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> maybe it is my European arrogance

It could be. Social cohesion is a lot easier in monoethnic countries, for better or for worse; and in countries where the monoethnicity is changing like Sweden (where a full quarter of the population is not ethnically Swedish), voters are putting political parties in power that promise to restore it by some combination of reducing immigration or enforcing integration.

In the meantime, the dystopia of the United States is such that the state of Mississippi, often panned both within the US and without as a "literal third-world country", has a higher per capita disposable income than Germany. The image that you have of half the population either struggling to stay alive or basically dead is not true to reality.

The fractions mentioned were of course hyperbole. My point was that giving away more of your income to your peers will create a more livable environment. For example as we talk about Mississipi and Germany:

- Infant mortality — Germany: 2.67 deaths per 1000 live births, Mississippi: 8.8 infant deaths per 1000 live births

- Life expectancy — Germany: 80.1 years, Mississippi: 71.9 years

- Homicides per 100.000 population — Germany: 0.933, Mississippi: 20.5

So the superiour disposable income in Mississippi surely does not help to keep their infants (or rather themselves) from dying more often.

But okay: you pay less taxes and therefore have more disposable income as people living in Germany. But it comes at a cost. And while well educated upper class people might not be as much affected by this (if they are lucky and don't fall victim to the resulting violence), this will shape the whole environment you are living in. Nothing else was my point. If I had to choose between more money and a less livable environment, or less money and a more livable environment I'd choose the later one. Money can buy you a lot of nice things, but unless you never leave your home living in a nice environment is worth more for a live well spent. And if you never leave your home, you should maybe wonder why.

By the way I live in Hamburg, Germany, where 34% of the population has a migration background, many turkish, arabian and african minorities. I never heard a single gunshot in a decade of living here. I have never seen a single person publicly using hard drugs (excluding Marihuana, Alcohol and similar things). I have once seen a used syringe and I live in one of the dirtier parts of the city.

Just like living in a noisy flat will wear you down in ways you don't even notice until you finally spend a few calm nights in another place, the environment you live in affects you as well.

You're absolutely right about everything you said, but for me the crux of it comes down to:

> If I had to choose between more money and a less livable environment, or less money and a more livable environment I'd choose the later one.

Some people might choose differently, and moreover, the less taxation there is, the more people are able to choose between the two at all. After all, you can freely give to charity what isn't taxed from you, should you choose to trade your money to better outcomes of those around you.

I have never been to your fair city (though I always have wanted to!), but a 34% foreign-born rate is comparable to many large cities in the US, some in states with more egalitarian policies (California, New Jersey) and some in states with less egalitarian policies (Florida, Texas); so clearly that is not a big driver, at least in the US, of where immigrants choose to go.

San Francisco, famously egalitarian in its local politics, is right in line with Hamburg at 34.1% foreign-born; yet it is full of people using hard drugs in public, leaving syringes and human waste behind.

There is a huge diversity between US states in our federal structure, just like there is a huge diversity between EU member countries. For better or worse, US states are sovereign entities with the right to govern their own internal affairs. It would be more sensible to compare Mississippi to Romania. (Although Mississippi does still come out worse on certain metrics.)

I feel you're just repeating randomly cherry-picked stats.

The data is fairly consistent that the USA as a whole has slowly lost it's advantages over Europe that it had after WWII and the New Deal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_the_Unit...

> In the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures health, education, and per capita income levels, the United States is relatively high, currently ranking 8th. However, the Human Development Index is not considered a measure of living standards, but a measure of potential living standards were there no inequality: rather, the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index is considered the actual level of human development, taking inequality into account. On the inequality-adjusted HDI, the United States ranked 27th in 2014, tied with Poland

Wikipedia has newer stats too, but the USA is still basically tied with Poland in the mid 20s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...

So, if the USA as a whole is Poland then presumably Mississipi, despite all the money they get from other states, is likely not doing that great compared with Germany.

Also intersesting, and new to me, they do one that takes into account how wasteful the country is with resources to achieve that standard of living, on that the USA slips way down, below Ukraine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_planetary...

I think they made a compatible point that you are glossing over.

The US can have all of the following: less social cohesion, more money, more inequality, and less human development.

I agree that social cohesion is at the crux of most of it. Many Americans hate most other Americans at any given time. Most are concerned in exerting political control over each other to force them to behave how they want.

I don't know about "hate", but one of the foundational ideas of the US, at least from what I can make of it, is that more control should be relegated to the lower levels of government (to the states or the people), and the highest levels (the federal government) should necessarily be sort of the least common denominator of what everyone agrees on -- which, of course, is going to be few things.

So you have a situation where one side wants to "help people" by throwing money at them and yelling at the other side for being heartless greedy bastards, and the other side wants to "help people" by imposing state-sanctioned morality on them and yelling at the other side for being immoral hedonists, and the federal government being simultaneous trying to be used by everyone for their own purposes and yelled at by everyone for being "obstructionist" (hint: that's it working as intended).

I think it goes a bit further than you described. both sides aren't just judging calling the other side heartless or hedonists. They are actively using the state and police to force them to comply with their own morality via mandatory taxation and laws. (e.g. mandatory taxation for social welfare, or prohibition of private behavior such as buying alcohol on Sunday)

Social diversity = differences in morality

differences in morality + State enforced morality = low social cohesion/animosity.

I promise I'm not downvoting you despite our disagreements -- I'm not sure why you are being downvoted.

I'm not disputing that other countries are more egalitarian than the US, and it's more comfortable to be poor in countries like Norway or New Zealand (ranked higher on the IHDI) than the US. But I'm willing to bet that almost all, if not all, of the countries higher than the US on IHDI are net immigrants to the US. This data is surprisingly hard to find, but the couple that I did manage find (Ireland, France) supported my viewpoint. If anyone has a table of net migration by country pair, it would be marvellous.

So clearly something is still drawing people to the US, even from countries that are more egalitarian than the US.

This "planetary pressure-adjusted HDI" thing sounds completely made up ;-) but by your same logic, if the US is doing poorly by virtue of it being ranked around Ukraine, then apparently Luxembourg is truly awful, ranked 153rd around the likes of Afghanistan and DR Congo. And I'm sure only very few people would choose to live in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, or Saudi Arabia over the US, given the same relative impact on the planet; in fact, when it comes to people's own lives, practically everyone chooses (metaphorically) "drill, baby, drill!".

Well, they could choose to live in a country that score high on all of the indices, like Germany.

The northern EU immigrants to the USA are generally a small amount of highly educated workers. And it's unlikely they're moving to Missisippi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

To Germany's credit, they are the second biggest receiver of international immigrants, only behind the US which take in almost a full fifth of all. But between Germans and Americans, the net gainer was the US for the past 30 years[0], though with the gap narrowing in recent years.

Granted, those are small absolute numbers and may not indicate much, but still, if Germany is that much better than the US, why are consistently more Germans choosing to live in the US than the other way around?

[0]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2020/10/PE20_N068_12411.htm...

If I had to chose one factor I'd say lack of language skills.

It doesn't really change the fact that America is squandering its many advantages and seems unaware of how poorly it's doing compared with what it could be doing.

You could make a reasonable case today for wanting to be born in China rather than the US. That should embarrass the US but instead they've recently latched on to a very convenient belief that China will implode in the next five years. And they've been saying that for decades because it's been obvious for that long how embarrassing it is to be caught up so fast and need an excuse that isn't just them at fault for their own problems.

"Oh China only did so well because we gave them all this stuff and they cheated and copied us, not at all like how we ripped of IP from Europe in our own history".

No instead were celebrating well known, tragic failure Mississippi because it has a number higher than another number if you carefully avoid all context.

> The data is fairly consistent that the USA as a whole has slowly lost it's advantages over Europe

It is September now, let's talk about USA standards of living vs European in say 6 months. This will give some time to account for the winter with natural gas shortages.

> Helping total strangers out with my tax money is not something I just do because it is the right thing to do, I also do it because living in a nicer society feels better than living in one where one quarter is desperately fighting for survival while another quarter has basically already given up.

This is basically my thought process, and I also feel it would be a stronger argument in a lot of cases. Some amount of me, in some cases, views the taxes through the lens of helping people and making a collective better future. Another part of me is much more selfish about it. Don't like seeing homeless, drug addicts, dirty streets, street tents, beggers, etc? Pay your share to not see them.

I'm not opposed to paying taxes to help out people in need. But in California, much of that tax revenue ends up in the "homeless industrial complex" filled with bureaucrats, consultants, vendors, and non-profit employees who have a direct financial incentive to perpetuate the problem rather than solving it. Some are also pushing leftist political ideologies which directly cause more homelessness when put into practice.

I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush here. Most people working to aid the homeless are sincere and trying to make a positive influence. But there is a huge amount of waste, and taxpayers are right to be skeptical about where their money is going.

I agree. I was talking more in general toward the idea of not wanting to pay more in taxes to "pay for the lifestyle of those who don't work", that is a common sentiment in general for social safety nets. Instead of focusing on how someone's money will help someone else, you can show how it will help those who would be paying more in taxes.

This is the main concern - millions or billions can be spent on a system that is obviously failing and the solution is always spend even more.

The concept of personal behavior being contingent on society providing free access to healthcare seems so bizarre. Up until a few generations ago there was hardly any healthcare, and what healthcare did exist often did more harm than good.

I do support expanding access to basic healthcare (including mental health services) but I think that would have only a minor impact on the problem. There's something else going wrong.

That’s not how it works. The obligation is to society, not the other way around