WTF is wrong with Americans? | Hacker News Reader

WTF is wrong with Americans?

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28 pointsngorenflo14 comments

As an American, I apologize. Like all of us, I am a mendacious and predatory economic sociopath. The United States contributes nothing positive at all to the global economy or culture. If only we could be like Norway -- which is, as I am told, perfect.

[Edit to counter a bit of my snark: I'm not saying these aren't problems, I'm just complaining about the stupidity of listing all of these more-or-less known issues and then grouping all Americans into a lump and asking us why we're all such idiots. The United States is a gigantic, complex nation of hundreds of millions of people whose voices need to be filtered into some kind of governmental consensus. It's not at all fair to compare the US to a Scandinavian country.]

The main point of the whole thing is not that Americans would be idiots, but rather that the way the United States is being governed is very suboptimal to the wellbeing of the average citizen and average inhabitant of this planet (yes, the way Americans live, how much they consume, has a great impact on every single human being on this planet).

Many points made are very clear, and well supported (e.g. income equality: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html).

As it happens, I have similar political views with author of the infographic, and I admire Northern European countries. But that doesn't mean that I have something to criticise about the USA. My home country is way behind in terms of government transparency, and liberal, free-thought of its population.

"Very sub-optimal"???

You think it doesn't matter "to the wellbeing of the average citizen and average inhabitant of this planet" that we e.g. keep the sea lanes open and the price of oil lower than many producers would like it? Or prevent another hot world war?

Good snarking! And on a serious note, I think the main comment here isn't about the actual issues, it's about Americans reaction to them. We appear to be OK with this or at least not willing to do enough about it.

Other than the insulting title, this isn't really making any points that haven't been made innumerable times. Education is getting far too expensive, too many people are thrown into prison for non-violent crimes, we spend way too much on military.

These observations aren't all that profound -- in fact I believe a majority of the younger generations agree with all of these points.

well, it's an infographic, which usually don't introduce new findings, rather summarizes existing info in an easy to digest way, they provide perspective.

Maybe so, but this didn't come across as an infographic whose purpose was to summarize information. Rather, it seems like a lecture to Americans about certain well-known and thoroughly discussed problems -- a lecture whose points the majority of Americans who read HN undoubtedly already agree with.

While the way to change things as an engineer is often to make something better than the alternative, one way to change things in politics is to keep the issue actively in discussion until public perception reaches a tipping point that something must be done. There are posts on HN about a new version of Rails or an interesting architecture used by a startup not just because it's new but also because it's the state of the industry and we want to dissect it and respond to it. We hear the same arguments about American policy because it remains the state of the country and we want to respond to it.

The basic American cultural value is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, or predestination by social class. At least in theory, the American Dream means your success is the result of hard work and talent, not your birth or social class. And to a fair extent, this works - our current president is the mixed-race child of a teenage single mother, who grew up in obscurity and near-poverty. Barack Obama is the embodiment of the American Dream. Many of our political, business, and cultural leaders are entirely self-made.

So the modern failures of American society are the failures to provide equality of opportunity. Three stand out in particular for me - substandard primary education, crushing debt for secondary education, and a health care system that traps people into working for large corporations rather than small businesses or entrepreneurship.

I would contest that anyone claiming America has equality of opportunity must necessarily show a correlation between recognizable Life Choices and the divergence of outcomes, and a lack of a correlation between personal background and the divergence of outcomes. Or in other words, equality of opportunity is measurable as social mobility (How many people wind up somewhere different from where they started?) and sociological significance of achievements (How are outcomes different between people who did X and people who did Y instead?).

To be sure, it's an imperfect correlation - mostly in that those who start on second or third base have a much better chance at a home run. But the point is that anyone can, in theory, hit a home run. In most historic cultures, that was not true.

To put it in presidential terms, someone like George W Bush becoming president isn't outrageous - he started on third base. But for someone like Barack Obama to become the most politically powerful figure would require an actual revolution in most historical situations.

In theory means absolutely nothing. Baseball metaphors tell us nothing about the real world.

Stop regurgitating badly digested Americana claptrap. Statistics on economic mobility: put up or shut up.

I cannot possibly pour enough irony tags onto the following words.

DAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA, you think human development and well being are important to the ruling class! WHAT A NAIVE IDIOT!

If only!

Now for the more serious talk.

Firstly, Americans have been convinced that freedom is property, and property is freedom. Since every good American knows that Americans love freedom, this means Americans love not only capitalism (in the sense of an unplanned market economy with free entry/exit of markets) but True Capitalism (this being the total elimination of all institutions that do not derive from private property). The process of this moral and political transformation of the American people has, ironically but quite predictably, started to make the predictions of Karl Marx come true. Ayn Rand, after all, was a Marxist in every detail except that she was on the other side.

In addition, a fundamental shift is happening in the world. It's going slowly enough that the general public aren't much noticing it, but it's certainly quick enough that by this time I think the entire intelligentsia everywhere is thinking about it. To cut to the point: productivity! It's rising so far, so quickly now that while we won't have a "robots do all the work" situation any time soon, the days are ending of most of the population having a productive job where their labor can out-compete sufficiently developed capital.

This shift goes much, much deeper than a mere economic crisis. This is a civilizational crisis. What do you do when most of your population is unproductive excess? Well, what seems to be happening in most of the world is that the "productive" elite (that is, the remaining elite who either hold appreciating capital or whose labor can still out-compete capital, this means us guys!) has begun to disregard the mass of the population entirely. Most people no longer matter. In fact, even most holders of traditional capital (factories and such) are being out-competed now. It's coming down to holders of land, robots, fuel, and money being the only ones with any actual pull.

Turns out capitalism doesn't collapse and bring about an inevitable socialist revolution; that was a bit of wishful thinking on the part of the Left. No, it collapses into rentier-driven neo-feudalism because "without these hands, not a wheel shall" stop turning.

None of which is to say that this is some inevitable process. It's not. We can change it tomorrow, if we want to. The problem is that this is the outcome of the deeply-rooted moral choices our societies have made. Capitalism can only behave this way because despite having abolished all other Grand Narratives our societies still worship at the alter of Productivism.

So make yourself useful, stick up for the useless, or die.

Ignorance is strength!

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