United States does rank below the UK in terms of social mobility. The notion that that is because the economic development of the country is "finished" seems weird.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who had no much opportunity to 'climb'.
The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while technically might have the opportunities others have, they live in a system that is not suited to exploiting them. They are happy in their version of he US, they're family oriented, patriots - but not going to college or after the white collar trades like migrants from 'everywhere else'.
Those two cohorts make the US 'very different' in terms of social mobility, and so you have a situation a bit akin to Brazil etc..
Canada and Australia are 'Immigrant States' without those cohorts, and newcomers do reasonably well or somewhere approaching 'normal' after one or two generations.
I'll bet social mobility among non-African American and Latino Americans, is about on part with Canada or Australia, and maybe even a little bit better than UK, and most of Europe (even Sweden) which also have vestiges of class.
Some indicative data here [1]. You can see mobility gap between Black and White in the US, it's very crude and subject to interpretation, but it does line up with PISA standardized testing results which show the same, that non-Black/Latino America is actually 'a lot like' Europe or Japan in terms of so many outcomes. 2018 PISA test scores here [2] (download the PDF).
FYI I'm not 'endorsing' or 'supporting' any kind of system here, just pointing out that the the US has a 'multi system dynamic' different than other places and it's essential to understanding how it works esp. on a comparative basis. FYI a lot of E/S European countries are poor, and represent similar kind of 'isolated communities' which is why gini coefficient etc. for the entirety of the EU is much worse than it is for any individual EU state.
From 1922 until today - most of our progress has been incremental. Other than satellites, and maybe computers, it seems as though they ave predicted a lot. Maybe not quite the social impact of them however.
What will change in 2122?
If we have successful Fusion at scale, it could change a lot of things.
If not, maybe it won't be that different: longer lives, more fashion. Maybe we figure out Climate Change and get plastics out of he ocean, but we'll probably still be arguing about 'what is normal'
Eventually, we'll be able to colour our skin, eyes, hair very readily, we'll have cosmetic limbs (i.e. pair of wings that don't to much but flap a bit). And maybe mechanical uterus - where you provide the eggs and sperm and it will make a baby in 9 months. If the identity wars are a bit complicated now just wait.
We will send a probe to Alpha Centuari and they'll be a small station on Mars, but it will be boring and young people won't even care.
Reduced population in the West and massive population booms in Africa and some other spots will crate some odd international dynamics. Africa will be much better off, but mostly still corrupt with crackpot leaders and nuclear weapons. One of them will use one on their neighbouring country.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-a...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm
The smallest nuclear devices aren't anywhere close to as large as commonly believed. An M28 "Davy Crockett" with a yield of 20T - 0.02kT - isn't that much different from a conventional GBU-43/B MOAB, which has a yield of 11T.
Tactical nuclear weapons are basically a faster and more effective version of conventional strategic bombing. "Little Boy", the first weapon used in combat (in Nagasaki), had a yield of 15kT. That resulted in an estimated 66k deaths and 70k injuries. Compare that to the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed ~100k civilians and burned the homes of over a million more.
Strategic nuclear weapons... they're in a whole other category. Obviously lots of people are killed during conventional strategic bombing, but most of the damage is ultimately done through fires set by the destruction of the intended targets. Some people have a chance to escape.
What's more, conventional bombing is WW2 wasn't generally a "one-night" affair; it took days or weeks to saturate a target to the point of neutralizing it, and after the first couple of attacks many people would have left the target area. The firebombing of Tokyo resulted in so many civilian casualties precisely because it was a (very effective) one-night event, and people didn't have a chance to flee. That was exceptional even in WW2.
Strategic nuclear weapons are effectively instant. They're incredibly powerful. We stopped building bigger ones not because we didn't know how, but because we couldn't see any reason to. If a 50MT blast won't do the job, a 500MT blast isn't going to either... so why spend the money to develop, create, and maintain bigger ones?
Finally, the idea that even a full nuclear exchange between major powers would be an extinction-level event is absurd. It would utterly destroy the countries involved, devastate the world economy, and poison huge swaths of the planet practically in perpetuity. Between the direct and indirect damage and the societal impacts on the remainder of humanity, it would set us back centuries as a species - but we would rebuild and it would take much less time to do so than it did to get to where we the first time.
Two points:
The first bomb was on Hiroshima, and killed many more people. The reason why the Nagasaki bomb killed "so few" people is because they missed. They were supposed to do a visual confirmation of the target, but the weather was cloudy so they (probably) used radar targeting, which wasn't particularly accurate in 1945. A lot of the energy hit the side of a mountain.
Second, there's a huge difference between a conventional bomb and a nuke of the same size simply because of the fallout. It continues to kill well after it's dropped.
Ugh. I hate when I do that. I don't know why I reversed them, other than the fact that I've been commenting on HN all day instead of working and probably just got overwhelmed :).
> Second, there's a huge difference between a conventional bomb and a nuke of the same size simply because of the fallout.
This applies much less to airbursts than groundbursts, and airbursts are the norm for modern weapons.
That's not to say it's not there - it is - but it's significantly less of an issue than commonly believed.
This is so wrong and misinformed it's hard to know what to say. This sounds like the happy slaves justification for slavery.
The fact of the matter is that Latino immigrants from Central/South America follow the same path of assimilation as immigrants from anywhere else do. From the outside it may not see like it but that's because there's a steady flow of new immigrants. I've taught a lot of second-generation Latino immigrants who are very much interested in college and white-collar trades and not looking to continue in low-wage service jobs.
To the extent that there's no opportunity to climb it's because of racist attitudes like yours.
Their experience, on the whole is different.
For some obviously much more than others.
Latino Household income is 1/2 that of other recent migrant groups of colour i.e. Asians [1], who fare better than 'White Americans', a simple fact which makes your 'it's all racism' immediately, well, probably wrong.
Latino Americans are more likely to live in a segregated version of America almost due to their own choices, much like many other groups have historically, and much like 'micro enclaves' (i.e. Armenian, Persian, Chinese, Turkish) form among migrant communities across North America, UK, Australia, Germany etc. - the difference being, their cohort is enormous. Entire cities, or regions of cities are formed by relative newcomers from Central America, that doesn't happen with other migrant groups.
Latino Americans fare considerably more poorly in school, and in terms of academic achievement; the independent test scores (to which I referred) point to that, and there's ample evidence of that otherwise.
The 'it's all because of racism argument' holds little water, obviously, because other 'migrants of colour' in the US do actually very well. Would you imply that Latinos face 'racism' but migrants from India don't? That's not a very sound argument.
There's even more detailed data to refute your argument, right in the 2018 PISA references I provided. While migrants across the board fare more poorly in school than regular citizens, in the US, Canada, UK (aka Anglosphere) - once you normalize for income, migrants overall actually do as well as or better than local kids. The same is not the case in Germany or Finland (ostensibly #1 place for education). This is really strong evidence that actually, migrants tend to have 'opportunity' at least in the Anglosphere, at least the level of education.
China, India, and Europe have high, even elite standards for education at least for a minority, and migrants from those places are likely to be from the upper tranches of that spectrum. Canada mostly accepts only those with a University degree.
Migrants from Central America not only come from nations with very poor educational standards, but they're also individually, very poor. Many people cross the US border with literally nothing, often as refugees.
The contrast between Latino Americans and others holds even for rates of crime, where Latino Americans are over-represented in almost all forms of crime, while their counterparts, migrants from other nations, are actually underrepresented in crime data.
Latino Americans, unlike African Americans, are not represented as much pop culture, music, sports and media nearly to the same extent, almost as though 'they don't exist' - or rather they do, but in 'their own media'. Even during the 'Oscar's So White' uproar, nobody wanted to point out that nary 100% of the Latino prize winners were not American. Nobody seemed to care.
Go ahead and name for me some Black SNL cast members. That's easy. Now name the Latinos ones. Much harder. I can't think of a single one other than Fred Armisen who has a bit of 'Latino Heritage'.
If you take a moment to visit those areas of Texas and California, you'll realize how vast the submersion in 'Another America' many of them live in, and that it forms an existential artifact of their integration experience, which is very much unlike those of other migrants.
(Again, it's not entirely the case, obviously there are millions of Latino Americans who live as 'statistically normative Americans')
"To the extent that there's no opportunity to climb it's because of racist attitudes like yours. "
I think it's probably people screaming about this or that and throwing names around that is 'a core problem'.
Latino America is 'different enough' from the other cohorts, and they are 'big enough' that this implies differing policy measures, approaches etc..
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
That's an understatement. Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives.(<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
As you note, Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
I wouldn’t necessarily take anything they say as fact. Lol
They’ve been talking about this for a long time
I was pointing out the anti-United states propaganda has been going on for years.
The WEF is just liberal capitalism. The trend towards technofeudalism (everyone is renting their existence from big corps) has been going on for a while, at the hands of capitalists. Because its profitable. See: the growth of financing/credit, software subscriptions, etc.
You can get a sense for Beck's work here:
Conspiracy theories aside, I've read Schwab's book, and it's a moronic, badly-written pile of buzzwords and corporate jargon that says nothing of interest and reads like the work of a hungover undergraduate who's padding the wordcount the night before the deadline while hoping the professor won't realise he hasn't done the reading. I'd tell you to ignore it, except Schwab is a man of enormous power and influence, so his apparent inability to produce an intelligent thought is really quite troubling.
German and Soviet troops that met in Poland after invading from the west and east had no trouble in celebrating their victory together, holding parades and such.
As John Gunther—who was in Moscow when the world learned of the pact's existence in August 1939—wrote, "communism and Fascism were more closely allied than was normally understood".