Whenever I explain the "USA" to (Eastern) Europeans, I always simply state the notion: "diverse country of the extremes".
Yes, widespread obesity, but health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money. How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.
Bad education? Yes, pretty much. But also some of the best research institutions and universities in the world. Some companies with the highest R&D spending anywhere. Many of the foremost intellectuals end up living there once they enter the international stage.
Backwards, conservative, patriotic? Yes, but also extreme progressive bubbles and widespread leftist sentiments.
"American elitism"? Largely yes in many ways, but also very friendly, welcoming to strangers (even though they are just hyperbole with excitement in many contexts compared to us).
When I read the comment section here it seems like it fits my narrative. The US, country of the extremes. Drinkers, and puritans. Now fight! By the way: The article is so speculative, how can you discuss this in such earnestness? My problem with The Atlantic in general. Many articles are kind of "grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that", which then has this "intellectual" appearance about it, but says very little. Not convincing at all.
The US is like a social experiment. Deal with your racism, alcohol, health, drug legalization, gender debates, sjw/pc culture, and all that, and please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight (though sadly that doesn't always work out it seems). And before I get angry responses: It's written somewhat tongue in cheek, extend me the courtesy of not assuming the worst about my person.
I think a lot of this is just because the USA is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the USA:)
Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often operate like 50 small-to-medium sized countries. And there's less of a push to homogenize the country since one of our political parties fights against federalization.
All that adds up to a country with a whole lot of variation. Describing what Americans are like is pretty useless. We're like everything.
I used to think mind-boggling big was a bunch of hyperbole until I drove from Georgia to Washington State. I’ve flown across the US a few times and it seemed big but not mind-boggling big. I can’t imagine how much bigger the US would be on horseback or on foot, and I’m ok with that.
Russia is bigger in terms of area, just two times smaller in terms of population, but 10 times more uniform, at least. You wouldn't be able to tell apart two typical provincial Russian towns from the opposite sides of the country.
So, no, just the size itself doesn't seem like a complete explanation for this.
U.S. divisions at this point run largely rural versus urban. Russia has the same thing - folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town.
If anything, Russia and the U.S. are pretty similar in terms of regional and cultural tensions.
>U.S. divisions at this point run largely rural versus urban.
I think you're trying to point out actual points of cultural tension, which I'd argue are largely superficial and mostly political. But I think OP was trying to say that the US is culturally diverse based on geography. And I think OP is right, the culture of Atlanta is very different than the culture of NYC which is very different than the culture of San Francisco or LA.
Similarly the culture of Montana or Wyoming is very different than the culture of the rural south.
I grew up in what most people would consider the rural south (a small town in Kentucky), and even the difference between various regions in the south are pretty stark... Just take for example this article; Kentucky, know for their bourbon, and I grew up in a dry county (couldn't sell alcohol at all). Prohibition laws stuck around decades after federal prohibition ended for largely religious reasons.
> folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town
Not really. I live in Moscow, and financially I have a very different life from someone in a small town. But in terms of the culture and people around, the difference is not that big.
Here's a random youtube vlog about a small russian town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwW5wdIt_w It's on the opposite edge of the country, and yet, I would only be able to tell it apart from Moscow's residential neighbourhoods by how tall the buildings, built from the same panels, in the same design series, are.
The vast majority of Russia is taiga and tundra, no? Like Canada, the land is vast but the population clusters heavily to one side. https://i.redd.it/v9rdedhje4i31.png
Whereas the U.S. has two heavily populated coasts and much of its land is arable, at temperate latitudes (at least with irrigation—setting aside water issues).
The gulf coast may have a higher population than the west coast depending where the line is. So three heavily populated coasts. Supposedly something like 2/3 of the population lives in the 100 mile border zone.
While size isn't a complete explanation, its important to consider the population distribution as well. Russia may be geographically larger but the population is much more concentrated than it is in the US.
Yes, overall diversity is smaller, it's all white and mostly Russian population, skewed to West, but also some very different minorities (and climate). Russian North and Caucasus are very different.
And two typical provincial towns in Russia can have more difference than two typical provincial towns in US. Both in population, demography, education, urbanization level.
Neither of the things you've listed sounds like diversity, it sounds like inequality. Why is half the country without proper education while the other ones are in the best research institutions in the world? And what does the people are those institutions spend their time on, if it's not helping the other half reaching the same position as themselves?
The social experiment seems to be about how extreme you can really make inequality before people starts to riot. Wages are so low in some places that people simply walk out of their work because they can't survive on it, while it's so high in other places that you barely have to do anything and still pull in enough to put you in the 1% of the world population when it comes to income.
> Why is half the country without proper education
Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance. It is something that bewilders me, and that has only become clear to me in the past 5 years or so. It isn't that some people lack access to education that they want, but rather do not want access to that education because they believe that if you can figure things out without relying on the knowledge humanity has built up over the years. I see it in my own father, who one day told me, "I've been thinking about climate change recently, and I just don't think it's a problem." He didn't research on it, he didn't read on it, he didn't perform experimentations, he just thought about it and came to his ironclad conclusion.
Likewise I see it in plenty of people, even people that are friends that I consider intelligent. They do not understand something, want to understand it, yet will do nothing to actually understand it. I had a friend that didn't understand an aspect of general relativity (he loves physics), which is totally understandable, it is complex stuff. He complained and argued with me about it for years. Finally I literally did a 1 minute search on youtube, found the first video on that specific topic and made him watch it. Then he finally got it.
Ok, I'm on a weird tangent ;) Back to the topic.
These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.
I don't know how prevalent it is in other countries, but I think it occurs in the US because of this new "independent thinker" attitude that is a warped version of the skeptic. They take great pride in believing something other than what they are told.
As a skeptic and someone that likes to work things out for myself and who generally likes to examine the nuance of situations, I find this greatly frustrating.
> Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.
This is, of course, self-fulfilling. In a society where education is poor, people will extrapolate from their own experience to conclude that all education is equally poor.
Source: grew up in the rural South, attending public school, surrounded by people who (correctly) viewed their education as nearly useless.
I think you have the symptoms right but I disagree with your premise:
> These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.
While this may come off as a bit pedantic I think it's important to recognize that no one actually thinks "learning things" is offensive or insulting. While it's convenient to package the behaviors of people you don't understand into a single box I think it spawns an unproductive and even unhealthy attitude towards others.
Rather than packing it all into one root issue, I think it's better to try and match the set of symptoms with a set of (possible) causes. Here is my own personal take on the situation:
|== American Culture Has Failed To Adapt To The Internet's Style Of Trust & Reputation
1. Before television a person's world was often restricted to those in their local community, this meant that reputation was everything and as a consequence, people tended to be naturally very trusting, naive even (since betraying someones trust would hurt your local reputation). If your town's doctor or priest told you something, you would believe them.
2. After television become a household staple in the 50s, this perspective changed a bit. Sure you could always /read/ about people outside of town, or even listen to them on the radio, but with TV they were practically right there in front of you. As a consequence this culture of trusting people within the community naturally extended towards those on TV as well. In fact people started to trust people on TV even more than the people within their local community! If the TV said it it must be true! (it often wasn't but then again, how would they know?)
3. Then the internet happened. It was slow, it took a lot of time to saturate into the lives of most people, but I'd say around 2010, the vast majority of people considered it more reliable than TV. It had now taken the throne of truth from TV and as a consequence: three generations of people who were conditioned to believe EVERYTHING they heard on TV without questioning things suddenly got exposed to a platform that was completely unmoderated and without consensus.
4. It used to be that people would just pick favored news channel and believe everything it told them. They thought that being a "skeptic" was doubting the handful of news channels that other people watched, but obviously /their/ news channel got everything right. These beliefs carried over to the internet, especially in the older generations (but not exclusively by any means). To them the only thing that changed is instead of there being 100 or 1000 channels, there are now infinite. But unfortunately they often fail to realize that their culture of trust is incompatible with a platform where that "local" reputation is near meaningless.
|== The Incompetence Of Mainstream Authorities, After Generations Of Public Trust, Has Lost It's Footing
* It's becoming increasingly obvious how incompetent and outright deceitful some of the most trusted news organizations have become without shame. They have of course almost always been this way but atleast local newspapers at a certain degree of accountability. By over optimizing for the web's engagement driven monetization strategies, news orgs drunk on the trust television provided them, have stopped doing their due diligence and pretty much everyone can see this now thanks to (ironically) the web.
* Coastal Elites over-estimating their intelligence and under-estimating the rest keep getting caught trying to play mind games with the public. This applies to many domains but the best example, while repeated ad nauseam at this point, would be health officials saying masks weren't effective against the virus at first so they could avoid a shortage. This created a very large gaping wound in public trust that will take a very long time to heal. While maybe in the days of television this would have been swept under the rug before long, that's not how things work anymore.
* Recent years have simply had too many cases where the mainstream opinion, paraded as absolute, turned out to be naked from the start. Trump was elected (2016), Brexit happened, and the Corona Virus is not just the flu (the was a conspiracy theory back in January 2020). Honestly even a bunch of little things on the side like CNBC saying the hedgefunds closed their position on those GME shorts have also added to this.
|= People Don't Actually Know How To Do Research
* Regardless of generation or exposure to television, people at large straight up do not even know how to do the most basic of research. A shocking amount of people think typing something into google and looking at the first result is something to be proud of. It's not as you suggest where they are proud not to go any deeper, its that the dunning kruger effect has caused many of the populace to believe that there isn't anything deeper to be looked at.
* People fail to understand the value primary sources. Even most programmers which one might assume trend a bit higher on the bell curve, fail to even look at the original documentation or specification for things that they are trying to learn about. When trying to learn about HTTP for example, rather than just looking at Wikipedia to find the RFC numbers and reading the RFCs themselves. They will instead opt to only look at the summary Wikipedia provides, or worse, rely on a bunch of SEO "optimized" tutorial sites that often get things wrong.
> There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.
My experience has been with people who don't think that education is bad, but modern universities. I know many people who are smart, self-driven, industrious people who like learning things - who aren't interested in going to a public university. (they're more than happy to avail themselves of YouTube videos, Coursera courses, GitHub projects, work on things with friends, and so on)
Given the state of modern universities, with so many of them pushing the murderous ideology that is neo-Marxism, I can't blame them. A few more generations of this and we'll have our own Cultural Revolution, except with even more than the tens of millions of deaths that China did with theirs.
I have no idea about your walk of life, but people leaving low paying jobs doesn’t feel irrational or lazy, or bullshitty in general. Why shouldn’t they ?
The reason it sounds bulshitty is that in order to leave a low paying job in which you are truly on the cusp you have to have another job lined up. There isn't a lot of savings to manage time to find another job if you just get up and go. If they didn't have another job lined up chances are they wouldn't walk out on the job. Not agreeing or disagreeing just adding some perspective on why it sounds a bit odd of a statement.
"Walking out" of a job implies leaving the employer without warning in the middle of a workday, something many people in the US pride themselves on not doing (despite largely having the legal right to do so).
It's related to strong senses of personal responsibility and pride in reliability and dependability, in my experience.
Let’s not split hairs about the manner in which some folks leave their jobs. “Walking out” can imply leaving without warning, or might better represent the worker’s state of mind when they make the decision to give notice.
The underlying problem is that wages are so low in some places that it’s not possible to survive without:
- multiple incomes in the household
- multiple jobs
- going into debt
- living in a dangerous place
Etc.
These conditions leave the person without much choice but to leave.
Anecdotally, I remember multiple instances of coworkers walking out in the middle of a shift when I worked as a cook in a chain restaurant due to the combination of high stress (including abuse from customers and management) and low wages.
Why do you suppose that under conditions of perfect fairness we would see perfect equality? That's just not the case. Human talent is not sprinkled in the proportion in each person. You can achieve equality only through Harrison Bergeron measures. I'd rather have freedom.
You are more right about your former point then you realize. Even in a perfectly fair economy where all the players are equally skilled, statistically the wealth will gather in fewer and fewer hands after each fair and equal transaction.
I disagree with your conclusion though “choose freedom”. In an unequal society, those that have will have control over those that have not. Meaning the freedom you speak of is only available to those that are lucky in their earlier transaction (or more realistically those that inherit the most).
>Why do you suppose that under conditions of perfect fairness we would see perfect equality? That's just not the case. Human talent is not sprinkled in the proportion in each person. You can achieve equality only through Harrison Bergeron measures. I'd rather have freedom.
The assumption here that perfect fairness is a perfect information meritocracy is an intellectual leap, and even if true belies the fact that what constitutes merit is defined by those who have power.
Is this perfect fairness outcome or opportunity based? Is the equality measured purely in terms of economic outcome or in terms of individual value maximization?
There's too much swept under the rug to generalize a model about the direction of society.
That's because most people don't really care about those things. If you're poor and all your friends are poor you don't have greater expectations, nor is it really a problem since you can organize your society around it.
What starts revolutions is disappointed elites - like if you promise your children good jobs and then they don't get them. Another kind is "revolution of rising expectations" where they do start getting good jobs and it causes them to expect even better ones faster than they get them.
I think you'll find that all the people we see rioting (whatever side they're on) would cite economic inequality and exploitation as a source of their problem; their differences of opinion (and focuses) might be over who is getting exploited and by whom.
While that is technically true, it doesn't create the type of diversity you can really tap into since some folks are too poor to realistically participate in society, and a lot of society is too segregated for different viewpoints to be in the same place.
Just wow... I guess you would have different sentiment if you would be on the poor side of the inequality scale. Sentiment about poverty being good because it gives 'vastly different life experiences'?
One of the things we can be actually proud here in Europe (mainly western part though), a rather strong middle class and tons of help to the poor (maybe too much according to some).
I know its nice to find cheap poor folks desperate to work for peanuts, and you can pat yourself in the back how the environment gives everybody a chance to thrive, but that's not an American reality, just a self-perpetuating pipe dream.
US is great for the ultra-rich, good for the rich, not-so-good for middle class and outright shit for the poor. But good luck trying to get this accepted in the US where folks are spoon-fed from the childhood how US is best in everything, rather than some healthy amount of critical thinking.
Generally everybody, but in my humble experience Americans (and French) especially, profit greatly when (have been) living abroad for some time. Then we can have actual conversations what is great here and there and what outright sucks.
The claim that the US is an experiment has a long precedent.
>No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth.
While your response is entirely predictable, it’s obvious why such a reaction misses the point because the scope is much wider than one issue.
Yes, it was said during a time when slavery was the norm. But the “experiment” also included allowing systems that challenged that notion rather than maintaining the status quo. That’s the point.
I don't think this really addresses the core issue, being that experimentation is used as an excuse to not apply the results of the experiments after they've been performed.
I don't think the idea is that experimentation is de facto bad. It's the use of experimentation as a tool to avoid implementation following experimentation that's being decried.
I think you are correct, but also think that’s why Jefferson deliberately rooted the virtue of experimentation in our ability to use reason to interpret the results.
If someone is acting in bad faith, the fault is not in the experimental process but rather their faculty in interpreting the results. We wouldn’t throw out experimentation in science just because a researcher was biased in their result. The OP seems to be throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Too right. What’s the alternative? Living in a stagnant dictatorship governed by caprice and bllsht? Making sure your citizens remain ignorant and downtrodden? Jefferson is undeniably problematic by our standards and judged by the standards of his time, but he had a way with words (and was pretty handy at some other stuff too!). He tried to do some good in the world from his position of privilege, through the lens of the world as he saw it… There are many ideas and actions of his that I disagree strongly with, but I can allow that he got some stuff very right and expressed his thoughts and ideas extremely eloquently.
You are correct, however my point was that when we see bad faith acting people will continue to use the same descriptive language of it being an "experiment" when there are active, known harms
> And what does the people are those institutions spend their time on, if it's not helping the other half reaching the same position as themselves?
Elite universities are supposed to advance elite science - stuff like math, physics, technology, sociology, history. They also train people for work that requires such training.
But, they dont create public education policy nor should they. They are not subject of public elections nor are they responsible for budget.
> Think of all we could do if our best and brightest weren't so damn distracted with status and money
Working at university does not bring you much money nor all that much status. And who is the best depends on your definition of the "best".
In any case "serving humanity" and "being in charge of public education, social system and economy" are massively different tasks. And the latter is currently settled through political system and activism, not through science or universities.
No one has ever quit a job because they can’t survive on it. If you’re really working paycheck to paycheck and barely scraping by, you don’t have the luxury of quitting. You would be homeless very quickly.
It's a little more nuanced than that. Crappy "barely survive" paying jobs tend to have high turnover and that's a two way street. You lose your job being janitor at the airport for pissing hot and you might not even lose a day's wage because you could be sweeping floors at the hospital that night if you play your cards right. Jiffy Lube gives you crap jobs for the 3rd straight week and you're rolling your toolbox into Midas the next Monday maybe without a single working hour lost if the new employer sends someone to help you get your stuff and get set up. Unskilled and barely skilled onboarding is nowhere near as drawn out and cumbersome as the white collar onboarding most of HN takes for granted.
I did stuff like that a few times back in the day (this century) when I was working those kinds of jobs.
Because the lag from starting new positions to getting paid is, for people without savings, extremely problematic, and the assumption you can obtain unskilled or low skilled employment rapidly is fairly optimistic in general, ignores potential travel issues, and is pretty city centric and much less plausible in rural areas.
Yeah the lag is tough but going without or being late on payments is part of life when you’re on minimum wage. It sucks, I’ve been there. It’s probably a lot worse if you have a family or live far out of town but that doesn’t mean people don’t quit shitty jobs. I’m not saying people don’t stay in shitty jobs either, they do, it just all depends on the person and the situation but most people I’ve known have walked out of jobs that were unbearable at one point or another.
That’s hilarious that people are downvoting this. I imagine they don’t even know that daywork is a thing or that getting paid by the hour isn’t just a metric used for billing different clients.
Freedom creates inequality. The freedom to excel comes with the freedom to do poorly at the game. Why should everyone be in the same position? They didn't put in the same effort.
We do give away a lot of welfare to people who are doing poorly. It might be more effective to stop giving people money and use it instead to create programs to provide better jobs and skill training.
>>Why should everyone be in the same position? They didn't put in the same effort.
For a simple reason - because we know, empirically, through decades of studies(some of which were done by the very US of A!), that it produces better results for the entire society. I've learnt long ago that it doesn't matter how I feel about benefits system personally - yeah I hate that some people get money for doing nothing. But it's literally irrelevant - we know through hard data that it works and produces good results. So the whole question of "how much effort has someone put in" is amusing to debate online, but it should be worth exactly zero when deciding policy.
>>The freedom to excel comes with the freedom to do poorly at the game.
Is it freedom though? How many of Americans can't get into these best education programs because they can't afford it? Yes, I am aware that there are grants and funds available if you really are poor - but you still have to apply. What if the chances were really equal - all higher education completely free to attend like it is in some other countries? Both the best university in the country and the worst both have the exact same cost of admission = zero. Isn't that what freedom is?
I was pretty poor. My mom worked part-time and call centers and did medical studies to earn extra money while my dad worked full-time. I made some bad choices, but then got a 2-year degree at a community college and yes, I did use some grants which I'm very thankful for.
Not to be pedantic but there's really no such thing as free is there? Someone is paying for that college. Personally I don't want to subsidize these quote unquote elite universities but if people choose to use their money to go there that's great.
To your final point, no that is emphatically not what freedom is. I once heard that freedom is the ability to choose wrongly but at the core it's really freedom to choose. If everything is the same then there's really no choice.
>>Not to be pedantic but there's really no such thing as free is there? Someone is paying for that college.
That is pedantic - literally no one with an ounce of intelligence would think that money for those services comes from the moon. Of course it comes from out taxes. I'm happy to pay my taxes to make sure everyone has the same opportunities.
>>Personally I don't want to subsidize these quote unquote elite universities but if people choose to use their money to go there that's great.
That's an incredibly individualistic approach that I don't agree with.
>>I once heard that freedom is the ability to choose wrongly but at the core it's really freedom to choose. If everything is the same then there's really no choice.
But that's exactly what other countries do! I said this in another comment - want to be a doctor? Go ahead, no debt. Want to be a lawyer? No debt. But also want to be a map historian? No debt. Art PhD? No debt. Marketing and Business studies? No debt.
That's exactly what freedom is. You are free to chose what you want to learn. If you choose poorly and there is no job waiting for you on the other end, well you just wasted 3 years of your life. But we as a society made it possible for you to take that leap and have a choice.
How about free online programs like Stanford and MIT Open courseware? Or public libraries? The education is waiting there to be had even without a college tuition or degree.
I'm not denying there is free education out there. My point is in other countries you have freedom to chose and don't incur debt for your choices. Want to be an IT professional with a 4 year collage degree? No debt. Want to be a doctor with 8 years of education? No debt. Want to be a stylist? No debt. Study ancient history? No debt.
Yes, there is free education available in the US - but it's what other people have decided is "worth it", not what you want. That's where I see freedom.
You have to pass difficult standardized tests to qualify for these spots though. It's not like 50,000 people can just decide they want to be doctors. It depends on ability as measured by testing ability which generally still relates to economic ability in aggregate.
I think we might be misunderstanding which "the model" we're talking about. I'm not talking about communism - I come from a former communist country, I know it doesn't work! - I'm talking about modern country with a functional and very comprehensive benefits system with healthcare and education provided to any willing citizen. That's not communism - just capitalism with a comprehensive social support system.
> For a simple reason - because we know, empirically, through decades of studies(some of which were done by the very US of A!), that it produces better results for the entire society
Is that why America's per capita GDP is higher than that of the EU? Why the US, not the EU, is the world's center of innovation and the strongest magnet for talent?
I don't think that trying to make everyone the same is good for society or conducive to high levels of human accomplishment. Striving for excellence will inevitably produce winners and losers, but if you don't do it, you just end up with mediocrity stew. I'm not going to cut off the right side of the distribution of human accomplishment on the say-so of people who have some weird ideological commitment to human sameness.
>>Is that why America's per capita GDP is higher than that of the EU?
No, but it's exactly why US is far behind EU in healthcare, education, equality, social mobility and a number of other social metrics that matter to you know - normal people on the street, not traders on wall street. GDP doesn't tell the whole story.
>>Why the US, not the EU, is the world's center of innovation and the strongest magnet for talent
Because US is home to companies that pay ridiculous salaries which make it worth moving to the US for, despite all the other downsides. You're going to get just as good education at many world class universities around the world, but if your goal is extreme salary then US education system gives you a leg up at the start - that's why. Not because there's anything unique or super special about US.
>>I don't think that trying to make everyone the same is good for society or conducive to high levels of human accomplishment.
That's absolutely not the idea, I think you misunderstood me. The point is to give everyone the same chances. In many other countries it doesn't matter if you're from a rich family or a poor one - it doesn't give you any extra leverage when applying to universities. There is no educational debt to deal with. A medical condition will not put you in any debt whatsoever.
Look at it as a gift to the society, to every child and every adult in the country - if they do nothing with it, that is their choice. But if they take these opportunities they can achieve incredible things, exactly that pinnacle of human accomplishment that you're talking about. That's freedom, not the American freedom that's tied to worship of money.
In America, everyone has the same chance already, at least to a close approximation. It's just not logically valid to look at unequal outcomes and conclude that not everyone had the same chance, but that's what half this thread is doing. Whatever the US is doing, it works for producing prosperity and innovation. Whatever the EU is doing doesn't work to produce that. Sure, people there are comfortable, but should comfort alone be the goal of human society? I don't think so.
> In America, everyone has the same chance already, at least to a close approximation.
Really? When your mother has to hold down two jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table? Or when your mother doesn't need to work because she inherited millions from her parents? Which mother will have a child who goes on to a good university?
The income share of the poorest ten percent of the population is 1.8% in the US, in Norway it is almost 3.5%. In Norway university education is also free. In which one do you think a child from a low income household would have the best chance of having a better income than their parents?
They specifically gave an example of someone being born in a family where the parent has to work 2 jobs to make ends meet. How is that "doing badly in life"??? I swear we're like 2 comments away from someone seriously saying "just get richer parents, duh".
And yes, not making sure that everyone has equal opportunities(not equal outcomes!!!!) is a failing of the system.
No one is attacking personal success here - it's important and should be celebrated. But the opportunities in the US are absolutely not equal, far from it.
Any person in the US can improve their lot in life. Nobody said it is easy. Success is hard work with a measure of luck. But, it is absolutely possible to go from living on the streets to living in a mansion in a lifetime. How is that not equal opportunity?
I cannot stop myself but flip this around - how can you possibly call this an equal opportunity?
It's like having a race where some people start 100m behind others and saying "well if they try hard enough, they can still win! The race itself is fair after all!"
>>Success is hard work with a measure of luck.
Of course ,but the American system is 1) ignoring that some people started at a much worse position in life and expecting them to "just work harder" 2) assuming that any problem you might encounter in your life is of your own doing, after all if you get into an accident and end up in lifetime medical debt.....well you shouldn't have gotten into an accident, right? Or again - just work hard to pay it back and you're fine?
After all it is possible. Yes, and winning lottery is technically possible but I don't think buying Lotto tickets is a valid way of living your life either.
Yes, everybody has a different starting point. That is life. Some families have the benefit of their ancestors working their asses off to pass something on to their heirs. That doesn't mean you cry foul and try to destroy the track or rig the race in your favor. You do the same as those people's ancestors. You work your ass off to pass something on to your heirs.
Everybody can do this. That is equal opportunity.
There is no promise in the rights granted to you that you will have 18 houses, a private jet, a yacht, and maybe an island or two. You are promised the ability to do as you wish to try to achieve your goals in life.
Yes, we should fix economic issues so people do not get destroyed by an accident. That is a separate issue and has no bearing on equality of opportunity.
It strikes me as similar to the approach displayed by American conservatives - the belief that there is a natural order to the society, and that's just how life is. Some people inherit insane amount of wealth, and that's fine, their ancestors worked really hard so they clearly deserve it. Poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough, or simply because they don't deserve anything else.
But hey. As long as we tell each other that with enough willpower they could just work extra hard and achieve all of those things that some other people get for free? It's all good.
And I'm not even against personal wealth. I'm not even against inheritance. I'm advocating for making sure everyone has equal opportunity through education, through safety in healthcare, through social policies that don't put you in crippling poverty if you fall on bad times. I don't believe in this whole "just work harder" adage, because I know sometimes working hard is not enough, especially not when facing institutionalised discrimination and lack of opportunities through no fault of your own.
>>Yes, we should fix economic issues so people do not get destroyed by an accident. That is a separate issue and has no bearing on equality of opportunity.
That's a social policy, not economic issue. And of course it affects your opportunities, if you get into medical debt due to an accident you don't have a whole bunch of opportunities that people without debt have, at no fault of your own. That is not a problem of economics to fix, it's a problem of the society to decide that maybe medical debt just shouldn't be a thing at all, which will put all citizens on an equal footing straight away. Or we can pretend everyone is 100% responsible for what happens to them and carry on as normal.
It is not a belief that there is a natural order in society. It is a belief that even if you are starting at 0 you can still reap the rewards of your own hard work. Starting from 0 does mean you are less likely to end up a billionaire. But, you can build your personal wealth and pass it on to make your "familial starting point" higher the next generation.
You are arguing that all these things are in the way of equal opportunity. I am arguing that they are issues on their own. Equal opportunity already exists.
High medical cost is an economic issue that is exacerbated by social policy. Insurance requirements and hidden medical care price both played into climbing medical care cost. Insurance companies and medical providers do not care about the high cost as both benefit from higher cost. There is no market feedback from the actual receivers of services.
> Freedom creates inequality. The freedom to excel comes with the freedom to do poorly at the game. Why should everyone be in the same position? They didn't put in the same effort.
I really dont think the difference is just in "effort". If I inherit money I did not put in effort, but I am getting super ahead. The luck plays role too. Plus, how much additional advantage I can get from being already little bit ahead is what creates a lot of inequality.
America is not known for a lot of welfare either. It is not country where it is comfortable or easy to be poor.
Not sure if you grew up in the US, but a lot of people in the US make a conscious decision it's not worth it to work hard earlier in life to have a better outcome later in life.
I grew up in Massachusetts, one of the most educated states, but I grew up around a lot of the kids in my town and surrounding towns who were "on the wrong side of the tracks" and I had many conversations with peers around middle school where they clearly indicated they had already decided it was not going to be worth it to work hard in high school and that there was little point in going to college. All of that was too much hard work and there was little point of it for them, their perception was that it was just too much easier to just go towards menial and low paying jobs just because it was easier today. Working hard in high school would just be too much of a detriment to enjoying a carefree teenage experience.
Now is that the fault of early education and/or parents for not making them understand the value of work today for a better outcome down the road? Who knows. But this is a prevalent mindset for a lot of people who grow up in the US.
This was such a pervasive thing my parents had to intervene and send me to a Catholic school. That mindset was completely absent at that school and it snapped me out of things just about instantaneously because the mindset there was 100% that hard work now is worth it.
To put it in context of the article a lot of that carefree teenage experience would have been going to parties and getting drunk.
> We do give away a lot of welfare to people who are doing poorly. It might be more effective to stop giving people money and use it instead to create programs to provide better jobs and skill training.
Giving people money gives them better jobs by increasing their negotiating power. Also, it lets them be your customer, which is important if you want to sell things to them!
"Skill training" doesn't work, it was bad economics from the people who mismanaged the 2010 recession recovery. They just claimed people "didn't have skills" as the reason we didn't recover fast enough and unemployment was too high.
Maybe this is true but I hope not. I'm specifically thinking of trade schools etc where people can prepare for a career without the frills and cost of university.
Honestly maybe a marketing campaign would be effective in letting people know that blue color work is honorable and needed and they can be productive and get a job that will support them and their family without having to go to Yale. I really like what Mike Rowe has to say about this issue.
> blue color work is honorable and needed and they can be productive and get a job that will support them and their family
Honorable? Maybe.
Able to support a family? Not without a secondary income from a spouse. And who's looking after the kids at that point? I hope you also have extended family that are willing and able to help, otherwise that's not much of a family.
> now i suspect that you simply don't know anyone who does blue collar work.
Incorrect.
HVAC, plumbing, elevator repair, landscaping, painting... These are all careers in my family. My dad was the only white collar of four brothers. Grandpa was AC/Refrigerator repairman.
Interesting comment. I'll say it another way: in America, people either agree or disagree with you. That's not my personal viewpoint but one that doesn't seem inconceivable to an outsider.
Hawaii is a place where that might be fairly said, though. Setting aside island natives, Hawaii attracts a lot of people. The reasons for wanting to visit and preceding life situations vary quite a bit. The result is you do meet a lot of characters, at least on the big island.
I bet Hawaiians working in tourism meet a lot more people than I do. Maybe as many as two hundred a day (granted, only for a few minutes at those volumes).
If you manage to do that five days a week for thirty years, you meet 1.4 million people, or 0.4% of the US population.
Obviously in most cases you'd have no idea about how smart most of these people are. You'd probably remember the ones who did especially dumb or especially smart things in the three minutes you interacted with them, which doesn't actually tell you much about how smart they are. It's even worse for that than a puzzle-trivia interview.
I think my point stands, even for a Hawaiian in tourism.
I don’t suppose there is any scenario in which you would give human observation credit. Regarding sufficient sample size, a person in that scenario would achieve it in weeks, or perhaps a year, assuming variance in types of visitors over the seasons.
There are tons of scenarios in which I think human observations are all that matters.
I think trying to generalize about populations on this scale from personal interactions is worse than pointless.
I have plenty of value for a reduced statement, one that acknowledges explicitly that the speaker can only legitimately talk about his experiences, not the US or Japanese populations as a whole.
"'grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that', which then has this 'intellectual' appearance about it, but says very little."
I would say it sounds a lot like social studies. But with those there is at least some scientific rigor (I hope).
Journalists often just spin speculation based on carefully selected theories into a narrative, put it into long form, sprinkle it with some writing skills, and sell it as profound. And 'The Atlantic' is especially guilty of that (according to my experience). And they're guilty of it with this one once more (imo).
The Atlantic: Pseudo-profound nonsense targeted at elites.
Policymakers don't really have to deal with the realities of what you mention. Like the bad education, for instance. That isn't really "your problem". The externalities of an awful public education system are borne by the unfortunates. Not you, who did things right, and not the people like you, who it is important you identify with. And so you're not going to give that issue anything more than lip service.
The fundamental moral basis of the US is that some people are born better than others.
If you have money, you're one of the chosen ones. The more money the better, without end. The losers who don't have money are not your problem. If they were as superior as you are they'd sort themselves out and have money too. But they don't, and of course that just proves how inferior they are.
It's absolutely an 18th century aristocracy with Internet.
This simply doesn't match the facts. For example, the United States ranks near the top of the World Giving Index, which certainly wouldn't happen if "the losers who don't have money are not your problem". Importantly, this is a man-on-the-street level index, not a government spending index, meaning it more or less assesses the charitable attitudes of the people in various countries.
Other countries have more functional social safety networks, so lesser emphasis is put on individual charity to compensate for environmental failings. To give you an anecdotal example, where I’m from American way of going about charity is often perceived as a form of virtue signalling/paying off your sins.
> please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight
I'm glad this isn't completely tongue in cheek, because I consider this a huge compliment.
I'm extremely critical of the USA, where I do live. The name of the game for the last ~100 years has been to allow wild cultural experimentation so long as cash is always king and big business gets bigger. Both aspects have had worldwide repercussions and especially given US foreign policy everyone is allowed a seat at the table to love+hate the US.
The US is a social experiment and it's had some incredible fruit. It just feels so precarious with such incredible social and economic divisions.
I think the media coverage has twisted your view of the US. As someone who immigrated to the US, if you travel the country it seems like any other country. Rich people and poor people. Left wing and right wing. Religious and the atheists.
I mean Americans could list a similar number of stereotypes about the British (for example), but if you’ve ever visited there you’d realize they’re not that different than anyone else.
The only one I can think of is from watching BBC produced television series. It seems like the British response to any trouble, minor or large, is to put the kettle on.
People want giant alcohol super markets with every type, size and price point of alcohol imaginable and then people want to bitch that other people have drinking problems to make a point about their a priori political beliefs.
My comment is not about giving the most nuanced picture of the US, but about the caricatures that seem to exist within, sometimes in stark contrast to one another.
"USA USA USA" chants, american flag on the lawn, big pickup trucks, the possession of firearms, monster trucks, american football, people who attend WWE events, "Trump voters" and MAGA hats (let's throw it in there, because it's tied into that), there's a certain stereotype there, and it's not exactly tied to those people being the cultural or intellectual elite of the country.
Orwell said it well: "By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power."
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? Your account has done a lot of that and we're trying for a different sort of site.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That would also include not calling names or being snarky in comments here.
> health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money
Doing elite sport in those competitive teams is not all that much healthy. It is tangential to your main point, but top level leagues are not in opposition to un-health.
The healthy thing is moderate amount of sport, where you get yourself to improve performance, but don't push yourself to limit. Cheap casual sport that dont require gym membership but provides some social outlet would be better for average person health.
> How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.
None of that is healthy and a lot of that contributes to obesity issue. Fad diets lead to yoyo-ing and to weight gain in the long term. It also causes proper health issues on its own.
Yes, widespread obesity, but health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money. How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.
Bad education? Yes, pretty much. But also some of the best research institutions and universities in the world. Some companies with the highest R&D spending anywhere. Many of the foremost intellectuals end up living there once they enter the international stage.
Backwards, conservative, patriotic? Yes, but also extreme progressive bubbles and widespread leftist sentiments.
"American elitism"? Largely yes in many ways, but also very friendly, welcoming to strangers (even though they are just hyperbole with excitement in many contexts compared to us).
When I read the comment section here it seems like it fits my narrative. The US, country of the extremes. Drinkers, and puritans. Now fight! By the way: The article is so speculative, how can you discuss this in such earnestness? My problem with The Atlantic in general. Many articles are kind of "grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that", which then has this "intellectual" appearance about it, but says very little. Not convincing at all.
The US is like a social experiment. Deal with your racism, alcohol, health, drug legalization, gender debates, sjw/pc culture, and all that, and please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight (though sadly that doesn't always work out it seems). And before I get angry responses: It's written somewhat tongue in cheek, extend me the courtesy of not assuming the worst about my person.