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Comment by drilldrive | Hacker News Reader

>But don’t rush to celebrate American exceptionalism: If IQs are dropping in other advanced countries but not here, maybe that means we’re not really an advanced country (too much poverty, too little social support).

I couldn't help but laugh at this. Is the author trying to spin the USA as second- or third-world? We are the top global economy!

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Top global economy indeed! With people having to choose between life saving medicine, food and rent. /s

America is a 3rd world nation in many aspects.

In what aspects? I can't think of any that I would want to compare to a third world country.

- Infant mortality in the Mississippi River delta is higher than in some third world countries.

- Roughly 1.5 million US households are living in 'extreme poverty' by global standards, meaning <$2 per day at ppp before government aid.

- Hookworm is still a relatively common problem in parts of Alabama, because sanitation is nonexistent; sewage is piped from homes but dumped untreated nearby. Outside the US, it's viewed as an "underserved tropical disease" which only goes untreated in the absence of functioning medical systems.

- The UN Human Rights Commission sent a special reporter to the US to study extreme poverty, who concluded that on many metrics like youth poverty rates the US is more comparable to developing or underdeveloped nations than other first world countries: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

This isn't just "we could help poor people more" or "things are less nice than in Canada". Significant portions of the US, mostly in the rural Southeast and West, are literally impoverished at the same rates as mid-rank third world countries.

Infant mortality overall is higher than in numerous third-world countries, not just in the Mississippi delta.

Is it? I suppose it'll depend on the definition of "third world".

The US ranks ~56th on infant mortality; of the countries that do better, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are the poorest by far. The IMF classifies both as "developing", and the World Bank calls them upper-middle-income. Even by the Cold War standard, all of them are either First or Second world. The first entry I see that clearly counts, Nauru, is about 40% worse than the US.

Mississippi, though, is ~60% above the national average, with some regions well above that. Which is to say, down around Barbados for infant mortality.

(Of course, I don't mean to imply that "rivaling poor and corrupt developing countries" is something to be proud of. It's just staggering to me how incredibly bad the situation in some parts of the US is.)

Maternal mortality is pretty horrible too.

... and still rising. Also not accidental.

Then you've never watched a loved one get bankrupted by medical bills and skip medicine because it's too expensive. It's a common tale here that is a fairy tale even in many developing countries. We have higher infant mortality than most of the developed world and 60-70% of bankruptcies here are because of medical debt.

so in a third world country they'd just die instead of being bankrupt, is that better?

Healthcare for starters. People routinely have to hop borders over to Mexico or elsewhere to get affordable healthcare.

Social mobility and life expectancy among other things. The US ranks 41st in life expectancy globally behind countries like Cuba, French Guiana and Slovenia.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/life-expectancy/

Income inequality.

This is why I find it so funny when people point to GDP or the stock market as evidence that it's all going fine. Most people don't own significant amounts of stock or see their wages grow as much as the already economically successful.

US infant mortality rate exceeds that of numerous "third-world" countries. Recently we were just ahead of Belarus, but they now have pulled ahead, well out of reach.

The US matches third-world countries in numerous other indicators, and is declining in most of them. This is not accidental; it is a direct consequence of choices made by those in power.

I recall that it's hard to compare infant mortality due to reporting differences.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/3/editorial-th...

Hard to compare precisely enough to defend a stable ranking, yes, but it easily places the US below dozens of other countries regardless.

More to the point, US infant mortality is still increasing. Reporting within the US has not changed.

The US on a large range of measures has never quite joined the ranks of the mainstream West. It has the largest GDP, sure, but with inequality rates approaching 3rd world levels, that wealth isn't sufficiently distributed to bring its human development on many measures up to that of other nations. It's very obvious to W. Europeans, Canadians & Australasians who spend much time in the US that life is harder and poorer and less socially mobile for vast swathes of the population.

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