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by polypodiopsi
1427 days ago
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/news/databl... The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not. A bit polemic but an interesting perspective. Maybe it's just the case that the us IS a "third world' aka >developing county< |
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People love talking about how the US is the worst developed country across so many categories, without grasping the point that if something is clearly an outlier from everything else in a category, the definition of the category itself is flawed.
The US isn't that bad of a country in that sense that if you knew you were going to be born into the US, and you got one optional re-roll, you shouldn't take it. But for some reason that isn't totally clear to me people (though I have some hypotheses), people seem to think that we should be doing dramatically better than we are, and the fact that we're not in an even higher percentile of best countries to live in is some sort of unconscionable moral failing.
My hypotheses for the source of this idea:
* Pure racism -- people think "the US is a Western country with a European-influenced culture; why shouldn't it be doing as well as all the other countries that fit that description?"
* People confuse wealth with development. They think "of course [country X] is fucked up, because it's poor, but the US doesn't have that excuse". However, they are actually two independent axes (despite being correlated, of course).
* The existence of so much "America #1" propaganda makes people want to hold the US to a higher standard -- if country X has problems, well, at least they're not going around claiming to be the best country in the world.
* The ironclad pop-cultural dominance of the US in the Western world means it's on people's minds way more than random median-quality countries.