America is a sick society

[Odin]

(06-29-2017, 01:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-29-2017, 11:45 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(06-29-2017, 10:32 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is as much symptom as cause. We have the severest economic inequality since the 1920s, and that is without regional under-development of the sort that existed in the 1920s or the institutional racism as it was known to exist as late as the 1960s. White privilege may be real, but it is not so severe that being a Mexican-American in Houston is worse for one's hopes in life than is being white in southeastern Kentucky.

Tolerance and inclusion? The UK looks like paradise in contrast to America. But then, Britain abolished slavery thirty years before the USA, didn't need a bloody civil war to decide that slavery was unsuited to a modern society, and never went through a Jim Crow era in any of its colonies except in South Africa.

Health and wellness? Is the image of Americans developing the bulk of football linebackers while drinking sodas or beer and eating chips while watching TV unique to America?

Europe has its sucky points though. Sure, they may seem to have more social justice than the US. But, in Europe, you need to be white to make it past a certain level. And even what type of white (or more properly, Caucasian) one is matters a lot. The native born, native ethnic still occupy the most important slots. Who your parents are / were, where you went to school, etc, matter a lot. The notion of a self made person is rare. This is one of the reasons why the social safety nets there are so extensive - the ability to be self made or reinvent is much less than here. This is why the rising inequality and bad trend in business formation here in the US are so sad. We have traditionally been exceptional in these regards, and this was noted even way back when by De Toqueville. That made up in many ways for our relatively smaller and less centralized government and lack of social safety net as compared with post mid-19th Century Europe. But now ... we are losing those traditional advantages.

Two world wars have reshaped the gene pool of France. Many people who consider themselves French have Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, or Russian ancestry coming from people who replaced the great casualty lists of Frenchmen who died in the First World War. Sarkozy is a Hungarian surname.

To be sure, where one went to school (Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, the Sorbonne or the Polytechnique in France) can give one overpowering advantages. So what. It is far more likely that someone who did his undergraduate studies at Harvard is likely to get further ahead in life than someone who attended "Kegger State", the latter specializing in "Education", "Agriculture", or "Hospitality Management", and getting few applicants with SAT scores in the 700s. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago or even U-Michigan or UC Berkeley are more likely destinations for those in the top 5% of college board scores. There is a cognitive elite, and it is far better to be in the Talented Tenth of African Americans than to be a white person of middling talent.

America didn't need a safety net when it had a frontier. But that is over. High densities of population are the urban landlord's best friend, which explains why Donald Trump, a really bad businessman, can be fabulously rich. The higher that incomes are of the Talented Tenth of any ethnic group, the more rent someone like Donald Trump can collect. It's arguable that it is far easier to get rich leasing apartments to software engineers in Silicon Valley than it is to be a software engineer. Europe had its feudal elites that dictated who was going to make the money off business enterprises like railroads, mines, and factories; America didn't have such elites except in the more backward parts (the South) that largely rejected any commercial or industrial means of making a fortune when the exploitation of slaves or sharecroppers was an easier way to make elite money.

...Galen is partially right about America not being capitalist enough. But his idea of how to make America more capitalist is to enrich those already rich  and ensure that they get their way by closing off opportunities for others. We will likely see more efforts at small-scale enterprise as people recognize the low glass ceilings of opportunity in bureaucracies in existing business and choose to start businesses or go free-lance. That will create far more opportunity. So the big bureaucracies start getting fewer good applicants? Tough luck! Where I live, many of the founders of new small businesses are Mexicans.

France is a bit of an outlier in Europe due to it's civic nationalist mentality. To them as long as you speak French and act French (that is, you completely and fully assimilate) you are French to matter what your blood ancestry may be. Their issue is more with racism and Islamophobia than with ethno-nationalist "blood and soil" thinking.