America isn't exceptional – it's the exception | Hacker News Reader

America isn't exceptional – it's the exception

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18 pointshedayet34 comments

While I agree that believing the US is "uniquely great, superior to other nations, destined for a special role in the world" is silly, this article feels just as cherry-picked, on the other extreme. The US is an outlier in plenty of negative ways, yes. But it's also an outlier in GDP per capita, venture capital investment, Nobel Prizes, university quality, immigrant demand, medical innovation, and cultural export. Any honest look at the data shows a country that is simultaneously world-leading and world-lagging depending on which metrics you choose. Picking only one side of that ledger isn't analysis.

None of those things help the random citizen with their life. Not one. Not even medical innovation if it increasingly can't be accessed.

If you just look at how things work in most societies now and throughout history and use the model of 'the purpose of a system is what it does', then you could surmise that the the purpose of society/nation is to make sure the top 0.01% of people have amazing lives. Everything else is just an consumable input to achieve that goal.

GDP per capita helps the average citizen. That GDP isn't all rich people's yachts. The average person gets a fair amount of it.

Not the bottom 5%, 10%, maybe even 20% (and that is very much a problem). But the average does.

> The average person gets a fair amount of it.

You chose poorly in choosing the adjective "fair", which can be read morally. But that aside, yes, rising GDP does improve middle-class incomes.

We agree that lived outcomes matter. But if OECD data are valid for health and incarceration, they’re also valid for household income and housing space, where the US performs very well. You can criticize the tradeoffs without denying the gains.

If you look at military spending US is exceptional

We are accomplished in the infliction of suffering and death.

Such a noble goal.

To pick one point out of the article for discussion, does anyone have any idea why the US is the leader in per-capita prison rates? The laws aren't all that different from other first world nations, and i doubt all the other nations have magically solved crime. What is going on? Is crime just lower in other nations? Do they not punish as many crimes with jail time?

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

That's can't be entirely it. Other nations have similar laws against drug use, and from what i remember reading only 5% of the prison population is in jail for non-violent drug related crimes.

US incarceration rates increased 500% in the decades following the enactment of war on drugs legislation, starting with the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.

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

More speculatively, I think the prison system has also taken over the role of the mental health institutions that were wound down under Reagan. Over half of the incarcerated population has a mental health condition, and likely are not receiving adequate mental health care while incarcerated.

You actually seem to have a compelling case here. I am seeing something like 20% of the combined state and federal prison population is in for drug offenses, but that raises some more questions. I could certainly believe that a lot of that is simple possession and the US is uniquely terrible in that regard, but certainly other countries must handle drug dealers as well. And it's hard to break out drug offenses into more detail. Are we talking kilograms of possession? Distributing drugs? (of course, some laws claim that possession, say, 10 grams implies intent to distribute which complicates things).

And even outside of drugs, while 20% of our prison population does account for a large chunk of the us's exceptional nature, it would still leave us #1 by a large margin if it didn't exist. Although Wikipedia does talk about another part of this is due to the _length_ of the US sentences, and how they are much longer on average then other countries, so that also contributes significantly.

Entirely? No, but check this out: https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civ...

Also, remember that the 13th amendment to the US constitution retained the right for the state to use imprisoned persons for slave labor.

Here's a question: The other countries you mention... do they have mandatory 5-year minimum sentences for possessing as little as 5g of Crack Cocaine?

Demographics and a punitive culture that leans towards violence.

That's a convenient explanation, but it's almost too convenient. We just got unlucky and there's not much we can do? We just got bad people and bad culture and that's that? It's also pretty difficult to prove! Not to say it's wrong, just that it makes thing too easy.

To give you an example in disparity of culture a relative of mine visited me a few years back from Austria. We took a train into NYC and the notices the sign that said “Assaulting transportation personnel is punishable by up to 7 years in prison” and couldn’t stop laughing all day. They are a lawyer and had never encountered a non murder case with a sentence that harsh.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".

This probably has something to do with it.

Many of the prison systems in the US are privatized

The United Kingdom also extensively uses private prisons, along with Japan and Australia, among others. If that is it then it would be a lobbying problem specific to the US, which seems like it could be pinpointed to more specific laws or sentencing guidelines.

Only 8% of prisoners in the US are kept in private facilities.

But that 8% is almost as many prisoners as comparable countries have, total. The lobbying and sometimes outright corruption around private prisons doesn't care if it also feeds people into non-private prisons as long as it also feeds the private prison beast

America uses prisons to warehouse the mentally ill. We also have the rare combination of extremely high rates of violence - our rate of violent gun deaths per 100,000 is in the top 5 globally, slotting in between Mexico and Venezuela - and fairly robust policing and judiciary functions.

Those are very good points, but it does make me question how other countries handle the mentally ill so much better.

Universal healthcare, social security. There has been a reduction in availability of care for the mentally ill in the country I live, which resulted in more homelessness, confused people on the streets etc.

Same where i live. In the 90s there were huge cuts to balance the deficit. Then, combined with the rising cost of housing throughout the noughties and after, massive numbers of homeless in tents you never saw before.

Longer incarceration times in the US, fewer alternative punishments, lower rehabilitation and a higher inequality compared to similar countries. Recidivism in North-west Europe is around 25% compared to around 60% for the US, combined with longer and more prison sentences for comparable crimes quickly leads to much higher incarceration rates.

Longer incarceration times and lower rehabilitation (and lack of interest in it) are definitely huge ones you're right.

additional to some things of other posters i would like to add these things:

- 3 Strikes policy: once you commit 3 Crimes, the third trial gets you a lifesentence

- police has effective immunity: the police can do everything, from getting 3 people incarcarated for the crime that only one person commited to shooting anything that shooting anything that frightens them(backfiring of an car has caused an shooting that turned an person into sieve)

- in many states lying by the police is allowed.

- the widespread availability of Weapons of War: i mean weapons that have no usage apart from killing people

- the prisoners are used as cheap labour.

a lack of a social safety net (and what little there is is often punitive and degrading)

Prisons are for-profit.

We invented so much technology, but drove it out of the country at the behest of labor cost reduction.

We have so many smart people, but they are irrelevant in the AI that we are giving away.

Is there any hope? I am not seeing it.

I'm curious if things change when comparing the US to the EU. The US is too diverse to compare to one homogeneous country. The EU might be better in this regard.

Exceptional in these examples seems to be a euphimism for uniquely bad.

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