

What is the most difficult thing people learn in their 20's? - gusgordon
http://www.quora.com/Life/What-are-the-most-difficult-things-people-have-to-learn-in-their-twenties/answer/Kathy-Hurst-Davis?srid=RYB&share=1

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eli_gottlieb
Reposting my answer to the commenter linked here.

Your answer is true, but stupid.

If by "our country" we're talking about the United States, the answers and
solutions are _bloody trivial_. Many of America's past public policies work
better than its current ones; many public policies of America's peers work
better than any of those ever implemented in America. When the entire rest of
the world has spent a century exploring the solution-space, poaching the best
of all systems and implementing it all together in a lean, mean hybrid is not
that difficult a plan to come up with. And no, I'm not talking about a
wondrous anarchist utopia, I'm talking about tested, proven ways of doing
things better than the USA currently does them. Maybe Paradise isn't around
the corner, but we've a lot of experience at building a society so self-
satisfied and easy to live in that people start contemplating their
existential angst.

The deeper problem is that most of the American elite is now composed of
people with a vested financial and ideological interest in our current system,
mostly loosely referred to as neoliberalism, which has been continually making
things worse.

So the hard problem is not what you do once you've won power, because we
already know how to run a _good_ society, even if _great_ ones may be very
difficult. The hard problem is how you get the people dedicated to ruling over
a wasteland to relinquish the steering wheel.

