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Comment by exolymph | Hacker News Reader

The United States is the land of high variance. We let people crash and burn, but we also let people soar. A society that permits the former is unremarkable — letting people suffer is the default in poverty, and most countries are relatively quite poor. But the latter, letting the tall poppies stand proud with not much more than heckling for their height, is something special, and it's a big part of how we've become such an outlier nation in terms of success.

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We don't so much let people soar by design, as have systems in place to capitalize on fame that end up earning more for the entrenched plutocrats than suppressing it would. That is why you hear the term "kingmaker" in the music and television industries, and why people were willing to put up with so much abuse from people like Harvey Weinstein. Find the most marketable thing you can and use all your money to shove it down people's throats as hard as your can. This is also why mainstream American culture has been mostly shit for the last 20-odd years.

In non-cultural areas, letting people "soar" is just the result of whitewashed bribery through campaign finance and lobbying.

maybe a and b are connected? You can't have the ultra rich or at least such a discrepancy between the top 10% and the bottom xx% without built-in systemic inequality. Nonetheless, it wouldn't hurt the US at all if the poorest had more support.

The poorest have tremendous support. US poverty line is at 80th percentile of world incomes, and welfare options ensure nobody has to live under that line. The ultra rich do a great deal (and got there) by making much affordable for lower incomes (Walmart, Amazon for high profile examples).

For that matter, world abject poverty has been largely eradicated. Increasing customer productivity (both individual and aggregate) increases customer buying power - favorable to capitalism.

This is blatant capitalist propaganda. Basic access to things like housing and education make for a tangibly wealthier society. Every dollar we invest in preschool education, for example, nets out $6 in terms of return throughout the course of the child's life.[1]

The nation continues on its "high variance" trajectory because it is structurally incapable of acting democratically. Two of the four major deliberative bodies are anti-democratic. The Senate is elected in extreme disproportion and the Supreme Court is ridiculous 9 unelected seniors deciding outcomes for an entire country.

It was set up this way intentionally, to entrench and structurally favor wealthy Southern slaveholders and established Northern merchants that traded on their commodities.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/12/504867570/how-inv...

> This is blatant capitalist propaganda.

Oh indeed, and you're salty about it because you know that you're losing because you simply cannot deliver equivalent results.

dang, if you're reading this, I'll take my smack on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper now.

Delivering results for whom exactly? Look outside and you'll see homelessness rising and storefronts closing.

The entire failed national pandemic response is due to the perverse incentives of our system.

Five hundred thousand Americans (and counting) are dead because we couldn't close the economy for a couple months and pay people to stay home.

Far be it from me to argue that the United States is competently administered compared to, e.g., a successful firm.

It's still a global superpower for a reason, and that reason is not "communism will totally work this time"

Of course you can't argue with the substance of my point. All it goes to show is how willing you are to write off half a million dead Americans for continued profits and power. Power to do what, exactly?

It's not just the communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba, even capitalist countries with newly minted leftist leadership like South Korea, have weathered this crisis with orders of magnitude less loss.

The systems for rending economic value from the value of human life are deeply entrenched here. Always have been[1]. That we can divorce the success of firms from the success of the people providing the value on the ground doing the work is a testament to it.

It doesn't make us awesome, it makes us abhorrent. The people that you claim "soar" are not randomly distributed, they are frequently born into favorable economic situations that allow them to develop the talents that make them super rich. In our lifetimes those islands of stability have degraded entirely in the service of ensuring the super rich can get even richer.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...

So true. This is why the US is so much better than Asia.

What worries me however is how there are more and more laws and regulation to not let people crash and burn - like forcing people to have health insurance. Stupid code for building houses - etc

EDIT: and I'm not being sarcastic. I admire how by taking the correct decision to apparently sacrifice the poor, we have made the pie bigger for everyone including the poor (unfortunately, as noted by a comment below about Des Moines, building code is quickly changing that)

Wait, what? You're against building codes? A lack of building codes is in no way why the US has been successful. They prevent people from literally burning.

GP frames it wrong but building codes make make affordable housing very hard to create in ways unrelated to safety.

>most homes built in Des Moines will be required to have a full basement, a single-car garage, and a driveway. Minimum lot sizes for single-family houses will range from 7,500 to 10,000 square feet. Building codes meant to guarantee residents’ safety will now decree their comfort

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/with-zoni...

This conflates zoning with building code. Building codes are things like requiring that your wires be properly attached and connected so that you don't get electrocuted in the shower as your house burns down, or that you have to build enough beams to support the weight of 4 people and all their possessions.

/s? Not sure if /s

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