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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

There’s probably not one single benchmark (and I won’t say that all of them are negative in the US) but we can just think generally about the things we’d like in a good life:

Life expectancy. Chronic disease rates. Suicide rates. Depression rates. Violent crime rates. Marriage rates. Home ownership rates. Education rates. Debt rates. Labor participation rates. Wealth inequity.

No one metric is a complete picture but together they tell a story. If America was a product and the above was on a dashboard, you would fire the CEO.

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Anyone who has visited China 25 years ago, and visited today, wouldn't argue that quality of life has not improved as a whole.

As for America, it is very debatable.

FWIW, the dashboard idea...was on the 2020 Presidential Candidate. Andrew Yang's platform.

70% of these metrics are solved in China (or most places in Asia) through methods that most people in this thread would be vehemently against. You can put the mentally-ill back into sanatoriums, enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime, and pay an economic underclass a pittance to clean your streets if you wish.

Unfortunately for Americans, it's not the CEO at fault here actually, it's the middle class and left-leaning/progressive that are directly responsible for many of the problems here. The funny thing is that Republican Party being in complete power with Trump would be more similar to the CCP than the Democrats or Progressives. Suppressing dissenting voices like Pro-Palestine in order to force national homogenity is a big part of that.

And I say this as someone who supported Biden and Kamala, but these left-wingers or libertarians who are so vehemtly opposed to the US Gov but then simp for China are just being childishly incoherent.

> enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime

In the Bay Area the median response to petty crime is zero consequences for the criminal. This is because in practice criminals are not caught or punished.

If the cost of having laws enforced is that we need better surveillance (read: more security cameras) then guess what? We are already heavily surveilled.

Does authoritarianism and over policing cause their QoL to rise while ours is debatable? Their middle class is rising, ours is nearly dead. Their years of salary to purchase a home is decreasing, ours is almost a full lifetime. We have more people per capita in prison than they do. We have rising obesity rates. Rising chronic illness rates. We are now surveiling our own populations social media to find reasons to kick them out just like they do.

So please let me know how locking up more people and paying an economic underclass to clean our streets will help us achieve all those goals? Crime, I get it, but how is what you claimed going to solve our health and financial issues?

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