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A huge systematic problem across all of American society seems to be the prevalence of problems that are profitable to someone. This leads to many cases where p
by api 3y ago
A huge systematic problem across all of American society seems to be the prevalence of problems that are profitable to someone. This leads to many cases where people fight reform to maintain some kind of profitable niche in society.
Housing shortages are profitable to property owners, bad rail infrastructure is profitable to airlines, complicated tax codes are profitable for accountants, bad foreign policy is profitable for defense contractors, etc.
All complex societies suffer from this but it seems particularly bad in the USA for some reason.
- huevosabio 3y ago100%. The combination of "this problem has clear winners" and "anyone can veto any change, but no one can veto the status quo" makes for entrenched, powerful interests. I suspect that it is particularly bad in the US because our insane vetocracy.
- syntheweave 3y agoIt's bad because of the lack of a fitness function: if we do something inefficiently, but we can afford to pay for it(which we always have, because of resources, having-an-empire, new technologies, etc.), it just keeps going. Once the buck stops, heads roll, and the parts of US history where it got close to that, the textbooks like to say as little about as possible. So, most of the positive changes we make come from either random whims of the rich: "we can't have that here, my sinuses are too delicate", or moments of revolt that scare the rich into action. But the actions also tend to be random and often go down the authoritarian maintain-status-quo route.