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> He wasn't defending destroying the frames though Agreed > In modern developed countries we have social security benefits, health care and such, to varying d

• simonh 6y ago
  Well I'm a Brit, but I did write that with an eye to the fact that most people here are yank... er, I mean my esteemed colonial colleagues. Yes you have fewer and more threadbare social safety nets that in Europe, but a heck of a lot more than in China.
  • fabianhjr 6y ago
    I am from Latin America though and have a 0.025 USD / year tuition on my current math undergrad education, public healthcare, and a more robust social security net overall.
    • simonh 6y ago
      Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of us on the curve by the early 2010s including in terms of jobs growth. There are pros and cons both ways.
      • BoardsOfCanada 6y ago
        Yes and we need to avoid the nirvana fallacy. I live in a country with public health care and every so ofter people are sent home to die from scheduled surgery because there aren't doctors or other staff available. My dad had 99% clogged heart arteries before he got treatment. My brother works in the US and prefer their system, but then he's got a good job - still a data point for the discussion.
        • XorNot 6y ago
          So, how rich is your dad? Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die. The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy. One problem is fixable. EDIT: And also, unless your brother has had a major health event, then the reality is he has no idea whether his insurance is any good.
          • BoardsOfCanada 6y ago
            Well my point was to not compare with rainbows and unicorns but how it works in the real world. Also I'm not saying the US has a better system. But just to entertain this discussion (big mistake), the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, which means that useful price signals for how to allocate resources are missing. You'll perhaps say: "Well it shouldn't be like that". I agree but there is a reason it ended up like this. My brother doesn't need a serious health event to know (for a reasonable definition of "know") because he has a brain and people to talk to with direct and indirect experience of the system.
            • simonh 6y ago
              >the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, ... Yes you absolutely can, here in the UK I've had private health insurance from my employers for the last 23 years of my career. I'm not aware of any country that outlaws paying for private treatment.
      • hummusman 6y ago
        Not sure this is particularly true, it took the US 6 years from 2008 to recover all the jobs lost in the recession [0]. I would assume the bulk of those were low-skilled, manufacturing roles, the ones ever more at risk of being rendered obsolete by automation. [0] https://www.cbpp.org/great-recessions-jobs-deficit-much-deeper-than-in-previous-recessions https://www.cbpp.org/great-recessions-jobs-deficit-much-deep...
        • me_me_me 6y ago
          Well given that the biggest looser of 2008 crash were the poorest slice of society that almost could afford a house. They were tricked into loans they couldn't afford. And with all blue-collar jobs being exported at alarming rate to Asia, i would say that the recovery after that recession doesn't ring true to me. Sure economy and gdp are higher up, but its not because poor recovered. They were left behind. Trump won presidency mainly because he turned to those people and promised them the good old time, where the town had its steelworks and everyone had quite life.
      • vagrantJin 6y ago
        > Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe I'm not EU or US, but the US printed a heck of a lot of magic monopoly money. And yet the dollar remained as strong as it ever was. Yes, some smartie pants will no doubt explain this away as "quantitative easing" which is the magnum opus of magic monopoly money. EU central bank doesn't seem to like that very much being so risk averse. So we can say the EU is keeping financial wizardry in check because if left to the US, no one would know what is going on. The EU might just save us all.
        • simonh 6y ago
          So the US bailed out the banks with a Trillion dollars, got it all back with a profit, used massive QE to successfully cushion their economy, without inflation. Which is bad. Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?
          • fakedang 6y ago
            If you can forget the divide in the wealth gap in the US, sure the US has been very successful at recovering from '08.
            • deleted 6y ago
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      • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        Recovered from the 2008 crisis that it caused. Those sub-prime mortgages were all in the US.
      • olau 6y ago
        How do you know that was because of their job market? As far as I'm aware, that was because they printed tons of money. Money was printed in the EU too, but stopped much sooner - far too soon. As if people forgot about Keynes. And actually I think you have some of this backwards. If you have a good social security net, you don't have to protect workers as much. Likewise, health care is an investment in human capital. When people are ill, they can't produce.
        • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
          Well the British recovery was almost certainly slowed by the introduction of austerity following the return of the Conservatives to power. The European (i.e Eurozone/EU) recovery was knocked back by the raising of interest rates by the ECB in 2011. And finally, the US did recover better because they put a lot more proportionally into stimulus (even though it wasn't enough, as later events showed). I'm not sure that you can suggest that the flexible labour market was a cause of that (and indeed, one would have expected the UK to recover quicker than the rest of Europe then, as they have more flexible labour laws).
          • simonh 6y ago
            Nowhere near as flexible as the US though. The ability to hire and fire quickly without high costs has helped the USA recover from crises many times in the past as well. Employers in countries with high protections for workers are often reluctant to hire because it costs so much to slim down the work force once you employ them. It's not like the aftermath of 2008 was the first time this has ever been tested. To be clear I'm not saying their system is superior, I think it goes too far. Poverty and what I consider labour exploitation are much more common over there. Also I think it's pretty clear now that significant increases in minimum wages don't seem to significantly increase unemployment, for example, but on severance pay particularly it's pretty clear this is a tradeoff.
            • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
              The US did not "recover" from 2008. It retooled its economy even further towards precarious hiring, with predictably disastrous political consequences. There are proven links between economic insecurity and the rise of political extremism, and it's manifestly incorrect to suggest that corporate economics operates in a moral and political vacuum with no political consequences. http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/74766/1/EPS_2018_accepted%20version.pdf http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/74766/1/EPS_2018_accepted%20ver...
      • dfgdghdf 6y ago
        The US system is truly the worst of a both worlds: a highly centralized, bureaucratic system, with a handful of winner capturing huge margins on the top. The level of regulation and corporatism means that free-market people should be as dissatisfied as those on the left.
    • refurb 6y ago
      Is the education, healthcare and social security you’re getting at the same level you’d get in the US? I live outside the US and I can assure you the universal healthcare here doesn’t not provide the same level of care that even Medicaid does in the US. Sure if I had a routine broken arm there would be little difference, but if I had a serious cancer I’d be dead here.
• wutbrodo 6y ago
  > the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/09/how-the-u-s-spends-more-helping-its-citizens-than-other-rich-countries-but-gets-way-less/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/09/how-t...
  • OJFord 6y ago
    It would be oddly specific, IMO, to claim that a country doesn't spend enough on (for example) social security. What people actually talk about is outcomes. Interesting that a lot is spent on it, but not really much of a counterpoint since, as you say, it's done so 'uniquely inefficiently' that the outcome remains less.
    • wutbrodo 6y ago
      > What people actually talk about is outcomes. This is not my experience at all. I feel like the vast majority of conversation on the topic I've read is about differential _political will_ for social welfare and other redistribution, usually due to perceived cultural failings. Eg, "the US doesn't want to take care of its most vulnerable because of muh freedom" The notion that the US has lots of _political will_ for infra, redistribution, homeless care, etc but simply has an incompetent government is anathema to polite-company discourse, usually leading to handwavy rationalizations about how "starving the beast" has caused the government to be incompetent.
  • tialaramex 6y ago
    > more than most developed countries Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all. I look forward to a study showing that the US has really good paid leave compared to the rest of the world, so long as you denominate it in dollars not hours so that a marketing exec's six months "gardening leave" to prevent them stealing accounts outweighs Amazon warehouses with zero paid holiday...
• heidar 6y ago
  China does not have a stable society. You never hear about most of the social issues that happen inside China. A country committing genocide against its own citizens is not a stable society.
• kebman 6y ago
  I don't want to be a stickler, but Europe isn't a country. It is simply inaccurate to claim that "Europe have a more stable society compared to the USA." There are countries within Europe that has extreme wealth, and extreme poverty, while most countries in Europe are still far better developed than, say, most countries in Africa. With that said, the best developed countries in Europe do seem to have a better social security system than the USA, but at a high cost.
  • Joker_vD 6y ago
    Why is it inaccurate to claim that? Sure, Europe is not one country but is made out of several countries, but so what? The USA is comprised out of states, some of them poorer than other; heck, even inside a single country there are richer and poorer regions/counties/lands/whatever, with money/labour flows and dynamics very similar to the international ones.
    • bumby 6y ago
      >money/labour flows and dynamics very similar to the international ones It’s quite different in my experience. Workers can be employed in another state with almost no friction (with the possibility of a income tax declaration at hire) but it’s a lot more complicated to work internationally.
• CryptoPunk 6y ago
  You need to look at per capita GDP, not GDP. In any case, the US has very high levels of per capita social welfare spending.
• tomatotomato37 6y ago
  Belarus has a more stable society than the US?