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Comment by mplewis | Hacker News Reader

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The US is #10 in the world in PPP-adjusted social spending per capita, at $9734. The Czech republic is #25, at $5799: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...

Edit: To compare further: By median PPP-adjusted income, the US is #2, at $46k, while the Czech Republic is #26, at $21k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

By homicide rate, the US is #53, at 6.8, while the Czech Republic is #184, at 0.4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Let this be a lesson on the importance of economy for a people's well-being.

Spending is a very bad metric. You can spend all your money with nothing to show for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...

By democracy index in 2022, CZ is 25th place, US is 30th.

Right below the US, #31, is Slovenia, with a 0.4 homicide rate. #34 is Italy, with a 0.5 homicide rate. Singapore is #70, with a 0.1 homicide rate, and China is #156, with a 0.5 homicide rate.

the democracy index is computed based on 5 categories, the homicide rate is not directly related to any of those.

I was addressing the perceived implication that a lack of democracy worsens crime.

I wonder how much US healthcare prices skew that figure.

The US spends the most money while getting the worst results in many areas. It's a corrupt, unequal, third-world country with homeless favelas in most major cities and no universal healthcare.

My take is that the US is just very violent compared to the other rich countries.

It's by some margin, the richest of the "regular" rich countries.

US cities are very violent compared to other prosperous countries, for a large part due to the politics of those places. The rest of the US is not nearly as violent.

To the down-voter: Instead of clicking that down-vote arrow in a (tiring) attempt to get this post greyed-out it would be far more enlightening to learn why you do not agree with what is written here. What, if anything, is incorrect about what I wrote here?

It's very violent on average, but that violence isn't evenly distributed. Most middle-class Americans have nothing to fear on a daily basis. The violence is driven almost entirely by poor black and brown men living in cities and often involved in violent crime. If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe. Some people can't handle this, so I'll say up-front: I think ignoring the problem means you are part of the problem, and a problem of this magnitude (the murder rate in the U.S.) deserves a solution. Part of that solution is changing social norms so that we can actually, you know, figure out what's going on...right now honest research into this is de facto banned.

Anyway, I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people:

White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3

White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2

White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8

The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 raw numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people on average. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). Hispanics are also included in "White" by the U.S. census (and they murder at higher rates than non-Hispanic Whites). Insofar as cities don't report to the UCR (like New York), if they were to report it would make the Black murder rate go up. Murder clearance ("solved") rates are abysmal in the U.S., 60-something percent on average, but are low where young black men do a lot of killing and higher elsewhere; Black Americans are more likely to get away with murder than non-Black Americans, so adjusting for that drives the Black murder rate still higher. It depends on your assumptions, but Black American men 15-35 murder at something like 50x the rate of the rest of the population.

FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...

I think you are mistaken. By the original definition the US could never be anything but a first world country. In modern usage first-world and third-world are anachronistic ways of saying developed or developing economies. I don’t see any possible argument for the US not having a developed economy as long as the dollar is the world’s benchmark currency.

It’s been described as an entire country that Gucci belts.

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