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Comment by ElViajero | Hacker News Reader

The USA was defined by how superior it was to the rest of the world, how their companies were the best and standard of living the highest. I still remember an episode of the Simpsons laughing at how few dollars you get in exchange of a bunch of foreign coins and bills.

That reality does not exist anymore.

Reaganomics, discussed in the book, and low taxes in the USA created a lack of investment for the past three decades. Meanwhile Europe has become the place in the world with the higher standards of living, and China the fastest-growing economy. Both thanks to investing in infrastructure, education and health care.

How to solve it? It is hard. I am from Spain, a former empire, and there is still people that does not want to accept that Spain relevancy in the world is pretty low (even that it lost its colonies more than 100 years ago). Can the USA catch up with the new reality fast and recover? Or does it needs to sink lower before taking action?

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I think the split happened before Reagan. About the closest we got to raising the standard of US society even higher was Roosevelt's second bill of rights speech in 1944:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#Roosevel...

Now we fight over some fraction of a part of one of his ideas, like lowering medicare eligibility to 60. It's mildly depressing to consider where we could be.

The great society programs by LBJ should not be ignored. It created Medicare and Medicaid. They declared a war on poverty. They stopped people from littering literally everywhere.

> lack of investment

What? You’re grasping. If you want to see the problem, compare government budgets and look where all the money goes.

They probably mean non-military investment?

IMHO it's complicated: US military spend includes tons of R&D, including stuff far from direct weaponry. Sure, it's a small % of the budget, but still vastly more R&D spending than most countries.

>55% of the federal budget goes toward social services and welfare. <11% goes to military spending. There is no lack of investment, just obscene mismanagement, at best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2020_US_Federal_Budget_In...

Entitlements are an 'investment' into loyalty to the federal government and the system it presides over. The military is cheap by historic standards. The entitlement system is so expensive that it stymies any significant federal policy ambition that requires resources. Our political leaders generally gave up on trying to reform entitlements in the 2000s (when it was last a TV dinner issue), so instead most just try to distract from the issue with trivia.

Thinkers these days tend to be frightened about trying to come up with alternative, more cost-effective ways to secure the loyalty of the population. The default position is to just not bother shifting away from the inevitable path to failure, because letting it fail might be an easier way towards creating consensus for a solution than trying to avert the failure. If the system fails because of collective inaction, no faction can be directly blamed for the failure (so the thinking goes).

The US government spends a similar amount per-capita on health care as France, but provides health care for a much smaller fraction of its population.

There has been a massive increase in entitlement spending since the 90s with very poor results on terms of a social safety net.

I'd like to know what the Gini coefficient is for entitlement spending by individual adult recipient.

I suspect that it would be similar to the income distribution, given so many special programs for child, medical, and disability entitlements.

On top of that, with states cutting unemployment, a lot of people that previously would have been on unemployment are on disability now. There are a lot of perverse incentives in some of these systems.

> Entitlements are an 'investment' into loyalty

Ha! Not working! Not even preventing outright social violence.

>The default position is to just not bother shifting away from the inevitable path to failure, because letting it fail might be an easier way towards creating consensus for a solution than trying to avert the failure. If the system fails because of collective inaction, no faction can be directly blamed for the failure (so the thinking goes).

This describes the EU better than the US. The Eurozone in its current state is incomplete. It can't work the way it is currently set up. It's failure is inevitable. There are opportunities to build the most advanced monetary union in the world but nobody is taking them. Governments collectively decide to do nothing except wait for things to get better. Of course there are institutions that have to face reality. Some of those institutions cannot just wait, in fact they are forbidden from waiting. What happens is that the central bank now has responsibilities that in an ideal world no central bank should have to take on. They do it (the futile attempt to save the euro) because they are the last entity that is responsible for the system as a whole.

It's similar to that article that said engineers should solve climate change through engineering and bypass politics. Our central bankers should solve the Eurocrisis (it's ghost is still here haunting us) through monetary policy and bypass politics. What good are politicians nowadays if all we ever do is ignore them through loopholes/escape hatches? Sure, having escape hatches is good but relying on them is bad.

The US is in a different position. Politicians are doing something, they are addressing problems, maybe in an incompetent/biased way with some collateral damage over the short term but you can bet that they are setting the stage for good years to come. For the US the pandemic is merely the end of the bad days. Meanwhile in the EU it is business as usual.

Trump tried to support low skill jobs in the US with the trade war. Biden is creating infrastructure jobs that cannot be moved overseas. Both have the same idea but they execute them in different ways.

Was there any information or opinion in there? It sounds like you have a lot to say, but aren't saying it.

> It's failure is inevitable

Why?

> There are opportunities

What?

> Politicians are doing something

What?

> addressing problems / setting the stage

How?

I feel like your comment has a serious anti-welfare-state slant to it.

The US government is (well, let's stipulate anyway) a democracy. It represents the will of the people. We've decided we like stuff like Social Security and Medicare and we're cool paying for it.

You frame this like it's some kind of scheme to enthrall Americans, but our government is us.

If you want to talk about inefficiencies in the social safety net, let's start with the weird public/private meshing of providers and facilitators written into our laws by conservatives who wanted to "unleash the efficiencies of the free market" (i.e. give government contracts to their peers and later themselves).

It's not like "thinkers these days" have been frightened into silence by a mob addicted to social services. They've been disenchanted by the depth of corruption in our system.

> The US government is [...] a democracy

No. It's not, or at least, it wasn't. By law, it is a constitutional republic. It was specifically designed to prevent tyranny, regardless of the source.

> If you want to talk about ...

You're just using one form of corruption to justify your chosen form. They're both bad. Tolerance of one leads to the other.

> No. It's not, or at least, it wasn't. By law, it is a constitutional republic.

Woof, I gotta say I super dislike the parsing out of "republic" vs. "democracy". It almost always deliberately misses the point: our government is supposed to represent us. And honestly, what does "by law" add here?

> You're just using one form of corruption to justify your chosen form.

There's nothing corrupt about social programs? That's not what "corruption" means.

> You frame this like it's some kind of scheme to enthrall Americans, but our government is us.

Well said. The government is the will of the people, to remove the government from all social negotiations leaves the poor, and the middle class unrepresented.

> conservatives who wanted to "unleash the efficiencies of the free market"

"efficiencies of the free market" that are not applied to big corporations, that get the advantages of a social-democracy by being helped during crisis. Corporations are treated with more compassion than fellow citizens. "People is lazy", "Corporations are hard working" is part of the indoctrination.

Social security is a separate trust. Medicare is far more efficient than private insurance. It could be even more efficient but is hamstrung by corruption in Congress. Being unable to negotiate drug prices is a good example.

American Exceptionalism

After about 1970, cognitive dissonance carried it further than could be delivered as excellence in all things declined. Self-deception is about all that remains when many things are honestly comparable to a third-world country.

The only way to "solve" it is if the "patient" wants to admit to it and then wants to solve it. There's too much false pride (future hubris) preventing self-reflection.

I've seen that referred to as "Post-imperial delusion", and I believe it explains Brexit as well as Russia's belligerent behavior. Britain lost its super power status less than a century ago, Russia only in the 1990s.

There are apparently quite a few people in these countries that have yet to accept that they are not as relevant as they once were, and who long for any kind of action to restore their country's status to what they think it should be. Very dangerous.

> After about 1970

Yes, the moon landings were peak-USA. Never mind that we were mired in "world-building" in Southeast Asia as well.

> if the "patient" wants to admit

You are being down-voted. So, I guess that the answer is "no, we do not want to admin any problem" , at this moment, here in Hacker News.

I downvoted. I did so because of this line:

> many things are honestly comparable to a third-world country.

I do not believe that to be an accurate assessment of the situation. It feels accurate, to some people, but it's a distorted view of reality.

Which lets you classify me as "no we don't want to admit any problem", and write me off. I'd encourage you not to do that, for two reasons.

First, I've been seeing a pattern here on HN rather frequently lately: Someone states fringe view X as being obviously correct, and states that everyone is willfully blind to not acknowledge it. This gets downvoted. The author then points to the downvotes as proof that people are willfully blind (and therefore that X is in fact correct). But this ignores that X can be downvoted because it is obviously incorrect, or just because the author is being a jerk. You cannot use downvotes to confirm anything other than the fact that you were downvoted.

Second, assuming that everyone who disagrees is a fool or acting in bad faith is how you trap yourself in a filter bubble. But the question remains: Are you actually right, or actually wrong? Trapping yourself in a filter bubble means that, if you're ever wrong, you'll never find out.

I've been noticing similar downvoting recently for calling out too America-centric topics recently so I'm inclined to agree

> Meanwhile Europe has become the place in the world with the higher standards of living

Umm what?

Have you seen the salaries and house prices in the EU.

Their average salary is about $150k for software engineers, in the EU it's about 50k. None of the taxes or any other differences make up for that.

Americans have got it easy.

Ok, it's the first time i'll go into it here, and i'm probably not the best writer (especially in english), but this typical of the bourgeois mindset.

You don't have to have capital (social/economic or cultural) to have the bourgeois mindset. It two things in my opinion: either you're aware that your capital, your capital esperance, or your comfort is iniquitous and you're justifying this iniquity by any myth or legend you can invent, either you're not even aware of the iniquity and how your less fortunate peers are doing.

I've been thrice in the US. California, Ohio/West virginia, and New-York/Maryland. I've talked to people trying to get the tenderloin moving, i've talked to dockers and construction workers, and i've spent a lot of time with back-to landers but also "rednecks", ex-miners or truckers in WV. I guaranty you, a Polish trucker have a better life quality than a West Virginia one. And i would rather be a construction worker in europe, anywhere, even in Croatia, than in Maryland. At least i could hope to survive my 60s.

Our standard of living don't mean much. I mean, i go sail as a leisure almost every day, i'm 2 minutes away from the sea (by foot), i've got enough money to buy a house outside the city if i want to, my main issue this day is that i need to weld a support on my bike to be able to bring my kite board with me, as the best place to kite is 20 minutes away, and doing it by bike would be shorter.

Having more than 55k/yr at 30 wouldn't make me any happier. The new fablab and engineering "courses" i will try to make for the less fortunate kids of the city with 3 friends next year will probably though.

The standard of living in the US is pretty good if you're rich like a software developer. The standard of living in many EU countries is imo better than in the US for median income households. There are also many differences that are poorly reflected in standard-of-living calculations. For example I like living in dense cities with good public transport and good bikeability because I really don't like driving. Those are harder to find in the US than in the EU.

It's not even that good if you're high income. High rent and housing prices suck most of that money out of the the working class.

The taxes might not.

But the education and healthcare costs might.

Also, you're much more likely to be shot or put into prison in the US, which are quite some costs too.

I don't know the numbers, but it seems to me that despite being payed better, the average US citizen carries a much bigger risk to their life than the average EU citizen, even when you include the east of the EU.

> 150k for software engineers...

That may be true in the Valley. The media US salary is $36k. Only about top 16% of the US population gets $150k aor over.

Yeah OP is just factually incorrect here. On paper many countries are poorer, and on the ground you can see standard of living is either worse or slightly worse.

Sure there is less corruption in EU healthcare, but outside of that sector Americans get better homes, cars, and disposable income.

OP is correct, actually. I am not sure how you define or measure "standard of living" but common measurements include human development index [1] and quality of life index [2]. by both measurements the US lags behind many european countries. life expectancy in the US has been declining [3]. and the corruption in US healthcare is massive [4], especially considering that it can be three times more expensive for worse outcomes, and because it takes up such a large portion of the economy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

[2] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...

[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6753

[4] https://mebassett.info/healthcare-ppp.html

PS Am a US citizen who lives in the UK and travels (or did precovid) to the east coast and west coast of the US and to EU capitals regularly.

> besides for healthcare

Ignoring people's actual health in exchange for more expensive things seems like a backwards metric.

Is that why German cars are selling so well in the US, because US cars are better? I also doubt that on average US housing is better than European housing. Don't get even started with health care. All numbers I know show, that consumer debt is way lower in the EU than the US.

A country is much more than just one of its higher paying industries, especially if that industry is such an outlier like SV.

Better in what respect? Larger? That's true, but is largely a reflection of land prices, and if you're able to steal the land it makes it a lot cheaper. In Europe most land was stolen a long time ago and there isn't so much to go around now. In terms of build quality here it is rubbish. Houses here have more in common with sheds than houses in most of Europe.

I wonder if SWE compensation is related to how valuable the profession is perceived too, by both employers and societies.

Even in the US, the compensation is bimodal. You have companies like FAANGs where SWEs are paid into the mid or even upper six figures and even juniors are making six figures. Then you have most companies outside of the SV tech industry where you'd be lucky to break $200k (in a HCOL city) retiring after many decades of work.

In terms of countries, the US now considers SWEs a "hot" or prestigious line of work. In many other countries, this is not the case. You're just another salaryman, far, far, far below the ranks of doctors, lawyers, accountants, government civil servants, etc. etc. and your compensation reflects that.

GP is right, if he’s only looking at Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Otherwise, if you look at PPP-adjusted disposable income, even after factoring in non-monetary income (e.g. welfare), Europe is significantly poorer than US states[0]. If France were an American state, it would be the 8th poorest.

[0] https://mises.org/wire/these-us-states-have-higher-incomes-n...

You do realize there are other people than software engineers?

> Reaganomics, discussed in the book, and low taxes in the USA created a lack of investment for the past three decades.

In the last three decades, three trillion dollar companies - Amazon, Google and Facebook - were founded in the US.

> and China the fastest-growing economy.

It's a lot easier to grow fast if you just have to catch up.

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