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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

You do understand the US, much like Europe, is highly bifurcated.

Show me the gap between the top and the bottom in Europe and the EU.

In Western Russia poverty looks like people earning $100-$200 per month. They exist in third world conditions. That's part of Europe.

Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US). Hint: it's not even close.

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The US is more like Latin America here, where top 25% does not mean you are immune to the problems of the other 75%. Your average resident of an affluent western European country does not come into daily contact with a poor resident of western Russia (except maybe through some recent drones...?). But in the US, it's hard to escape the poverty and violence unless you're closer to the top 1%. I am probably around top 20%, in an affluent part of an affluent coastal US city (but not Manhattan affluent). Still, I don't walk outside after dark because of the high crime rates. The crime rates are not as high as in the bad parts of the same city, but people are mugged on a daily basis, and even murders are uncomfortably frequent. I didn't have this problem when I lived in several different places in western Europe, which had lower incomes, but also much lower levels of violent crime. I will admit that American pay is better, but not sure about the quality of life.

Western European cities have been getting more violent.

London murder rate per million in 2024: 11.6 NYC murder rate per million in 2024: 43

And from what I read, NYC is exceptionally safe for a US city, and London is exceptionally unsafe for a UK city.

104 murders in London in 24/25, 535 in the whole of the UK for the same period

Overall crime and especially violent crime is falling in the UK but there are some well publicised hotspots - phone theft, shoplifting

What do you think that difference in homicide rates proves? It’s caused entirely by racial disparities in homicide victimization rate. The NYC homicide rate for white victims is about 9 per million: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p... (7% of 343 homicides divided by 2.7 million). The homicide rate among white people in London was also about 9 per million: https://aoav.org.uk/2024/londons-2023-murders-examined-key-f... (43% of 103 homicides divided by 4.7 million).

It seems unlikely that this pattern of homicides would be explain by differences in general government policies between the U.S. and UK, such as healthcare policies.

The post I was replying to was edited and originally claimed that London had higher murder rate than New York.

NYC is very safe for an American city, but London is not particularly unsafe for a UK one; its violent crime rate is about average for England as a whole.

You are right. Should not have relied on the most likely LLM-generated description attached to the data. I trusted it because I already had the wrong impression that it was less safe, but that was just because the raw number of crimes is high because it is very populated.

As a general rule of thumb, probably never trust anything an LLM says; they're bad at things.

(I'm particularly unsurprised that they'd get confused about _London_, because, well, what is a London anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London . Even _human_ writers sometimes get confused about stats for London.)

I’m sure you can a find a city or two where this is true, but the general trend in most places is slow reduction since a peak in, usually the 80s or 90s. It’s not well-understood _why_ this is.

Social media tends to make people _feel_ like there’s a lot of violent crime.

There was another HN thread recently where someone was commenting about how living conditions in specific parts of Europe were better than the US. When everyone questioned them, they explained that they just didn’t consider various parts of the EU or even certain large cities in major EU countries to be part of the comparison because everyone knew their living standards were lower.

It’s a strange double standard where the US gets evaluated as a mix of the worst headlines from every state, but when commenters talk about Europe being a utopia they actually refer to a cherry picked mix of the best parts of different countries.

I can’t speak to the specific living standards of a bottom half European but I can say I have visited probably a dozen major cities of Europe and never seen a single person living in a tent on the street. In at least half of those cities I have ventured well outside the “tourist” areas.

Meanwhile, I can’t go anywhere in my American city without encountering people living in conditions worse than the average person in a third world country.

Clearly you havent visited Paris, especially the northern part. Tent people are everywhere and it used to be more at the periphery but nowadays even inside the city around popular metro stations, they are right there.

All this tells me that you have rose tinted glass and would rather ignore reality. Sure, there are plenty of things the EU does better than the US but I seriously doubt the bottom part of the population is living significantly better...

> Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US).

I don't know where you learned statistics but this is like comically bad.

I suggest you pick an even smaller country like Andorra ~82K people and compare that with the top 82K people in the US.

Seriously, it's well known the US is skewed towards the top and it's actually a problem... We all remember how Warren Buffet had to say it was weird how he played a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary, right?

I need to brush up on statistics. Would it be better to compare p95 or p90 between the two? Granted I don’t see a lot of these stats outside the tech industry and I always wondered why.

Yes that's the point that was being made.

So your argument is that Countries:Countries is unfair, and that Europe should be inclusive of Russia, which isn't even an EU member state, and they are at war with by some metrics, for a proper like comparison?

Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela?

The failure of your argument is front and center, you basically admit that Germany has done well for itself, and so you label it "Elite". But that Elite nature is recent and fleeting, its based on what the government has been able to deliver its citizens. The same things that the US government has failed to deliver its own citizens.

We aren't just comparing regions of land, but polities. Otherwise its moot. I think the US can do better, and it can do better by improving the performance of its polity. Germans however cant exactly vote to directly improve Russian literacy.

> Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela

Because they aren’t part of the USA.

You didn’t address their point at all, which was to demonstrate that the USA is a rich country, and that both the top and bottom tiers are higher in wealth than top and bottom tiers in Europe. Even excepting Russia and other non-EU countries this holds true.

>USA is a rich country

Yes, so the proper comparison is a Country.

Not a Region or a Continent.

You could stretch the EU to fit "Country" but the poster went even further and decided that Germany includes Russia.

Spain gets even poorer if you include Zimbabwe in its data for no reason at all. Crazy.

If you include Western Russia, you can also include Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.

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