Hacker News Reader

Nobel prizes? Manned moon landings? Reserve currencies? AC units per capita?

Are any of these stipulated as criteria anywhere?

There's also proportion of adult in prisons, people who believe in angels, and the mass-shooting high score

> AC units per capita

This gave me a laugh

Despite all of those things people still travel across the world to give birth in US just so their posterity can become a part of our country. What other metric do you need?

Not everybody across the world is doing that in equal measure (I've not heard of a concerted effort by Europeans travelling to the US to give birth in contemporary times).

People migrate for economic opportunity. South Africa is not a rich country, but sees millions come in from the SADC for this reason, despite some pretty big social problems.

The US is nothing special, it's just a particularly large market of economic opportunity with a history of allowing in migrants. If China was significantly more migrant friendly, we'd see the same happen there. None of this specifies that the US has some secret recipe for success that papers over some of its obvious and glaring deficits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com