1. Hedonism is "fairly correct". In a well-fed and low-violence society, the pleasure/pain axis explains >40% of what every human cares about, especially chronic pleasure/pain.
- 1a. Both the US and China are low-violence and well-fed.
2. Obesity is responsible for a high amount of pain. Furthermore, there are few things in society that don't kill you which are worse that obesity.
- 2a. People don't die that much in societies like China.
3. Modern entertainment is a good painkiller. However, obese people that consume it still experience great amounts of pain throughout the day. Entertainment that distracts people from fixing the chronic pain they feel is a negative to society.
With these assumptions, the US doesn't look like a significantly better place than China. In theory, the freedom enabled by the US allows people to do well on the pain/pleasure axis. In practice, the US enables companies to do things that lead people into greater chronic pain.
Note that I think that Taiwan could be a significantly better place than China by this logic.
Those are definitely good quality of life indicators.
Every country can do better. The US should do better at a lot of things and poverty, inequality, and racism are for sure big drivers of things like childbirth death rate, lack of education and more!
But to OP's comment, there is no way in hell you can convince me or even a significant minority of Americans that China is better on the whole or even on a minor slice.
Lol even life expectancy and health seems like a lot of people here don't care about and are perfectly happy to guzzle cola and sit in front of a tv lmfao.
In terms of do better, China's list is ginormous and some of the things on it - like not building interment and forced 'integration' for millions of their citizens - are so extremely opposite of the values most here hold that it far outweighs any good weights on this 'better than' scale. It feels farcical to say otherwise.
I commented an open ended question in the first place is because these one off comments similar to OP feel to me exactly like what the article shows are active campaigns to interact on social networks like HN. But pointing that out without proof (impossible for me to get) is against HN ethics. I'm guilting of doing it though this is a moral and emotional issue for me.
Plus we americans are pretty self confident and often beligerantly arrogant. Makes it hard to convince people anything beyond american exceptionalism even on obviously nice things. Like that historical pamphlet comparing French lifestyle during the war that was posted here a long time ago. Yes they can value family and well being over working, that's horrible and un american ;) !
1. Hedonism is "fairly correct". In a well-fed and low-violence society, the pleasure/pain axis explains >40% of what every human cares about, especially chronic pleasure/pain.
- 1a. Both the US and China are low-violence and well-fed.
2. Obesity is responsible for a high amount of pain. Furthermore, there are few things in society that don't kill you which are worse that obesity.
- 2a. People don't die that much in societies like China.
3. Modern entertainment is a good painkiller. However, obese people that consume it still experience great amounts of pain throughout the day. Entertainment that distracts people from fixing the chronic pain they feel is a negative to society.
With these assumptions, the US doesn't look like a significantly better place than China. In theory, the freedom enabled by the US allows people to do well on the pain/pleasure axis. In practice, the US enables companies to do things that lead people into greater chronic pain.
Note that I think that Taiwan could be a significantly better place than China by this logic.