
America is now a second-tier country - sbachman
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-21/america-is-now-a-second-tier-country
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tjr225
This shouldn't be surprising at all. As someone who lives in a primarily
black, urban adjacent neighborhood (midtown Kansas City) for the last two
years, I can't help but think that America is a place where our government
prefers to help corporations and businesses over people. Here in KC we have
public schools that have been de-credited, crumbling water and sewage
infrastructure, and the bare minimum of public transportation. I say all this
as someone who loves this country and whenever I go abroad I can't wait to get
home...but there are times when I am driving through the ghetto that the
thought of America as a first world country is laughable. Our government and
our culture does a massive disservice to our people.

Edit: While there is much more to the city than the eastside, here is a neat
HBO documentary about the drugs & violence in eastside KC in the 90s:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbt16OevZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbt16OevZc)

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devoply
Well historically America was more or less built like that. It's just that you
need perspective to see it and many Americans simply don't have that. America
was founded on the premise that the rich in America no longer to pay taxes to
the hereditary rulers. They have always ruled and the corporations are simply
their heirs. It's a way to separate their interests from their persons. The
labor movements and the World Wars forced them to distribute their wealth. But
it seems that we're going in the other direction again... and this time
coupled with the fact that it's more difficult than ever for them to exercise
their birth right, more profit. So they squeeze out the middle class. It's
expected.

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apeyrard
"America leads the world when it comes to access to higher education." If
you're rich, maybe, otherwise, I doubt this holds true when compared to
european countries. I'd like to see the source for this statement.

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k-mcgrady
Are loans maybe very easy to access? So although you'll come out debt-ridden
is the point that anyone can get the money for higher education?

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madeofpalk
Elsewhere the government will just pay for university, or give you an
interest-free loan.

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k-mcgrady
Oh I know my point was, although US universities may be more expensive maybe
that doesn't impact on access if loans (even if they aren't interest free) are
easy to get.

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richmarr
Well it kinda does, Sutton Trust (an education charity in the UK) did a study
that showed three quarters of graduates will still be repaying their student
loans when they're in their 50s.

From a policy perspective that kind of long term debt comes with stress,
health problems, productivity problems, social mobility problems.

Peoples ambition (and in some cases sense of entitlement) comes from their
upbringing; if you add long term debt to that aswell you end up in a situation
where even more careers are decided by childhood circumstance, rather than
potential.

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gambiting
On the other hand, my repayments of the UK Student loan are so small that I
literally don't care. They are also always based on my income, so if I lose my
job - no biggie. No one is going to come and chase me about it, there just
won't be anything to pay until I get a job and make more than the current
threshold.

I don't see how this could be stressful even if I continue paying some small
amount into my 50s - from my point of view it's not debt, it's more like
paying a water bill each month.

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richmarr
You as a reasonably well paid technology professional (presumably) don't care.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that the rest of the world is in a similar
situation to you.

For example; a starter salary of £28k would be only £7k over the threshold and
"only" result in repaying 9% of that, or £630 per year. But in Austerity
Britain people on that kind of salary (e.g. nurses) are already starting to
resort to using food banks.

Weigh up the alternatives, such as an apprenticeship or a job offer and
university starts to lose ground to other options; but much more so for people
with a lower socio-economic background. This is the problem.

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gambiting
I actually make less than the amounts you quoted and I still absolutely don't
care. I'm actually living very comfortably on this salary. But then I'm in the
north east, maybe in London you have to use food banks on 27k but over here
you absolutely don't.

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richmarr
Sure, it's great to hear that you're doing okay. It's still important not to
generalise your own situation to the whole country. As you say, things are
different for other people.

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amarant
"America leads the world when it comes to access to higher education" Is this
really true? From what I hear, higher education is only available in America
if you can afford it.. This is not the case in many other countries, and I'm
not sure if American universities are of higher quality than for example
Swedish ones (which are free for citizens).

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usmeteora
higher education = college not highscghool

we have horrible highschools compared to Europe and Urban China

We do have good higher education but with the following caveats

1\. 500% increase in tuition relative to inflation

2\. Global competition for entrance rates as people from all countries want
access to American universities

I wouldnt elite view American colleges as American institutions of higher
education. Just ones that reside in America, but that does not mean that
Americans are the ones excelling and going into them, going to grad school,
starting wealthy companies and creating jobs in America.

edit* I removed the statement about saying America versus North America.

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arethuza
How do you compare anything with schools across Europe? Even within the UK the
range from the top private ("public") schools to the humblest state schools is
enormous.

[NB Total cost of going to a top private school in the UK is probably at least
$50K a year]

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bluejekyll
Can you explain the (" and ") on public when you refer to private in the UK?

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jrkatz
Over there, "public school" means what "private school" means in the States.
It's confusing.

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jk563
Both "public school" and "private school" are used to refer to schools which
require a fee to be paid.

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Loic
The big problem with all these comparisons of countries is that you compare a
320 million people country (USA) with a less than 6 million people country
(Denmark). It simply does not make sense, we should compare the USA with the
complete EU.

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srrge
I'd like to see the reasoning behind this claim that one cannot compare
smaller countries with bigger countries.

A strong counter-argument would be economy of scale (in education, healthcare,
defense...) for example.

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antisthenes
Quality education and healthcare do not have economies of scale, so countries
should be easily comparable.

It's unlikely that as a country grows, the optimal class size increases or
that a doctor is somehow able to treat a patient n _x times faster than in a
smaller country. Doesn 't make sense on the most basic level.

Defense does...sort of, but the US DoD is such a unique and unprecedented
beast in human history that it's hard to make hard conclusions about it with
n=1.

_a caveat to healthcare is that medical R&D probably does have economies of
scale, but not routine treatments and healthcare.

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keithnz
seems a bit odd, you rank western countries on various things you always get,
surprise, some kind of ranking and people can moan or boast about it..... in
terms of the "points" difference, it's not too big comparatively. Not sure
these kinds of indexes really tell the real story.

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arethuza
With any of these rankings (also for things like universities) I always wonder
if the authors start out with an idea of the desired output and then work
backwards to select and weight the various factors to give the "right" answer.

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quickben
So, what do you propose then?

To measure the "wellness" of a country's population, they took stuff as
health, education, etc.

What would you choose?

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smikhanov
The list is questionable. UK above Austria, they cannot possibly be serious.

Anybody who would make a trip from Vienna to Graz and, say, Aspang am Wechsel
and then would make a similar trip between London, Birmingham and, say, Battle
in East Sussex would see very, very, very different levels of social
development is just about any regard.

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tilt_error
America is a continent, nowhere near a country and definitely not only the
United States of America.

Why being picky? Because referring to, say, Europe as a unity is questionable
and definitely is, were you to intend Scandinavia.

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usmeteora
and its only going to get worse as we veto visa the best and brightest from
all over the world, reverse our status as a melting pot of immigration and
believe that padding blue collar american workers with the forever promise of
working manual labor in manufactoring jobs because people are entitled to have
the same job forever because thats how progress works ^_^

over bringing in the best and brightest while simultaneously making higher
education affordable for americans and bolstering our public school system
which is one of the worst in the world, the quality of which is entirely
dependent on the average income of the neighborhood your parents live in.

The scariest part about having a reduced credit rating and falling into
descent while having a sexist American for President is that most of the
internal (I'm a United States citizen) banter I hear is the grumbling of
Americans blaming our falling status on everyone else.

We have horrible schools

We are lazy on average in comparison to other higher educated European
countries when it comes to educating ourselves

We supposedly hate CNN/Fox news but people watch it.

While I would not say the HN population is like this, the majority of suburban
America is xenophobic even in the Northeast where people like to brag about
being better than the South (I grew up in the deep South, went to college in
NY and now live out West)

The north and the south are still deeply divided and it reflects the long
standing habit of thought in this country is that we are deeply divided and
unwilling to accept blame for our actions.

Our political system is a rock throwing party to see who is still alive and
standing at the end.

We are second-tier country. I'll be impressed to see if we are one by the end
of my lifetime.

The scapegoating along with the sense of entitlement so many Americans have
along with the persistent ignorance and declaration that we are the best
country in the world and that is a title that belongs to us forever while by
every measurable metric we are not, borders along the narcissistic
psychological disease of continual denial and mental evasion of the person who
was voted to lead this country.

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duality
Countries like Japan and Korea rank highly in many metrics of advanced
countries, yet have very restrictive immigration policies.

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usmeteora
Its true, their countries were not founded on being melting pots of
immigrants.

I am not denying that fact, but I am not sure how that correlation relates to
the non existent correlation to America.

I'm open to more explanation

