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Comment by unpopularopp | Hacker News Reader

I will generalize but by my experience most Americans I have met just can't fathom to pay (= taxed) for some common good. Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking? Why should I pay for someone's free train ticket when I only travel by car? This I saw across all genders, age groups, and political affiliation. Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet. It's good for some things like innovation (see the HN crowd) but not necessarily a benefit for the society.

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Americans are literally socially selected for that mindset. Around the world, the vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries: https://news.gallup.com/poll/652748/desire-migrate-remains-r.... Even in sub-saharan africa, only 37% would emigrate if they had the choice. In asia it’s single digits. So a large share of America’s population is literally made up of the most antisocial 10-20% of the population that would leave, along with their descendants.

I want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait, and generally whether we can say anything useful about people living today based on the choices of their ancestors several generations back.

People emigrated from Europe to America because they were out of options. It was not a case of throwing away all of your possessions to go on an adventure. Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth, and your older brother already inherited the farm, or your family did not own any land in the first place. Or perhaps you couldn't even find an apprenticeship.

Keep in mind that all of Europe existed in an extremely rigid social hierarchy with practically zero mobility. Most people in Europe lived in abject poverty. America offered some social mobility, at least to those who came there by choice.

> want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait

About half the variation in personality traits is biologically heritable: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55834023. Even political ideology is moderately heritable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...

On top of that, there’s social transmission of values within families. Much of the country descends from 20th century immigrants, where the effect of the immigrant generation is still prominent. Much of the rest of the country descends from people who left their civilized east coast and settled the frontier.

> Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth

This isn’t any different in much of asia or africa today. Most people are content with their place in the world without abandoning all their kinship ties to “move up.”

Yes, thank you. A huge percentage of historical European immigration to the US was by groups that functionally had zero wealth or social mobility in their home countries. Working in a steel mill in the new world was hell, but it beat generational rural poverty back home.

The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.

You cannot read the Founding Fathers without noticing that Americans were quite individualistic (and mistrustful of governmental power) from the start of the country. Till about 1910, there was no Federal income tax because it was believed by most Americans that it would be unconstitutional (i.e., an illegal encroachment of the individual's right to keep all the money he or she earns). Ditto any Federal ban on heroin or cocaine, both big social problems.

Individualism in the contemporary sense is not the same thing as skepticism of governmental power circa 1780.

Income taxes as a concept weren't really adopted, globally, until the mid-1800s through the early 1900s. So I don't think skepticism of them is inherently an American individualist thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax#Timeline_of_intro...

And as I already wrote:

> The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.

America circa 1950 or 1900 had much stronger social bonds in local communities, families, etc. The current hyper-individualism is more a consequence of the last third of the 20th century, not anything inherently American.

Of course, one might make the argument that this was some kind of inevitable outcome due to a seed in the American psyche, but I don't really buy that argument.

The 1960s was when the US got welfare and SSI (disability insurance for people who haven't already paid into the Social Security system).

Being able to rely on these governmental benefits might have made families less reliant on the local community, churches and extended family, which in turn might have caused daily life to feel more alienating or atomized.

I bring this up because welfare and SSI can be viewed as a move towards collectivism and away from individualism, so arguing about how individualistic the US has been over time is kind of a sterile game because the answer is highly dependent on the exact definition of individualism.

> I bring this up because welfare and SSI can be viewed as a move towards collectivism and away from individualism

Yes, this is an excellent point.

A good portion emigrated because it was either that or the gallows. Another portion - possibly those that you referred to with the 'by choice' bit was imported as so much cattle to be used and abused. Slavery powered a lot of engines in those days and even if those European ancestors washed their hands of it in Europe at the time their descendants had no problem at all setting it up in what would become the USA as well as they folks 'back home' profiting immensely from it. Here in NL they are still to a large extent in denial about it. And that spirit is also still alive and well in the USA.

I think the commenters above were mostly talking about late 19th century immigration by Irish, Italian, etc. workers in the post-Civil War era.

It's still true that the pay and conditions were awful, but it was clearly something people chose to do.

The group that descends from enslaved people brought here involuntarily also has by far the highest levels of group identity and support for redistributive policies. So that supports my point.

Hey man, everything supports your point so I don't think I'm surprised by that.

ICE deportations without due process: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Massive and ongoing violations of the US constitution: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Immigrants and their descendants voting against immigration: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Troops deployed to cities that were doing no worse than other cities but happened to be run by democrats: check -> supports Rayiner's point

Taking a sledgehammer to the federal government without any consideration for the consequences: check -> supports Rayiner's point

I wonder at what moment - if ever - you will look around and say 'Hey, you know what, I'm co-responsible for this mess and I own up to it'. I don't know if you have a daughter or not but if not we'll substitute some other female relative. Let's imagine for the moment that you do and you get the choice of leaving her in a room for a couple of days with Trump, Biden or Harris which would you pick? And if not Trump, why not, after all, what's there to fear, he's an upstanding citizens that any self respecting lawyer would vote for. There are plenty of MAGA's who are just too stupid to know better after a couple of decades on FOX and AM talk radio, so they get a pass, in spite of all the damage that they do.

But guys that clerked for the US court of appeals are held to a higher standard.

There is this proverb: a country gets the government that it deserves. Now, I have a crap government here at the moment, but at least I'm not responsible for voting it in and cheering it on while they do their crap and I still feel responsible just by being from here and the fact that they - unfortunately - represent me too.

> you get the choice of leaving her in a room for a couple of days with Trump, Biden or Harris which would you pick?

I don’t know how this is relevant to what we were discussing, but yes, I have a daughter. And one of my principal fears was how much social pressure she would feel to relate to Harris, a shallow mediocrity who might have been greater if everyone didn’t have the lowest possible expectations for her on account of identity politics.

If you have a daughter and you voted for trump, you deserve this version of trump to “be around” YOUR daughter.

https://youtu.be/OhDuL7LrLEc?feature=shared

https://youtu.be/Q0_axTST2aY?feature=shared

You dodged the question.

And so you voted for the greedy, utterly corrupt criminal instead. I really wonder how you could come to this utterly bizarre conclusion. Trump isn't an example for anybody, least of all your kids, and god forbid they'd look at a woman that made it to president and think that that might be something to aspire to. Incredible.

EDIT: I wrote a bunch of stuff, but realized Glenn Loury said it a thousand times better: https://x.com/nashvilletea/status/1961683711511969904?s=46. Watch to the very end: “You will not be equal at the end of that argument, even if you get what you ask for.” I almost felt bad for Harris after the election. It became obvious how few people actually respected her as a leader. They installed her as a generic “woman of color” because it made them feel good and like they were achieving a milestone in the “arc of history.” It’s pitiable, not admirable.

I raise my kids the way my dad raised me—and how white elites raise their own kids, in contrast to how they see brown kids: to always have an internal locus of control, never make excuses, and never demand society’s protection or accommodation.

> It became obvious how few people actually respected her as a leader. They installed her as a generic “woman of color” because it made them feel good and like they were achieving a milestone in the “arc of history.”

Yes, obviously she didn't get there because of merit... unbelievable this exchange.

So your main point is that Harris, who was in the spot to become president for all of four years if something happened to Biden, was only there as a generic woman of color? This is in a way a worse insult than if it had been just jealousy. Do you honestly believe that the slob you voted for is there on merit? And never mind his sidekick? Harris has more merit than either of those two grifters combined.

For your sake I hope that one day you're going to snap out of the groove that you are in. But by the looks of it the more likely end game is that you will dig yourself in further and further until there really is no way back.

Just for a 10 minute exercise: imagine you are wrong about all this and that in a decade you look back at the end result. Then realize that there is such a thing as minimization of regret and that this radicalization path that you - as you admitted yourself - are on does not offer any outs other than ever more convoluted rationalizations which your original self from just a few years ago would have been horrified at. The reason I keep talking to you is because I hope that somewhere in there the guy that we knew before he went off into the woods is still there and is still able to use common sense instead of the sense that words on paper matter more than people. Probably I'm the idiot though and I should just give up on you.

> So your main point is that Harris, who was in the spot to become president for all of four years if something happened to Biden, was only there as a generic woman of color?

Being a "woman of color" was Biden's stated reason for picking Harris. She has no merit as a political leader--someone who is able to inspire people to action. She had to drop out of the race in 2019 being she was polling terribly in her home state: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/03/politics/kamala-harris-califo.... Listen to the post-mortems of 2024 being done by folks Mark Halpern. Biden's own team thought that Harris wasn't ready.

I saw her in person at an Asian American fundraising event in Iowa in 2019. It was just her and Andrew Yang. She gave a canned speech and ran to her tour bus and hid after the event. She was awful. Given Biden's age, the obviously correct play in 2020 was to nominate Elizabeth Warren, who is a gifted populist politician. I saw her in 2019 as well, and people were literally crying when they would meet her to take selfies. Harris, meanwhile, was hiding in her bus, because she's awkward and doesn't actually like crowds.

Everything was out there for anyone whose eyes were open to see. But the party is full of weirdos who are obsessed with skin color--like how you couldn't help but bring slavery and colonialism into this unrelated discussion--and they nominated her because it was part of "the arc of history." It brings me endless joy that this view forced them into a course of action that cost them so dearly, and so quickly.

> Do you honestly believe that the slob you voted for is there on merit?

In a Presidential system, "merit" is being able to win over and lead a coalition of voters. That's what made Bill Clinton and Barack Obama extraordinary politicians. Trump has merit in the same way. Trump took over one of the two major parties, overthrew its establishment, and made it so someone named "Bush" can't even win an election for dog catcher in Texas. Whatever else you think about him, he's an incredibly gifted politician, while Harris is a terrible one.

> It brings me endless joy that this view forced them into a course of action that cost them so dearly, and so quickly.

Yes, you fit right in. Think about what you just wrote.

> Whatever else you think about him, he's an incredibly gifted politician, while Harris is a terrible one.

He's a gifted agitator, he's not a gifted politician. A gifted politician knows how to govern, and build consensus, Trump is completely clueless (or hiding it remarkably well). His main shticks are division and destruction, not unification and creation.

So if you are looking to bring about hardship and chaos you did the right thing by voting for him.

Europe and particularly the UK is still extremely rigid, and I fear to until the bitter end. You have a government right now riddled with aristocrats ignoring the electorate. I fear for my family living in Manchester and London.

I wonder how Gallup framed 'leave permanently' to their interviewees. I know many Filipinos who want to work abroad but retire back home.

But this does have some upsides, it appears.

Hard to say. Americas have been far less dense in population than the old world, and colonizers brought old world tech with which they immediately could start to make use of the land, so they face far less scarcity. For any group of people this is hugely beneficial to their development and helpful in solving their conflicts. Yet we still see some of world's the worst slavey and genocides there. Also today's Latin American isn't world famous for high living standards.

Taxes as various European states and US states are sometimes on par. Everyone pays for somebody’s health problems, Americans as well, through insurance, it is just health insurance is mandatory in Europe. The other stuff boils down to effective use of tax money, it is easier to do it in a smaller state compared to US or Canada or similar. Individualism has an effect but at this day and age it is about lobby groups politicising any topic they do not like. FYI nobody likes to pay taxes.

Americans pay first through taxes, and then again through insurance, so it's even worse. Medicare+Medicaid cost about as much per capita as the UK's NHS, in part because they have intentionally been barred from being as efficient as possible, with e.g. limitations on using their negotiating power.

As for ease of doing it: At least several European systems does delivery via private actors, at least one has decentralised the insurance (Germany), several has segmented the public delivery in regional or local trusts or similar (UK, Norway). In other words: Universal coverage doesn't mean a single top down healthcare system, not is that necessarily desirable. E.g. the UK model uses trusts that prevents failure of leadership in one organisation from causing the whole to fail, and let's trusts get put under alternative management if they underperform.

If anything, the EU is a demonstration of how it is possible to do in a heterogeneous way across a much larger population than the US.

the NHS is not a shining model to emulate

It's underfunded, but it remains one of the top healthcare systems despite that, and provides universal care.

It's however relevant here to illustrate how insane the US healthcare situation is, in that Americans pay enough in taxes towards healthcare to provide universal healthcare if structured better, but chooses not to.

As an example of how to provide cost effective universal care, the NHS is a shining beacon. If the UK spent comparable amounts per capita to comparably wealthy countries to upgrade it, it'd be 20-30% more expensive, and a lot better, and still vastly cheaper than US healthcare overall.

We are too well-programmed to be individualistic, the crowd said in unison.

And that was a typo: too well-programmed to not be individualistic or something.

But I guess it works both ways?

>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?

This is a common bad, not a common good. Fundamentally people follow incentives, and when you financially punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (make someone with healthy habits pay for someone else's unhealthy habits), you disincentivise the good behaviour and incentivise the bad behaviour. At a society-wide scale, that leads to more of the bad behaviour.

I think the incentive of not getting a life altering or threatening disease is much stronger than having to pay for the treatment yourself. If the cost has any effect on choices, it must be very small because it does not show in statistics.

Then explain the trend in overweight/obesity/diabetes/heart disease statistics?

It has long been known that over consuming carbs and sat fats leads to long term health issues, easily measured by excess weight.

And yet, the vast majority of people over consume.

1) Excess calorie consumption has only been true since about 1990. Up until that point, average heights were still increasing, so that meant that a significant chunk of the population were still undernourished. We are only about one generation from that mark, so people's social habits still haven't moved on from scarcity.

2) Nicotine, in particular, is quite good for appetite suppression. Unfortunately, the delivery system most people choose (smoking) causes more problems that the obesity it suppresses.

3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower. The human body has a lot of systems encouraging you to hoard calories metabolically and very few systems telling you to stop. It is quite impressive that a single drug can somehow flip those metabolic systems completely in the other direction.

> 3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower

What? I’m about as pro-GLP1 as it gets - see past comments on the subject.

But if anything it absolutely slams the door shut on obesity about being anything but overeating when the environment made it so damn easy to do so. The method of action is you are less hungry and eat less. Full stop. Secondary effects are a rounding error.

Sure, there are societal reasons people are fat now. I don’t actually believe willpower is a real thing when surrounded by unhealthy addictive choices. But being able to turn off the hunger switch and turn to easy mode is absolutely the reason these drugs work and are life changing.

I’m not ashamed to admit my being fat was due to lack of willpower to not eat excessively. Having a way to make it so I didn’t need to engage said willpower even half as much was the reason I’m now down to 12% body fat and am in shape from working out heavily. It’s not like you take the drug and you magically get thin - you still need to work at it and make healthy choices. They simply become easier to do.

Pretending it’s otherwise for the vast majority of people is a disservice.

The best most honest way I’ve come up with to describe these drugs is a performance enhancing drug for your diet.

Changing society at a root cause level would of course be far better, but that’s not realistic on any human lifetime sort of scale. This is the best we have for people alive today.

One of the things that blew my mind when I moved to the US from Europe were the enormous portions and the amount of grease in every single dish when eating out. Even simple salads were shiny and drenched in oil. It only takes a small percentage of excessive calories over long periods to explain the obesity epidemic.

I agree with your comment, except that framing it as "lack of willpower" is unfortunate, because it implies that you should somehow be able to ignore these signals - if only you had enough "willpower". It seems to require an untenable amount of willpower to sustain a resistance to these signals, so perhaps it isn't realistic.

I think the main unhelpful thing is the implication that a lack of willpower is some kind of moral failing that means you deserve the results.

(The other fiction which causes problems is the idea that the amount of willpower required is the same for everyone)

The idea of individual locus of control is how western society has made so much progress. The idea of determinism that a certain subset of the "political left" has embraced is detrimental to the functioning of society, no matter how true it actually is. When people are not invested in their outcomes through a society-wide belief in individual control, we end up with situations like collective farming. Taken to its extreme, the idea of determinism results in "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", equal outcomes for disparate effort and ability.

I eat whatever I want, don't really exercise and I'm not fat. I guess I just have awesome willpower.

Sure, but making people pay for those treatments themselves does not change anything. For many the quick satisfaction of good food is simply a stronger incentive than a healthy body or a fatter wallet 10 years later.

I highly doubt the people overeating are picking up the fork, then considering "oh, I'll be really unhealthy when I'm older, but at least I won't be out any money for it" before they take their bite. Much like harsher punishments for crimes, this kind of thinking doesn't work because it's just not something people factor into their behaviour anywhere near as much as you would think.

Carbs correct, saturated fats wrong.

Source: try keto diet with only saturated fats (like I do) and its great for weight loss (animal fat, coconut oil).

For whatever reason, mentioning keto or calories in, calories out around here is extremely unpopular.

I have watched many people lose weight with one or both of these methods, naturally.

I’ll never understand the pushback.

It's a bit like "just do some exercise" for depression. It's not wrong in that if you achieve it it'll help, but it's also something that's common knowledge and a lot easier said than done in practice, so it's not useful advice and kind of irritating when you hear it over and over again.

Keto also helps (sometimes) with depression though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7jg6wlD6gY (The Truth About Treatment Resistant Depression: Part One (Breaking the Myth))

And it's not "just do some keto" in this case. You have to be very strict.

But there are many dosages of keto diet and you have to do it correctly.

Epilepsy keto is hard for real and takes commitment. You will never eat modern food again in your life. But better than life-long-suffering just to eat cake.

So, because it’s hard to lose weight, solutions that work (which are hard) get shunned and argued against?

This feels like a “the truth hurts” kind of thing. Or a “personal responsibility isn’t my problem!” thing.

Maybe that’s the whole point though, anything that requires personal responsibility and accountability is rebuked.

What's your definition of 'solution that works'? Because yes, running a calorie deficit is a solution that works (for losing weight, it may cause problems for other, perhaps more important, goals for some people), but telling someone 'run a calorie deficit' is not, in general, a solution that works if your goal is to help the person lose weight (it can actually do the opposite, in fact, if you're sufficiently obnoxious about it). It works fine if you want to just blame them for not losing weight, though.

So yes, at certain point a person is responsible for themselves, but on the other hand, if you have a goal of reducing obesity, you're not going to get anywhere by just saying 'well, everyone who's obese is responsible, and I am going to do nothing about it but remind them of it'.

The whole world has been against saturated fat and pro carbs.

It will take some years for people to change.

What's funny is weight loss is extremely easy (with keto) and people still fail at large doing it inefficiently (with carbs).

Trust me, we live this. And it's always someone else's unhealthy habits; I remember a chainsmoking manager expounding at lunch about the awful burden drug users put on the economy.

One reason is that it's unsustainable with a top heavy population age histogram, and leads to lower and lower quality of life for younger people.

Meh... that's not uniquely American.

I lived in Asia and the country had a very capable public healthcare system with universal coverage. Generally a very socially harmonious society that heavily balances personal status with that of society.

But cover the cost of drug for orphan diseases? "Why should my costs go up because of some child that costs half a million a year?"

It was quite shocking.

> Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet

Come to Poland. This kind of egoism becomes more and more rampant.

>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?

In the EU (I have no idea about America) tobacco is heavily (and I mean heavily in some countries) taxed because of this.

Also tobacco users cost less in healthcare because they far more often die right around retirement age, never incurring the far more expensive age related healthcare. Being a smoker also disqualifies them from many common procedures, and also the sin taxes smokers pay on tobacco often exceeds their entire lifetime medical costs.

People who blame smokers for healthcare costs are just looking for someone to blame because they either don't want to admit, or don't realize, that their 90 year old granny taking 30 medications a day, having hip replacements, and 3rd round of cancer costs as much in healthcare per year as most people do over 2 or 3 decades.

There are tobacco taxes in the US but it varies by state. Also it seems US is in the lower range on smoking rate compared to many other OECD countries.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...

we don’t smoke nearly as much as europeans

Historically these "tax for the common good" policies have only been abused. Most of us are suspicious of/frustrated with them. If you want to improve the common good kill the income tax.

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