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posted by mrpg on Friday June 23 2017, @01:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-mean-the-whole-continent?!?! dept.

America leads the world when it comes to access to higher education. But when it comes to health, environmental protection, and fighting discrimination, it trails many other developed countries, according to the Social Progress Imperative, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

The results of the group's annual survey, which ranks nations based on 50 metrics, call to mind other reviews of national well-being, such as the World Happiness Report released in March, which was led by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, or September's Lancet study on sustainable development. In that one, Iceland, Singapore, Sweden, and the U.S. took spots 1, 2, 3, and 28—respectively. 

The Social Progress Index released this week is compiled from social and environmental data that come as close as possible to revealing how people live. "We want to measure a country's health and wellness achieved, not how much effort is expended, nor how much the country spends on healthcare," the report states. Scandinavia walked away with the top four of 128 slots. Denmark scored the highest. America came in at 18. 

The Social Progress Index gives the US poor marks. America may, however, still lead the world in funny cat videos.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Friday June 23 2017, @01:56AM (22 children)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 23 2017, @01:56AM (#529761) Journal

    I’ll nominate you as CEO of a major U.S. airline (using U.S. to avoid confusion with the company called American Airlines) and see if you can make any of the majors appear in the first fucking 10 best airlines of the world.

    You know the Wright brothers right? How the airplane and airplane industry was basically invented on the U.S. but nowadays anyone can eat our lunch? Fucking leftist CEO’s of U.S. Airlines I tell you!

    See the latest Skytrax awards [worldairlineawards.com]. Even by region [worldairlineawards.com], in North America number one is Air Canada!

    Don’t tell me it’s all about government regulations, they were deregulated [aviationweek.com] by Jimmy Carter, a fucking Democrat!

    The U.S. is declining because rich people decided to game the system and make it better for themselves and to hell with everyone else. They killed (or are killing) the American Dream. And the people (those not on the 1%) are happy because they think they are numero uno, while drowning in booze and opioids.

    Going to hell in a hand basket is more like it, not a "leftist" conspiracy

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday June 23 2017, @03:57AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 23 2017, @03:57AM (#529811) Journal

    They killed (or are killing) the American Dream.

    The American Dream is long dead and buried. But that doesn't stop them, they are working now on killing the American Nightmare too.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Friday June 23 2017, @04:15AM (16 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 23 2017, @04:15AM (#529824) Journal

    I’ll nominate you as CEO of a major U.S. airline (using U.S. to avoid confusion with the company called American Airlines) and see if you can make any of the majors appear in the first fucking 10 best airlines of the world.

    Why would I want to do that? Not every airline specializes in making some "best" list. A huge part of this problem is using bad metrics. For example, why would we want to improve environmental regulations or fight discrimination even harder? Haven't those turds been polished enough by now? Similarly, high quality airlines are just not that desirable to passengers (who have long had the ability to spend more for quality).

    Don’t tell me it’s all about government regulations, they were deregulated [aviationweek.com] by Jimmy Carter, a fucking Democrat!

    It is in large part due to government regulations with, for example, gate-based oligopolies, labor union rent seeking, and the federal government takeover of most large airports after 9/11.

    The U.S. is declining because rich people decided to game the system and make it better for themselves and to hell with everyone else. They killed (or are killing) the American Dream. And the people (those not on the 1%) are happy because they think they are numero uno, while drowning in booze and opioids.

    Who again created the system that is being gamed? Turns out there were strings attached to all those social benefits that voters voted themselves.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @10:43PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @10:43PM (#530282)

      All the benefits that voters voted for themselves? My my you are extra crazy today. Social benefits have been slashed repeatedly since the 70s and they have not come back. Who created the system? Rich people with power, straight up bribing politicians, then pushing through legislation to legitimize the corruption! Corporations getting government handouts, bailouts, and money that disappears with no benefit to the public.

      You cray cray khallow, possibly just a well read idiot.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:55AM (#530433)

        I know that the headlines make you think that.

        Usually you see something like:

        GOP CONGRESS EATS KITTEN SOULS AND PUTS ORPHANS ON STREET

        Very scary stuff!

        Then you read the fine print and find out a) that no such thing was done b) they're deficit financing all sorts of programmes that turn into jobs for their districts c) whatever they actually did vote for will create another 2,000 make-work jobs in the federal bureaucracy.

        Look at the actual federal budget for various social programmes, and you'll see that despite SCARY HEADLINE HORROR DRAMA the benefits expenditure has been climbing more than dipping.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 24 2017, @12:49AM (13 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 24 2017, @12:49AM (#530349)

      Voters didn't vote themselves all those social benefits directly... they came about under FDR because, to paraphrase Jim Morrison, the whole shithouse was going up in flames. If FDR hadn't instituted social security, public works programs, and all the other "pork," the rich weren't going to have anything worth buying in the US.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @04:07AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @04:07AM (#530435)

        That's a common misconception.

        Actual studies after the fact reflect that FDR did more to screw up recovery than create it. Things stabilised - but they do so after shocks anyway. His consistent policy of determined restraint of trade kept things hidebound until he got lucky, and WWII gave the economy a kick in the pants. His playing footsie with (some) unions managed to ossify the union movement with winners and losers coming pre-picked, and in an ironic move for the president of the Post-Prohibition era, his defence of the federal right of interference in pretty much everything laid the groundwork for the War on Drugs, and the FBI according to J. Edgar Hoover.

        So, yeah. Not sympathetic.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 24 2017, @04:47AM (11 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 24 2017, @04:47AM (#530450) Journal

        they came about under FDR because, to paraphrase Jim Morrison, the whole shithouse was going up in flames.

        Then why are they still around? The whole point of emergency measures is to deal with emergencies - not many decades in between. FDR's social programs should have ended long ago (assuming they should have ever started in the first place, some of them were quite lousy even by the low standards of social programs).

        And voters don't do anything directly. Votes are always for proxies who do the deeds for which they were voted in.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 24 2017, @09:17PM (10 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 24 2017, @09:17PM (#530693)

          >whole point of emergency measures is to deal with emergencies

          But are social services really an emergency measure? When the economy has shifted from agrarian through to service based, are social services "optional" anymore? My great-greats back on the farm had houses with 20+ family members in residence, those that were able worked the fields, hunted the woods, etc. and they took care of their own. Even without the shift to a goods and services economy, that model was doomed because they were having 8 and 10 children per generation and the available land for farming in that style was running out fast - right around the time of FDR. With the shift, my grandparents moved off the farm and took services jobs (teacher, sales, mechanic, hairdresser), and lived apart from the big family support units they came from. They sent their children to university (supposed to be progress...) and each successive generation moved further and further away from the core family. Without that core family, there's no social safety net, and the results are not only unpleasant, but also expensive to society.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 24 2017, @10:23PM (9 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 24 2017, @10:23PM (#530706) Journal

            But are social services really an emergency measure? When the economy has shifted from agrarian through to service based, are social services "optional" anymore?

            There are multiple points of view in this thread. For example, your grandparent post presented the idea that social services were in response to the Great Depression, which let us note, is no longer around. Now, you present it as being a necessary part of a "service-based" economy. Either view has its merits, but my view is that social services are first and foremost, a bribe for the status quo, which unfortunately involves a lot of corruption and cronyism.

            For if it were emergency services, then they would only appear when there was an emergency. If it were merely some necessary part of a modern economy, then no one would have promised more than they could deliver. There would be concern about the long term viability of these programs and they would have long ago been adjusted so that they wouldn't threaten the long term health of the US (and all other developed world economies let us note!).

            But that wasn't done. Public pensions and health care to name the two universal, glaringly out of control systems, are used the same way everywhere - as a means to control the voting public. And you can tell this, because these are universal threats to the future stability and viability of the entire developed world. These programs were created and run without sufficient thought for the future. They're already bringing down the more unstable countries in Europe both directly through consuming public funds and debt that would be better either not spent at all or spent on vital services, or by creating internal dynamics that encourage excessive spending and corruption without regard to the future which is the inevitable consequence of bread and circuses.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 25 2017, @02:28AM (8 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 25 2017, @02:28AM (#530760)

              My single point of view is that the Great Depression and the seriousness of its effects were a symptom of the basic changes in the economy and social structures, if the depression passed and social supports were left at, or returned to the then status-quo, another depression would have eventually happened with similar or worse severity. A "Great Depression" in 1835 would have been mostly laughed off in the rural areas, and the city folk who were hurt by it could move out to the country and make a living for themselves, even if they had to go "out west" to get some acreage to work. A "Great Depression" after 1975, without the "New Deal" social supports and government bailouts, would have resulted in mass starvation, chaos and violence. The so-called "Great Depression" of 2008-ish may have seen some people forced to move out of their 4000 square foot homes into 1200 square foot apartments, but nobody was walking town to town with just the clothes on their back looking for a way to get their next meal.

              Corruption and cronyism are very real, and pervasive - not only in healthcare and public pensions, they're everywhere from city councils that make laws to enrich friends and family first while "serving the public" on their public face, all the way through national politics controlled by multiple layers of lobbyists arrayed around the D.C. beltway in an obscene display of entrenched influence purchasing acted out by a cast of tens of thousands. I've also seen plenty of it in corporate hiring and promotion decisions. You'll get no denial from me that the finances of health care aren't dysfunctional beyond wild imagination, but in my view Medicare/Medicaid is on the more rational end - not saying they're anywhere near rational, just that they're less out of control than the insurance market / organized health care providers' Ouroboros. And, when comparing public pensions to those funded by private corporations, I've heard since the 1970s how Social Security "might not be there" by the year 2000, 2010, 2020, etc., but private corporations really have raided the pension funds, left their workers high and dry, and lately they've been encouraging revolving door employment to avoid accruing pension liability in the first place. Yes, yes, we should all save for our own retirement like my Grandparents and Mother, or at least divorce and re-marry rich like my Father, but the reality is: most people don't. And when they don't, you end up with my parents-in-law who don't go to the doctor because it's too expensive / they can't afford it, end up with bigger medical problems as a result, and generally drag on in a miserable state for decades before they die.

              At the end of the game, debt is an imaginary concept. The World Bank tried putting debt on the developing countries as a way to get their natural resources in-play in the global economy and it worked to some extent, but large parts of that so called debt have been written off, forgiven, just like Trump's failed casinos, paid for by other more profitable ventures. The real question is: what are people going to do - for each other, for themselves, and with the natural resources they have access to? Not all are motivated by money, but in a world where most access to food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and higher education are all controlled by access to money, you've got to do something to keep the money game working. Buying bread and circuses with tax money isn't a good long term play, but providing food, shelter, and entertainment "for free," might not be the worst thing. Free education has been a very good thing, historically. I'd also argue that free basic medical care is working for those countries that do it. Lots of problems remain to be solved no matter which direction of change is pursued, but making everyone self-pay for everything isn't a workable solution from where we stand today, especially with so much of the population on WalMart part time paychecks or worse.

              --
              🌻🌻 [google.com]
              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 25 2017, @04:44AM (5 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 25 2017, @04:44AM (#530785) Journal

                My single point of view is that the Great Depression and the seriousness of its effects were a symptom of the basic changes in the economy and social structures, if the depression passed and social supports were left at, or returned to the then status-quo, another depression would have eventually happened with similar or worse severity. A "Great Depression" in 1835 would have been mostly laughed off in the rural areas, and the city folk who were hurt by it could move out to the country and make a living for themselves, even if they had to go "out west" to get some acreage to work. A "Great Depression" after 1975, without the "New Deal" social supports and government bailouts, would have resulted in mass starvation, chaos and violence. The so-called "Great Depression" of 2008-ish may have seen some people forced to move out of their 4000 square foot homes into 1200 square foot apartments, but nobody was walking town to town with just the clothes on their back looking for a way to get their next meal.

                And my view is that the Great Depression was merely a severe recession from a combination of stock market delusion and country-level weakness from the aftermath of the First World War) that got made worse and more enduring in the US by a meddling FDR. I don't buy that the "social structures" have actually made any problems of large recessions better. What is forgotten here is that the US and other countries would naturally recover from recessions anyway as they had for more than a century prior to the Great Depression.

                ut in my view Medicare/Medicaid is on the more rational end - not saying they're anywhere near rational, just that they're less out of control than the insurance market / organized health care providers' Ouroboros

                Last I checked substantially more is still 0.being paid out of Medicare than goes in. And Medicaid is being progressively undermined to the point where it will cease to qualify as health care. In each case, we're seeing the expected outcome happen - costs of the program are being cut back by means foul or fair to match revenue going in.

                And, when comparing public pensions to those funded by private corporations, I've heard since the 1970s how Social Security "might not be there" by the year 2000, 2010, 2020, etc., but private corporations really have raided the pension funds, left their workers high and dry, and lately they've been encouraging revolving door employment to avoid accruing pension liability in the first place.

                It's always been a bad idea to let someone, private or public, promise the Moon and then expect some distant future authority to honor the extravagant promise. And you mention "hearing" the flaws of Social Security for forty years. Well, the flaws of the system are on us now, despite those forty years or more of warning, with costs exceeding for the first time the revenue of the program. That means that unlike the first 75 or so years of the program, we're now in a situation where Social Security is a net drain on the US government budget rather than the reverse. And it'll only get worse from now on.

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:49PM (4 children)

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:49PM (#530872)

                  There's a deeper problem with individuals' retirement savings than what proportion of it you let the government manage. Even if the government bows out and claims zero responsibility for old-age pensions, the value of retirement savings are still well outside the control of the persons doing the saving. Factors of inflation and market valuation, which are in a large part influenced by government decisions, I wouldn't say "controlled," but the government is one of the larger players in the game, have a tremendous bearing on how long and in what lifestyle a saver can live after putting away 20% of earnings for 40 years. In favorable conditions, that savings plan has enabled people to live indefinitely off of "secure" interest income in the same style they lived before retirement, in less favorable economies, they don't even get 10 years at 50% of their previous expense level.

                  Letting each individual manage their own investment decisions sounds good, but invites corruption and exploitation ala Bernie Madoff. If the free public education system included even 80 hours of investor education, I might soften this position, but even then most 17 year old kids just aren't neurologically developed to a point where they're ready or even able to think about responsible management of their future financial needs, much less recognize crooks, cons and simple bad investments. Provision of a better social safety net could be cheaper to the taxpayers than the current high-wire system where people are fine, until they fall off.

                  If zero personal income/savings didn't put people down in a hole where they are in real danger of dying, then there would be no need for public pensions or programs like SSI/SNAP. Nobody needs to "save for elementary school tuition," some people do and their children get some benefit of the parent's increased selection of schools. If the same were true for food, shelter, basic medical care, then government could back out of the business of managing poor people's monetary affairs. The system we have actively encourages the poor to not work: get a job earn some money, even worse save some money, lose your benefits. Lose said job, spend savings and become eligible for benefits again, jump ridiculous bureaucratic hoops to get benefits reinstated.

                  In the US economy of the 1700s/1800s, the able bodied could obtain land, work it and have children who also work the land and take care of their elders. This worked until populations got too high for the available resources. If we're going to continue at these population levels with people concentrated into cities, the government is going to need to provide something more for people than enforcement of contracts.

                  --
                  🌻🌻 [google.com]
                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @08:13PM (1 child)

                    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @08:13PM (#530941)

                    OK, so there's an eloquently stated case for governmental paternalism. Well done.

                    One question: what if one doesn't want that? What if one wants a government with a lighter touch? Is it OK to vote for someone who will offer that, and try to legislate that way? How about accepting that different countries might offer different approaches to various problems, and moving to countries that support your view of how a society should be run?

                    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 26 2017, @11:37AM

                      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday June 26 2017, @11:37AM (#531261)

                      I don't, but say I did like FInland's government? I also prefer Aruba's climate... now I must choose, or move to Aruba and start a revolution.

                      --
                      🌻🌻 [google.com]
                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 26 2017, @05:08AM (1 child)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 26 2017, @05:08AM (#531135) Journal
                    Ok, how does all that help? I'll note that there are a host of ills associated with this such as encouraging people to become eternal failures, discouraging planning for the future (Big Brother will take care of you), and spending money that could be spent on more important things like the usual roads, emergency services, national defense, etc, or even not spent at all. A lot of people became more needy as a result. And we have all sorts of zero sum games being played now because when one gets a piece of the squeeze, someone else loses - this encourages in no particular order, racism, generational conflict, corruption and greed, and a generation of people who don't have a clue how markets work.
                    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 26 2017, @11:35AM

                      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday June 26 2017, @11:35AM (#531260)

                      Nobody respects Malthus, but he was right. The underlying problem in all of this is: if you give people a comfy existence with zero penalties for reproducing (or, worse, incentives such as tax credits, etc.) they do in fact breed like rabbits, which doesn't matter on a 20 year time scale, but is disastrous on a 200 year time scale (when starting from saturation, which IMO we passed some time in the 1980s on a global scale.) Keep the fire-user through heavy-industrial populations in check by whatever means, and all the looming environmental disasters back down. Problems with population control are many - starting with pervasive entrenched economic models that are dependent on population growth, continuing through national/racial/religious etc. competition, "fair" administration of any non-voluntary systems, etc. but the benefits (for those who do get born) are huge. Clearly, my personal view is that 2 billion people living in relative ease, comfort and harmony with the (remains of the) ecosystem that they evolved from is a preferable state compared to 12 billion people living on a technological tightrope, squeezing every available bit of energy out of the planet. Get off this rock and colonize others, and I'd say that's fair use of extended living space - let the population grow other places as it is able, but raping our ecological heritage for a couple generations of high population seems short sighted, to me.

                      Returning to present day earth, if big brother really is going to take care of you, do you need to plan for the future? I mean, if big brother's idea of "taking care" is a 200sq ft basement apartment in BFE with rice and beans for dinner every night, yeah, I think most people would eventually grow up and do something to get out of that situation, but knowing that the roof with rice and beans is always there for you also encourages things like entrepreneurism / reasonable (and, granted, unreasonable) risk taking - just ask any rich kid that's tried to start a business or two with mom and dad's backing - should that opportunity only be available to the children of the rich? If more kids actually spend a few years trying to make a business work instead of flipping burgers, that's education about markets that you can't get in school.

                      --
                      🌻🌻 [google.com]
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @06:10AM (1 child)

                by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @06:10AM (#530807)

                You know what else are imaginary concepts?

                Money.

                Voting.

                Laws.

                Things that actually really help us get by and forge stable societies in which we can live better. Suggesting that somehow debt is just some kind of power play doesn't measure all its practical uses - it matters, for example, as a token of trust. Trust that helps us do more than we could before.

                I'm not sure how you differentiate bread and circuses from the public purse, from free food, shelter and entertainment (because sure as shit someone's paying the tab - probably the taxpayers).

                The question is what the society gets for its collective expenditures, and there are an awful lot of people who are getting a tiny bit tired of footing the bill for all sorts of goodies to help politicians keep their jobs, and are consequently fighting back hard against the idea of expanding the goodie bag.

                Remember that if politics is the art of the possible, it includes dealing with people who disagree with you, and are pulling in the other direction.

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:12PM

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:12PM (#530863)

                  Last time I was in Copenhagen ~30 years ago, I saw a suburb of "free housing" ~500 sq ft "houses," heated (important there), with indoor plumbing and a television, provided for any Danish citizens who thought that's what they wanted to live in. As far as I know, they still do something similar, and the Danish economy hasn't imploded.

                  We don't charge money for air (though we also don't charge enough for polluting the air, either), most of the US doesn't charge money for drinking water - though companies are trying hard to make it a market of preference. If you extend the concepts and include (or, rather, raise the current standard of) shelter, food and medical care into those things that you can obtain in society without exchanging money, it seems that some people are afraid that the whole world will just sit down and refuse to work and that nothing will get done and the existing structures of free education, public roads, etc. will then cease to exist.

                  --
                  🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @05:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @05:59AM (#529866)

    And Air Canada sucks donkey's ball.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @02:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @02:19PM (#530021)

    You know that Kodac invented digital photography too right?

    Then it killed them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @06:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @06:20PM (#530137)

      What killed them was that they tried to bury it in order to save their film business.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @05:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @05:12PM (#530088)

    Nationalized airlines throw a chunk of the national budget at the problem. This is just showing off for reasons of national pride. It isn't profitable.

    It is in fact a sure path to bankruptcy. Sometimes US airlines make that mistake. Shareholders do not appreciate it.

    A better goal is to have the lowest operating costs that don't create a PR disaster or otherwise make the customers go elsewhere.

    Customers like this too, despite claims to the contrary. We see how people vote with their dollars. People even fly on Spirit.