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Comment by precisioncoder | Hacker News Reader

That's the wonderful and horrible thing about the US. There are a myriad of high risk high reward options like credit cards and student debt. For some people they pay off, for others they end up drowning in debt. There are some wonderful success stories and some terrifying stories of lives reduced to abject poverty.

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I think it is mostly wonderful. In the part of the third world my parents are from unless your family is independently wealthy then you simply won't be able to afford to go to college and thus are destined to (at best) have some very low-paying menial labor job.

Contrast this with the US, you can get federally-backed, low-interest loans, go to school majoring in engineering and move from poverty to middle class in one generation.

Pretty sweet deal, imo.

Well it's a huge difference with Europe. Specifically in Austria where I'm living everyone gets an education for free, there's free health care, even menial jobs are well paid. Everyone lives a pretty solid middle class life but there are much fewer people struggling to change the world. Fewer success stories but everyone is taken care of. It's an interesting situation, hell there's not even credit card debt since if your credit isn't paid by the end of the month it's locked until you pay your balance down to zero.

Another thing to factor in: for whatever reasons, you aren't reproducing. Per Wikipedia, your fertility rate is 1.42 to 1.44 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...), which is perilously close to the "lowest low" of 1.3 from which societies don't recover from, and certainly isn't even close to the 2.1 needed for steady state replacement.

I.e. absent serious change, your society is doomed, you'll die out in due course; many say the example your and other counties like you provide are object lessons in what not to do.

That's a strawman unless you can produce data that relates the reproduction rate to the standard of living. If you can do that then apparently what you're saying is that a country needs to enforce low standards (or at least wildly differing) standards of living in order to ensure survival. I.e. absent major changes your argument has been refuted; Many say the example your argument and other's like it provide are object lessons in what not to do.

Also as a side note you can't compare the US to third world countries and get meaningful results, normally all first world countries are better than third world countries. By comparing the US to other first world countries you will see it's strengths and weaknesses more easily.

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