Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shaki-dora 3429 days ago
By any objective standard, the last 70 years were the best ever for Europe, and the world as a whole. There are certainly differences of opinion and interests between Europe and the US, but they are far from negating the overlaps. The ideas that the US has propagated are fundamentally sound, and any US hypocrisy may undermine the effort to spread them, but not the value they offer.

If you are an average citizen anywhere in Europe, throwing the dice in either the time or spatial dimensions is a losing proposition: there is almost no time nor place of higher prosperity, lower physical danger, better chances regardless of class/gender/race/etc, higher life expectancy, more vibrant cultural life, more freedom to explore your interest/kinks/obsessions etc. And the shift of the US under Trump is a throw of the dice in the best case. In reality, it is unlikely that a new world order build by an orange buffoon could in any way rival the current one, which was build by people who had the foresight and moral compass to invest trillions into a continent, and even the very country that had just plunged the world into the darkest crevice of history.

I'm not saying that all is well, just that we are, historically, closer to the best than the worst, or even to average. But any assertion that the system was fundamentally broken is obviously not supported by the outcomes it produced, and the way to optimise a system running at it's historical best involves carefully planned tuning, not destroying it with a sledgehammer and asking a reality TV character to build a new one.

3 comments

> If you are an average citizen anywhere in Europe, throwing the dice in either the time or spatial dimensions is a losing proposition: there is almost no time nor place of higher prosperity, lower physical danger, better chances regardless of class/gender/race/etc, higher life expectancy, more vibrant cultural life, more freedom to explore your interest/kinks/obsessions etc.

Exactly. And at the risk of sounding entitled, privileged or whatever, I like it this way. I would like this to stay. The changes happening in US (and similar ones starting to happen in Europe) threaten this.

And sure, it's not fair to everyone all the time. But it's like some people these days think that if they can just blow everything up, things will be better for them, that it'll improve their relative well-being. It won't. Destabilizing things isn't beneficial for anyone.

Not at all. There is many a lost generation in European countries.
Best for the entire group on average != best for some subset of that group. But it seems to me that some people believe they'll be happier if they pull the world back to year 1940.
Exactly we are at a peek. Like a bubble in stock. It is about to pop.