. The USA will be a moderately poor Spanish speaking hispanic nation. Europe will be a moderately poor Muslim caliphate.
Everything just goes that way my friend,
Every king knows it to be true,
That every kingdom must one day come to an end,
- Ben Howard, EverythingAre there any countries that are nearly this large that have a consistent quality of infrastructure for everyone? I live in a large city and it seems that even we have trouble maintaining up our roads/bridges/grid/telecom systems and we pay a lot of state taxes comparatively — I can't imagine how a much larger, less dense, less wealthy area filled with people staunchly against taxes could even begin to keep up.
If spending and benefits are primarily local, shouldn't the decisions be as well?
There are only 50 states. The median state is larger than Greece.
The true problem is that the federal government is responsible for spending three times as many tax dollars as all the states put together. The county government knows they need to fix the bridge, but the feds took all the money the local taxpayers could spare and spent it on not-the-bridge.
Federal Defense: ~$0.7T
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/revenue_pie%2C_...
And here's a graph of federal spending --
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/total_spending_...
In theory the payroll taxes from the first picture completely cover the spending on social security/unemployment insurance -- (and this is currently the case) -- so including that category in the total federal outlays is a little disingenuous when making an argument about too much federal spending/taxation if you don't intend to cut that source of federal spending/taxation ...
If what you say is true that the issue with u.s. infrastructure is entirely the result of too much money going to federal tax authority and not enough to local tax authority -- then to make more dollars from the federal budget available for local taxation you are going to need to do one of the following in order of which action affects the largest monetary amounts:
- argue for reducing payroll taxes and cutting social security benefits
- argue for reducing federal healthcare spending
- argue for reducing tax expenditures https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/taxexpenditures...
- argue for reducing the defense budget
- and then way down there at the bottom, the entire rest of the federal budget which is typically vilified as "government waste" and out of control federal spending by people who adamantly refuse to consider any of the above funding priorities when making arguments that try to scapegoat federal spending for regional management failures ...
Tax deductions are not a part of the $3.8T. If you were to "cut" "tax expenditures" with no change to the tax rate it would cause federal receipts to increase. If made revenue neutral by a corresponding reduction in the tax rate, federal spending would remain at $3.8T, all that would change is the distribution of the same total federal tax burden.
> In theory the payroll taxes from the first picture completely cover the spending on social security/unemployment insurance
They in fact more than cover social security, which is part of the problem. We have a highly regressive payroll tax -- janitors pay >15% while Warren Buffet pays <1% -- which is then used to collect more revenue than the program it ostensibly supports actually spends. The rest of the money is immediately spent by the rest of the federal government through an accounting fiction in which the government issues bonds to itself, as if the debt and the bond together could sum to anything other than zero.
> including that category in the total federal outlays is a little disingenuous when making an argument about too much federal spending/taxation if you don't intend to cut that source of federal spending/taxation ...
Eliminating payroll taxes is what we should do. Pay for social security from the general fund and let rich people and corporations pay their share.
And there is no inherent reason benefits would have to be cut to remove them from federal jurisdiction. Hand the entire program over to the states. It changes who is responsible for the problem, which allows it to be solved, because each state can make a rational local choice between different local needs.
Then you don't have inefficient decisions as a result of federal politics. Right now states like California are falling apart because they have a high cost of living, even though federal tax rates take no mind of that. Making $70,000 in California produces the same standard of living as making $35,000 in many other states, but causes the person in California to pay a higher federal tax rate and receive fewer federal benefits. The state then has to suffer or cover the benefits deficit while its people have less discretionary income for the state to tax, because a higher percentage of it goes to the feds which is then spent on other states.
That sort of interstate theft is inherent in large central governments. The people of California pay the brunt of the burden, but they aren't a majority of the federal legislature, so they can't stop it. The money goes primarily to cronies and large corporations (especially with federal healthcare spending), but there is a secondary benefit for people in low cost of living states who get subsidized by people in higher cost of living states, which gives it the votes to pass at the federal level and creates all of this waste. Wasteful and expensive programs are easy to pass because losing half the money to corruption is no impediment to passage when it was some other state's money to begin with.
> and then way down there at the bottom, the entire rest of the federal budget which is typically vilified as "government waste"
The waste isn't the NIH budget or NASA, it's in the structure of all federal spending. Social programs belong at the state and local level. Even the defense budget should be more local -- let the state-level national guard be a larger percentage of the military.
People malign the US healthcare system, but the root of the problem is that we have federal heathcare policy. It would be like trying to have a unified healthcare system for the whole EU, regardless of the different cost of procedures, income levels, cost of living or anything else between countries. It's not that Italy can't have a functioning healthcare system, it just needs different rules from the German one. California needs different rules from Alabama.
If you try to build one system that works for everybody, you end up with an inefficient bureaucratic mess that doesn't work for anybody.
Spain decentralized the healthcare system even within their state with positive results, indicating that the optimal scale for healthcare may even be at the county level.
I regularly visit CA/SF as I have clients there. It's a beautiful place, but many things about living in ND are much more attractive.
Many of the prominent examples of a successful rural area are either very self reliant (parts of NH serve as good examples, but the opioid epidemic is taking a toll) or reliant on a single industry that might just up and leave (airline manufacturing or fracking come to mind).
Or more accurately compare any of the non-oil related rural areas in the country. Or any of the particularly poor rural areas of the black or white southern US.
The Republican philosophy means rapidly shrinking public services. These area already have super low taxes and the conservatives who moved there don't want to pay anything that might benefit someone who isn't them. Such is the price to pay when selfishness is the primary political philosophy.
But based on original meaning Switzerland is third world country which also does not sound right.
If one were to hold to the original meaning of "third-world", then one would have to class Namibia and Angola as "first-world" countries while classing Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, and Finland as "third world". Something that clearly goes against the current general usage of the term.