I have a ton of admiration for Dutch society and their social safety net. They do a great job culturally of remembering to treat everyone in a very humane manner. I wish America was more like them in that regard.
Everything gets easier, when you live in a high-trust society--unfortunately I don't think the US has been high-trust in quite some time. The bad part is that it takes generations to build and a decades to erode. My local bodega doesn't have free groceries, but rather a sign on the door prohibiting people from wearing ski masks, because groups were walking out with merchandise.
There was a time when people with a minimum wage job could afford to pay rent. Now the government has to pay 10k euro to help them make ends meet.
For all it's progressive reputation, Netherland has had economically conservative right-wing governments for a long time now, and vocal extreme-right parties trying to push further into that direction, while the left has been dwindling. A couple of years ago there was a massive long-term scandal where poor families of a mixed background where treated as fraudulent criminals, which has done tremendous harm, and despite everything coming to light and everybody being upset about it, the main person responsible for it is still our prime minister.
It's good that the Dutch people and companies are stepping up where the government is failing, but it would be better if the government wasn't failing this sort of thing.
Yes, America can learn from The Netherlands and other countries that are doing well, but it’s also reasonable to acknowledge how hard the American problem is.
https://ind.nl/en/consequences-for-right-of-residence-when-a...
In the US you can generally establish residency in a different state in the amount of time it takes to get a USPS change of address notice and a billing statement of some sort showing that you’re able to receive mail there.
Yeah you can move wherever but you're not eligible for benefits, and the hiring managers want to know you speak fluent $LANGUAGE and have the right certifications from whatever credentialing system exists there.
Common currency and regulatory standards, but it's not like you're just moving from Spain to Poland, at least not without serious hurdles.
Controlling who has the vote has long been an issue, but denying political power to a region is a different category of thing than denying it to poor people etc.
Anyway, money is fungible you could say you’re helping Mississippi schools just as people in Mississippi schools are helping your local schools. Or you can think of it like the electric grid where money doesn’t get sent around the country just shifted left and right regionally which smooths things out.
Here is a list from English Wikipedia about the floods. The Dutch Wikipedia has much more info on the flood, as well as a museum in Leyden (from Rijkswaterstaat if I remember well). Not everyone can read the Dutch language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_the_Nether...
The problem is that the US isn't really trying, and there's a large movement that's actively trying to make the government worse. Fix that, and I think a lot of problems will disappear.
More likely, there are a benefits and costs to a large government. I doubt it's scale-free.
Look at all the process at BigCo vs the lean startup. Government also has to deal with all those tradeoffs inherent to people managing.
It’s not an easy task.
Overall I believe that free and good(!) basic education independent from status and location is a solution for many problems but it seems that as more capitalistic a system becomes as less incentive there is to actually educate and teach the population.
West coast US cities are a perfect example of this, not enough housing means labor resources are constrained which is the biggest input for actually getting things done (fixing problems, creating value, etc).
It’s not easy.
Taking something like medical treatment as an example, it's not just that you have to scale up the number of beds and doctors in each hospital - you need to build many, many more hospitals, staff them, ensure they have critical infrastructure, etc.
That's not to say that the US is doing even close to enough, but the fact that GDP per capita doesn't do anything to capture the differences in magnitudes of solutions required by the two countries.
But at the same time, the situation is nowhere near 10x worse in the US since you mostly just need hospitals close to the urban centers anyways.
(Though I do grant you that quality of life for people in very rural areas will be a bit worse since they need to travel far)
However, the US still has a higher GDP per land area than countries such as Norway, Sweden, Canada and Australia.
Furthermore, you would think that economies of scale should be quite beneficial for countries as large as the United States.
> I’m not hearing concrete evidence of a gulf that can’t be bridged by money.
The land area differences provided is part of the concrete evidence: I can invest a lot of value onto a small plot of land, but it will take many times more money in order to do the same for an area the size of a small town. The costs for infrastructure skyrockets as the amount of land in need of servicing increases. 15% more money per person is relatively useless if the people are spread thousands of miles apart.
It's not that the US doesn't have the means. It's just clear that its priority is not improving the lives of Americans.
As a person who works for a defense adjacent company, I can tell you confidently that government adjacent healthcare is the closest thing this country has to socialized medicine.
I do agree that it doesn't seem to be a priority. I have to assume there's a bunch of slack and waste in the system given the amount of money that goes into it.
Yes but most of that is medicare, most of which is really part of social security for the elderly (a very good thing, but not at all comparable to what European countries do in terms of providing access to health care for all their citizens).
The comments here are focused on how the US government should do more.
In the US we have churches and other religious institutions that would help with problems like this locally but as time has gone on, their membership has dwindled. Perhaps we should take a look at this article and try to get our companies to emulate what is being done here?
But I also think that it is business's purpose to serve society as well. At some point we moved away from that.
We used to have companies that would donate to the school library or to fund school technology programs. Now, some of that was rooted in the idea that they would need workers in the future so this was part of the pipeline but it was also building society. (You still do see companies donating money to sports programs, for their banner to be displayed)
Currently companies are all complaining about the lack of X, yet are they funding training for X? No, we expect workers to come in fully trained and ready to go.
Looking beyond that, companies are willing to up and shift counties in order to save money but that has effects on the local economy.
It did help them jumpstart their economical development by.. quite a lot tho and they have been very prudent with their money ever since.
but like, at the end of the day thinking that "multiple cultural groups" is the problem basically a coded/socially-acceptable way of saying that we can't have a social safety net because of black/hispanic people (or whatever disfavored minority/immigrant group is currently en-vogue). It always has been.
It has nothing to do with race. Roma people have continuously refused to integrate, which is perfectly fine if they don't want to, but then don't be a weight on the host society by receiving every form of financial support you can get your hands on, while being a centre for criminality, and demanding access to what a contributing member of society can access.
I have experienced roma communities first hand. They shun their own who decide to get educated. Is that the kind of societies you'd like around your kids in the 21st century ?
There must be a reason that people dislike certain societies.
The British government doesn't, but it does show the "White Gypsy/Traveller" ethnicity has 31.2% "Never worked or long-term unemployed", higher than any other group [1].
Particular types of petty crime obviously increased when travellers settled (temporarily) on some land near where I grew up. It happened every 18 months or so. However, this doesn't show up in arrest statistics, so I think it's that society is accustomed to the existing petty crime and notices the change.
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-popula...
Our string of right-wing governments haven't done much to fix that (and sometimes made it a lot worse), but it's good to see citizens step up with these sort of projects.
I still think it's a failure of the system that this is even necessary.