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Comment by fcarraldo | Hacker News Reader

In what Western democracies are the right combinations of luck and talent not potentially life changing? The only uniquely American part of this story is that the boy was homeless in the first place.

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I think the GP should have left luck out of the question.

Real question to ask is: In which countries can you succeed with talent, hard work and perseverance without luck?

Meritocracy is strong in USA just as it is in a lot of western democracies.

I have friends that grew up in India, Italy, Mexico, China - where meritocracy takes a backseat.

>Real question to ask is: In which countries can you succeed with talent, hard work and perseverance without luck?

None. Pure meritocracy is an illusion; there's just too much stuff going on so that your success is attributable to your work alone, and inversely there is no place in the world where hard work guarantees success.

>Meritocracy is strong in USA just as it is in a lot of western democracies. I have friends that grew up in India, Italy, Mexico, China - where meritocracy takes a backseat.

See e.g. https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf . USA has a similar level of intergenerational income correlation has Italy (that is, one of the highest among OECD countries).

> None. Pure meritocracy is an illusion; there's just too much stuff going on so that your success is attributable to your work alone, and inversely there is no place in the world where hard work guarantees success.

I think you missed my point. I wasn't looking for an answer. You're right, luck is always involved in serendipitous opportunities and discovery. My point was to correct the parent comment and ask the question in reverse.

Even better is to raise the question: "In which countries can you succeed with talent, hard work and perseverance with least amount of luck?"

My simplistic Googling shows a claim that the US social mobility actually is low for nations among the OECD - but Italy indeed (slightly) lower.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

The economist claims Americans overestimate social mobility in their country while Europeans tend to underestimate it.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...

He was homeless because his family came over as refugees. That’s uniquely American because, for the most part, the rest of the developed world hasn’t accepted refugees and economic migrants at the rates the US has taken them. (Very recently that’s changed in places like Sweden, but it’s already causing those countries to go into right-wing coniptions.)

But this kid was in a homeless shelter. That’s how most countries, including Sweden, house their homeless population. (Fun fact, rates of homelessness are lower in the US than in Germany, Sweden, or the UK.) It’s not like you show up to say Germany as a refugee and they put you in an apartment. (There are 400,000 homeless refugees in Germany, comprising half of Germany’s homeless population.) You stay in a camp for a period, than are transferred to the municipal housing assistance programs, which in Germany are a bit more generous than Section 8, but not fundamentally dissimilar (being structured as subsidy where the state pays part of the rent).

>the rest of the developed world hasn’t accepted refugees and economic migrants at the rates the US has taken them

https://www.pewglobal.org/interactives/international-migrant...

The U.S. is ~14% foreign born, as of 2017. That's below Norway, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Austria, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland (and that's just the first world countries). It's one percentage point above the U.K. Expanding beyond the first world, Jordan (with population 6 million and some of the highest water prices in the world) took in approx. 1.5 million Syrian refugees. In America, we took in 15479 in 2016, 3024 in 2017, and 11 in 2018. That's with a population of 327 million.

I said “refugees and economic migrants.” A quarter of the foreign born in Ireland are from the UK. 2/3 are from the rest of Europe (mostly the EU). I’m going to guess that these are mostly not refugees and economic migrants. Half of Sweden’s foreign born population, likewise, is European (with Finns being the largest group). And much of the balance is very recent—after Finns, the next two largest groups are Iraq and Syria (so likely they came here in the last 20 years). Contrast this to the US, where many people whose families came here as refugees and economic migrants are not “foreign born” because we’ve been accepting such immigration at high levels for more than a century.

  changed in places like Sweden

Sweden is rejecting almost 70% of refugees after their first case review (2018 stat) [0]

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

The boy is a refugee from Nigeria, so obviously his problems aren't uniquely American.

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