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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

The US is behind Western and Northern Europe in almost every facet of development that I can think of, except for GDP per capita. Education, healthcare, social mobility, political culture, news media seriousness, public infrastructure, etc.

The US is also shockingly institutionally paralyzed and unable to make meaningful reforms in any area, even if they are very popular with the majority of voters. The last one I can think of was ObamaCare, which was not a particularly radical change, but felt like it because of how difficult it was to pass.

It's not particularly interesting to ask "why can't we reform digital privacy laws" -- the more interesting general question is "why can't we reform anything".

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I just listened to a Freakonomics episode about the business of the political party duopoly the other day. How federal politicians operate to preserve their institution first and foremost, and that the continued growth of the political industrial complex only serves to profit the parties at the expense of the democracy.

Fundamentally the US needs constitutional amendments to break the duopoly and return elections to being about people instead of parties, but for that to happen you would need a super majority of state legislatures to force an amendment and that is nigh impossible as well given how state governments are modeled off the federal but don't have the safety valve to try to repair the democracy with competitive and diverse elections - a vast majority of states are functionally ruled by one party with supermajority and in perpetuity and would never propose changes that would harm them federally.

The sea between getting a few members of congress or states to support restoring democracy and having the super-majorities required to actually see it done are so vast and the opposition so wealthy, connected, and influential I've never heard anyone propose a legitimate strategy to see it done, because the damage has already in large part been done - even if a super-majority of citizens agree with reform, that has no influence on the behavior of any legislature they elect. You would need to co-opt one of the major parties in ways their charters expressly prohibit and their incumbents will block.

Pretty much. I am rather dumbfounded by some of the political debates I read in social media by Americans when many of these have been pretty much solved here in Europe, with respect to healthcare, education, abortion rights, gun control, etc. E.g. there is living proof that you can keep a country going with free/subsidized healthcare or education for almost all of its population, as evidenced by literally every Western country that is not the US, yet this empirical evidence is brushed away by American detractors with utterly bizarre arguments about economic freedom that don't have a foothold anywhere else in the world. I don't know if detractors are being 1) ignorant of living conditions abroad, 2) not willing to change a system that benefits them personally, 3) fully aware of how things are elsewhere but reject it for ideological reasons.

This is amusing because politicians still try to emulate the US in many respects as do a lot of companies.

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