> America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”
Given my laypersons knowledge of Tammeney Hall, the early 20th century labour gangs and so on, it seems incredible that America is not subject to more such problems - but what did it do right - and is it still doing it right?
Summary: "Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has dumped trillions of dollars into wars, piled huge debt onto students, forced legions of foreigners to leave after getting advanced degrees, driven millions of Americans out of the workplace with felonies for sometimes minor offenses and hobbled the housing market with hastily crafted layers of rules."
Exactly right. Many Americans are so ashamed of the US, when in many ways it's a shining example of how to do things right -- certainly relative to many other countries. The US is a spectacularly prosperous country, and all it seems anyone talks about is how to fundamentally change the systems that made it that way. There are always in which a society can improve, but man -- let's not forget what's worked well.
The US wasn't always as dysfunctional or as corrupt of a banana republic of some billionaires, a nonexistent middle class, mostly poor people, and undercounted millions of homeless people living along freeway embankments and under highway overpasses. The problem is the blind faith in capitalist utopian magical thinking when certain functions are perverted when they are abandoned to unreasonable and under-regulated profit extraction. Prisons, firefighting, public safety, the military, healthcare, voting, and education should not be privatized or for-profit.
I've found that America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a country run by rich people, with a whole lot of workers. For the rich, this place is amazing.
The rich have all the political power, so this makes sense. You'd think the working class has political power but their opinions are controlled by the wealthy.
So for the people running America, there's nothing to fix. The system is designed to produce exactly what it produces. The fact that there's no shelter or health care for the poor is a result of the fact that the poor in America are discarded. We don't have a cultural respect for human life here. We have business. And business doesn't need poor people. They're not good workers or good consumers.
I'd like things to be different, and I'm working on it, but I don't have much power at the moment.
Interesting. The thing that seems missing here is deeper comparison to other countries (there is only a brief mention of britian). Its presented as an american problem, so how does the american system compare to other systems? Do they have the same problems? Did everyone copy america?
America, has for a long time, not been a country to emulate in all spheres. Some, perhaps, but definitely not when it comes to post-1960's cannibalism of community and commonwealth, i.e., government institutions, social services, common infrastructure and services, and ambitious projects and goals, often under a deluded notion that profit motive and unfettered greed creates handwaving "good" without externalities. Additionally, most empires in N. America and Europe are in decline and will only skip and bounce with a cultural revolution with a core hopeful outlook that is concerned that their neighbors aren't going bankrupt with medical bills, their kids aren't shot at school, and festivals aren't mass shooting galleries. Healthy societies don't have excessive violence, extremely large prison populations per capita, absurd income disparities, media full of superheroes and apocalypse fictions, populist "strongmen", millions of unhoused people living worse than IDPs without UN assistance, and don't know their neighbors.
The U.S. really was never as bad as many developing countries are today. In the age of the robber barons, the U.S. government didn't do anything to stop them, but wasn't in bed with them the same way as in China or Russia. Remember, a huge portion of China's businesses are still state-owned, and many of the rest have very incestuous ties with the government. Think of the defense sector in the U.S., except far less transparent, far more corrupt, and far more extensive.
"The things that people used to believe made this country great" mostly took place in the second half of the 20th century, in the post-war boom period.
Look, all across Europe there are economic problems, but America (and to a lesser extent the UK) is the only country that's actually just scrapping large parts of its own landmass into Third World substates.
How, exactly? One day your children could say the same of political atrocities committed in your youth. Governments outlast people.
The infrastructure and incentives which drive it have not changed. America was founded and bred on colonialism and foreign dictatorships which enable cheap cost of living at the expense of hellish working conditions in other countries.
Thank you OP for posting: above average read. The paragraph,
"Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart."
It's disheartening to read because several aspects are true. Some are off: self-loathing except in a Doonesbury elite-white way seems untrue. The issues that concern me the most are,
- profit: money is not the measure of all things. Money is a tool. When I think of the opioid crisis and the manufacture's owner's ability to shield money, or the deception on the part of tobacco (nicotine addiction), oil (global warming) I become frustrated.
- Worse, the powerful particularly since President Reagan whether as individuals or companies are not held to equal accountability. While societies have said for ages don't do 'X', people do 'X' all the time. But there are penalties criminal, financial, logical, and natural. People or organizations with money or influence don't seem to have that problem.
- Elsewhere the article references governmental institutional incompetence as companies, advantaged by the above issues, aren't pulling their weight. Of our three federal branches, surely the US Congress is by far the worst
This. America has a lot of humane integrity over time. We are no longer a nation for the people by the people.
Countries like Sweden, Norway, Switzerland get it. You don’t plow over your citizens in the name of capitalism.
But then, America has always been like that. A harsh truth of the human condition. A nation of people who have it because they were born to the right parents, and some who will toil their entire lives in questionable conditions because they got delt a bad card.
I moved from Europe to the US as a teenager, and I remember being shocked at the evident shock, decay and poverty I saw even in what was supposed to be a large and prosperous city (New York).
It took me a long time to realize that this is how America works: things that didn't work or that nobody wants are allowed to fail, and this clearing out of the underbrush is what allows new things to come forth. Contrast this with Europe, where things like unprofitable state enterprises are propped up essentially forever, sucking away capital and people that could be doing something useful instead.
But this was a long, long time ago. These days I don't hold out much hope for the US or for Europe: humanity's future is in Asia.
Would be nice if americans acknowledged that although their country is great in many things, its not so great in quite a few others, or outright horrible at some. Just like any other place. Maybe take some humble inspiration from places where it can and does work better. It doesn't mean system ends up with communism, dictature and whatnot. Just a slightly more humane system to live in, where rich stay rich just with tiny little less wealth, on levels that don't make any difference to their luxury lives.
If the country is so prosperous as US, its also important for those rich and beyond such petty worries to live in well working society anyway. Otherwise they end up in their little fenced paradise with wolves roaming everywhere outside.
The problem is that there has been over a century and a half of histrionic propaganda within the United States asserting that government can’t do anything right, government and regulation are the root of all societal problems, the only proper role for government is to preserve property rights, and so on, starting around the late 1840s for some reason.
So there have been multiple generations of Americans who have marinated in this their entire lives, resulting in large populations who assume more local control is always better, people only deserve what they can afford themselves individually, and so on—and entire societal systems built atop the ensuing systematic deprivation.
At the same time, there’s also an almost North Korean degree of jingoistic “we’re the pinnacle of human achievement” nationalism so any change to the status quo is opposed even by those who would directly benefit because they don’t really believe it’s possible for things to be any better. After all, if they could be, they would be, because We’re The Best! So if things are bad, well, they’re worse everywhere else so quit complaining.
This is why Americans get such culture shock going elsewhere in the world. They see that others can actually have a society that’s just as good or better, and they have to figure out how to integrate that into their worldview.
TL;DR: Many things in the US stay as bad as they do because multiple generations have been brainwashed into thinking they’re the best they can be.
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America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible."
The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.
But that wasn't always the deal. The US up until 1900 was not the top dog.
Yeah, the US has a lot of flaws that need to be reformed, but that doesn't make it any different than any more country in history, it makes it exactly like them.
It's not an American problem, it's a human problem. When we understand that and stop pointing we'll all be better off.
I think you could be clearer in what precisely you are disagreeing with in the article. From my reading, the author is trying to describe the state of the US today and struggling to find parallels in history because, while the US is productive and has lots of resources, the people have a surprisingly poor quality of life.
Given my laypersons knowledge of Tammeney Hall, the early 20th century labour gangs and so on, it seems incredible that America is not subject to more such problems - but what did it do right - and is it still doing it right?
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