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Comment by bepotts | Hacker News Reader

Americans don't believe the onus is on the whole to make sure the individual lives a happy life. We just don't have the collectivist culture the Europeans have. I think this is a great thing, and is why America is where most of the innovation, cultural, and political power is.

I personally have lower taxes, high quality healthcare, and live in an awesome location, and I got all of that through an education and training. That is available to almost every American if they just put in the work.

That, to me, is not just a great thing but the morally right thing. Apply yourself and make a better future for you and your family.

To the people responding to me with the most predictable lines: poverty exists in Europe; so does homelessness; as does food insecurity. Please don't tell me that Europe is some great place where poverty doesn't exist and everyone is living great lives.

It is also possible to be sympathetic toward the most needy while not supporting collectivism. You know what the poor need most? A marketable skill. A good job. Support programs that give people the skills they need in order to compete in a globalized market. It's funny how collectivists never push that though, and instead push for more collectivism.

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"I personally have lower taxes, high quality healthcare, and live in an awesome location, and I got all of that through an education and training. That is available to almost every American if they just put in the work."

I don't know if that's true. If I'm a child with food insecurity, my lack of nourishment, poor home life, overtaxed regional social programs, and government disincentives will cause me to be unable to focus on my education at my overtaxed school program, thereby setting me back for the rest of my life through no fault of my own.

If I'm one of many children born in a county or state with no access to clean water, I am more likely to develop a chronic illness that will prevent me from putting in the work necessary to achieve your lifestyle through no fault of my own.

If I'm one of many blue collar workers who destroyed my body in my 40s putting in work, I no longer have access to my way of work and the industries I can go into are plagued with known ageism. I am now stuck through no fault of my own save for a lack of future-sight that technology will be the thing to get into 40 years ago.

Moral correctness is all well and good, but if we are gleaning over those less fortunate with our morals, we're not being moral at all- we're just providing justifications for why we deserve what we have and more importantly why people who do not have what we have deserve their poverty.

The message of American conservatism is, "I've got mine, go get yours". Meanwhile the gots are pulling up the ladder behind them wherever they can.

This message tends to resonate with people with little empathy and imagination. They can only see their own experience and find it impossible to imagine another's could be different. Basically, these people are kind of dumb. They don't notice the ladder being pulled away and can't imagine a better way.

Unfortunately, these amount to a good 30% of Americans. Maybe those people were winnowed away during WW1/WW2 in europe, or maybe the way America was settled self selected for optimistic, unimaginative people with narrow vision.

For those more economically minded: We know that 1$ given to poverty will return the economy somewhere along $1.12, while $1 given to wealth will return the economy somewhere along $0.7. There requires no empathy to conclude that providing for our neediest appears to be economically beneficial for everyone, assuming economic growth is a good thing.

I understand and accept that certain poeple do not give a damn about the poor. But in this case the poster claimed something about those less fortunate that may be untrue, which is a distortion of reality I hoped to point out. If the poster simply didn't care about the poor, I could adjust my rhetoric appropriately.

How can a dollar taken from me by the government and given to a poor person generate a positive cash flow overall? Has no one taken economics 101 when they get to government that they cannot understand the broken windows policy that Baathist put forward?

Step 1. I earn money.

Step 2. The government makes fallacious claim using whatever economist dujour is will to prostate themselves to the political party in need of economic justification (no worries both parties here in America have them).

Step 3. The government taxes me based on this reason a dollar. I am negative a dollar that I may have spent on something.

Step 4. My dollar is used to pay the administrative and bureaucratic needs of the system, god bless them if they can do it for less than thirty cents (after healthcare, salaries, fringe benefits, building costs, etc.) my dollar is down to $0.70.

Step 4. The money is given to a person in the lower quartile who then spends the $0.70.

After this process, anyone is going to say with a straight face that there is an overall increase of 12% to my dollar that was taken from me?

What if I was going to save my dollars up to start a business, which could really create wealth, instead I have to save up longer to start it.

If the economists were honest with that statistic, they would admit it is not the percent increase but the turn around time to spend the money, or a pull forward to quickly juice the economy.

Examples of the government being spectacularly wrong about telling me why they need to listen to economists:

1. Cash for Clunkers, hurt the poor with a destruction of used cars, pulled forward purchases.

2. Stimulus 2, is shown to have no impact on the economy.

3. Trade Tariffs, supposedly to help protect industries, they just happen to be the industries that are rent seeking. Hurts the poor by increasing prices.

4. Minimum wage: started for racist reasons, still has a disparate racial impact.

You're not going to save it to start a business. You're just going to spend it on rent, products from China and a car loan. Don't pretend your socioeconomic class is better than that.

Or that person might just "save" it for generations, keeping the money from circulating in the local economy.

> How can a dollar taken from me by the government and given to a poor person generate a positive cash flow overall?

Changes to th velocity of money in different uses. Dollars aren't consumed when spent, they keep circulating.

> Step 4. My dollar is used to pay the administrative and bureaucratic needs of the system, god bless them if they can do it for less than thirty cents (after healthcare, salaries, fringe benefits, building costs, etc.) my dollar is down to $0.70.

No, it's still a dollar, because spending it transfers it to other people, rather than destroying it. And, with government spending, at the first hop essentially all of that $0.30 is still in the domestic economy.

> Step 4. The money is given to a person in the lower quartile who then spends the $0.70.

Also, again, largely in the domestic economy, and in places where it has a higher velocity in the domestic economy than it would if a richer person spent it.

And that's where the gain in total economic activity comes from.

> If the economists were honest with that statistic, they would admit it is not the percent increase but the turn around time to spend the money

That's exactly what economists say produces the return to the economy / increase in economy activity that GP discusses.

This is Econ 101 stuff.

> or a pull forward to quickly juice the economy.

It's not a pull forward. (There are ways you can do that, too, but downward redistribution isn't really one of them.)

Do you have references for those figures? I'm quite interested.

I'm especially interested in how those figures account for the feedback loop as the poor typically work for the wealthy, so I expect the gap in those figures is potentially larger.

Here is your citation. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-econo...

Spending from a finite pot will grow the economy more if it goes to poorer Americans. That should be obvious to anyone. The wealthy will save it, the poor will spend it and it will often pass through multiple hands.

> There requires no empathy to conclude that providing for our neediest appears to be economically beneficial for everyone

Unless you have information on the distribution of returns, they conclusion is unwarranted. At best, you can say that if you find a friction-free way of taxing and equally redistributing the gains (including most of the redistribution to the poor), and paying it back (starting by paying back 100% to the people you took it from in the first place) you would improve things for everyone.

But of course, you can't: reversing the redistribution would reverse the gains from the redistribution.

So what it does is improve the mean. It maybe improves the median. But for everyone? No, it doesn't. At least, not in the narrow financial terms those figures address.

>I think this is a great thing, and is why America is where most of the innovation, cultural, and political power is.

No, that's just a byproduct of being wealthy -- which is a byproduct of starting with looting a huge plot of land, not being left devastated by 2 world wars (420K Americans died in WWII, for contrast millions of people died in European countries each with 1/5 to 1/20th the population of the US), not having any serious enemies within near borders, succeeding a couple of declining (due to national uprisings) colonial powers and so on.

When the US was not as wealthy, but still as much if not more individualistic, most innovations were coming from Europe (Watt, Volta, Faraday, Maxwell, Bell, Marconi, Siemens, Lumiere, Kelvin, and so on).

And a heck of a lot of innovations today (and increasingly more in the future) come from the hardly individualistic China, which, -like the hardly individualistic- Japan in the 70s and US in the 20th century, has gone over it's "copy cat" stage -- take DJI leading in drones, to Huawei P30 Pro leading in low light mobile photography as examples).

Much of the modern business models I've seen basically try to minimize research and innovative work because it's costly and risky. It's far easier to wait for other venture to succeed and either buy the strategies early while they're cheap (even though they may not be well marketsble) or simply copy the successful models to become competitors, trying best to avoid infringement lawsuits but writing them off as a cost of business. These approaches are more cost effective and help maximize ROI then the innovation process.

US business is becoming increasingly efficient at accumulating and concentrating capital while producing less innovation for society at large by utilizing a variety of tactics that break much of the picturesque model of capitalism.

...most innovations were coming from Europe...

Not too many people know about Operation Paperclip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip) and what it meant for NASA and space race (Wernher von Braun was chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the key instrument in getting man to the moon)

>You know what the poor need most? A marketable skill. A good job

I thought freedom to play and study as kids. A full belly. A supporting family. Family connections. Not fearing for tomorrow (eviction, money trouble, muggings, etc). Money for college. Not having to work to support anybody but themselves.

You know, the kinds of things it would be statistically (if not entirely) safe to presume you had as a child, or that most successful (e.g. college wise) kids have, and most unsuccessful kids lacked.

https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-penci...

But yeah, lacking all that, a marketable skill and a support program will do.

And they might even be able to make it, if they work doubly as hard, and manage twice as many hardships as those who had all of above provided for them from birth.

> I personally have lower taxes, high quality healthcare, and live in an awesome location, and I got all of that through an education and training. That is available to almost every American if they just put in the work.

I'm sure that's nice for you personally. From what I've observed, this simply isn't true for many in America, who face desperate struggles despite hard work.

Yeah. The healthcare part made me lol.

I put in the "work," live in an awesome location, and I have to fight insurance damn near every time the Dr puts me through any procedures. That's not counting the awful healthcare I actually get. I guess I just need to drive 3-4 hours to get it instead of 1? Then I can't put in the "work" because I'm spending days traveling to get all this stuff done.

I guess the answer is to move. Well then that means i get to start over fighting insurance to get them to cover everything, again. I'm not doing that a third time.

It simply isn't true for many anywhere; there are desperate, unhappy people everywhere.

Trying to argue whose is better (or worse) isn't helpful.

"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire." - George Monbiot

If you believe in the gospel of meritocracy, "hard work = success", then you'd have to believe the reverse ("poor people are poor because they're lazy."). But this ignores the luck factor (that a lot of people are poor because of bad luck, and that a lot of people are so god damn rich because of good luck). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTDGdKaMDhQ

It's sure nice to think so, and I thank you for stating this viewpoint so clearly. I think a lot about the line between rich and poor, launch and crash. I've come to think that line is largely in our own heads but also entirely out of our control.

Someone born poor will be born into an other reality of poverty. Every person they love will have no money, education or resume and will have crashed against unmoving walls while trying. Every mentor will teach them that the world takes and never gives. Every day will be tinged with hopelessness. Everyone will tell them they don't have what they ought to have and that there's no way someone like them can get it. This person could be as smart and filled with potential as the best of us and they will never escape this invisible cage of other people expectations.

Someone born rich with be born into an other reality of abundance. Every person they love will have a comfortable amount of money, educational achievement, and professional accomplishment and will have leapt over the obstacles in their life. Every mentor will teach them that if they ask, the world will give. Every day will glow with possibilities. Everyone will tell them about their success and make plans together for how to get even more. This person could be dumb as rocks and lazy but they too live in an invisible bubble of other people's expectations. The wisest of the people in this bubble of prosperity know exactly how fragile it is and work tirelessly to shape their families and communities so that their bubble never pops.

I agree to the advantages / disadvantages in general, but I think a lot of people push back because it does not jive with personal experience. In my case, my parents grew up poor with blue collar immigrant parents, but became successful and (in my fathers case) eventually wealthy. Conversely, growing up I knew _many_ people who grew up with much more financial and family stability than I had, who just threw it all away. Not a few -- a lot. In college, I became friends and acquaintances with a lot of dirt poor people from Mexican immigrant family's, and I saw a great number of them succeed (from e.g. migrant working parents to law or medical degrees, PhD's, etc). I'd never argue that being rich does not come with substantial advantages that hold in general, but I've just met too many people who threw them away or succeeded despite poverty to buy into an argument that generalizes into absolutes.

That's fair, and I don't mean to sound absolute because most things in life are not.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

"U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies."

So in other words, birth privilege is strongly correlated with future earnings in the USA, but less so in other industrialized countries. We still have more economic mobility than many countries, but we should say the "Nordic Dream" instead of "American Dream."

The scale of mobility is different, in the USA you can be much more wealthy. That's thrkwd direct comparisons like this off. If every is relatively poor then mobility is really high and uncorrelated with parent wealth.

Or those are considered outliers.

While those rags-to-riches cases are true data points, they are not representative of the population sample. They are the exception despite the strong correlation, likely due to another contributing factor (sheer random luck, great financial earning abilities, etc.).

So, not trying to be antagonistic but this is pretty much a perfect example of survivorship bias: "this worked for me/X so it could work for everyone."

It's also part of what the author is referencing: this idea that you can always point, post hoc, to ways in which someone could have worked harder.

It also ignores rampant structural problems. There are plenty of people with marketable skills, or who are capable of doing such work, but who are walled out of opportunities because of implicit or explicit rules that actually have nothing to do with ability to do the work at hand. So we, for example, assume that task X can only be done by someone with a score on some proxy standardized test A, or with specific degree B, or who come from a certain type of school C; or who have experience working with specific platform D.

These types of arguments always seem to devolve into extremes, which is frustrating to me. It's possible to say "the US can be a better place to be for more people by changing X, Y, or Z."

The irony is that if I could change things the way I'd like a lot of the changes would involve pretty extreme deregulation in some areas mixed with certain select areas where I would increase taxes and provide more things publicly through the government. But these kind of mixed solutions tend not to get anywhere in today's political climate.

That's called luck and it's one of the reasons we have shared healthcare in (most of?) the EU.

There's many things that can happen in one's life (and where one doesn't necessarily have control over) which would swing the pendulum from "a better future for you and your family" to "fucked for life". In the US if bad luck hits you there's less chance of getting back on track.

And people are getting back at you with "predictable lines" because apparently you've been in your stubborn perspective for a looong time.

> That is available to almost every American if they just put in the work.

Some people "just" never had the opportunity of an education like yours. And through no fault of their own. It's easy to think they should have "just" put in some more work from where you are standing. But the deck was already stacked against them when they were born. It's very arrogant to think that you would have prevailed if you'd started out in their spot. It's incredibly unfair to justify your position on your hard work when this same path was just not available to other people. When it would have been much harder for them.

I'm using the statistical "you" for the person that lives a privileged life. That person comes from a privileged position to start with, statistically speaking. Maybe you the individual poster are an outlier, but that doesn't change the picture.

I have a hard time seeing your point. The things you say are good are all far more available to Europeans. If your claim is that Americans apply themselves more, then that means they get less for their effort. It seems like you have fallen into the trap of thinking exceptions are an indication of success, when it is really the opposite. In successful environments success is normal.

When on my death bed, I’m personally not going to be thinking: “Man, I sure did apply a marketable skill to generate shareholder value and grow the GDP in a globalized market!”

This has some points of merit. The issue with the American system is what happens when you get rocked by no fault of your own despite hard work and initiative. This becomes somewhat more apparent when you are older. Did you randomly pick a career path out of the hat in your 20s which dead ends in a dying sector twenty years later due to shifts unforeseeable two decades earlier? I'm not sure how old you are but there is a path dependency in life and particularly when you have family obligations in both generational directions (caring for children and aging parents) it isn't so easy to just totally change career course halfway through your life. Not impossible - but pretty darn difficult.

Then you need to fear for feeding your family and providing them with medicine. Did you or a loved one get really sick along the way? Tough for you.

"Morally right thing"... So you think it'd be immoral for you to pay a tiny bit more taxes to contribute to someone besides "you and your family" having a (better) life or simply not dying of a horrible disease? And what about "you and your family" get into a lot of health troubles at the same time (which I wish will never happen)...would it be immoral to have people from your country help you recover? I think the collectivist culture of Europe is what makes us better societies than the US. Because while you might say it every Sunday morning but do nothing about it, we actually help and protect the weaks and less fortunates and contribute to improve society in general and not just "you and your family".

"...and I got all of that through an education and training."

Who are you? Where are you from? What color is your skin? Are you male? Etcetera

Many points to dispute here.

> America is where most of the innovation, cultural, and political power is.

American innovation has largely been a byproduct (European refugees, cold war spending, deregulation) and not a deliberate result of the rational egoism which you venerate. Where America has been successful is in the marketing of innovations, which has created a perception of America as being particularly innovative when in fact global innovation rankings consistently place countries like Norway, the UK and others ahead of America.

The claim that America is where most of the cultural power lies is even less substantiated by facts. Taking in to account population sizes and language barriers you will find that the relative cultural influence of many European nations exceeds that of America despite their 'collectivism'. That is unless you consider culture to be the commoditisation of everything and anything.

You are correct when it comes to political power - American political hegemony has been a great tool for enforcing a liberal world order. This however goes against your overarching point - the opposite of a collectivist mindset would be something along the lines of the John Quincy Adams maxim “we do not go in search of monsters to slay”. America simply could not 'justify' its military presence in far flung regions of the world without appealing to collectivist moral principles.

You must live in a bubble (physical and delusional) if you fail to see the trade-off involved with having government spending/GDP on par with many European countries yet operating a low tax regime with little social safety nets.

Yours is the only developed nation which regularly shuts down it's government and doesn't pay its workers. Unlike in most other western democracies, your veterans face disproportionately high suicide rates due to the comparatively poor levels of social assistance. Your homicide rates and levels of incarceration are among the highest in the developed world. You are guaranteed almost no holiday entitlement and are are one of few countries in the world that does not require employers to offer paid parental leave to new parents. Your vast levels of inequality (individual, regional, etc.) are contributing factors to phenomena like the opioid crisis, leading to whole generations of individuals whose opportunity is never realised simply due to the accident of their birth.

You have every right to support this system of governance and I don't dispute that it has benefited you and your family. Choosing to extol its virtues and claim that it is the 'morally right thing' without even an attempt to recognise the trade-offs involved is disingenuous to yourself and everyone else however.

These "pull yourself up by your bootstraps” comments, always seem to reek of the Munchhausen Trilemma[0]. Take that to mean whatever you will, however I'd say from my own personal experience most of the bootstrap pulling seems only to further selfish means, or worse is just some sort of wheel spinning that no one sees gains from.

Due to the overwhelming amount of memoirs and op-ed's and other things of the like that exist in abundance, I will refrain from giving example circumstances that prevent people from taking such “obvious” poverty relinquishing actions, such as education, and “workharder-ness.”

Not trying to be rude here but "the morally right thing...(is to) make a better future for YOU" is really laughable honestly. I am not broadly traveled but this sort of sentiment seems uniquely American. A land where even the idea of community is a bad word that stings with thoughts of dependence. Where self-sufficiency and lack of illness are the greatest things to behold, in much the same way that we measure the quality of chattel (be that farm animal, slave, or inanimate property).

I have had more than one conversation with some supposed Ayn Rand [1] touting "ideologist", that seemed to have no inkling of anything that was per-provided for their meager successes. Such as, an entrepreneur who started with no small sum of money provided by a parent, that did not believe an any sort of government regulation, other than ones that hold his employees to mythical slavery contracts he dreamed up in his spare time. Not willing to even except that food practices were made safer but some regulatory concerns, because of course there is no such thing as germs anyway(including all sickness which was simply a lie to get out of working hard). A friend of mine installs captioned phones for people who have lost their hearing, and even though he is required to explain as well as have them accept a contract that specifically states it is a government program at no cost to them, they still confide in him with their fears of socialist uprisings. In fact, I hardly meet a person with even an appreciation for the roads they rode in on. Much less the horse, that seems to brandish itself at the mere existence of their will to travel and an ability to procure a loan.

I’m not only suggesting that we should be a little more aware of the benefits that so many of us have been given from the past, but also that we not cheapen ourselves by only valuing self-reliance. We may have a system in which individuals can live in an imagined state of “I’ve done all of this by the sweat of my own brow,” but this is only imagined, and our souls are weaker for it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

[1] Not intended to denounce Rand, only pointing out a trend.

> Not trying to be rude here but "the morally right thing...(is to) make a better future for YOU" is really laughable honestly. I am not broadly traveled but this sort of sentiment seems uniquely American.

I think it has something to do with Calvinism and how it basically provides moral coverage for the status-quo: your wealth is a reflection of your morality so that have whatever you have, you deserved it.

Creeping Calvinism is indeed a thing that exists in America, hence the existence of things like the prosperity gospel.

I'm European and I'd love to live in the USA; if I put the same effort in there as I have done here my quality of life would be so much better.

I've worked incredibly hard all my life in the UK (and I've been successful at work -- something I have to remind myself of regularly) and it's got me practically nowhere. I'm taxed to the eyeballs (this year I'll pay approx 70% of my turnover in taxes of one sort or another) and the cost of living is insane (the average house price in London is currently about £530,000). Unless you have wealthy parents and bought 10 years ago you can forget about ever escaping the rent trap.

Great public transport though eh! Er no actually. Rail services carry people crammed in like sardines in conditions that it would be illegal to carry livestock in, and reliability stats are terrible; I am regularly delayed by an hour or more. And I am forced to use the trains, because I don't own a car, as I don't have a parking space attached to my tiny rented 1-bedroom flat.

Free healthcare is great though right? Well, when a total of 500 million EU citizens are all entitled to rock up demanding 'free' healthcare whenever they like despite having never paid a penny into the system all their lives, and I have to wait 3-4 weeks to see a doctor, then no, it's not great actually.

Please, my US friends, do not believe the Julia Roberts films, or your friend's holiday snaps of Rome. We, the poor European people who do all the work, do not spend our days writing poetry and blissfully sipping premium coffee, we have it pretty sh!tty actually, and be grateful for your amazing country and the opportunities it offers you.

I'm so sad for you and the company you own.

As another UK citizen, the problems are our government, and a bit of a european oddity tbh.

E.g. just to take one of your points, I've found trains in germany and france far better than ours.

Well to be honest you're complaining of the UK system which in 30 years has seen Thatcherism and then Blairism bend the country's social contract into some half-baked neoliberal inferno.

Is that why people cannot afford insulin in America. This is something to be celebrated?

Even when health care is free (but rationed), there's a ton of people who are killed by delays to receiving a needed medical procedure. Every approach to health care has its down sides.

"Every approach has downsides" does not mean one approach isnt objectively worse than others...

Which approach is better is very difficult to objectively evaluate. There are a vast number of yardsticks you could use, and I can't see two people ever agreeing on which yardstick is the right one to judge a health care system. Since cancer is one of the top quickly fatal medical conditions, I consider the wait to get treated for cancer to be an excellent yardstick for evaluating any health care system. In this regard, the USA is way better than many countries that have government run free (but rationed) health care systems.

Cancer is the second biggest killer in the US. There is no cure for cancer, any cancer. We can treat it if caught early enough by cutting it out. That requires having health insurance in the first place. Almost half the people who get cancer die from it within 5 years and that number is only that good because we're really good at breast cancer. Not sure cancer is the yardstick you want to use as how "great" the US health system is. Even among cancer patients you see disparities in how the wealth survive versus the poor, basically wealthy people do better. We're rationed the same as Europe, we just ration differently and claim it's because of social darwinism.

Note I didn't say "better" - I said "worse". For example, there are different voting systems, each that optimize different outcomes. Impossible to agree on the best system because we all think different goals are important. Yet despite this inability to determine the best, First Past the Post is across the board worse than the alternatives. PIck a feature people really want in their voting results, and FPTP is worse at it than any other.

My point being, though, that "every system has its flaws" is a terrible excuse for accepting problems.

It's has many parallels to the fallacy of Loki's Wager: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager

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