Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Or rather, admittedly from an European POV, Americans seem to be kindly, trusting and helpful towards members of their own sub-group, and quite the contrary to those they deem "lesser" in status - the poor, the disabled, people of color.

That makes it all the easier for rich vultures to pit Americans against one another - to the tune of it being the subject of a very valid joke:

> A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies. The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: "Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away."

View on HN

> Americans seem to be kindly, trusting and helpful towards members of their own sub-group, and quite the contrary to those they deem "lesser" in status - the poor, the disabled, people of color.

As a European, I can assure you we share these traits. Try asking one how they feel about local Romani, African or Syrian refugees, foreign beggars, etc.

Or about inherited wealth. America at least has better social mobility, for now.

Absolutely not. The US doesn't even make the top 20.

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

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

its a common misconception, since that was sold to the public for the last 100+ years.. but not, actually, the demographics in recent decades show less social mobility overall, as compared to other developed nations in the same time periods..

source: Pew research reports and other

Social mobility requires a society that allows you to fail but stil pick you up afterwards. America doesn’t.

No, social mobility does not need that. And no, America has some (imperfect, but quite wide) social safety net.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_safety_net

In my experience it is the opposite. Americans give about 3x as much per capita to charity as Germans, for example. In continental Europe generally you will also see strong anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments expressed in casual, middle class society that I haven’t seen to anywhere near the same degree in the U.S.

A huge fraction of that charity is donations to the church one is a member of, much of which money goes to church salaries, property maintenance, etc. If we included country club dues and gym memberships in the German charity numbers, perhaps the "charitable giving" numbers would be closer.

Donations to religious organizations were about 28% of donations in the U.S. If you excluded all of the charitable donations to churches, the U.S. numbers would still be more than twice as much as Germany.

Also, while a large part of the religious donations go to the operation of the church, churches do a lot of other charitable activities such as food pantries, shelters, disaster relief, education, etc.

Having lived in both places, charity is simply much more of a part of the culture in the U.S. I think the general feeling in Germany was that taking care of people in trouble was the job of the government and that they paid their taxes and that doing more was not necessary.

That's definitely a case that can be argued.

Social problems often make more sense to attack at a governmental level.

When you have a patchwork of different charitable initiatives, often regionally bounded, they can easily fall victim to tunnel vision. You end up with solutions like "we solved the poor care metrics in Facility A by shipping the worst cases to Facility B" and then nobody's checking if Facility B is actually worse.

Individual charity also tends to have the problem of awkward consumer choices. well-marketed and mediagenic causes out-raise less appetizing ones that might produce more impact for the same investment. Getting this information into the hands of a few professional analysts and budgeters may be easier than trying to run a broad PR campaign.

The real pisser: the overwhelming majority of those "charities" are either fundamentalist religious organizations with deeply troubling agendas or thinly camouflaged tax shelters for the obscenely wealthy. Ain't that a kick in the head?

That’s funny, when we look at Europeans we see the same thing.

Europeans freak out at levels of immigration that are normal in the US.

To be fair lots of European countries have immigration levels comparable to or greater than the US, although a sizeable amount of those immigrants are other Europeans. And it's not like the US "build the wall" isn't also having a moment.

If we are being real, isn't the banker probably from Europe though?

> and quite the contrary to those they deem "lesser" in status - the poor, the disabled, people of color.

At least it is better than Europe which spent the first few decades of the 1900s exterminating them by the millions.

Even now, Europe won’t allow foreigners to assimilate. Name any major EU company led by a non-white person. Even today at football games all over Europe, non-white players are openly subjected to horrific racial abuse by the crowds.

Europe is still horribly racist towards any outsiders. Yet, living in their ethnically homogeneous countries they cast stones at the USA which has actually assimilated and welcomed people from all over the world.

Not EU (and I'm British so I'll stick to the UK), but:

* Rishi Sunak is literally our Prime Minister.

* Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London.

* Wael Sawan, the CEO of Shell, the biggest UK company, is Lebanese.

* C. S. Venkatakrishnan is the CEO of Barclays, HQ'd in London and one of the worlds biggest banks.

* Johnny Boufarhat is the founder of Hopin, an online meetings platform that exploded during COVID. While it's in some trouble now and I'm not a fan, Johnny's parents are Lebanese and Syrian, although he's from Australia.

Seriously dude, this stuff isn't hard to find. What kind of warped vision do you have of Europe here?

I've worked in the UK for decent stints of time.

As a brown guy, I have definetly faced much more microaggressions and "do you belong here" type conversations in the UK than I ever have growing up and working in the US.

Your comment is the equivalent of saying "Obama was president, blacks don't face racism anymore".

My comment was a very specific answer to the line:

> Name any major EU company led by a non-white person

(although the UK is no longer in the EU)

I meant nothing else other than answering that line.

If anything, take it up with parent comment, someone who believes non-white people are incapable of running large companies in Europe.

Fair enough!

> Name any major EU company led by a non-white person.

Shell (nominally UK but founded and well known as Royal Dutch Shell) is the largest EU(ish) company, headed by Lebanese-Canadian Wael Sawan.

Exor (Italy/Netherlands) is #10, headed by Indian Ajaypal Singh Banga.

Please, check your facts before making prejudicial claims again. And don't try "No True Scotsman" because it would just be too funny in this context.

> ethnically homogeneous countries

Wut? Europe is anything but ethnically homogenous.

The US is anything but welcoming now. It might have been in the past.

> Wut? Europe is anything but ethnically homogenous.

You are right. I forgot how diverse countries like Belgium are where Flemish, French, and German communities (whose ancestors all likely were born within a few hundred miles of each other) all live together in peace and harmony (other than when they try to form a government)

I think you have a slightly different impression of Europeans than me.

We mildly dislike all the other nationalities (except the French, everyone hates the French), but we have a few thousand years of history fighting each other and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort any more.

All of that falls to nothing compared to the dislike some people have for the European version of the Mexicans stealing our jobs (hence, far right populism in Europe rising sharply right now)

Never mind that none of the ethic Europeans wants to do those jobs in the first place. I’m sure we’ll figure it out in 100 years or so. When everyone will be some variety of brown/yellow/pink.

It’s wild seeing US centric and Euro centric povs. How do both sides not see the problem with the Global North as a whole. The lack of self awareness between the Great Powers is interesting.

The UK, one of the largest European countries, is led by someone from Indian descent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com