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A sad read. It is provocative that one of the richest countries in the world can treat its unfortunate citizens in such a manner. But I guess that is what happe

A sad read. It is provocative that one of the richest countries in the world can treat its unfortunate citizens in such a manner. But I guess that is what happens when you build a whole country on the myth that the life you get is completely your own choice. It is very odd how many American you read who state I don't need health insurance because I make sure I live healthy. That is about as intelligent as saying I don't need a seatbelt in my car because I drive safely. Many people utter words like that too. Perhaps it is simply something people want to believe in. They don't want to believe they can be the next victim. They want to believe everything is under control and they are master of their own faith. If you realize how much is out of your control it would be all too depressing to know how screwed you are going to be if you developed serious health problems, getting into serious accidents etc in the US. There is little safety-net to fall back on. I have a good job today, but I have period mental problems. I do worry about what would happen if I suddenly couldn't hack it anymore. What do you do when you got small children to provide for and you get screwed up in the head? Fortunately I know that because I live in Norway and not the US, there are limits to how far I can fall. I will never end up on the streets with my kids. They will still be able to go to good schools, and university whatever happens to me. That takes some stress away. I can not begin to imagine what it is like struggling in America and knowing that if you can't work, your whole life is over and the future of your children. It is surprising why American's don't want a proper welfare system. People buy insurance for their car and house. They buy health insurance. I pay higher taxes than Americans but I view that as the cost of having airtight insurance against the mishaps of life.

oldmanjay 10y ago
There sure are a lot of people who don't live here and carefully explain our attitudes to us as though the filters of bias are somehow pure perception. I used to get annoyed by it, but now I just find it endlessly amusing. If I were as clever as a feminist, I guess I could call it Eurosplaining.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  well it helps them to talk down about American and over exaggerate the issues here so they can ignore what they don't want to see at home. There are enough horror stories everywhere that people fail to acknowledge, first world problems pale in comparison what people suffer in the non Western worlds. From complete lack of some basics we considering necessary to every day threats to their lives and property, should they even have the ability own anything.
  - zajd 10y ago
    Why do you think "well it's worse other places" is some sort of defense for our callous handling of our social safety nets? All while every other industrialized nation shows a better way (see: Healthcare)
    - AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
      Why is it better? Because you say so? The American way offers huge rewards for success and punishes failure brutally. It forces you to take risks. Overall, it creates more than other systems.
  - jernfrost 10y ago
    I find it odd that you care more about the perception of your country than actually dealing with the horrible problems you have. What is more important solving poverty in America or shut up some smug European saying unfavorable things about America? I would never excuse problems in Norway by saying look how horrible it is for people in Ethiopia. We are a rich country and should be judged by those standards. So is America. It ought to be embarrassing that you are even competing with third world countries. In your sad world I guess you imagine that this is a game to me. That I just want to embarrass America to feel all good about myself. I don't. I feel deeply sad about the many people suffering in the US. Why do I not feel the same about people in say South Africa? Well we humans are odd. We don't care equally much about everybody. As Europeans we will feel strong kinship with Americans. We have many family members there and we can relate to American society as it is another western society with many of the same values. Solving Uganda, Jordan or Colombia's problems are very difficult not at least because they are poor. America's problem seems like the most unnecessary problems in the world because America is so wealthy and still have third world problems. They could have been solved with political will. Other countries don't have that luxury, they actually have to build and industrial base and get rich first.
- jernfrost 10y ago
  I've lived in the US and my wife is American. I also have distant relatives in the US. I know what their lives are like and I know the struggles various members of my wife's family has gone through as well as my distant relatives. I work with a lot of Americans and deal with a lot of American companies. I'd say in many ways I think see America clearer than a lot of Americans because they have nothing to compare it with. I've lived in several countries and I can compare my experiences. If you have never lived abroad you tend to take too many things for granted and you become blind to so many realities in your own country. Anyway it isn't like American's are the quite guys in the corner never volunteering their opinions to anybody else about how the rest of the world should be run. Quite the opposite, except American are frequently extremely opinionated about things they know absolutely nothing about.
- vkou 10y ago
  If you were a Congressman, you would call the American version of this phenomena the Voice of America. (The conclusions that it draws are consistently pro-business, anti-labour, pro-Pax Americana, anti-red, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
zajd 10y ago
You'd be absolutely shocked at how little a vast majority of Americans are in interested in paying taxes to improve their communities from the smallest to the largest. I don't really get it because I've lived here my whole life and you can pretty much 100% guarantee the more a locality taxes their populace the better the quality of life is, at least in the states. I live in a town (Boulder, CO) where this isn't the case and it's such a breath of fresh air. There's such a prevalent "the federal government is less efficient than private business" attitude it's mind blowing. This despite the fact that in any area where public competes with private public wins here every single time (ISPs, Infrastructure, Criminal Justice, etc) edit. oh yeah and the army of "well at least the poor here aren't literally dying of starvation en masse"
- ves 10y ago
  >I don't really get it because I've lived here my whole life and you can pretty much 100% guarantee the more a locality taxes their populace the better the quality of life is, at least in the states. ..what? This makes no sense. My quality of life was significantly better when I lived in TX than when I lived in SF, and you already know which one taxed me more. Even a lot of public infrastructure, like roads and highways especially, was just so much better. Plus, even though TX doesn't do much to help the homeless, the likelihood that the author would have ended up homeless in the first place is lower because home ownership is feasible. And the programs the OP is referring to, social safety net type things, aren't local but national in scale. That said, I do like the idea but the quoted statement just makes no sense to me.
  - zajd 10y ago
    Yeah I mean if you think the quality of life is higher anywhere in Texas than San Francisco obviously I'm not going to convince you of much. edit. yeehaw, downvotes
    - nojvek 10y ago
      Quality of life at $600 a month is greater in SF than Texas? You must be kidding right.
bko 10y ago
Bottom 10% in US live considerably better than OECD bottom 10% average (#4 of OECD countries) and better than top 10% in a lot of countries [0]. Perhaps that's what drive the optimism in the US. [0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-chart-17?Fsrc=scn%2Fgp%2Fwl%2Fdc%2Fbetterlifeindex http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-c...
- jernfrost 10y ago
  Since you present this number, then I assume you have read how this have been calculated, and can give some credible answer to e.g. why the low 10% in America are considered better off than the bottom British, Germans, Australians and Swiss. Having been in several of these countries and knowing people who have lived there it simply does not strike me as believable. Maybe it is true, but I'd like to hear some articulated reason for it. Here are my counter points. We know that for all these other countries supposedly worse off than America health care access for the bottom is considerably better. Access to education is better. Crime levels are lower. So within what area is it that American's gain the upper hand? I've seen studies like this before giving poor Americans an upper hand and all to often it is due only focusing on material aspects. E.g. the poor in the US usually have bigger houses, more microwaves, bigger cars etc than the poor elsewhere. This is often given as evidence that they are better of while ignoring the fact that poor Americans have significantly worse access to health care and education than other people. Also Europeans e.g. spend a lot more on travel than on just accumulating stuff at home. So quality of life is difficult to asses exclusively by just adding up stuff.
  - bko 10y ago
    Well certainly how "well off" someone is requires a value judgement. Everyone has preferences and one individual may prefer to be bottom 10% in one country as opposed to another. The scale is based off data compiled by OECD and includes the below: Housing Income Jobs Community Education Environment Civic Engagement Health Life Satisfaction Safety Work-Life Balance Another index includes EPI’s State of Working America Report [0] as well as research from World Bank economist Branko Milanovic [1]. I understand you might disagree with methodology or how they weigh certain aspects and that's perfectly fine. But if you come across some objective measure that tell me that people in the US are considerably worse off than other Western nations (in absolute terms), I would like to see it. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing-numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity/#5c66f06b23c4 http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishi... [1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...
TheCoelacanth 10y ago
What's especially sad is that it would probably save us money to get homeless people off the street and we still don't do it. If getting her a place to live would have prevent even one of her thirteen hospitalizations in the past year, that would almost certainly have a positive ROI.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  This has been proven, I can't find the link but there was a study done with statistics for New York and they found that the homeless cost on average about $30k a year to keep homeless, between interactions with the police/jails, ER visits because they can't get medical care any other way, reduction in property values, etc. On the flip side putting them in cheap housing with a shower, food, and a TV would cost s fraction of that but there's no way in hell you're going to sell that to the American culture as long as the bootstraps narrative holds.
  - joelhoffman 10y ago
    Are you thinking of this? http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...
mfoy_ 10y ago
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
- 13of40 10y ago
  Having escaped from poverty in my 20s (I'm one of those guys who made it in software via dumb luck and no college degree) that's a cozy concept, but I don't think it's at all accurate. The poor people I grew up with have no idea of the life we lead. They live in a world where there's no such thing as air travel, you'll probably never travel outside the US, having your car start in the morning (if you've got one) is a sometimes thing, and you'd be mega-rich if you had 4 figures in your bank account - and that's all most of them have ever experienced. They don't see themselves as embarrassed millionaires, because most of them don't even have the faintest understanding of what that means.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Socialism did take hold. It was brutally repressed. The battle of blair mountain is a clear example of what happens when workers demand fair treatment in America. They didn't just send the army in to break the strike, they sent the air force. Though they lost, in the long term it raised awareness enough to actually lead to organized labor victories like the New Deal (which effectively led to the creation of the middle class 'good life' from the 50s). The thing that really worries me is that another, similar battle would be necessary in order to arrest the current decline of the middle class.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Is this mentioned ? the new deal thing is world famous, but not the blair mountain event. History ...
    - gknoy 10y ago
      I had never heard of it until I saw it mentioned in an HN comment a year or so ago. For anyone who's interested, here's a link to the Wikipedia article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
syshum 10y ago
So to you the only options possible is suffering for poor people, or massive government programs? That is really the only 2 options you believe can exist?
kamaal 10y ago
>>But I guess that is what happens when you build a whole country on the myth that the life you get is completely your own choice. Congratulations on figuring out freedom doesn't exactly mean what people think it means. But really that's what freedom actually means. You are responsible for your life. Both good and bad parts of it.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  There is never a way to fully control everything in your life. And the poorer you get, the less you can control. Poor do not get to shop for jobs, move to healthier or cheaper places (especially faraway), spend money or time on exercise. (if they attempt to make ends meet) Older people are much less wanted on the job market too. Nobody is God. Nobody can fix everything.

oldmanjay 10y ago

There sure are a lot of people who don't live here and carefully explain our attitudes to us as though the filters of bias are somehow pure perception. I used to get annoyed by it, but now I just find it endlessly amusing. If I were as clever as a feminist, I guess I could call it Eurosplaining.

Shivetya 10y ago
well it helps them to talk down about American and over exaggerate the issues here so they can ignore what they don't want to see at home. There are enough horror stories everywhere that people fail to acknowledge, first world problems pale in comparison what people suffer in the non Western worlds. From complete lack of some basics we considering necessary to every day threats to their lives and property, should they even have the ability own anything.
- zajd 10y ago
  Why do you think "well it's worse other places" is some sort of defense for our callous handling of our social safety nets? All while every other industrialized nation shows a better way (see: Healthcare)
  - AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
    Why is it better? Because you say so? The American way offers huge rewards for success and punishes failure brutally. It forces you to take risks. Overall, it creates more than other systems.
- jernfrost 10y ago
  I find it odd that you care more about the perception of your country than actually dealing with the horrible problems you have. What is more important solving poverty in America or shut up some smug European saying unfavorable things about America? I would never excuse problems in Norway by saying look how horrible it is for people in Ethiopia. We are a rich country and should be judged by those standards. So is America. It ought to be embarrassing that you are even competing with third world countries. In your sad world I guess you imagine that this is a game to me. That I just want to embarrass America to feel all good about myself. I don't. I feel deeply sad about the many people suffering in the US. Why do I not feel the same about people in say South Africa? Well we humans are odd. We don't care equally much about everybody. As Europeans we will feel strong kinship with Americans. We have many family members there and we can relate to American society as it is another western society with many of the same values. Solving Uganda, Jordan or Colombia's problems are very difficult not at least because they are poor. America's problem seems like the most unnecessary problems in the world because America is so wealthy and still have third world problems. They could have been solved with political will. Other countries don't have that luxury, they actually have to build and industrial base and get rich first.
jernfrost 10y ago
I've lived in the US and my wife is American. I also have distant relatives in the US. I know what their lives are like and I know the struggles various members of my wife's family has gone through as well as my distant relatives. I work with a lot of Americans and deal with a lot of American companies. I'd say in many ways I think see America clearer than a lot of Americans because they have nothing to compare it with. I've lived in several countries and I can compare my experiences. If you have never lived abroad you tend to take too many things for granted and you become blind to so many realities in your own country. Anyway it isn't like American's are the quite guys in the corner never volunteering their opinions to anybody else about how the rest of the world should be run. Quite the opposite, except American are frequently extremely opinionated about things they know absolutely nothing about.
vkou 10y ago
If you were a Congressman, you would call the American version of this phenomena the Voice of America. (The conclusions that it draws are consistently pro-business, anti-labour, pro-Pax Americana, anti-red, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America

zajd 10y ago

You'd be absolutely shocked at how little a vast majority of Americans are in interested in paying taxes to improve their communities from the smallest to the largest. I don't really get it because I've lived here my whole life and you can pretty much 100% guarantee the more a locality taxes their populace the better the quality of life is, at least in the states. I live in a town (Boulder, CO) where this isn't the case and it's such a breath of fresh air. There's such a prevalent "the federal government is less efficient than private business" attitude it's mind blowing. This despite the fact that in any area where public competes with private public wins here every single time (ISPs, Infrastructure, Criminal Justice, etc) edit. oh yeah and the army of "well at least the poor here aren't literally dying of starvation en masse"

ves 10y ago
>I don't really get it because I've lived here my whole life and you can pretty much 100% guarantee the more a locality taxes their populace the better the quality of life is, at least in the states. ..what? This makes no sense. My quality of life was significantly better when I lived in TX than when I lived in SF, and you already know which one taxed me more. Even a lot of public infrastructure, like roads and highways especially, was just so much better. Plus, even though TX doesn't do much to help the homeless, the likelihood that the author would have ended up homeless in the first place is lower because home ownership is feasible. And the programs the OP is referring to, social safety net type things, aren't local but national in scale. That said, I do like the idea but the quoted statement just makes no sense to me.
- zajd 10y ago
  Yeah I mean if you think the quality of life is higher anywhere in Texas than San Francisco obviously I'm not going to convince you of much. edit. yeehaw, downvotes
  - nojvek 10y ago
    Quality of life at $600 a month is greater in SF than Texas? You must be kidding right.

bko 10y ago

Bottom 10% in US live considerably better than OECD bottom 10% average (#4 of OECD countries) and better than top 10% in a lot of countries [0]. Perhaps that's what drive the optimism in the US. [0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-chart-17?Fsrc=scn%2Fgp%2Fwl%2Fdc%2Fbetterlifeindex http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-c...

jernfrost 10y ago
Since you present this number, then I assume you have read how this have been calculated, and can give some credible answer to e.g. why the low 10% in America are considered better off than the bottom British, Germans, Australians and Swiss. Having been in several of these countries and knowing people who have lived there it simply does not strike me as believable. Maybe it is true, but I'd like to hear some articulated reason for it. Here are my counter points. We know that for all these other countries supposedly worse off than America health care access for the bottom is considerably better. Access to education is better. Crime levels are lower. So within what area is it that American's gain the upper hand? I've seen studies like this before giving poor Americans an upper hand and all to often it is due only focusing on material aspects. E.g. the poor in the US usually have bigger houses, more microwaves, bigger cars etc than the poor elsewhere. This is often given as evidence that they are better of while ignoring the fact that poor Americans have significantly worse access to health care and education than other people. Also Europeans e.g. spend a lot more on travel than on just accumulating stuff at home. So quality of life is difficult to asses exclusively by just adding up stuff.
- bko 10y ago
  Well certainly how "well off" someone is requires a value judgement. Everyone has preferences and one individual may prefer to be bottom 10% in one country as opposed to another. The scale is based off data compiled by OECD and includes the below: Housing Income Jobs Community Education Environment Civic Engagement Health Life Satisfaction Safety Work-Life Balance Another index includes EPI’s State of Working America Report [0] as well as research from World Bank economist Branko Milanovic [1]. I understand you might disagree with methodology or how they weigh certain aspects and that's perfectly fine. But if you come across some objective measure that tell me that people in the US are considerably worse off than other Western nations (in absolute terms), I would like to see it. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing-numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity/#5c66f06b23c4 http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishi... [1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

TheCoelacanth 10y ago

What's especially sad is that it would probably save us money to get homeless people off the street and we still don't do it. If getting her a place to live would have prevent even one of her thirteen hospitalizations in the past year, that would almost certainly have a positive ROI.

FussyZeus 10y ago
This has been proven, I can't find the link but there was a study done with statistics for New York and they found that the homeless cost on average about $30k a year to keep homeless, between interactions with the police/jails, ER visits because they can't get medical care any other way, reduction in property values, etc. On the flip side putting them in cheap housing with a shower, food, and a TV would cost s fraction of that but there's no way in hell you're going to sell that to the American culture as long as the bootstraps narrative holds.
- joelhoffman 10y ago
  Are you thinking of this? http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...

mfoy_ 10y ago

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

13of40 10y ago
Having escaped from poverty in my 20s (I'm one of those guys who made it in software via dumb luck and no college degree) that's a cozy concept, but I don't think it's at all accurate. The poor people I grew up with have no idea of the life we lead. They live in a world where there's no such thing as air travel, you'll probably never travel outside the US, having your car start in the morning (if you've got one) is a sometimes thing, and you'd be mega-rich if you had 4 figures in your bank account - and that's all most of them have ever experienced. They don't see themselves as embarrassed millionaires, because most of them don't even have the faintest understanding of what that means.
crdoconnor 10y ago
Socialism did take hold. It was brutally repressed. The battle of blair mountain is a clear example of what happens when workers demand fair treatment in America. They didn't just send the army in to break the strike, they sent the air force. Though they lost, in the long term it raised awareness enough to actually lead to organized labor victories like the New Deal (which effectively led to the creation of the middle class 'good life' from the 50s). The thing that really worries me is that another, similar battle would be necessary in order to arrest the current decline of the middle class.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Is this mentioned ? the new deal thing is world famous, but not the blair mountain event. History ...
  - gknoy 10y ago
    I had never heard of it until I saw it mentioned in an HN comment a year or so ago. For anyone who's interested, here's a link to the Wikipedia article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

syshum 10y ago

So to you the only options possible is suffering for poor people, or massive government programs? That is really the only 2 options you believe can exist?

kamaal 10y ago

>>But I guess that is what happens when you build a whole country on the myth that the life you get is completely your own choice. Congratulations on figuring out freedom doesn't exactly mean what people think it means. But really that's what freedom actually means. You are responsible for your life. Both good and bad parts of it.

AstralStorm 10y ago
There is never a way to fully control everything in your life. And the poorer you get, the less you can control. Poor do not get to shop for jobs, move to healthier or cheaper places (especially faraway), spend money or time on exercise. (if they attempt to make ends meet) Older people are much less wanted on the job market too. Nobody is God. Nobody can fix everything.