What would make more of a difference for crime--expanding police budgets in cities that already outspend dozens of foreign militaries or investing those resources in systemic changes to provide people wellbeing and economic stability?
Most of this is simply not true, even though it feels good to say. For example, US public spending on healthcare is greater than all of these countries: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
Of these, only "outcomes" could reasonably be described by "quality," the rest are a further goalpost pushing. And the US ranks highly on those, (e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...). The only way to get US outcomes to look bad is to compare things that also include non-health-care inputs, like mortality, which is like comparing a sports medicine clinic to an ER room and concluding the ER room loses more patients.
I don’t know where you could possibly be getting your information from but here is some reading for you.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
It's funny, this entire chain started because someone claimed the US spent less than all those other countries and I corrected them.
> has lower life expectancy, infant mortality, childbirth safety
You completely misread my post, because I specifically addressed this point. The reason you look at treatments of specific diseases to judge quality of health care rather than something like life expectancy is that life expectancy depends more on things outside the health care system's control than in it. If you get shot or die in a car accident, that wasn't the doctor's fault, a population with much higher rates of obesity will die at a faster clip than one without, even with the exact same care, etc.
I sleep easily, knowing it's for profitable efficiency and not merely corruption.
Part of the reason that social services are necessary is that modern society does not support traditional support networks such as those you might find in a village in Bangladesh. Many people today don't even have families they can turn to for help.
Increased crime rates today compared to the 50s are largely due to higher rates of reporting. In the 50s, crime in low income neighborhoods wasn't reported. It's much safer today, and continues to get safer every year.
Countries with excellent social safety nets, such as Finland, Japan and Germany have much lower crime than the US.
Source? Homicide rates have been well reported since the 19th century, and they track the same general pattern as violent crime rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States. Also, I’m not sure how underreporting is an explanation since crime was higher at the turn of the 20th century and decreased after that.
> Countries with excellent social safety nets, such as Finland, Japan and Germany have much lower crime than the US.
Those countries are also homogenous and socially rigid compared to the US. Homicide rates in Germany and Scandinavia fell below the 5 per 100k (the current US level) way back in the early 1800s, long before the modern welfare state: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/homicide-rates-across-wes...
You picked Japan, Germany, and Finland, three countries that happen to have high social spending and low crime. But Korea also has low crime and has lower social spending than the US: https://mobile.twitter.com/oecd_social/status/98735230257827.... By contrast, Brazil has a very high crime rate with similar levels of social spending as the US.
The data just doesn’t tell the story about the root causes of crime that you want to tell.
There is one confounder here which makes the tracking progressively less and less good for past 50 years, and makes it seem like the current crime rate look better than it actually is, relative to the past crime rates: improvements in trauma medicine.
Basically, what would be a homicide 50 years ago, today increasingly is “only” an aggravated assault, because of advanced treatments. If you adjust for that, if you assume that the standard of care today is unchanged for past 50 years, today’s homicide rate would likely double.