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.
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.
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 easy.
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).
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 an easy task.