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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds:

(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.

(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can't be invaded, isn't saddled with war or reconstruction debts.

(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.

(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is "you should lower your expectations". I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don't give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.

(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don't try because there's no "try again". They also have no access to capital, essentially.

(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.

On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.

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I do agree with many of your points here, but just to nitpick...

> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.

So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?

I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.

> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower

The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.

It's relative. There's a culture of ambition, competition, success and financial reward here in the US. Other countries have it, but in the US it's organized. It's so crazy, everything is setup to compete. The latest craziness: top universities have multiple, competing startup incubator programs - each!

(I have many more stories of course)

They never claimed Americans are the only ambitious people, or even the most ambitious. Just “very ambitious”, in a list of factors that (put together) allegedly combined to explain the notable outcome.

There are other countries that can’t be invaded, or speak a single language, or have a large market, or have ambitious people, or culturally permit failure without ostracizing people.

LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause.

Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain.

American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will point to the French and claim that they're lazy and don't want to work, but would never dream of fighting for their labor rights the way the French do.

Definitely not my experience working overseas in a few countries.

There are certainly lazy Americans, but I’ve worked in multi-national offices where youd get fired in the US for the type of slacking i saw.

That's simply because firing people is easier in the US thus, maybe, people slack off less on average.

My personal impression (I'll admit in limited in scope) is that expectations are generally higher in the US. Not expectations around hours put in, but rather how quickly work gets done, quality of the work, etc.

And that's not just management expectations of employees, but also employees expectations of other employees.

If my coworkers in the US pulled what I saw in some parts of Asia, they'd stick out like sore thumb and be generally despised by other employees for screwing them over.

I have not worked in America, but I have worked with Americans so this is hard for me to confirm, but I simply think that weaker work-related laws simply lead to people having on average more fear of losing job and thus there's more internal/social pressure.

Anyway I did travel America though and lived 7 months in Ohio (went to OSU for exchange) and I don't know in which fields do you think where expectations are higher.

Food industry, including fast food in US, has extremely low quality/pressure and expectations. It didn't seem to me like people work harder in that field.

Building/craftsmen too I didn't see any noticeable difference at all, as most of these people are generally self-employed or in very small business anywhere in the world.

People working in shops or supermarkets, again, I haven't seen any noticeable difference.

Thus, I ask, what are those field where expectations are "generally higher"? Dystopic corporate ladder climbing?

Also, I have few colleagues that worked for Facebook, Indeed and Google (specifically Youtube) in Dublin and they recounted that it was American coworkers being consistently late, lazy, and taking every single excuse for class actions and work avoidance (such as getting PTSD or problems over any minor issue).

Also, Europe is a very huge place with different cultures.

I'm speaking of professional white collar jobs. The kind of jobs where you can work independently, nobody is really keeping track of what you're doing and it's not hard to blow off work without causing concern.

I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.

Could you make examples? Do you think European bankers work less hard than their american counterparts? Or who does that?

European software engineers? Or is it European lawyers that do less? Or accountants?

It seems to me like you're overgeneralizing.

While I don't doubt that US can have a more competitive nature compared to many countries (in Europe we care much less about status or what other people think about our car and how big is our house, we aren't that insecure) I still think that the scenario you present is just an average where there's more incentives for great performers and low performers to perform better, but the median isn't different at all.

Bankers might not be a good example. US investment banks work their staff notoriously hard to the point of people actually dying on the job from overwork. But, I've repeatedly heard from people who have lived through it, that the work they were doing was largely wasted make-work and the whole thing had a large degree of hazing ritual about it. One guy I talked to had quit and moved to SF to try and join the tech world because he felt the work/life balance was a lot more sane there.

I never talked about Europeans at all, so no, I don't think they work less hard. I said "parts of Asia".

As with anything, it varies. Software engineers in China routinely put in 72 hour weeks (996), and are required to make up holidays using weekends if the holiday falls on a week day. Even “labor day” is made up on a weekend, ironically.

The workers’ rights Americans are accustomed to might be viewed as lazy or unambitious in places where working more is the norm. And across the other pond, where many Europeans have generous PTO and leave allowances, they view Americans as very hard working while some Americans might view Europeans as lazy or entitled. It’s all relative.

Ambitious doesn’t mean works a lot, not sure why you think so. It means they have ambition to make their life/community/family/etc better

The US doesn't have particularly high GDP per hour worked:

https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm

Slightly above Sweden and slightly below Denmark and quite a bit less than Ireland.

GDP is a complex measure as it depends on what that hour of work produces. And GDP also includes production that required no labor at all (i.e. see Ireland's incredibly high GDP per capita due to multi-nationals funneling sales through the country).

I was trying to think of some objective measure for "hard working" - I don't really equate this measure with simply the number of hours worked.

I get where you were coming from. I'm not sure there is a better measure.

Well, that's probably because companies make so much "intellectual property" in Ireland, which they then have to pay licensing fees to their Irish subsidiaries to use.

I am being a little sarcastic. This is a description of a standard tax-avoidance scheme.

My point, ultimately, is that I suspect Ireland's numbers are inflated by its status as a tax haven for multinationals.

How is this a response to the comment you replies to?

It’s not an accident the French are able to protest for workers’ rights while Americans mostly can’t. And it’s not because of differences between French and American psychology either.

No, the reason is simple: unions. Most Americans aren’t in one, which makes collective organization nearly impossible. Businesses know this, and politicians know this, which is why some of them have made it a point to demonize and defang unions.

Well, it is not that simple, the unions in France have substantial power but rather modest membership:

France

Collective Bargaining Coverage: 98%

Proportion of Employees in Unions: 8%

------

Sweden

Collective Bargaining Coverage: 88%

Proportion of Employees in Unions: 70%

------

United Kingdom

Collective Bargaining Coverage: 29%

Proportion of Employees in Unions: 26%

--------------

From https://www.worker-participation.eu/national-industrial-rela...

If it's true that unions are so valuable, why is it that in most industries in the U.S. workers are far better compensated? Take tech as one example of a non-unionized industry that has still secured for itself work-from-home, sometimes unlimited PTO, extensive maternity and paternity leave, sometimes five to six plus figures in bonus and stock compensation, etc plus pre-WFH the dankest office accomodations which regularly include catered meals, on site yoga instructors, massages, free drinks and more. Do any unionized French companies get such perks?

I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.

Tech is probably an outlier. Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.

As far as why tech workers are better compensated in the US? Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US. Those working in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC are far better compensated than their counterparts in say the Midwest (the pandemic may have changed things, but looking at pre-pandemic figures is useful to gain an understanding of the wage disparity). When you factor in healthcare and other social services provided in Europe, West European tech workers are not disimilarly compensated from their Midwest counterparts.

The reality is that the outliers are these handful of American tech hubs which have outsized outcomes. Which brings us to what’s probably the real reasons for the US’s high economic output.

Immigration and college education, which is what these places have in common.

>I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.

Huh? The US has the highest median disposable income in the world[0], let alone tech which blows Europe out of the water even in the lowest of cost of living states.

You're not going to find accurate income information for service workers because service workers notoriously do not report their cash tips which make up for a large portion of their income. That means the median is even higher.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

> Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.

No, they're not. The median income wouldn't be higher in the U.S. if the majority of its workers were not compensated more. In particular, with regards to commercial, full-time farming, farmers make far more in the U.S. (median commercial farm income was $186K in 2021 [1]).

Truck drivers in the U.S. earned a median income of $47K in 2019 [2] while truck drivers in France as of 2021 report around 25K EUR [3]. Many such examples.

> Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US.

Sure, but we can compare tech hubs in France (are there any besides Paris?) to tech hubs in the U.S. or we can compare overall U.S. vs France. It doesn't matter how you slice the data: U.S. salaries come on top and by a large factor. This is also generally true across all engineering professions. As an example, take Civil Engineers (37K EUR vs $71K USD base) [4].

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps... [3] https://www.salary.com/research/fr-salary/benchmark/truck-dr... [4] https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala...

It’s not because of unions or the 9-5 work schedule either. It’s because they can’t find parking.

I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.

Except that's just not true. The vast majority of Americans don't actually believe "they can achieve anything." The proof is that they never actually try. It's merely rhetoric that we use to punish the most vulnerable. For the vast majority, we either never reach a spot where we're comfortable because of a lack of skills or training or we get there and then lament our luck when things don't go our way with layoffs and technical obsolescence. This is of course discounting MLMs, which aren't real entrepreneurship.

Neither is part-time work. I get a 1099 NEC from a few companies each year for "consulting," which basically means I get a retainer to fix a few things that break on their servers should something go wrong. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm just getting a few extra checks.

> I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.

My anecdotal experience is that the Mexicans¹ I have known have been way more entrepreneurial than the Americans. If the Spanish-speaking Americas were to establish economic union a la the E.U., I suspect that they would become the dominant economy in the world in a generation.

⸻

1. Speaking here, specifically, of Mexicans living in Mexico and not immigrants to the U.S., although come to think of it, the immigrants are likewise also highly entrepreneurial, but this is a self-selecting segment of the population who are willing to undergo great hardship and go to a whole other country, suffer discrimination and struggle with living outside their language and culture to make a better living for themselves. Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. which is probably a big factor in American (U.S.) entrepreneurship.

what makes america great, is the current system or ie rule of law and institutions. those yeah are being destroyed bit by bit. by oligarchs and nefarious individuals. but in terms of laws / institutions that are not easily influenced by current politics - america is still ahead.

mexico etc the courts etc are easily corrupted. hence they can never be #1.

same for every other poor country.

the other country that I can think of with almost comparable laws to the states is the uk i.e favourable to enterprise -- but they're not doing enough to encourage labor participation

> Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S.

Not necessarily. It's definitely a cultural thing: Latin American immigrants are far more entrepreneurial than Asian immigrants, even after correcting for wealth and education.

I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one.

Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.

Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.

In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.

It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.

Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.

A big issue for Canada is that the government focused on resource extraction.

The bigger issue is that isn’t just one government. And those governments largely do not allow free trade, especially historically. Only recently was a limited free trade agreement finally signed between provinces.

In the US, the federal government supersedes the individual states. It can come down heavy handed and say that trade between states is there to go nuts with. In Canada, the federal government is only an equal to the provinces and must stay in its lane. Matters like interprovincial trade is beyond its jurisdiction.

I heard (not verified) that every province of Canada trades more with USA than with any other province which I think is quite remarkable.

It's not really that remarkable. 98.6% of Canadas population lives in provinces that border the US. And provinces don't have much population. Outside Ontario, no province has more people than NYC. I would imagine more trade would happen with a land-bordering country with 90x the population than with a neighboring province.

Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.

> Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.

No. No US state has trade with Canada at more than 15% of state GDP <https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_tra...>, and Canada is a bigger trade partner for the US than China.

"No US state has trade with Canada as more than 15%" doesn't disprove that "every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state". GDP and interstate or international trade are pretty different concepts.

And while Canada is a bigger trade partner in total than China, I'm willing to bet that China is more evenly distributed between the states as a trade partner.

>I heard (not verified) that every province of Canada trades more with USA than with any other province which I think is quite remarkable.

As of 2017, international trade was 65% of Canadian GDP, compared to 40% of GDP for interprovincial trade. <https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA...>

Another way to think about this: <https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trad...>

It's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.

I’m Canadian and I think this is insane. Free trade between the provinces seems like a no-brainer. I also think we should be taking a harder look at our protectionism against American companies. I understand the value of having healthy domestic industries but the prices of cellphone plans here, for example, are nothing short of outrageous. We already pay so much more than Americans in taxes, must the services we buy from private companies also be so much more expensive than stateside?

Just to give you additional data point with cell phone prices.

I’m French but I’m living in the Us since a decade or so.

Cell phone prices are considerably cheaper in France ( €30 gets you unlimited everything on mobile and €80 is a combo for fiber + mobile plan )

But yet, that a heavily regulated market. If I’m correct there is 5 licences. All other companies have to buy and resell bandwidth thought those 5 licence. They tend to be French company.

Here I pay close to $200 total for the same service ( actually lesser service, I can’t have fiber where I live )

Maybe those expensive price are not due to that regulation? ( or maybe it is. I don’t know, but I wanted to give you a counter example )

Excellent points, but perhaps part of the reason for the price difference is because the US population is much more geographically dispersed, so the infrastructure costs are much higher.

Most people live in metro areas.

It depends how you define metro area. The US census 80% urban has a very broad definition of urban. My 7000 person town with many houses on dozens of acres is classified as urban because it’s within 50 miles of a major city and near some smaller ones.

30 euro seems reasonable. In the US you can get unlimited everything for $30 a month (well, after some amount of data in the gigs I think it downgrades from 5G in the fine print).

Maybe I missed that, what carrier do you have in mind?

Mint MVO on T-Mo network

https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/

There are a lot. Mint Mobile is $30/mo for unlimited if you pay for a year at once (a little more if you pay monthly). Visible is $30/mo but goes from 5G to 4G after 50GB (more expensive options have higher caps). There are lot of other ones out there, mostly trying to get people in the $20 range but with smaller limits on total data.

Right right right, my bad.

Now I remember why I switched from cricket. From time to time, I need data in Europe. On my US phone. That being said I should just switch when appropriate.

Thanks for reminding that.

I took the opportunity to check what the prices are in France now.

€20/month, and €10/month if you bundle it with your internet connection. ( bringing to a total of €40 )

I just checked the operator that historically has the better price. ( free.fr )

You're welcome for the reminder. People forget those alternatives exist.

Apparently Mint offers a US/Canada/Mexico plan for only a little more.

But when I travel internationally, I get a prepaid SIM when I land. It's cheap enough.

Canada has more expensive cellular service than the US which its self has more expensive service than EU.

It seems likely that population density is playing a role not just regulations. Sure there’s gaps in every country, but companies need to do more than just cover major cities or what’s the point of having a cellphone?

Along these lines, recently Alberta and BC got in a fight about oil pipelines and Alberta threatened to have its province owned liquor distributor monopoly stop buying BC wine lolol.

Canada isn’t a single language market.

It’s more than say, Spain+Germany+France+Italy+Uk

Well I guess the US has this problem too. I lived in a town where a significant portion of the population didn't speak English fluently

I think the downvotes are thinking you are joking about peoples’ english proficiency, while I assume you just mean there is a large Hispanic population in your town.

Ah. Yes correct. The majority of people in my town spoke spanish, and a significant percent did not speak english at all.

Well, even if you put language aside. Each European countries is still wildly différents.

Less and less, that’s true.

But regulation, borders, culture, habits, buying power, taste…

The first startup I worked for was wildly successful in France. We had dream of conquest of all Europe, of course.

Each new country was a headache, nothing to do with langage. ( language was the easy part )

People wanted different stuff. We were able to make it to Italy and the UK, got laughed out of the room in Germany. Never got more than mild traction in Spain and nobody talked to us in Portugal.

Randomly we got Chinese customers. Super hyped.

Then we realized that while doing all that … we had let our primary market down and that someone else was eating our lunch there.

Got bankrupt a year after.

It was poor execution. But I still think that expending from Nebraska to Missouri is easier :)

US has some unifying things, and maybe it isn't on the level of Europe, but there are massively different cultures in the US. States have a lot of power with regards to regulation.

It is true you can do business in other states pretty easily.

Almost the same fraction of people speak English at home in Canada as in the US.

It's an embarrassing example of how insanely big (and thus regionalized) Canada is and how untravelled that most Canadians are that in writing this post I apparently briefly forgot about the existence of Quebec and New Brunswick. lmao.

I haven't been to Quebec for probably 20 years. If it was dramatically cheaper and easier to travel in this country maybe I wouldn't (even briefly) forget that millions of Canadians speak French as their first language.

But interesting point in that it underlines the problems that a Canadian company would have in diversifying across its own nation. A successful Ontarian company would induce significant cost in expanding to Quebec, a remarkably different jurisdiction with important language regulation that needs to be respected, while the same sort of company in Vermont would have less barriers expanding to all its surrounding states.

(Also for completeness sake, one should point out that there are areas of Canada where indigenous languages are significantly spoken (eg. Nunavut) but they are quite small in population)

Couple points:

- Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...

>In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that.

As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>

>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.

Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.

Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.

Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.

As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.

> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying

Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade.

My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and beverage are not that hard to come by. A good house is indeed expensive in most of the world, but after that, what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”?

Build a school for those left behind.

If you want to build schools, why not get a job at the department of education?

Is that a serious question?

Look I know hacker news is biased towards thinking the solution to everything is "do a startup, become a billionaire, use your money to solve it" but there are legitimately other ways of getting things done, for example engaging with the civic process to get things solved through democracy.

I couldn't agree more. Where I think we disagree is the idea that working for the Dept. of Education will have one "opening schools" in the same (meaningful) way as the parent comment intends.

If one invests the ambition into rising into a position of power in the department of education, their impact on educating the youth will be many times bigger than that of the rich guy's who just throws some money at school building, but otherwise has no clue and no impact. This is often why ambitious people choose the public servant career path - they want to have a real impact.

> what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”

Stop working?

Not dying when you no longer have health insurance

Most countries are not like the US with its crazy health system.

You still get better and prompter health care when you pay more money in pretty much every country.

Like most things, it depends.

There’s no money you can pay to get a donated organ faster in most decent countries. There are treatments too expensive for even the best health plans and are only available through government sponsored systems. You couldn’t buy yourself a vaccine ahead of anyone else for any price during the covid peak, etc.

Health is as much a collective issue as it is an individual one.

Those things are all available to the ultra-wealthy.

For your last example: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/03/how-rich-and-privileged-...

That's why I prefaced the statements with “most decent countries”, etc. The U.S. health care system doesn't qualify as decent for the richest country on earth in the XXI century, unfortunatly.

No True Scotsman arguments aren't particularly interesting.

Canada, England, Brazil are far poorer and have way better health systems. I don’t understand how that’s a No True Scotsman fallacy.

The US has the best healthcare in the world, period. It's just not cheap. Brazil isn't even remotely comparable.

The best healthcare is available in the US, but it is not the best health care system. The system is awful in almost every possible dimension. And tying it to employment is one of the worst features.

The best healthcare system is the one available to most people, period.

And you’re right, Brazil’s is not even remotely comparable to the US. It’s universal, completely unrestricted and covers continental distances for over 200 million people. It’s not only free, but a fundamental right guaranteed by the country’s constitution.

If one has a serious disease like cancer and is not a millionaire, guess where there’s a greater chance of survival.

Also, when large scale sanitary solutions must be applied, like, you know, during a pandemic, wouldn’t it nice to have a way to reach millions of people other than improvising mass vaccination campaigns in stadiums and fairgrounds?

I mean, Jair wasn’t exactly a hero in the pandemic. There’s probably better examples.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/27/toll-bolsonaros-disastro...

He was disastrous. Fortunately he wasn’t reelected, may become unelectable and possibly imprisoned.

Any half decent administration could have aced with Brazil’s capillarity of health infrastructure and pro vaccination culture.

He managed to create an antivax movement and embezzle vacine money.

Universal, completely unrestricted, free, fundamental right... What a rosy picture you're painting. You can't possibly have ever dealt with this crap if that's what you think. I gotta wonder if you're even brazilian.

This is a system that tells citizens they have a constitutional right to health and that providing it is the state's responsibility. Rights are incredibly expensive though. Giving people "rights" is amazing when you're up for election. When the time to actually pay up comes, though, politicians can't leave the room fast enough.

The result is of course scarcity. There isn't enough for everyone. How do you manage scarcity in a supposedly universal system? Rationing, triaging. The system is forced to decide who's eligible for medical resources. People show up at the "basic health unit" at 3 in the morning and stand in massive lines so they can try to get a consult. There's often a literal quota of how many exams doctors can order per period of time, even cheap blood tests. The amount of bureaucracy you need to go through to get something like a CT scan or even an ultrasound is truly incredible. It can literally take years just to get a consult with a specialist who will actually fill out the paperwork you need. When faced with all this, most people just give up. Some seek the private sector. Others seek the justice system which just pens out an order for the city to pay up, screwing over literally everything and everyone else. They do that with the private sector too, making it increasingly unprofitable.

So we have a population that demands the best from doctors even though they have few resources with which to provide care. There are places in this country where doctors don't even have a sink they can use to wash their hands and yet they are are expected to attend to patients and solve all their problems in ten minutes each. That's how poorly developed this country is. If you're a doctor in these parts, defensive documentation is a vital skill: you have to literally write down stuff like "I wanted to do X but couldn't because X wasn't available" lest they accuse you of criminal negligence. This is especially true in emergency care, there are places here where you're essentially practicing war medicine. Emergency care basically turned into a dead end job that only doctors fresh out of medical school accept so they can make some money while they prepre for residency. Anyone with options would rather work elsewhere where they can practice medicine with a minimum of quality.

So people expect you to do more with less, sometimes with nothing. Do they value your work more for it? No. Doctor salaries are decreasing, autonomy is decreasing, insatisfaction is increasing. Doctors themselves don't get even paid on time: government being like 3 months late on payments is very common today. Another common practice: some small town mayor offers ridiculously high salaries to attract doctors and then just stops paying them when the money runs out. Sometimes a judge will even prevent doctors from leaving due to lack of payment because apparently the people have a constitutional right to their slave labor. Result: doctors wised up and now these regions just don't get any medical assistance at all because you'd have to be stupid to accept a job there. As a result, Lula wants to import doctors from Cuba and put them to work there.

This is also a huge theme here. Government just blames it all on doctors. Doctors don't want to go work for free in some shitty undeveloped region or the literal Amazon jungle? It's because they're mercenaries who care only about money. Their solution isn't less corruption and actual development of the nation but turning the medical profession into cheap labor. Lula is literally quoted saying "we need to create a new generation of leftist doctors who accept working for less". His solution to all this is to flood the job market with doctors by importing them from Cuba, increasing the number of medical schools, you name it. Low quality medical schools created just to pocket the sweet government student loans, often without even so much as a hospital for students to practice in. Quality of doctors is declining. Doctors screwing up classic myocardial infarction cases are making national news. Government couldn't care less, politicians don't get treated at such places, they go to Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.

Brazilian healthcare isn't cheap either. It's just incredibly corrupt and eternally dependent on political will for funding. In the middle of the pandemic politicians got caught overpricing items like respirators and pocketing the difference. In the middle of the pandemic with everyone's eyes on them. Imagine the corruption that goes on in a normal day.

Brazilian health care system? Better than the USA? You gotta be kidding me.

In the US care, particularly specialist care, is both expensive and de facto rationed by lack of supply. Need a psychiatrist? No insurance accepted and a 3-6 month wait.

Hmm, not true in my experience. Family members have insurance paid psychiatric care and got their first appointments within a couple of weeks. I get that this is variable in different areas and insurance plans, but you stated no insurance and 3-6 months wait as general facts. That is incorrect.

Definitely variable - I am in Seattle and this is the state of affairs. When I was in NYC the same or worse. In WA state there are effectively zero in patient beds to the extent people in crisis are warehoused in ERs or jail. Where are you? Not specifically about wait time, curious where you rank. My experience in WA and NY ranks 11 and 15 in the US, so most Americans fare worse:

https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/mental-health-america-ac...

He's an economic migrant in a country where you don't need health insurance. He won't die.

You can with a lot less.

But the problem is, after a while, you get addicted to working. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

> Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

Status seeking is independent of economic system.

I find “capitalism” has become a placeholder word for “emergent systems we don’t like”. After all, ≈50% of GDP is government spending which is closer to socialism than we might like to admit.

The single biggest drive that seems to grease the wheels is our natural desire for status. For the middle class this often is shown by our property purchases - bidding against others until we can only just afford the repayments for a house in a nice neighbourhood. We then spend many working years trying to pay off the mortgage, and we often upgrade if we get more income.

It appears most obvious when we look at other cultures, where the drive for status shows up in other ways. For example a truck owner in Northern Pakistan spending equivalent of 7 months of wages adding custom bling to his truck: https://youtu.be/1quNm7Ctd-Q?t=21m58s although he justifies it “such decorations are good for business: shows the client I am doing well”.

Once we start talking about "a lot less" the options to not work become scarce.

For instance, my estimate is that with the minimum number of millions ($2M) one can support a family while unemployed in the USA and pretty much the rest of the world. With 4% SWR such family will have $80K per year, which is more than the median household income. They will pay little taxes and will qualify for a subsidized ACA health plan.

If you are talking about less than a million, you won't be able to support a family in US. It is possible in a 3rd world countries, but it is not always an option for a lot of people.

Millions of dollars of product (e.g. gross revenue) is a statement about scale and impact, not personal profit.

Let me answer you honestly and in depth:

Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge.

I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.

Money is also more than the ability to acquire toys. Money is power, and money is freedom. Money is time. Money can pay other people to save you time. You can save thousands of hours over the course of your life paying other people to mow your lawn, wash your car, paint your house, repair your engine, and re-tile your bathroom.

Money can buy you citizenship anywhere you want, and if war comes, you can just pay to fly away.

Money can establish schools, medical research orgs, and human rights charities. Money can buy media and reshape politics, or it can pay for scientific instruments that have no other funding, and it can secure the future for people (or other things) you care about. Paul Allen built a telescope array, the world's largest airplane, the living computer museum, a cell research institute and a brain research institute, and a ton of other fantastic stuff that would otherwise have no funding.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute is still one of the wealthiest charities in the world, he's been dead for 50 years and we are all still benefiting. That wouldn't be the case if he spent it all on yachts and mansions.

Money can keep an old-growth forest from turning into an apartment complex.

Money also makes all kinds of new things possible, and allows you to do things "The Right Way", i.e. to overengineer for the sake of beauty and reliability, cost be damned. Money can replace a cinderblock and plywood hovel with marble and oak. Money can build you a house that can ignore tornadoes and earthquakes. Money can pay engineers and machinists to create things that would never be commercially produced.

Money means I can work on what I want to work on: difficult and time-consuming things.

Money means I can buy the local schools all of the equipment I think the kids should have, and more importantly, I could pay for staff to make that equipment useful and not just sit in storage because none of the teachers understand telescopes or computers or 3D printers.

I could pay for our town to have a planetarium. On that note, if I were rich enough, I could embarass Zeiss and build the most ridiculous optical planetarium projector ever known.

Like it or not, money is also respect, awe even. I want to be the husband most wives could only dream of, in terms of success.

I want to buy my children education they can't get at school, by doing things with them the school cannot afford to do.

Money means you can participate in expensive hobbies that introduce you to people that you'd otherwise never meet. Those people are often interesting.

I want to set an example for my fellow citizen, and show them that it doesn't matter that we live in a shitty town in the middle of nowhere, if you just refuse to concede that our disadvantages cripple us, you can still win. We're human beings after all.

I don't even own a house yet, but I started another company 6 months ago, and this time I have no business partners to blame and no outside investors. It's all me. Moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world just makes it more fun, it's life on a higher difficulty setting. I relish the challenge.

I could probably rant about this for hours, it's not that we need the money, it's that without it, so much less is possible.

We (humans) just achieved fusion, and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.

You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted.

Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direction?

There's a balance to everything. We wouldn't be human without the ability to invent, to use tools, or to contemplate the future. We need to respect that power though, not lean into the shiny objects and power we can buy with a currency that itself is an entirely man-made system designed to feed a system of taxes and perpetual "growth".

This is a bad theory because it could apply to literally any time in the past or in the future. It’s infinitely variable and not falsifiable thus unscientific.

Meanwhile, progress (aka people trying to make the world better) will continue whether you like it or not, bringing benefits to practically everyone forever. Pessimists may temporarily stifle progress, but the genie has been out of the bottle for the last 400 years or so. Good luck trying to stop people from wanting better for themselves aka solving problems.

I specifically ended my comment saying we need to be responsible with this power, not abandon it completely.

I said nothing of pessimism or pessimists, or that progress shouldn't be made. I strongly question how you could possibly know that anything we do with the intent of making the world better could possibly bring benefits to practically everyone forever.

Everything has side effects and more often then not we can't predict them. What we do today with the best of intentions can be a huge mistake that we only realize years, decades, or centuries later. That doesn't mean we should hide in a cave and do nothing, but it does mean we need to be extremely careful with where we lean in and change things and where we don't.

I disagree to some extent that we should not change things just because we can: we grow beautiful ornamental gardens and weave silk and make cheese because these things please us and not necessarily because we need them; nature would never produce such order. We are the masters of our world. Nature, too, has merit, but nature makes flood and famine and disease -- we can engineer against those things.

Money is an instrument of labor also; it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources.

In fact, more efficiency (less resources used to produce a good) means more profit, doesn't it?

Money is the only reason a lot of endangered species are still alive. Here, rats eat ground-nesting bird eggs. Only money to build fences and island sanctuaries and establish breeding programs saved them.

> it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources

Arguably it's currently only possible to do so if you're rich, but as more and more rich people do so the marginal cost of living such a lifestyle decreases.

"humans shouldn't change things" is group-think that has pervaded morals & values.

Nobody really believes that. You're not living in a mud-hut. You've decided the balance should be less than whatever that guy said, but it's all relative. You are ridiculously wealthy and having such an incredibly outsized impact compared to any non-human animal that the relative difference between you and the GP is effectively nil.

See my last paragraph, we agree on this

You know, I'm re-reading your comment again later, and you're right about some of the things we do because we can being detrimental.

We don't often weigh those decisions, we do first and figure out the consequences later. That happens less now with environmental issues than it used to, but we do things just because we can, we fill the night sky with satellites and we build AI without pausing for even a moment to consider if we should. We may regret some of this later. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but we won't stop to figure that out in advance, we'll find out the hard way.

Still though, we eradicated smallpox, hedged famine in most countries, closed the ozone hole, build networks that allow instant global communication by wire instead of by ship.

It may all yet work out, we'll see.

This is wildly unhealthy and un-selfaware.

Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour. Sometimes, that's to the net benefit of the community, since the value of the labour involved is increased by a superior process. Often, that is to the net detriment of the community: for example, a landlord.

The reality is, the impact of a wealthy person is almost always small, and usually negative-on-net. That's why, in the thousands of historical examples of titanic changes brought about by new ideas or state-level policies, we have so few examples of wealthy people changing things for the better.

Who did JK Rowling underpay to get to the top ?

People can make money through success in positive sum games, which wouldn’t require exploiting other people.

Sure. It's just not the norm. JK Rowling is essentially one of a kind. The tech sector is an outlier too, in that it is normal for founders to be significant technical contributors. In most of the economy, rich people become rich through rent seeking.

If the problem is people gaining through rent seeking, then attack rent seeking itself, rather than rich people in general.

There are poor people who make money through rent seeking too, by playing zero sum games. These zero summers should be targeted rather than the entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and musicians who play positive sum games.

There are entire industries behind people like Rowling - book publishing, movie production, etc., subject to all the same exploitation of surplus value.

It’s similar to how we benefit from cheap manufacturing labor in other countries, performed by people we don’t know. Who did we underpay to get our luxurious lifestyles? The fact that we can’t name them is part of the sleight of hand that allows us to ignore the exploitation, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

> Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour

This is actually completely wrong. Believe it or not, many of the richest people get rich because they pay their employees more than they think they are worth.

Explain to me why you would hire somebody if they lose you money.

Value is subjective, you can't point to x worker and calculate exactly how much "value they create" to the company, because many things a company does are not possible or nearly impossible by individuals. If you calculated how much value each employee brings in by subtracting what the company would have made in their absence, that would often result in being more than the company makes for most high skilled jobs.

That's why I said worth not value. You can define what a person thinks they are worth by asking them.

Please provide just one example.

> I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.

Or perhaps energy disparity? The guy who serially starts companies and works from 3am in the morning is probably in the 99th percentile in terms of raw energy available to him.

> We (humans) just achieved fusion

There’s no sense in which that statement is true.

We’ve been doing fusion for 80 years. What was recently achieved was a small increase in efficiency of fusion. We’re really not all that much closer to being able to use it to generate useful power than the first fusion reactor 65 years ago. We’re still not even close to being able to produce more energy than we used to drive the reactor, and there’s a high probability that this won’t change in another 65 years.

> and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.

Not if it’s wasted on impractical ideas like commercial fusion power, or colonizing Mars. Money without intelligence behind it wastes resources and destroys the planet.

> you can still win

The true cost of this alleged “winning” isn’t measured in money.

Most interesting people are not in private clubs. A lot are in public forums, virtual or not, such as this.

If you're looking for wives that are impressed by monetary success I think you're in for a lot of disappointment, but to each their own.

You have a strange definition of “facts”.

Your first point, “America is a single market” is a fact, and a pretty uncontroversial one.

America being “geographically isolated from war” is conjecture. Whether Mexico will invade, or whether Pearl Harbor is part of your definition of “America” is irrelevant, it’s not a fact.

America “being able to produce everything” is not a fact and much too vague to ever be a fact. To begin with there are 20 mineral commodities that the US fully relies on imports to acquire. Could these be found in the US? We don’t know, and this is only one example, regardless it’s not a fact.

Americans being “ambitious to a fault” is not a fact, it’s your opinion and generalization based on the americans and non-americans you have met and interacted with.

A fact means something, it doesn’t mean “like an opinion but a really strongly held opinion”.

What are the 20 mineral commodities?

FWIW, the U.S. would be incredibly hard to invade. It does have a number of geographic advantages that no other country can match (not least of which is the Mississippi River system).

Even Pearl Harbor was a hit and run attack. No Japanese troops ever touched shore.

Technically Japanese troops did land in the Aleutians, but it accomplished essentially nothing useful. The US got some extra practice doing amphibious landings though.

A lot of the hard to invade stuff comes from having a bunch of guns and the world's strongest military. When it was inhabited by Native Americans the Brits, French etc. managed to invade ok.

We didn't have the world's strongest military until WWII, and even then, we had to ramp up to that.

The Brits, Spaniards and French didn't invade, they established colonies. These colonies actively engaged in trade and defense agreements with various native American tribes. At various times different tribes were aligned with one European nation or another, with the most famous example being the French and Indian War, with the Iroquois and Cherokee allying with the British and the Wabanaki, Abenaki, Shawnee, etc allying with the French.

Native American tribes and nations had deep seated rivalries and disputes going back centuries (just as the Europeans did), so there never was any kind of single unified America until the U.S. expanded across the continent.

Notably the British did not succeed in the War of Independence or the War of 1812, despite having a superior military and navy.

Consider Japan:

(fact) a single market with a single language

(fact) geographically isolated

(fact) not much space

(fact) burned to the ground in WW2

and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories.

So what is the common thread? Free markets.

mortgage slavery is the common thread

for some reason this motivates people. primordial need for land ownership. the call of the feudalism.

engine runs out of steam once the growing cabal of landlords eat the last marginal production in excess of rate of interest

america has more land relative to its population so takes longer to nimbify it all

Why?

Seems to me owning what you create is the key, instead of having it ripped from your hands.

As if you can cleanly define "what you create". Or "you". Or "create".

Back to the philosophy playpen, John G.

I mean, yeah?

Markets are great at finding how much something is worth. uhhhh

Want to give some examples?

No examples needed. You can't adequately define "what you create", because nobody can. Where does your contribution begin, and end? Where does the contribution of your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your society begin, and end? To what extent did you create anything, or was it just a remix? Is everything a remix? Who are you? You have a unified, continuous sense of self, but most contemporary psychology finds it fairly easy to take people through processes that break this down (as do a number of psychedelics).

We don't need simplistic randian objectivism - it fails to describe the nuance, the beauty, the depth, the wonder, the complexity and the truth of reality.

If it wouldn't exist without your efforts, then you created it. There's no mystery to it. People freely willing to pay for it with their own money is sufficient evidence.

But if it wouldn't exist without other's people efforts too, then what? And they may be people you don't know. They may be people who are dead.

"paying with their own money" ... ack, not this simplistic nonsense again. People temporarily gain control over some measure of various economic resources. It's not their own money, beyond some temporary mutual agreement. Tomorrow, it may not be.

Also, people pay for things regardless of the creator or the morality of its creation. Their willingness to pay for something speaks to their relationship with the thing, not that of the thing's nominal "creator".

You’re mixing different levels of abstraction and equivocating across them.

Sure, no human could produce anything modern on their own, without knowledge, training, support, materials, products, labor, etc. that comes from others. A child raised by wolves will never launch a new line of tennis shoes.

At the same time, no complex effort comes to be without someone’s motivation and effort to take the risk, coordinate the activity and see it through. It doesn’t have to be one primary person to do so, but it certainly can be. It is not difficult to look at the history of a given project and conclude who most acutely put it into motion. The choice to incentivize this acute influence has trade-offs, but many different societies across history have tried many variations of what / where to incentivize. Abstracted, that’s one of the main points being discussed here.

That doesn’t mean all stories about who started / created / produced something are told accurately. But to throw your hands up and say “everything comes from everyone” is completely useless when designing society with the goal of solving problems, providing for its members and improving the human condition.

I didn't say "everything comes from everyone".

I said "nothing comes one person".

Ergo, there is no "what you create", at least in the sense of being able to point at something and say "I did that, it is my creation".

Sure, we may use this a shorthand for situations where the proximal effort came from one person. But it's just a shorthand, and should not obscure the deeper truth.

I'm not discussing the general thrust of TFA or the overall comment thread, just another randian and their simplistic ideas about how the world works.

Oh knock it off.

By your logic you can’t even define what a definition is so your whole schtick goes poof.

Bad unfalsifiable philosophy like this is why people hate philosophy. You’re just deliberately confusing people and trying to make yourself seem clever by sucking people into this silly definitions game.

This sounds like you're in favor of giving weight to religious arguments in economics. But I doubt that you'd agree with that idea. The fact is that some things cannot be determined with sufficient precision and inclination to be dismissive of this fact creates its own problems.

Please give examples!

Ok no examples _needed_ but please provide some.

I made software that helps my clients. I sell it for $1000/mo. I get $1000/mo and pay taxes on it. I have created $1000/mo.

Please explain what's not fair about this? The intricate nuance I'm missing? LOL

Let's say I work with one other person and pay them $1/hr, which they accept. They make my idea. I end up paying them like 100 and I make 1000/mo forever

Where's the nuance there?

1. you didn't create $1000/mo. You did something that caused the (temporary) transfer of control over $1000/mo of economic resources into your hands. That means that what you did was not judged as useless by everyone else in the society where you live - and that's good!

But the value of your software is utterly contingent on the full context of where you live. As many have noted, there are many highly paid jobs in (say) the USA that would simply have no value if you attempted to perform them in, say, Sudan (especially right now). So that $1000/mo is predicated on the work that others have done to create a context where your work actually has some value. Take that context away (or destroy it), and your work is close to worthless. So, where does the value in your work actually come from? No doubt some comes from you ... but how much is a lot harder to define.

2. I never said anything about fair.

3. I have no idea what your $1/hr example is intended to demonstrate.

1. What caused the transfer? If not value creation, why was it worth transferring? LOL

2. Ok, so capitalism is fair, then? you get paid what you're worth and control that value privately ... uhh...?

3. Explain the nuance of ownership there, what am I missing that makes it unfair?

> more land

So does S. America, which has never been prosperous.

argentina and venezuela have gone through periods of prosperity. Rule of law is too unstable for the system to get off the ground. Also political intervention by foreign actors, resource curse.

The great thing about free markets is that any country can do it. Free people thrive wherever they are.

Plenty of underdeveloped countries are free markets as well.

China is attempting to show that not even democracy is needed to be prosperous.

>>Plenty of underdeveloped countries are free markets as well.

All less developed free market economies have been free markets since relatively recently.

The wealthiest economies are generally those that adopted market based rules the earliest, e.g. the Anglosphere and North West Europe, which were free market based since the 19th century.

> Plenty of underdeveloped countries are free markets as well.

Example?

And you're right that democracy is not a requirement for free markets, though they usually go together.

Somalia and Yemen are about as free market as it gets.

(fact) Karoshi

I won't claim to know anything else about Japan. Would love to visit, but I'm not sure I'd love to be part of its economy as a salary man.

The Japanese directly intervened in their manufacturing companies, and shaped their economy via the Bank of Japan to "rebuild" and grow their economy. They also have a notoriously closed (to outsiders) economy.

Cuba's economy is closed to outsiders. Didn't make them prosperous. They have a state run bank, too. Didn't make them prosperous.

Whilst your comparison is problematic on the grounds that Cuba suffered from decades of economic sanctions, it still manages to do better than similar nearby economies, Haiti, Jamaica, etc.

The point I was making was that the person I was replying to was claiming that Japan's economic prosperity was due to it have a "free market" which it does not (unless you count socialism for the companies as "freedom").

One other thing that should be noted about the Japanese "miracle" is the fact that, at a crucial point in time, their manufacturing got a huge cash shot from the USA, due to a need for vehicles for the Korean War.

The USA has given huge cash shots to many countries, and no miracle resulted. Afghanistan, for a recent example. All that foreign aid money, which does not produce any visible results.

All that money probably had very visible results in places like Dubai?

> suffered from decades of economic sanctions

Protecting an economy is the same thing as economic sanctions. You can't claim that one results in prosperity while the other explains economic malaise.

> which it does not

It certainly does. It wasn't a perfect free market, though, as nothing human is perfect. But it was close enough to do the job.

BTW, I wrote that it was a free market.

>> suffered from decades of economic sanctions > Protecting an economy is the same thing as economic sanctions. You can't claim that one results in prosperity while the other explains economic malaise.

Uh, no.

Hard no.

> BTW, I wrote that it was a free market.

Yes, I realised it after I posted, but did not care to update what other people can see for themselves.

Embargo - hitting the other guy's foot with a hammer

Protectionism - hitting your own foot with a hammer

Brexit - swinging at your foot with a hammer and hitting your head.

How do you understand US subsidies on EV, only applying to US manufacturers?

Japan doesn’t have a nearby superpower that makes sabotaging your entire economy a yearly campaign point in order to prove your country sucks. Cuba’s had that for well over half a century.

The US was very helpful in protecting Cuba from the competition from the US economy.

Somehow, that didn't work out for Cuba.

Probably because every powerful economy of the past 6 centuries got there due to strong trade, which the US has gone out of its way to prevent Cuba from doing.

No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.

And yet the same people say that protectionism is good for the economy.

But protectionism is often good and necessary for a country's economy. If country A cannot produce a good x, then another country B can stifle A's technology growth for producing x by selling x outright at a cost A can not produce the good at (yet). If you ban the import/restrict of x from country B, you will have to pay some fixed costs to get the production of x up to speed; but you will end up with cheaper unit costs in the end. The catch is, you can not ban all imports outright because importing the technology to produce x will probably save you years on R&D and related costs. Like everything in economics, doing things are good and bad at the same time.

Protectionism takes many form and is controlled by the country doing it.

For instance subsidies for US EV véhicules in 2023 is protectionism and will probably benefit US company.

The US do that a lot for a free market proponent.

As opposed to sanction where it’s something that is imposed to you.

You mean sanctions?

That's what sanctions are. Protecting another country from your economy.

Cuba can’t control those sanctions. Protectionism imply that it’s a choice to bootstrap a sector.

For instance : Biden subsidies on EV véhicules apply to US companies only. That’s protectionism.

EU subsidies for EV works with any brands. So the subsidies money are currently going to Chinese EV manufacturers.

Cuba is in a unique position to be a ridiculously wealthy country. They can flaunt US long-arm jurisdiction (ie: FATCA) and act as a safe heaven for US/EU monies. The embargo on Cuba is pretty much self-imposed by the their current regime.

Yeah, being a criminal safe haven right next to a country that has no problem supporting terrorists and dropping bombs on civilian targets is a wonderful idea. Can’t imagine why they never tried it.

Communism doesn't have a great economic track record.

That kind of depends, the Asian countries that are communist seem to have struck a balance between capitalism and communism that suits them (China, Vietnam)

The DPRK seems to be a basket case, with regular crop failures (we are told), but its relationship with China ensures that it continues to survive.

Capitalism in countries like the USA seems to work for part of their population, but not all, there are large swathes of poverty and homelessness, and the disparity between the haves and have nots is enormous.

The whole point of an economic system, whether it be Capitalism, Socialism, or the more common middle ground (almost every country has struck a balance between the two, with Welfare states, public housing, public health, etc), is to ensure that resources are managed such that they provide for the population.

Capitalism is great at a micro level, people get to decide for themselves how to spend their time, what they want to eat/drink/wear/grow on their farms, and so forth.

But, it's absolutely horrendous at a state/macro level - can you imagine roading being multiple companies competing by putting half a dozen roads between yourself and your work? Emergency services have tried that model (Fire engines used to be owned by one insurance company, or another, and you would have a label on your home letting the crews know which insurance company you were insured by, so if the wrong fire crew showed up they would just watch as your home burnt down)

It's super easy to say "Capitalism has incentivised innovation" but the Soviets were ahead of the USA in several engineering fields, without capitalism (their incentive was competition with the USA)

Yeah. It's everything state owned that doesn't work very well eg. China in the 60s. But some stuff state owned, some free enterprise can work well eg. China in the 2000s. Or most of the west.

Curiously some of the problems that state ownership has also show up in capitalism - corporations that centralise decision making lose the ability to make fine grained, optimal local condition decisions.

And bureaucracy becomes a major headache.

A very common refrain at the moment is businesses wanting to be "nimble like start ups" but are unable to do so due to a myriad of reasons.

Not to mention the crucial land reform project targeting landlords:

> The government forced absentee landlords to sell all their land to the government. Farmers were allowed to own a small amount of farm land that they could rent out to others ( 2.5 acres or one hectare in most parts of Japan, and 10 acres or 4 hectares in Hokkaido), and had to sell any excess to the government. The government then sold this land, usually to the tenant who had been farming it. The result greatly improved the living conditions of farmers.

http://www.crosscurrents.hawaii.edu/content.aspx?lang=eng&si...

Given the political climate in the US — with accusations of socialism flying left and right — it is fascinating that they were able to conceive and execute literal redistribution of farmland and that is has been held up as a exemplary example of successful reforms. Perhaps there is more to the story, punishing the social class/monied interests that prosecuted the war?

There was considerable appetite for socialism immediately after the war, and the US officials of the early occupation were notably progressive (New Dealers, basically). As US-Soviet relations soured over the next 5 years, a lot of reforms were walked back or discarded, but some were obviously irreversible.

Japan's prosperity did not stem from agriculture.

Japan is a relatively populous single market with a single language -- about 125 million people at present. It's smaller than the USA, at about 332 million; but almost 60% larger than the most populous Western European country, Germany.

Your data are wrong.

Germany is home to approximately 83 million people. Japan 126 million. Japan is 40% bigger than Germany, not 60%.

US is roughly 334 million. Europe is rougly 748 million, of which the EU is roughly 447 million.

What data is wrong?

Germany is the most populous Western European country. The figures that you quote for the EU have nothing do with the comparison we're making in this thread.

I don't see how the figure for a percentage that you're quoting is compelling in any way:

126 / 1.6 = 78.75

126 / 1.4 = 90

1.6 * 83 = 132.8

1.4 * 83 = 116.2

(fact) Market was not free, US imports were taxed for decades and Japanese exports to the US were not effectively subsidizing Japanese economy for political reasons

Nothing is a perfect free market. One can still reap the benefits of free markets without them being perfect.

> So what is the common thread? Free markets.

Not when it comes to Japan.

During the post-war boom era the majority of its largest businesses were conglomerates with interlocking ownership structures that prevented accountability to shareholders. In addition to that a large amount of corporate investment was state-directed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).

It was an effective system (at least for a time) but not one that can be accurately described as driven by free markets.

This is not as cut and dried as you suggest.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato...

Cato has a pretty clear pro-market anti-regulation stance so this isn’t a surprising article from them.

Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes.

The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully turned the corner to being functioning democracies that are still driving economic growth rather than devolving into corrupt dictatorships.

And of course the biggest (in scale) economic success story of our time is China the last couple decades - which is not a democracy at all as well as having massive government intervention and ownership.

China was an economic backwater until they implemented free markets. The Chinese miracle is probably the biggest and most obvious example of how important free markets are to growth.

Not just free market, and not completely free markets (there’s a lot of government regulation, intervention and ownership). More specifically they followed Singapore’s model.

Tell me how Singapore is a democracy ?

They have elections and the government follows the wishes of the people to some extent even if it doesn't change over much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy_in_Si...

While I agree with you that free markets are a very powerful benefit to any state, you're biased in favor of it being the driver of America's success. America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and unimaginable amounts of diverse resources. These alone make for a very powerful state, no matter what system you have. Now add in that it's populace has more small armaments than every other armed forces in the world combined (including it's own), and the free markets, you get a pretty unbeatable recipe, unless theres another continent nobody knows about lurking around the corner waiting to be discovered.

"America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and unimaginable amounts of diverse resources."

If those matter so much, Mexico should be much stronger than it is. Unblockable access to two oceans, big population, reasonable amount of resources.

What is lacking is rule of law...

Well, yes, but that explains other phenomena that lead to this. Mexico has had a lot of state blunders in the past 150 years that have led to it being behind the US, and the US got there first. Once someone gets there, they necessarily have to try to prevent someone else from doing so. Mexico could've, but they made a lot of mistakes along the way that set them behind. Lawlessness is a symptom of these blunders.

It's hard to know who's best when you don't play fair

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

Is the US somehow unique in history for this?

If the US is simply better at it, isn't that relevant?

It's not like other (former) superpowers didn't do the exact same things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_involvement_in_regime_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_regime_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Third_World_relations

Touché. I suppose inwardly focused benevolent systems wouldn't spread because they wouldn't want overthrow other systems

Can a benevolent system be inwardly focused? How benevolent is it to ignore your neighbor?

If we say that it's not a pretend virtue to care about democracy and freedom around the world, then wouldn't it would be a reasonable imperative to interact with the world?

I think you're right, but I'd like to add, a lot of rhetoric surrounds this idea that America is as successful as it is because of freedom. And I like freedom, and it has played a role, but it isn't really true.

America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the original local inhabitants of which mostly no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when it was settled. It has direct access to both the edges of the great old world continent of Eurasia in the form of coasts on both oceans. It has an absolutely massive population, and the government has smartly invested in the past in infrastructure to transport between them both over land.

In past times, america drained the population of the leading power center at the time, Europe, to populate itself. This held back it's competition at a time when the ability to produce depended on the number of hands and minds at your disposal. It currently has the third largest population of any one government in the world. It is also currently doing this to other regions of the world, although comparatively less with the population boom resulting from largely American technological advances decreasing infant mortality.

There have been various theories about the grand chessboard throughout history, ideas like "whoever controls central Asia controls the world", " whoever controls the seas controls the world" and "if one power has control of all of Europe they can then move on to control the world", all with various levels of truth to them (Genghis Khan controlled central Asia for example), and the grand chessboard was tossed into the air when the continent was discovered, but that wasn't really realized until the west coast was discovered. There are ways to threaten America's position, but as long as one polity controls both coasts and the land in between it's mostly safe. You can institute any form of government and it will be a major force, maybe not the big guy, but just the territory and population itself is built to be powerful.

In addition to siphoning wealth, America has been very successful in siphoning talent. Which is why this kind of news should be pretty concerning:

https://sciencebusiness.net/news-byte/scientists-leave-uk-ch...

I imagine 99% of the scientists moving to China were originally from China, and decided to return rather than stay in the US.

I don't think many non-Chinese foreigners are learning Chinese to move to China and chase the "Chinese dream" the way people do in America.

I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations

My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.

To outsiders, this dogmatic 'exceptionalism' appears revolting.

My 2c.

What is exceptionalism and what is cultural values? Is it equally revolting if Europeans are proud of a culture of having & taking long parental leave?

It resonates with me because it describes me. It’s not uniquely American, but it still describes me & the (American immigrant) culture I grew up in.

I don't think it's any different from the French being proud of their work life balance.

Am outsider and not revolted, nor consider it particularly exceptionalist, now you have 4 cents

I chuckled and cheered at the same time. It is who I am; it is who we are. "The chief business of America is business." - Coolidge

As a fellow American, I can't really identify with some of these points. You seem weirdly almost perversely proud of the idea of overworking oneself, towards what end, economical? I mean it's not as if there is any intrinsic purpose to life anyway, but this one feels rooted in some long-lost rags to riches Horacio Alger Gilded Age.

He's willing to die trying to.... export things lol.

> On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.

Can I ask why you chose to move to NZ considering the rest of your comment? Do you intend to move back to the USA in the near future?

I have never seen any evidence that Americans are more ambitious than people from other nationalities. No studies, nothing. Not have I even ever heard a theoretical reasoning why this would be the case. I assume it's just the general "my group is the best" baseless bragging.

Not sure studies would be particularly helpful for that, anecdotes and feelings are the best you'll get. But FWIW it's been my experience that Americans are more ambitious than people from other countries, including myself.

If you're not from the US and you meet people in the course of business, then obviously the people you meet are going to be more ambitious. It's selection bias. That's what it takes to reach across the ocean to seek out new business opportunities.

I've had friends who never left the US that I made via random channels - chatrooms and the like - and they also were more ambitious and entrepreneurial than me. Yes, people with programming skills so that biases it a lot, but, I also knew plenty of people with such skills in Europe. The difference was quite visible.

> in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time

Where the h. is this?

I will add that US is a strong "legal platform" for business. It has a very good law system and with more complex cases as precedents that other countries in world. It has also extra territorial reach.

> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault.

All 350 million of them?

And if you mean 'some of them are ambitious', surely you will have to accept that there are people in other countries who also share that property?

Culture is real.

Americans tend to be optimistic and positively inclined towards entrepreneurship. This is often refected in business practices and regulations.

The only thing those business practices and regulations reflect is that the 'entrepreneurs' get a lot of political and regulatory rights, and the people who work for them get very few.

That kind of arrangement works out very well for the former, but just because a king is doing well for himself doesn't mean that the serfs are 'positively culturally inclined towards autocracy.'

----

A country's regulations and politics aren't an average of its culture. They are an average of the culture of the politically powerful. All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.

[1] Way less powerful than incumbents, but for some strange reason, it's not sexy to point at Comcast and Kaiser and Exxon-Mobil and Wells Fargo as examples of brilliant entrepreneurship.

Way to move the goalposts.

> All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.

I haven't demonstrated anything yet. I've only asserted things.

OP is pointing out relative differences and more importantly, culture. The very concept of the "American Dream" is proof positive of that.

"(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations."

I'm probably being pedantic, but: the "single set of regulations" really is an oversimplification. Each state has it's own rules in addition to Federal regulations (trying selling cars in California that meet Federal emissions standards, but not California's). Plus, there are state taxes to consider.

Compared to the difference in regulations between France and Germany, _let alone_ the difference between France and Nigeria, US states have very little to differentiate them.

> The consequences of failure in America are lower;

Several fellow commenters have already pointed out as the contrary is actually true, and I'd like to add a corollary: risking everything you have in a business is simpler in the USA than abroad because the society knows that they will lend a helpful lend should you lose everything.

Safety nets are a thing worldwide, and they cost money; thus some responsibility is imposed to each individual in order to limit the risks.

> they will revoke your passport for some time.

Ow, I never heard of this?

> They also have no access to capital, essentially.

This is like the most foundamentally important issue and you have in tucked away in a minor point

Raise invesment in US, you get $million for a minor stake in the company

Raise investment in UK, you get $100 K for a minor stake

Raise investment in Czech republic, you get $50K for 51%

Raise investment in Russia, they break your legs if you don't pay back. They don't understand thw difference between investment and debt.

And if you die they will pursue your family for your debts.

Raise investment in Zimbabwe.. I don't even know.

This is in jest, but the overall point is roughly this:

Non-westerners cringe when they hear 'Don't take China's money for Belt and road, it's a trap'. In 2nd/3rd world, securing capital for non-elites is impossible even if you just came up with a working fusion reactor.

The relevant amount of money isn't just with strings attached, it can be dangerous to life and limb.

> Americans are ambitious to a fault

Plenty of ambitious people in Russia, the problem is their activity is usually something detrimental to society.

Consider the dominance hierarchy

The top of American society is a billionaire entrepreneur, not sure where to place politicians, maybe a distant third. Civil servants are basicallt nobodys, they are treated worse than people working in the private sector, called lazy, etc.

Top of a society in Russia is FSB/ Security services. Second is politicians. Third is civil servants. Fourth is organised crime bosses. What do all these people have in common? They have the powet to ruin your life. And they use it.

Entrepreneurs are like 6th person down the food chain, and they are preyed upon by the layers above.

https://www.rferl.org/a/newspaper-says-russian-businessman-r...

This is also what the right wing does not understand, when life gets harsh, life of crime becomes more attractive. The world becomes god-eat dog, a man who didn't take advantage of a situation to enrich himself, is not an uostanding citizen. He is a loose who failed to peovide for his family.

The consequences of failure in America are higher, that’s why we work so hard. You are a millionaire, or you are homeless. The in between is a hard and continuous struggle to get to the former and avoid becoming the latter.

So which one are you, millionaire or homeless?

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