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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Aside from police brutality, all the spying and erosion of privacy, corruption at high level (like regulatory capture), the medical and insurance situation points more to the fact that this country -- US, is not a civilized country.

It is a country with a high GDP, strong military, good natural resources, strong manufacturing. All those nice things. But it is still not a civilized country.

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As a counterpoint from civilized Germany, after the birth of a child both parents are granted 14 months paid leave (at 2/3 salary up to ~$3k/mo) to split between them. Usually the mother takes 12 and the father 2 concurrently. The state pays for this, not the employer.

You also have the right to 3 years unpaid leave (extended with further children) and the employer must find you a similar position when you return to work.

So far this has neither economically crippled the nation nor made it impossible for its companies to compete on the international market, nor driven all the manufacturing and blue-collar work abroad.

I'm just astonished how such different systems can coexist. What are the benefits of the American system and who receives them? A lower tax burden? Is it really that much lower to be worth it?

The real "benefit" of the American system is that it keeps everyone eager. It keeps us grateful to have a crappy job at all. It keeps us ready to trade salary for benefits, or vice versa. It keeps us at jobs we don't like for the medical benefits we think they give us and our families. It reduces the bargaining power of labor.

Is this good in the long term? Maybe not, but it is the American aesthetic. It goes hand in hand with the perpetual hope that we will win the lottery/start the next Facebook/work our way up the ladder and then we too can benefit from low taxes. That's why poor Americans defend the privileges of rich Americans to the death: if we ever make it up there we want those privileges to remain!

That can't be the case. Pretty much every country with a better handle on these things, also has a young, eagar often educated workforce.

A thought from Jimmy Carter comes to mind. He said countries are not really 'democracies' or 'not democracies' but rather that democracy is either strong or weak. Similarly, one shouldn't say the USA is uncivilised but that some of it's civic institutions are weak in some ways. Additionally they do not uniformly share the same strengths and weaknesses across the entire country.

I think that's an enlightening way of looking at things, but doesn't quite bring the same shame as referring to ourselves as an uncivilized country.

Perhaps if the national debate was about being a civilized country instead of framing it as 'socialism' we'd eventually be able to move into the modern era in the context of social policy.

I strongly agree. Its interesting how the US chooses policies some times. The culture here is very different from most other civilized countries.

Countries with no national paid maternity leave policy: US, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Liberia [1]

Countries who have executed people in the past 25 years who were under 18 at the time of their crimes: The People's Republic of China (PRC), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United States and Yemen. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave (also noted elsewhere in the comments)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Juvenile_off... Admittedly this fact is cherry picked. The US has since changed the policy

Its unfortunate that there are not laws preventing things like this from happening. Too many people in the US do not want the government to impose laws or regulations just because they oppose any government interference what so ever. Even if the interference will benefit everyone.

People have a choice where they work. Had this happened to me I would be high tailing it out of there but professors dont have that luxury.

It is sad how people who would benefit most from it can easily be brainwashed to vote against it. This is summed best by the ironic "get your government out of my Medicare" slogan. It is not a real slogan but it is used as a joke to illustrate the underlying logic.

Uncivilized, really? We certainly have issues, but I think that's a bit much. Those are all very real problems, but for the most part our day to day lives are very civilized. And there are ways to fix these problems, it just isn't easy.

All of which is based on your perception of reality, all of which comes from news.

News are by definitions things that almost never happen.

Define corruption level, quantify it, and then we can talk.

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