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Comments (36)
Looks like we means US, again.
How the US can achieve the living conditions of other first world nations is a solved problem: do what they are doing, Lower crime by lowering inequality. Fund urban renewal instead of letting cities rot. Etc.
Of course that's all moving in the progressive direction, not the reactionary direction.
Kind of funny how you completely misunderstood the text. "unable to extract first-world living conditions from the materially richest country on earth" refers to the DR Congo, not the United States (check the link). The United States actually is a first world country.
Some other mistakes I frequently see Europeans make when grandstanding about the US (but refusing to do even 2 minutes actual fact-checking:
-US social welfare spending per capita is higher than any EU country. -There have been massive urban renewal projects in the US, for decades.
That would suggest we are misspending compared to Europe if true.
Yes. That is certainly true about healthcare, the US government spends comparable amount of EU governments per capita, the issue is basically with higher costs (and holes uninsured people can fall through).
For example, about urban renewal, currently the Austrian government rarely pays 100% of the cost of an apartment house and I think the US government often does, "projects" etc. The Austrian method is to have non-profit co-ops where tenants are members build them and the government pays 30%, gets to hand out 30% of the apartments on a social basis (wohnservice.at) basically mixing poor and non-poor people, to avoid the formation of ghettoes, although they are not the poorest people because they pay full rent. They don't pay the starting capital. Because the 70%, normal members-tenants need to cough up about 20% of the value of the apartment, roughly $25K to 50$K in advance. This is what the government buys out for 30% who get it socially/are poor, so actually my calculation was wrong, the government does not even pay 30% of the total cost. But they pay normal rents, which means for a two-bedroom roughly 60% of the unofficial monthly minimum wage. This means they are not the poorest poor actually. At any rate, the leverage here is fairly low spending giving a significant hand up to the non-poorest poor and incentivizing these building projects.
To the extent urban renewal projects actually work (they often don't), I think they mostly move the problem around. The urban core itself may be revitalized, and the poor then move somewhere cheaper as gentrification sets in. I definitely don't think it is an effective method for fighting poverty or inequality, but it is popular.
As for welfare, I don't think misspending is the problem per se. One problem is that healthcare is a lot more expensive in the US due to our convoluted healthcare system. I think the main reason life is much worse for America's poor than Europe's poor is that America's poor are harder to live around.
I would not generalize over all of Europe, I generally would not want to live around the Paris poor while the Vienna poor are way more livable. To put it very, very bluntly, Turkish-Albanian-Serbian poor > North African poor. It is an incredibly insensitive way to put it, but this is simply what my experience boils down to. The former countries got historically more "westernized"/secularized/liberal/whatnot. I regularly train with the former types of guys as I go to a fairly cheap boxing gym. They are okay. A bit rough around the edges, may be a tad aggressive, but culturally compatible. Football > religion types of guys. There are places in/near Paris I would not go in, for the police / ambulance does not really dare to go in either.
"do what they are doing, Lower crime by lowering inequality" Is there some evidence that this is what they're doing and if so can we tease out the effects of confounding factors such as homogeneity, race and other explanatory factors that inform reactionary thought?
Once you tease out these factors, does Europe actually end up being better at all?
Well one thing you could look at is the level of criminality in the homogenous but poor European societies - most Eastern European countries fit that description.
I haven't investigated this map, though google images turn up several which show a similar pattern so I'm guessing it's not nonsense: http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Murder-Rate-map.png
Assuming it's accurate, that at least provides a prima-facie case that inequality does cause crime. I suspect however the existence of a ceiling past which reducing inequality no longer depresses crime rates. And ofcourse criminality and inequality could have a common cause, such as lower IQ. If we look at a world IQ map:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v0ofzbpEfd8/VOyorckWQvI/AAAAAAAAFFM/6H0UFN5tFKY/s1600/world_average_iq_2000.png
IQ does seem to interact with criminality.
That particular idea has been widely explored in the literature. E.g. Fajnzylber does it in Inequality and violent crime, finding a significant correlation of 0.54 between income inequality and log of homicide rate. This is pretty strong by social science standards. The correlation with other types of crime is much lower.
Curiously, If you restrict to Europe, the correlation is negative, but it is positive if you restrict to East and South Asia, which has Gini coefficients and murder rates comparable to European countries.
IMHO murder rates are incredibly gun-dependent, and I don't meant it as a gun-control argument, because politics is downstream from culture, so they are gun-culture dependent, not gun-law dependent. (Pro-gun culture with restrictive laws just means a huge black market, like drugs.)
Anecdotally, it is not easy to find black market guns in Eastern Europe. The supply of the ex-Yugo civil wars and drunk Soviet soldiers dried up, the international dealers and organized crime simply do not care about the minimal profits they could make on retail, they want it wholesale into conflict zones and whatnot. It is not a good black market retail business, unlike drugs, customers won't return every day or week. Retail black market could be based people owning 10-20 guns, private collectors, and occasionally sell one, there are a lot of people in the US who are like that but almost none in EE.
Things like not having a lot of game around to hunt play a role. But more likely, there are only two stable equilibria, everybody or nobody having guns, EE is tending towards nobody, the US has so many already that the only possible equilibrium state is everybody.
I think that is not true at all. That is, there is no significant dependency between availability of firearms and murder rate. Where aren't many guns, most common murder weapon is knife, it is the only difference.
Availability or widespread ownership?
I am absolutely not convinced it is a good idea to port policies from one culture to another. Neither when US Neoliberalism gets exported to Latin America & Eastern Europe ("Washington Consensus") nor when Euro Social Democracy gets imported to the US ("Nordic Model"). Cultural differences can make every policy win or fail.
I mean, even in the EU it seems very similar tax-and-spend models work well for Scandinavia but abysmally for PIIGS. The cultural difference between the North and E̶s̶s̶o̶s̶ the Mediterrean is already too high.
I think homogenity/multiculturalism may also play a role... which predicts sooner or later we will see less Social Democracy in the EU. But the point is, tax-and-spend requires trust, and trust is based on things like similarity or making sure the other players in the prisoner's dilemma don't defect (don't cheat on taxes etc.) and it seems to suggest the need for cultural homogenity.
One useful way to model is that supra-national, EU-level redistribution does not really work due to the lack of trust which is due to the - thankful! - lack of cultural homogenity, and the US is so dishomogenous that it resembles the whole of the EU more than any individual nation. European nations stopped being ethnic too but there is at least still some kind of a default ethnicity & ethnic culture in each, which at least helps in coordination problems: a German-Turk and a German-Serb at least have a basic idea that their easiest way to cooperate in the game is to behave like a German-German, the "default" citizen. The US went way beyond the point where Scottish and German ethnicities could be considered default. And this is why there are constantly these coordination problems e.g. men no longer know how to behave with women without being creepy because there is not one default ethnic culture.
BTW before anyone misunderstands this comment, it is not a criticism of multiculturalism or some kind of a hidden racism. It is simply pointing out in the long run it cannot be combined with nationalism and the national level redistribution we commonly call Social Democracy. To cope with multiculturalism, nationalism needs to go the way of the dodo and nations reimagined as a loose confederation of communities, and redistribution happening only inside the communities but not overall in the nation. This is doable, for example Austria has universal healthcare but not single-payer, there are stuff like miners or railroad workers health insurance "cassa". This is workable. Similar institutions are possible to imagine on an ethnic-communitarian basis. Private business is aleady doing it, DenizBank is advertising in Vienna largely where Turks live because it is of course so that they trust it more than others. Time to go beyond the Westphalian period of (economic) nationalism.