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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

> US public education is ... not exactly what one can expect from a first world country.

As a European, I slowly wonder if there's any public service in the US that meets the "first-world country" standard. Not education. Certainly not healthcare. Infrastructure is also crumbling from what I hear.

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Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. It leads to generic and therefore lower-quality discussion.

(Especially please avoid generic tangents on flamewar topics like the superiority or inferiority of nations.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you just read people complaining on HN, then yeah, I’m sure you’d get that impression.

The only OECD country to spend more per student than the US is Norway.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

San Francisco is not on the high end in the US, but it is suffering largely because of increasing pension and salary requirements. I assume the latter (and likely both) is itself caused by the extreme cost of living in the area.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sfusd-expects-budget-cuts-de...

You're somewhat arguing his point for him. We spend significantly more per student than almost anywhere, and our education is comparatively poor. We spend significantly more per patient, and our healthcare is comparatively poor.

How much we spend isn't a metric of it being good. It's demonstration of failure.

Yeah, but the parent comment attributes the problem to “massive underfunding,” and that claim was not questioned, but seemed to be accepted.

My point was simply to say that throwing more money at the problem is a poor solution. Pardon the pun.

Unfortunately, just because you spend more doesn’t mean you get what you pay for.

I spent 3 years in an education startup and I never saw such a correlation.

As another European, I wouldn't throw too many stones. It's not like every part of Europe has first rate schools and healthcare, or flawless infrastructure.

I do not see this comment as an attack- just as an impression needing discussion...

I'm not sure there is, really. Having moved to Europe I do miss the libraries in the US, but that was in pretty wealthy areas (Santa Monica, San Diego, etc.)

But the private services can be top notch if you've got the cash.

That's true in third-world countries too though. Service is good about anywhere if you've got the cash.

But is it true at the highest end? If I'm in Russia I can't get a Harvard level education at a private university or in a small nation in Africa I'm unlikely to receive incredible plastic surgery that I could in the U.S. or S. Korea

Try the library in Downtown LA, you may change your opinion :)

Sorry, don't mean to be snarky, I also now live in Europe and miss my hometown library but many of the public ones in cities are glorified homeless shelters now

Well, there were plenty of homeless by the library in downtown San Diego, but it was a really nice library all the same. I went to a wedding there (it's an awesome venue too). And hey, homeless people can enjoy the library too.

Re: LA - I experienced that with the buses. I got a bus from Vegas to LA after Defcon, and then bus 20 (local version of the 720) from DTLA to Santa Monica about 1 AM, and it was mostly full of people sleeping rough. Kind of ridiculous, really - the city pays for a bus, fuel, maintenance, insurance, a driver, etc. and gets a pisspoor homeless shelter, when they could just pay for housing.

Though yet again that's a failure of housing policy... which is exactly what this article is getting at.

I think there's a fundamental distrust of government here in the U.S. that I chalked up to greed until I bothered to glance at the beginning of Tom Paine's "Common Sense" which basically states that government is a necessary evil.

US is the best if you are rich, you can get almost everything here not same in Europe.

According to the article, even the rich are complaining.

Then they're obviously not rich enough /s

This is also true for many third-world countries, and for that matter most of Europe. It isn't evidence of much, really.

But you are slapped with more taxes and duties there then suddenly your money can't buy enough.

Also, to have much power with money you need desperate people who will do anything for money.

You can get guns and you aren't charge 40% tax on your income even tax on capital is quite cheap in states.

Having money in Europe doesn't mean difference between life and death as it does in US as they've state funded healthcare.

Here you can go down the road and ask them to act in a porn and in return you pay them enough money to fix their whatever health issue they've for which they've no money.

I am not advocating that this is better, I am just pointing it out why some people might like US.

Plenty of places in the US have excellent public schools. This is unique to SF.

Plenty of places in the U.S. have terrible public schools by developed-country standards. To the point where U.S. tertiary-education institutions are essentially required to compensate for the terribleness with ubiquitous remedial and GED-like courses that are essentially unknown elsewhere, where secondary education does the job properly.

it’s a big country, i don’t know how it compares with all of Europe as far as schools. Schools in Chicago area, for example, are great and there is a big choice of public and private.

Military. Fire service. Police (in specific ways). Government research. University education. Parks. Interstate highways.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-...

> The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service (...)

Fire service: Not first world standard.

We can argue that the rest are acceptable examples.

> Infrastructure is also crumbling from what I hear.

To be honest this also plagues Europe - all the way from Romania (https://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-entrepreneur-one-me...) over Italy (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/17/italys-crumbli...) to Germany (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tries-to-close-infrastructure-...).

The root cause here is that "thanks" to decades of neoliberalism and privatizations tax revenue and thus the financial base for investments has eroded.

Afaik the best health care in the world is only available in the US? Meaning the type of treatments you can get. Whether you can afford them is another question.

Great if you are in the 0.001%.

It's great if some treatments are available at all, that you can get nowhere else in the world.

At that level of money state borders mean nothing since the additional cost for travel is not significant.

The situation would not change a lot for people if the only place the treatment was available was eg India.

Yeah but it isn't, it is available in the US. The claim was that health care in the US sucks. It presumably doesn't. Only the insurance situation sucks (I guess - I am not in the US). The service itself is good.

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