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Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

> Why do you Americans have to make everything either liberal or conservative?

Because there are different groups of people who have diametrically opposed views on how to solve many of the social problems modern America is facing.

> Life is about tension. If you want to hold a bird in your hand, you have to hold it loose enough that it isn't crushed, and tight enough that it doesn't fly away.

That's the problem with you Europeans. You refuse to make decisions, so you structure your society by averaging out all opinions. In the end, nobody's happy, and none of your problems are really solved :)

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Ok, I know there is a smiley at the end of that. But I also think that a lot if non-Europeans take that half serious. "In the end, nobody's happy" in Europe just isn't true. :)

http://unsdsn.org/happiness/

The report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness:

  1.Denmark
  2.Norway
  3.Switzerland
  4.Netherlands
  5.Sweden

There is serious criticisms as to exactly what those studies measure. At best you can say that they measure contentment. That people from those countries are more content with their lives and have less significant complaints. That is quite different from happy in the joyous sense of the word.

Of course they measure contentment. "Happiness" isn't really meaningful at large scales.

Arguably, the people who are the happiest are those who strive for contentment instead of happiness. :)

I think this contentment is a good thing to strive for anyway, even if it does not equate to true happines.

The United States offers more potential for happiness than the countries listed above. The average mainstream person may be happy in Scandinavia and Switzerland, but I'm willing to bet that a dark-skinned or Asian person with a huge entrepreneurial drive is going to be quite frustrated. Christian-Muslim tensions are growing in some neighborhoods, and anti-Semitism has returned as well.

The United States has plenty of flaws, and we discuss them ad nauseam to the point where the rest of the world thinks of us as a horrible place. Probably, the majority of Americans are discontented, and have been since the 1960s when our cohesive society was ripped apart by overseas war and domestic social unrest.

But, discontent is what spurs people to seek change, not just change in their own lives but change in the political process. American politicians love to use "change" as a campaign slogan, e.g. "Time for a change!" (Clinton) and "Change!", "Hope and Change", "Change we can believe in!" (Obama).

Would you choose a life of contentment or a life of discontent that calls for disruptive change? I think I'd go with change, simply because it offers unbounded horizons for a dreamer such as myself. Perhaps for others, a safe shell of contentment is best--state-provided housing, health and retirement, jobless support, etc.

I think you are describing social mobility. I don't think the US is a horrible place. Having live in the US for a number of years, and in the UK, Sweden, plus having family in Switzerland and Spain, I have opportunity to compare firsthand. IMHO people in the US overestimate the social mobility in the country and essentially buys into the often repeated message that the US is the best place to live. Repeated by the wealthy and their media channels. Which if course serve them well.

That the US has lower social mobility is corroborated in some studies [1], especially lower than those listed as "happier" above.

"[A] study found that of nine developed countries, the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility with about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income passed on to the next generation. The four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children." [1]

"In spite of this low mobility Americans have had the highest belief in meritocracy among middle- and high-income countries."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...

It sounds like you're addressing general prosperity, but I'm talking about individual opportunity. There's been plenty of articles and books about the wealth divide in the U.S., the permanent underclass of mostly Black and Latino poor who have had trouble rising out of poverty, the decline in the quality and the power of education to uplift people economically, the decline of the white blue collar working class, etc.

But for individual entrepreneurial opportunity, I would maintain that the U.S. is still a top destination. Entrepreneurship is essentially disruptive. Is entrepreneurial activity in Sweden as active as it is in the U.S.? In years past, it was not; perhaps things have changed.

I think we are talking cross purpose. A chat over a beer would be better. Entrepreneurship is easier than it was.

> Because there are different groups of people who have diametrically opposed views on how to solve many of the social problems modern America is facing.

And furthermore, the FPTP voting system shoehorns every political controversy into liberals versus conservatives.

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