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Comment by adamcharnock | Hacker News Reader

A phrase I've heard said: The rest of the world thinks of the USA in the same way that the USA thinks of Florida.

*rest of the world on twitter

Scoreboard says people still want to move to the US

I've always wondered why that is. I would guess it's a legend that persisted from previous centuries when north America was the newfound land, the country to start a new life, where you can dig for gold, with a modern legal system (even if that was only by virtue of being recently founded back then), the whole narrative around the USA is still like that.

Meanwhile the actual social mobility in the USA is lower than in Europe[1], so you'd be better to stay put or go to Europe. People here don't know what they got.

You say twitter, but it might just be people that have access to the internet and better information?

I'd be curious if anyone looked into why the USA is seen as so ideal when various metrics are only on par with developing countries. (Of course, it's clearly beyond a developing country, it just doesn't like to admit it -- healthcare, welfare, incarceration rates, income equality, minimum wage, minimum paid time off, university costs, etc. Sources here are OWID and Wikipedia, mainly from memory but feel free to ask for a specific source)

Another theory is that the USA generally sees itself as the best country, with e.g. starting every morning of primary school with this "pledge of allegiance" indoctrination (sorry, I have no other word for it and I still have a hard time believing this is real). With English being the lingua franca online, much of what you read online is likely to be written by someone who thinks this way.

[1] See figure 1 on the 43rd page which has page number 40 https://docs.iza.org/dp1993.pdf

Internal mobility doesn't matter as much as the one-time mobility you can get from moving to the US.

If you get stuck at a moderate FAANG salary for life, it may still be better than where you started from, for example.

I wouldn't expect an economic immigrant, evidently coming from a poorer place because (1) the USA simply has some of the most inflated incomes in the world but also (2) they wouldn't come for a better life if they were already rich, is going to fare better than someone natively born in the USA.

I would expect the opposite, as they already have the ability to leave their home country, which puts them at middle-class or so at least, and they apparently do quite well in the US.

So, study from the 1990s by a European confirms self-biased conclusion that Europe has more social mobility than America, despite evidence to the contrary.

Notably, all but 2 of the European countries in that study have smaller populations than Los Angeles. It's a lot easier to have social mobility for a small group than it is for a much larger group, especially when they can offload a lot of social ills (homelessness, immigration) entirely to other countries. Which is presumably why the study excluded the Mediterranean and Eastern European countries.

Why couldn't LA offload homelessness and immigration to another state, if you say that's such an effective strategy for these European states?

Also I didn't hand-pick the source, it's just a piece of info I came across while reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31705542 which had a link to clearerthinking.org which had a quiz called "Political Bias Test" (wouldn't recommend it btw, at least not for the advertised purpose; it's more of a "do you know random stats about the world" quiz) which had a question about social mobility with the aforementioned source. The website seems to be made by an organisation founded in New York, but it's not clear to me whether a European made this particular quiz question.

Most of LA's homeless are the offloaded homeless from other states; we ship as many of them back as we can but we can't legally force them to go back to their homes.

At any rate, it seems the European HNers took issue with learning that their tiny homogenous countries do better than a country with a larger population than their entire continent. Which is made possible because the U.S. pays for their defense.

You say you've always wondered why that is, but it doesn't seem like you're prepared to consider the possibility that America, in its current state, actually is a desirable place to live for a majority of the world's population.

If stats tell you one story but reality tells you a different one, then you should ask why that is, and not say the numbers are right and reality is wrong, or vice versa. There are more possibilities than just the world is getting bamboozled by brainwashed Americans online.

It's super simple: America is rich, and people want the opportunity to participate in our wealthy economy.

Yes, to be fair, "the rest of the world" should be "the rest of the industrialized first world".

Still, though...

Scoreboard also says many people from the rest of the industrialized world want to move to the US

>>Scoreboard says people still want to move to the US

Scoreboard also says many, many people are choosing to move to Florida at the expense of other states - one of the top 10 states IIRC.

Poor uneducated desperate people mostly. Even those would be most probably better off in most of western Europe rather than barely surviving in US. US honors well top 1%, very well top 0.1%, rest not so much. But simpler folks often can't see beyond the illusion of American dream, to their detriment.

Ie I can move with my skillset and languages to most of the world. I did move twice. Didn't consider US, ever, even if I loved common US folks I met when I spent few months there. Society is just not that good - lack of true freedoms, high criminality, class system based on income, messed up medical and school system, too much workoholism. Not a place to raise your child in, if you can stay ie in Switzerland.

so all those 'desperate, uneducated and poor' people should move to your Switzerland instead? with its 96% white population and 27% higher cost of living? Would Switzerland even accept poor minorities in large numbers?

You sound like quite the elitist...that would be like me telling those 'poor uneducated and desperate people living in Detroit, they should just move to Naples FL or Beverly Hills to escape the poverty and crime - if only they were smart enough.

To be fair, scoreboard says Americans still want to move to Florida

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

> The rest of the world thinks of the USA in the same way that the USA thinks of Florida

So the rest of the world wants to move to the USA because of the great weather, low income taxes, and the fact that the government doesn’t demand that you stay at home during a health scare?

Great as in hurricanes or great as in sunburn and heatstrokes?

> the government doesn’t demand that you stay at home

You mean "politely suggest" without any coercion.

Good luck "staying at home" when your home falls into the ocean the day after your last 3 insurance companies decided to close their doors forever.

ahh yes everybody who doesn’t live in Florida assumes death and destruction are always a minute away.

And yet Florida is richer than almost every country on Earth. Depending on how you measure it, Florida might actually be wealthier than every single European country and the typical European would be much better off in Florida.

Possibly true. Not sure it is relevant though.

Especially given then title of the article, and that insulin in generally free in Europe AFAIK.

It's certainly relevant to anybody who thinks Florida is some kind of weird backwater that's clearly inferior to Europe, when the exact opposite is objectively true. (I can't speak to "quality of life" measures, which people are free to argue about until the sun burns out, but objectively Florida is the richer geography and objectively the typical European would be far richer if they moved to Florida.)

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