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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans

Now there's a vast oversimplification if there ever was one. Using SF, which is highly anomalous economically and socially, to extrapolate out and project it on "Americans" and their attitudes toward poverty is a lot like saying the City of London's particularities are the same as the rest of England.

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It's kind of true, though. Compared to other developed nations, the US is a country that doesn't care if you get sick or die. It's about as social-Darwinist as it gets. SF is even much more liberal than the rest of the country, so it's a best-case.

Don't mean to be inflammatory, just how I see it having traveled a lot. It's wonderful to be rich in the US, you can get anything you want, but there's no sympathy for the poor or unfortunate or social underclasses (immigrant labor, etc) at all.

Having lived in chicago, DC, San Diego, and visited NY, philly, LA, honolulu and baltimore, extensively, and volunteered among the homeless in SF, SD, DC, and Fargo - SF is much worse than the rest of the country.... Except maybe Baltimore. I think the US had a long tradition of taking care of the downtrodden outside of state-run institutions. This tradition was slowly dismantled starting at the beginning of the progressive movement (1920s-1930s through FDR) in favor of having the state run things. The net result now is that the state runs things poorly, and people now think that there is no longer any need for private charitable action, because government will deal with it.

You make a point about SF/America being Darwinist. Compared to the European socialist countries, Canada, Australia, it's a stark difference.

Is America too big of a country to be able to fix this?

It'd take a dictator to fix the USA. I think I could do it, but it wouldn't be peaceful.

Simply not true. City of SF spends a lot of money on social services specifically for homeless people. So it's not that they don't care if people get sick or die. In fact, it seems like they care a lot, based on dollars spent to try and alleviate a problem that is very tough to mitigate.

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