We Are Living in a Failing State | Hacker News Reader

We Are Living in a Failing State

theatlantic.com

67 pointsheadalgorithm32 comments

rolls eyes. No you aren't. You're living in a state with systemic issues that perpetuate a growing inequality.

My family left Germany in the 20s. My grandma told me stories of people going to the bakery with wheelbarrows of cash because the inflation was so dramatic.

Stop it.

A very good write up. The initial premise is something I agree with: that the virus has shown up existing weaknesses in the US political, economic (income inequality, taken to extremes), and cultural matters. The pandemic has been a magnifying glass.

The more I read the Atlantic, the more I realize it's a nihilistic rag. Ok, there are shortcomings, but it seems they only like to trumpet inflammatory remarks-perhaps they think they are counterbalancing our govt.

This is “narrative reporting” where you start with a premise (US is a “failed state”) and then cherry-pick events to fit the narrative. It can be entertaining, but it’s so full of holes it’s Swiss cheese.

From the article...

"Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together."

Headlines from DDG News search...

Fort Myers Nurses Travel to New York City to Help

Real-life heroes: 25 Cleveland Clinic workers travel to New York to help with coronavirus battle

Tusculum University nursing graduates travel to New York to join fight against virus

Minnesota nurse on battling coronavirus crisis in NYC: 'I stepped up to the plate and here I am'

This kind of reporting is weird. Yes, the virus is showing up problems.

No, the US is not a failing state.

Europe as a whole is faring almost identically to the US.

No, they are not.

How many citizens have lost their health insurance in the US and the EU?

How many citizens, in the IS and the EU, will claim bankruptcy from medical bills in the next 12 months?

We’ll see if that’s significantly different from prior years.

My guess is that it will be worse, but not in some catastrophic way.

Yes, I agree that medical bankruptcy is a serious problem.

But it’s not new, and doesn’t mean we have a failing state.

I also don’t actually know what the state is across all of Europe. Do all states cover all of their citizen’s Covid treatments?

So having medical insurance or not determines whether or not a country is a failed state?

By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic. But all you need to do is think about it a bit to realize that's ridiculous.

> By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic

I believe that was the premise of the article.

The US was a failing state before the pandemic, unless you’re upper class. It’s just even more so now.

I remember reading an interesting premise about 5 years ago, that the U.S. was rotting from the bottom up and it just took longer for higher social classes to recognize it. If you were poor and black the U.S. was always a failed state. If you were a factory worker you started noticing it in the 1970s, and then it accelerated with Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound " in the 90s. The former middle class started realizing it with the financial crisis in '09, which knocked many of them out of the middle class. In the last couple years many of my friends (who went to an elite college and all have professional jobs) have started realizing it. Coronavirus probably finally exposed the wealthy to it.

I think it's actually going to get worse before it gets better. Right now we're just a failing state, give it a year or two and we're likely to be a failed state. Then we get to see what emerges from the ashes, but the process of getting there probably won't be pretty.

Interesting how so many people are so desperate to come here and live in this failed state they'll enter the country illegally!

Really remarkable.

Not so remarkable.

“The illegal immigrant population of the United States peaked by 2007, when it was at 12.2 million and 4% of the total U.S. population. Estimates in 2016 put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 10.7 million, representing 3.3% of the total U.S. population. Since the Great Recession, more illegal immigrants have left the United States than entered it, and illegal border crossings are at the lowest in decades. Since 2007, visa overstays have accounted for a larger share of the growth in the illegal immigrant population than illegal border crossings, which have declined considerably from 2000 to 2018. In 2012, 52% of unauthorized immigrants were from Mexico, 15% from Central America, 12% from Asia, 6% from South America, 5% from the Caribbean, and another 5% from Europe and Canada. As of 2016, approximately two-thirds of unauthorized adult immigrants had lived in the U.S. for at least a decade.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...

Those use the Pew numbers, which are known to be bogus because their inflow numbers come from a study that counted only working-age males, and their outflow numbers count everybody, even infants. The true net (through 2016) has always increased, even during the Great Recession.

Please provide a citation backing this assertion.

That's not an argument.

You can be a failing state and still be a better place compared to a place in complete chaos.

> So having medical insurance or not determines whether or not a country is a failed state?

If a public health crisis triggers a statistically significant percentage of the population to face bankruptcy due to the inability of it's state to face their most pressing needs then the answer is yes.

So if a gov’t can provide a service it’s a failed state?

That’s just silly.

> By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic.

That's literally the point of the article

Yeah, from what I can tell the U.S. currently has fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, or Ireland. Of course, part of the reason for this might be the timing of when COVID-19 hit the U.S. as opposed to when it hit those countries. But it certainly doesn't seem to me that the U.S. has been doing wildly worse, at least when it comes to the death toll, than most wealthy Western European countries. Germany is a big outlier, with about half the deaths per capita so far when compared both to the U.S. and to most of its wealthy Western European neighbors.

It could also be argued that, even if the U.S. ends up having a COVID-19 deaths per capita rate that is similar to that of Western Europe, people in the U.S. will have a harder time dealing with the economic aftermath of the crisis due to weaker social safety nets. Probably a lot will depend on how efficient the U.S. emergency stimulus measures end up being.

The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds. There are many nations that have less political bickering than the U.S. does and have more technically competent and less divisive people in charge of their governments than the U.S. does, but have nonetheless been suffering from the crisis as much as the U.S. has been suffering.

There are plenty of good reasons to criticize U.S. political partisanship and to criticize the Trump administration, but this article strikes me more as intellectually shallow anti-Trump complaining or propaganda, not as a serious and unbiased analysis of the political state of the U.S. and how that state relates to the COVID-19 crisis.

> The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds.

Did he or anyone has to try for that connection to be extremely clear?

I mean, right now the Trump administration is desperately trying to manipulate the public to force the Overtime Window over the "let's stop the quarantine" spot. How is that not a glaring failure?

And let's not forget how the Trump administration persecuted a carrier captain for protecting the crew after finding out the epidemic was spreading within the ship.

I recently stumbled on an article from April 13 that claimed all the hubub about the virus in the media was to make the president look bad. Seriously good leadership in times like these isn't rocket science. And they can't manage that.

Well, my point isn't to let Trump and his gang off the hook. I'm no fan of them. But this article strikes me as a hit piece, not an objective bit of editorializing.

>And let's not forget how the Trump administration persecuted a carrier captain for protecting the crew after finding out the epidemic was spreading within the ship.

Those Navy personnel volunteered to potentially kill foreigners on government orders and to give up some of their civil rights at least for the duration of their service. It's one thing if some of them wanted to endanger military security for the sake of letting the wider public know about abuses - which is what Snowden did, and is something that I support. It's another thing if people who volunteered to potentially kill people on government orders want to endanger military security just to try to save their own lives.

> Those Navy personnel volunteered to potentially kill

Completely irrelevant and ridiculous point.

The job of a captain is to a)protect the crew and keep them healthy, and b) keep the boat operational. You cannot have none of those if you have an epidemic raging through your ranks.

US didn't have a reliable test for SARS-Cov-2 virus till just over a month ago.

Deaths per capita is "fun" considering that you're comparing Netherlands to all of US. US actually has a lot of ICU beds... And yet New York State has a higher death rate per capita than Netherlands. (similar populations, btw)

US has been doing as bad as Italy in certain areas - notably the poorer areas of NYC have been hit harder, than the wealthier. (Which is literally the opposite of Italy, where the wealthier north got hit hard)

You could drill down further.

In the wealthier north of Italy, was it the wealthier areas or the poorer areas that got hit hardest?

Probably the closest comparison would be the US to the whole European Union. Similar sized population, a broad a mix of left/right leaning states, some more affluent than others, that are largely operating independently.

About two weeks ago the EU was around 800k cases and 57k deaths, the US is there now and at 40k deaths - so maybe doing better, but possibly could have been a lot better if the Fed Gov had taken charge early.

But we don't know precisely how many non-hospital deaths have occurred in either case. They estimated the UK was out by 40%, and Wuhan added 50% to their total recently.

Northern Italian here, from the fringes of the first red zone. Basically the two areas which where hit hardest, Bergamo and Codogno, where hit along political lines.

Codogno has an "hospital" which is basically a glorified asylum (and is often considered one of the worst asylum in Italy). It was not equipped to deal with anything serious and basically it was considered and hospital only in order to avoid spending money on other infrastructures.

Bergamo, on the other hand, is one of the economical centers of the country and the regional government delayed action under the pressure of the industrial establishment, until national government stepped in.

Many citizens of Lombardy knew that our healthcare system (which is regional competence) was a disaster waiting to happen and still suspect our regional government is lying in order to cover their failures.

The US also got hit pretty late, yet is taking it the worst. The extra time could've been used to prepare - everyone in this comments section wants to compare to Europe, but there's a much better reference point sitting on America's border. Canada took it seriously from the start, and despite having a greater diaspora that might transmit the "Chinese virus" into densely populated areas, has had a flatter curve, a less catastrophic economic impact on individuals, and most importantly a far lower morbidity.

The big problem with comparing directly to europe, is not only the timing but the demographics. Italy was hard hit because they have a lot of old people. Canada already has a lifespan 4 years longer than America's, which if you think about it is probably better proof that America is failing than most of the article.

I didn't vote for Trump, but I always hoped from the day after the election in 2016 that he'd put the partisan showboating aside and turn to governing. But it doesn't seem like that ever happened. And we need that now more than ever.

I think in some way, too, people want to feel united. I know I do. But it just can't ever work when the President calls for unity one day and then reverts to us vs. them namecalling on Twitter the next.

I really wish there was some way to overcome all of it but I don't know how we do it.

> I always hoped from the day after the election in 2016 that he'd put the partisan showboating aside and turn to governing.

What made you think he was even capable of that, let alone was interested?

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