Want to get rich? Try socialism.
Oct. 27th, 2011 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleInteresting graph of inter-generational social mobility as compared to the US:
More here
Not to put too much into one study, but the higher class mobility index for Canada matches my personal experience. My cousin, for example, is basically a lug - nice guy, moderately smart, middle class. But he's a VERY hard worker, and he is making a LOT of money in construction - i.e. going from basically nothing to buying a second house by age 50 (I think his first is paid off). Of course the strong Canadian real estate market and stable banking system doesn't hurt. But his story is not so unusual, and he's doing better at the American dream than almost any American I know.
Canada knows how to help people help themselves. By and large their social welfare programs don't create a lot of intractable dependency, not like here. In the US, where "welfare" is disguised in all sorts of bureaucratic forms that make it not look like welfare, people end up getting trapped in permanent poverty by programs whose real goal is not to help them, but to disempower them. This is in part because of people like Reagan, who instilled such a passionate hatred of mythical "welfare queens" that actual recipients of social programs are actively blocked from succeeding lest they become undeserving of their assistance.
The elephant in the room is still health care. It's hard to be an entrepreneur here when it's so hard to control the risk of medical bankruptcy. The US, for all it's blather about "freedom", presents huge barriers to doing business and achieving cooperation between ordinary people. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but I'll say it again: when the uber-conservative Heritage foundation ranks social democracies like Denmark and New Zealand higher than the US in its index of economic freedom, the US is obviously doing something very, very wrong. (The US has actually slipped from #5 to #9 in just a few years.)
In this context, all the right-wing hysteria about "socialism" seems intended to divert attention from an increasing number of not-actually-socialist countries that are basically walking all over the US when it comes to opportunity and quality of life.
More here
Not to put too much into one study, but the higher class mobility index for Canada matches my personal experience. My cousin, for example, is basically a lug - nice guy, moderately smart, middle class. But he's a VERY hard worker, and he is making a LOT of money in construction - i.e. going from basically nothing to buying a second house by age 50 (I think his first is paid off). Of course the strong Canadian real estate market and stable banking system doesn't hurt. But his story is not so unusual, and he's doing better at the American dream than almost any American I know.
Canada knows how to help people help themselves. By and large their social welfare programs don't create a lot of intractable dependency, not like here. In the US, where "welfare" is disguised in all sorts of bureaucratic forms that make it not look like welfare, people end up getting trapped in permanent poverty by programs whose real goal is not to help them, but to disempower them. This is in part because of people like Reagan, who instilled such a passionate hatred of mythical "welfare queens" that actual recipients of social programs are actively blocked from succeeding lest they become undeserving of their assistance.
The elephant in the room is still health care. It's hard to be an entrepreneur here when it's so hard to control the risk of medical bankruptcy. The US, for all it's blather about "freedom", presents huge barriers to doing business and achieving cooperation between ordinary people. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but I'll say it again: when the uber-conservative Heritage foundation ranks social democracies like Denmark and New Zealand higher than the US in its index of economic freedom, the US is obviously doing something very, very wrong. (The US has actually slipped from #5 to #9 in just a few years.)
In this context, all the right-wing hysteria about "socialism" seems intended to divert attention from an increasing number of not-actually-socialist countries that are basically walking all over the US when it comes to opportunity and quality of life.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 06:19 pm (UTC)You've taken a more general measure and tried to refute it with a more specific one. I think you could take any two countries and find particular health statistics where A looks better than B in aggregate, but B looks better than A on several specifics.
To turn it around: if the Irish can smoke and eat massive amounts of fatty foods and suffer high rates of heart disease, while their overall life expectancy remains neck-and-neck with the US, they must also have some advantage which counterbalances that particular problem. It may be true that genetic risk factors are involved (African ancestry in the US contributes to heart disease), but there's probably more to it than that.
I read some recent news items about the drama in the Irish healthcare system. It is possible this will have effects on health outcomes; maybe a lot of it is the unions exaggerating it for political effect. It will always be the case that a little more money would have saved so-and-so from death. The difference is that state-run single-payer systems are publicly accountable for that decision, while private practitioners can simply close the door and not have to explain themselves. So its' not surprising that socialized medicine ends up being more melodramatic.