Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S.

At least the first five of these seem to mostly be a problem in New York, where the author is based, and similar cities, not “America” writ large. For example, the author complains about the housing costs, but the national home ownership rate in the US is about the same as the UK or France, and substantially higher than Germany. (And the median American home is twice as big as in those countries.) The author complains about the lack of transit, but the median American commute is among the shortest in the OECD. The homicide rate in my Maryland county isn’t great (about 2 per 100,000) but it’s closer to say Canada or Belgium (1.7-1.8 per 100,000) than those countries are to Sweden (1.1 per 100,000). Racial divisions are a challenge throughout America, of course, but that’s true all over the world. France’s Macron is talking about a government takeover of Islam: https://www.ft.com/content/88c1e898-5269-11ea-90ad-25e377c0e.... And Macron is the liberal! Le Pen, a far right candidate, is polling dangerously close to him at 45-55. As a brown person, I’d much rather be in America right now even with Trump than in France.

What the recent situations are bringing out is not that “America” is in decline, but that “American cities” are in decline. The mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, recently said that cutting police funding was impossible, because given the union contracts the city would have to lay off mostly black and Hispanic officers! This is a police force that was running Abu Ghraib-style interrogation centers. For what New York is spending extending one subway line a few miles, cities like Copenhagen have built entire new, fully automated, lines. New York City spends $25,000 per student, or about 44% of the city’s median income. London spends just 15% of the city’s median household per student.

You can’t fix a problem unless you can properly identify the problem. Articles like this are willfully blind to the problem.

You are making several false comparisons. Home ownership rate is not the same as housing costs. A lack of transit options is not the same thing as the length of commute. In both these cases they are likely barely correlated. Also why would you assume that other countries don't also have an unequally distributed patterns between their major metropolitan and more rural/suburban areas? You compare statistics of your county with entire other countries as if it provides some kind of useful data point.

> Home ownership rate is not the same as housing costs.

No, but it’s a strong indicator that housing costs are not unaffordable nationwide, but merely in some high cost cities where most people don’t live.

> A lack of transit options is not the same thing as the length of commute.

Talking about “transit options” presupposes a solution to a problem. The problem is getting people to places, not transit per se. The US has chosen to prioritize direct car travel over potentially indirect transit, and the result is that Americans spend less time commuting than almost anyone else in the OECD. Put differently, for most Americans, the fact they have a 25 minute auto commute instead of a 45 minute train commute is not a sign of America being “in decline” but rather an advantage.

As to homicides, other countries do not have the same massive differences in homicide rate between cities and suburbs as the US. My county includes a small city (the state capital). The homicide rate in the nearest big city, 30 minutes away, is almost 15 times higher. By contrast, the homicide rate in London is only 50% higher than in the UK as a whole. Toronto’s homicide rate is actually lower than Canada as a whole. The differences are small enough to ignore for purposes of the point I’m making, which is that many parts of America are quite safe. Large cities have stratospheric levels of violence, but most of the population doesn’t live there.

So what is the problem exactly? You don’t really say.

I don’t know! But we have a pretty good idea where the problem is. Most of the stuff that the author complains about: housing, infrastructure, education, policing, etc., are local issues. They’re not local just in the US, with our federal system, they’re local in many other developed countries too: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/reg_glance-2016-32-e... (table 3.1). In the US state and local governments are responsible for about half of all spending. That’s on the more “federal” side, but in line with say Germany or Spain. Canada, Denmark, and Sweden delegate even more spending authority to state and local governments, with a remarkable 80% of total government spending being controlled at the provincial level in Canada.

So if New York can’t build transit because it costs ten times as much per mile as in Germany, or New York can’t properly educate its kids even though it spends twice as much per student as other developed nations, or New York has high housing prices—is that a problem with “America” as the article claims? Or is it a problem with New York?

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