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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

I saw a Tweet to the effect of "Instead of thinking of the US as a version of Norway or the Netherlands that happens to be failing on virtually every metric, it's more accurate to think of the US as a version of Brazil that happens to be rich."

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would be very interesting to see what metrics one can use to visualise this sentiment, and if it's true or not (my feeling is it's true). imo metrics like GDP, healthy birth, education etc provide a distorted and inaccurate view of citizen welfare. to have a good society, we need to choose metrics that will rank a perfect utopia better than a dystopia (which we don't have, a slave state will have higher GDP, cuz, well, slaves) . but ofc, everyone can't agree on what utopia looks like, so how do you get the metrics? maybe by agreeing on some basic ground rules (slavery bad, murder bad, work-life balance good etc) and build metrics based on these. ofc now no one will agree on the ground rules, but I suppose it's the elected governments job to decide those based on the specific culture of a country. ofc this is a very simplified view of reality and will fall apart in mere minutes in the real world, but kight serve as a starting point, no?

> see what metrics one can use to visualise this sentimen

the Gini coefficient goes some way.

In percent:

Norway 27.6

US 41.5

Brazil 53.4

See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef...

This is the correct approach, but I think the real answer is "a version of Brazil that fully capitalized on European wobbles in the first half of the XX century". The US effectively conquered Europe in WW2, hence acquiring complete leadership of the rich world.

That’s a hilarious and great point.

I’ve had the same thought before - America does a great job within its population bracket, but it doesn’t make sense at all comparing us to, say, a Switzerland or a New Zealand.

Switzerland has what may be one of the more comparable health insurance systems to that in the US. I definitely thought twice or three times before contacting a doctor (and ended up not doing so), and somewhat regretted an ambulance being called for me due to the ensuing bill.

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