I always find it a little silly that people assume their country is amazing without looking up the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state http://en.w

I always find it a little silly that people assume their country is amazing without looking up the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state if you look at welfar expenditure by GDP you'll notice that it ranks around 26 assuming I counted correctly, behind most of the western world. This is not intended to hate on America, one of the wonderful and horrible things about America is that there is amazing opportunity and terrifying risk to living in the country. Most developed countries even out the risk and reward a little more. I find this fascinating and I wonder how many factors such as innovation, attitude, ambition, etc have related causation (rather than just correlation).