posted
By the way, my positives about this country have been listed already, but I'd like to add that I enjoy:
- Living in a country with a high standard of living. We have access to the best of what the world has to offer.
- The rule of law and the habits that go with it are well-engrained here.
- Our educational opportunities (both public and private) are excellent.
- We are a pluralistic society and we actually worry about things that pose a threat to that tradition.
- We have strong building codes and a good deal of effort and money is spent on health and safety of our citizens.
- Our armed forces are answerable to the civilian power, and the vast majority of the people in the military not only support that ideal, but spend their careers defending it.
- With notable recent exceptions, private property rights are upheld by our legal system.
- We have some form of separation between church and state.
- We can legally and openly criticize our leaders and hold them accountable to the same laws as apply to every citizen.
As others have said, I don't believe we are perfect, nor do I think we're the only country on the Earth with some or all of these attributes.
Posts: 61 | Registered: Aug 2004
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quote:Originally posted by ClaudiaTherese:That's great.
:: laugh :: Point taken.
No, really, I did meant that was great. It was reassuring.
quote:
quote:The world, alas, is confusing, and I am far too often feeling the need to gird against it as of late. *woebegonish
((CT)) Sorry you've been finding yourself in need of emotional armor lately.
Well, you know, the saying that "the only consistent thing about all of your disatisfying relationships is you" does have some merit. I've been a real prickly pear lately. [Thanks for the many kindnesses, Noemon. ]
---
Thanks for the reassurance, MrSquicky. I appreciate the friendship that lies behind the calm, thoughtful response.
I'll try to pull a few of my thorns. *grin
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Where do I sign up for this liberal cabal? I've been meaning to join a cabal for a while now, and this one seems pretty snappy!
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
I love that I have the right to say whatever I think needs to be said
I love the fact that I can criticize the government without serving jail time as a result.
I enjoy the fact that I have the right to dissent peacefully and assemble with like-minded individuals
I love that I can go to Vegas without wading through some bureaucracy for permission
I love that I have both the freedom to ruin my life or make it wonderful.
I love that I can read any book I want and listen to any music I want.
I love the fact that I can vote my conscience regardless of my race, religion, or party without fear of consequences.
Posts: 681 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
I love the fact that almost everywhere, including places in the middle of nowhere, you can find a toilet where you can sit down in an enclosed building and use toilet paper provided for you.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
To be honest, most of the things listed here are things you can say of many other countries as well. And some things, such as gay rights or women's rights, are actually handled better in countries such as Finland or Sweden than in America, I feel.
Anyway, what I find positive about the US is the diversity of the society in that there are many different people with many different views, and it's taken as a granted that there are many people with many views, and that it's even seen as a good thing, not as a threat. (Though I suppose this'd also apply to other countries as well, such as Canada.)
Also, the free toilets, if that's true.
Posts: 247 | Registered: Dec 2006
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posted
Free toilets stocked with toilet paper really are the norm here, Snail. I've been startled by the lack of them in most of the other countries I've travelled in.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: I love the fact that almost everywhere, including places in the middle of nowhere, you can find a toilet where you can sit down in an enclosed building and use toilet paper provided for you.
The value of this cannot be overstated.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:I love the fact that almost everywhere, including places in the middle of nowhere, you can find a toilet where you can sit down in an enclosed building and use toilet paper provided for you.
Yes, I agree too! Can we universally agree that this one thing about America, at least, is great?
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Yes, I think so. It was such a pain trying to find a public bathroom in the UK. I was surprised at how many large businesses did not have them.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Javert Hugo: I almost hesitate to ask, but what do people do instead?
*Warning YOU asked for it. Talk of doing the unmentionable below.
I still have no qualms with peeing outside so long as nobody else can see me, or if from a distance I look like I am just standing there, this works best a night.
Where I grew up in Hong Kong if I was walking down the street and I saw a little kid simply squat by the side of the road I would have thought nothing of it (Chinese people routinely cut slits in boys pants so they don't have to drop their pants and try to squat with them in the way. Little girls would be held up with their front facing upwards by their parents and told, "OK Go" whatever vile subtances projected from their orifaces would then safely spray and plop onto the street in full view of the public.
If I walked down an alley and saw a man simply peeing against the wall I did him the courtesy of ignoring him and his naughty bits, he did me the courtesy of not pretending I was not there, i.e turning and offering me a salutation.
I still don't know what adult girls do when they need to go.
In Malaysia you find some bushes, they are to be found EVERYWHERE.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Javert Hugo: I almost hesitate to ask, but what do people do instead?
In Finland there are public toilets, they just cost money to get into.
But yay! Free toilets are definitely a Good Thing. Why can't we have free toilets? Though it's probably okay if they don't have free toilets in Sweden either, we just need to get them first...
Posts: 247 | Registered: Dec 2006
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posted
My favorite thing about America is the concept that if you work hard, you can become anything you want to be. It's not that America doesn't have classes, but through hard work and a touch of luck, a person can become achieve more than they would expect from the background they were born in to. I don't know that this is totally unique to America, but I do think it's more internalized as part of our cultural ethos here than elsewhere.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:My favorite thing about America is the concept that if you work hard, you can become anything you want to be. It's not that America doesn't have classes, but through hard work and a touch of luck, a person can become achieve more than they would expect from the background they were born in to. I don't know that this is totally unique to America, but I do think it's more internalized as part of our cultural ethos here than elsewhere.
That's good and bad, especially when it comes to moral compromises. If you are willing to exploit all of your advantages and the disadvantages of others, then the whole world is at your feet. The flip side, of course, is that people who aren't willing to do this aren't trying hard enough. There is a difference between hard work and dirty work, and I'm not sure which our great American ethos rewards and encourages.
quote:There is a difference between hard work and dirty work, and I'm not sure which our great American ethos rewards and encourages.
Irami, your decision to treat all life as a narrative at times makes it very hard for you to see the obvious: that both are rewarded and encouraged, typically by different people and to different degrees.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I'm probably as liberal as you can get around here. And I think that Occasional's OP, along with his other posts on the subject, does insult people like me with the presumption that we (a) are not patriots and (b) somehow need to "prove" our loyalty. Both are wrong, and this is why.
I love that our Founding Fathers had the opportunity to set up a monarchy and/or dictatorship, and refused to, out of principle.
I love that, when our first attempt at establishing a governing body failed, we didn't devolve into chaos and destruction, but through civil discourse, rewrote our Constitution and emerged stronger than ever.
I love that the law of our land is a living, breathing document that has the flexibility to meet the changing needs of its people.
I love that people of all faiths, creeds, races, and worldviews are welcome here, and have the same right (albeit sometimes not the opportunity- but we're working on that!) to participate in government as anyone else.
I love that you can drive from city to city and never experience the same local culture twice.
I love our national parks, our forests, our bays and rivers and lakes and skies. Seriously, they're freakin' beautiful.
I love that my parents were able to move here without understanding more than basic English, and through dedication and hard work, put me in a situation wherein higher education is not only possible for me, but expected of me.
Yep. American kinda rules. We're nowhere near perfect- in fact, sometimes we're downright scummy. But I think we're doing all right.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:My favorite thing about America is the concept that if you work hard, you can become anything you want to be.
Your socioeconomic strata is more rigidly defined and static in America than it is in most of the EU countries.
Ironically, the best way to get the American dream is to try for it in Europe.
Yes thank you for that unashamedly objective fact posted in a thread designed to allow people to talk about what they appreciate about America.
Please continue posting disparaging remarks about the this country whilst simultaneously talking about how great Europe is. I am so happy your continent stacks up to our country so well.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Uhh there's nothing disparaging about it at all.
It's just one of those quirky facts, since the american dream is literally the rags-to-riches mobility deal, you know?
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Uhh there's nothing disparaging about it at all.
It's just one of those quirky facts, since the american dream is literally the rags-to-riches mobility deal, you know?
Yes that is part of it. But unless you have some sort of advanced degree in sociology with an emphasis in American/European comparison, or else God himself decided to let you know that this is true, I just don't know how you can make such a claim.
I might as well argue that people in Europe compared to America are less in love with each other which makes Paris' claim to be the "City of Love" bogus.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
He could have looked up "social mobility" in Wikipedia at some point, which leads to a study from the London School of Economics link :
quote: The report focused on how education affected the life chances of British children compared with those in other countries. It put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries, with Norway at the top followed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Canada.
That would alleviate the need to postulate a less likely divine revelation Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Mucus: Well of COURSE the LONDON school of economics is going to place the UK at the lower tiers of the study! Don't try to rustle my position with your "facts"
posted
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at.
If you're accusing the school of bias simply due to its location in London, that seems to be a rather "ad hominem." In addition, even if it did falsify its data to make the UK look bad (and I'm not entirely sure what its motives would be), why would it also falsify its data for the US versus the other six countries?
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Dude. That edit means I am completely confused now.
I'm just going to say that I'm not particularly attached to either "side." He might be right, he might not, I was just sorta curious if he was. Thats just literally the first study I found.
edit: There's a second linked study from an American source at American Progress, if a non-foreign source helps any.
quote: The United States has long been known as the land of opportunity, where hard work is rewarded and economic prosperity is within reach for all. Judging from opinion surveys, our national faith in this proposition is on the rise... We are also more optimistic about the value of hard work than those in many other countries... These survey results suggest that the American Dream is alive and well. But what exactly are the chances that an American child who is born to low-income parents will end up rich? ... While few would deny that it is possible to start poor and end rich, the evidence suggests that this feat is more difficult to accomplish in the United States than in other high-income nations. This claim is based on cross-country comparisons of the intergenerational elasticity of earnings, a statistic that measures the percentage difference in expected child earnings that is associated with a one percent difference in parental earnings. Higher elasticities mean less mobility: they imply that parental income matters more, or that the children of the poor are more likely to remain poor. Figure 2, below, displays the intergenerational elasticity of earnings between fathers and sons for nine upper-income countries, and shows that the United States and the United Kingdom are especially immobile....
In the interests of full disclosure, the paper does go on to talk about why there might be less mobility in the States, and why this might not necessarily be "unfair."
I'm just going to add that while Samprimary was not particularly *diplomatic*, that does not automatically make what he said incorrect or the topic impossible to research for anyone with less than a degree in the appropriate area. *shrug*
posted
My comment was made purely in jest. Why would I complain about "facts" and for what plausible reason could a UK school intentionally place its country in an unfavorable position within such a study?
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Sorry. Misinterpreted your tone then. Your post combined with the previous made me wrongly think that you were a bit outraged/offended.
As a consolation, I'll note that this study actually backs up your non-serious assertion that people in the United States are more in love than those in France (or at least more sexually satisfied).
quote: The report focused on how education affected the life chances of British children compared with those in other countries. It put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries, with Norway at the top followed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Canada.
So when he said "most of the EU countries" he excluded UK, Ireland, France, Italy and how many others?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Note that most of the countries scoring well in the measure also have score far higher on socioeconomic homogeneity measures. Countries with higher socioeconomic homogeneity are known to have higher inter-generational income mobility with similar policies. Many consider the explanation to be that, due to higher homogeneity, subsequent generations tend to persist practices of their own (and the prejudices of others) less from the previous generations. This does not mean fewer people end up poor than the previous generation, but it introduces a lot of noise between generations as things reshuffle, reducing the correlation between parental and child income.
This leads to my next point: that measure (inter-generational) of income mobility is not very good. Intergenerational income mobility measures the amount of income mobility that is explained by parental income changes. If child incomes are just not very well explained by parental incomes, or if most children have a similar size in increase in income compared to their parents, neither of those affects is captured. Broader statistics that are less subject to such nuanced effects show extremely high intra-generational income mobility in the US (whatever you think of this source, most of the article just cites well-regarded studies): http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/BG1418.cfm
quote:So, if everybody's income is 50 percent higher than their parents', that shows up as zero income mobility. On the other hand, if average income stays constant, but a lot of low-earning parents have high-earning children, and vice-versa, that shows up as high income mobility.
quote:1. "Age-adjusted parental wealth, by itself, explains less than 10 percent of the variation in age-adjusted child wealth."
2. 20 percent of parents in the lowest quintile of the parent's wealth distribution have children who end up in the top two quintiles of their generation. One-quarter of the parents in the highest wealth quintile end up with kids in the two lowest quintiles.
3. The age-adjusted intergenerational wealth elasticity is 0.37. What does this mean? If parents have wealth 50 percent over the mean in their generation, the wealth of their children will be 18 percent above the mean in the childrens' generation.
So no, there's no particular reason to think your social strata is more binding in the US than in Europe. The studies brought to bear in this thread only support much weaker statements, namely that parental income in the US contributes slightly more to future child income than in many other nations (note that this would happen if parents were particularly good at passing along their work ethics).
It uses a very large sample, and was able to get very thorough data, and was collected randomly. It is a very strong study.
quote:In other words, a member of the bottom income bracket in 1979 would have a better chance of moving to the top income bracket by 1988 than remaining in the bottom bracket.
That's a rather striking finding of the study. People in the US (at least in that period) are better at breaking out of social strata than staying in them, by far. In fact, they're better at jumping to the highest income bracket in the US then they are at remaining in the lowest. That's a pretty dang high amount of income mobility.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
As for how many EU countries were excluded, there are twenty-seven countries in it currently . . .
So it seems the US is likely doing quite well in relation to the EU overall, even by the measures cited.
Of course, some of that is for similar reasons. For instance, income in Ireland has been going up nearly across the board, so I doubt it would show up as having much inter-generational income mobility.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
An unscientific, completely anecdotal perspective:
My dad and uncle own a plant in Salt Lake City, and they hire about 70 unskilled, blue-collar workers. Not completely unskilled - you get some skills by working there - but no one goes to school or trains somewhere in order to work at a metal finishing plant. They hire people that seem serious and like they would be good employees, and then they train them.
My dad far, far prefers to employ immigrants. That's because in order to stay competitive and keep the business running, he really can't start anyone at over eight or nine dollars an hour. However, since it's a full-time job, sometimes there are swing or graveyeard shifts, and every new employee gets specialized training so he wants them to stay around - he needs to hire adults.
In his experience, immigrants are DEFINITELY the best employees because they are qualified for this job but generally lack the qualifications for higher-paying work. (While the supervisors have to be bilingual (so the owners can communicate with them) the line workers don't have to speak English.) They had enough gumption to move to a strange land to make a better life, and they generally do. $10-12 an hour won't make anyone rich and you can't live in the avenues, but it's possible to survive if you work full-time and it's way more than they were earning in Mexico or Vietnam. Also, they usually came for their families and don't have destructive personal habits that would make them poor choices for employees.
However, he really doesn't like hiring the children of immigrants, because in order for the children of the immigrants to be in a position where $10 an hour is the best they can get, they had to make some really poor choices. They had to drop out of high school, skip community college, ignore opportunities in general. The parents work at the shop (generally until they learn English), but the children do a whole lot better.
The choice isn't to pay more - he can't - because they get outbid by plants in China already, and only have the benefit of being close by to justify their higher prices. If their prices went up (as they'd have to if labor went up - labor is by far the biggest expense), the work would just go to China. In the meantime, on top of the 70 blue-collar jobs, there are 25-30 skilled and white-collar jobs that are possible because the plant is there. It's a win for everyone.
I like that about this place.
[ July 03, 2007, 10:06 AM: Message edited by: Javert Hugo ]
Posts: 1753 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: So when he said "most of the EU countries" he excluded UK, Ireland, France, Italy and how many others?
Quickly, I might point out that I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek. While I'm sure that there is a 0% probability that Samprimary acquired his information from divine revelation, I am only marginally more confident about his chances of acquiring his information *specifically* from Wikipedia and specifically from this study.
Looking quickly through, it looks like it cited a study that picked high-income countries comparable to the US for more than one generation. France is actually included in the second study. I'll look more closely (plus Fugu's stuff) as time permits.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Looking through the data, it seems like Dagonee's objection is best founded. I'm not 100% sure why the papers picked the countries listed, but I can give several good guesses.
The second paper from American Progress (which is actually the most detailed of any of the three sources so far) indicates that the countries were chosen by income level. Looking at a GDP per capita map seems to confirm this, roughly half of the EU countries, mainly from the former Soviet bloc are excluded by income. This also explains the seemingly odd inclusion of Canada in a European study, Canada has the closest income to the US. There may also be the problem of obtaining multiple generational data from the former Soviet bloc countries (for the obvious reasons) although this does not explain Italy and Ireland (However, it does explain why Germany is specifically labelled as "West Germany" in the first study).
So, inclusion of countries, seems to be a valid concern.
Fugu:
quote:
quote:In other words, a member of the bottom income bracket in 1979 would have a better chance of moving to the top income bracket by 1988 than remaining in the bottom bracket.
That's a rather striking finding of the study. People in the US (at least in that period) are better at breaking out of social strata than staying in them, by far. In fact, they're better at jumping to the highest income bracket in the US then they are at remaining in the lowest. That's a pretty dang high amount of income mobility.
The issue of intra versus inter-generational mobility is interesting. However, while I am not convinced that inter-generational mobility is the best measure, intra-generational mobility seems to be actually a worse measure, especially when measured by annual income tax files over a lifetime as in your last reference.
You can think about that easily be examining well, even my case. In the last two years, by that measure I would have jumped one quintile per year. Of course what really happened was I graduated from college, switched from a student job to working for a half year (as far as taxes are concerned), and then for a full year after that. At the same time, my father retired and would have dropped a quintile. In the last study, this would be shown as great evidence of mobility, while in the first two it would be shown for what it is, both my father and I are going back to our "natural" middle-class status.
Now the question is whether this anecdotal evidence persists when looking at the data, well according to the second study (which spends about a 1/3 of its length talking about short-term variability):
quote: Upward mobility is almost always largest and most likely, on average, for those who start at the bottom, while downward mobility is largest and most likely for those who start at the top. This fact, which many find surprising, is a statement of the well-established empirical finding that incomes regress to the mean (or median) over time. As a result, this kind of analysis will rarely conclude that the rich are getting richer, no matter how rapid the secular rise in cross-sectional income inequality may be. The reason for this counter-intuitive finding is that when we select a group of (say) high-income people, such as the top quintile, we necessarily will capture a large number of people who are in that quintile by virtue of their having had higher-than-usual incomes in that year. Of course, there will also be some people who are in that quintile despite having had a worse-than-usual year, but the higher up the income ladder we go, the greater will be the share of people whose annual incomes were unusually high for someone endowed with their human, financial and real assets. Such people are headed for a fall: Next year, it is likely that they will earn something more nearly resembling their usual incomes, i.e., they will experience downward short-term mobility. As a result, the upper brackets contain a disproportionate share of soon-to-be downwardly mobile people, and vice-versa for the bottom brackets. This effect will be more pronounced when overall income volatility is higher.
This leads to odd effects such as:
quote:One of the strongest predictors of upward short-term mobility is being in a household in which nobody has health insurance. The reason may be that the set of households that lack any health insurance contains a large proportion of the unemployed, who are likely to display significant upward short-term mobility when they find new employment. This points to one of the pitfalls of studying short-term mobility: You need to consider why people find themselves in the state they are in year one before you can fully understand the meaning of their transition to year two. The same reasoning may explain why households that received food stamps were upwardly mobile: They could be people who were suffering from temporarily low incomes.
Thus, I'm not convinced that we should be studying short-term income changes when looking at whether strata persist, the income changes between generations seem much more relevant.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
The primary criticism is that the measures of income mobility being cited ignore general increases in income and lack of correlation of child income with parent income. See the quotation about everyone increasing in income by 50%. That is, the statement that it is harder to move between social strata in the US is simply not backed up by an observation that inter-generational income mobility (which is a measure of the elasticity of income change between generations) is higher in other countries; the measure isn't strong enough to support the conclusion.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
You could entirely be right, I just do not follow.
Why *should* a measure of income mobility take into account general increases of income? If everyone's income goes up by 50% across the board, then it would seem that no one has moved between strata?
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:he really doesn't like hiring the children of immigrants, because in order for the children of the immigrants to be in a position where $10 an hour is the best they can get, they had to make some really poor choices. They had to drop out of high school, skip community college, ignore opportunities in general.
I'm not sure that's true. And even if it were, I'm not sure that dropping out of high school, skipping community college, or ignoring opportunities should preclude one from working a job that you admit does not require training.
I will be the first to say that in America, the money is out there, if you aren't too particular about how you acquire it, and that's no small virtue.
Posts: 5600 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:That's a rather striking finding of the study.
IIRC, Russell, they didn't exclude retired individuals and students from that study. Ergo, anyone who had little to no income in college would appear upwardly mobile within four years, while anyone in the lowest income bracket due to retirement had a good chance of dying and not appearing on the study at all within the same period.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Without commenting on anything that any particular study may or may not have done right or wrong in coincidentally supporting what I said:
Wealth distribution is a crucial measure of a country's ability to deliver on the promise of prosperity. Unfortunately, the United States ranks 24th among the industrial nations when it comes to these sorts of wealth issues. All 18 of the developed European countries have less income inequality between the rich folk and the poor folk, and they all tend towards having less fickle fates for above-average wealth.
The Foundation on Economic Trends in D.C. took a look at the 16 European nations for which data was available involving wealth and poverty levels. They found that we've still got more people living in poverty, and that our socioeconomic positions are more fixed, even for those of us who work hard for the promise of future prosperity.
Our structure contributes to this. It's not as helpful to the poor. Our living costs contribute to this, too: our federal poverty measurements are based on an obsolete food-based metric that ignores the compound problems that exist when the poorest demographics spend the highest percentage of their income on rent and transportation. America is also a more dangerous place to live, especially for the poor. The effect is cumulative and the E.U. has a higher quality of life index than the U.S., even when we have higher GDP per capita than anyone but .. um, Luxemburg's, I think.
Don't get me wrong; I still love america and support the troops and am strong on terror and am a uniter and not a divider. Honestly, I'd rather live here than anywhere else. It doesn't mean, though, that I'm willing to suspend commentary on subjects that show the United States needing improvement. I don't bring up comparisons to the E.U. to pooh-pooh the U.S. or idealize Europeland as the greener grass on the other side. All countries have problems. It's best to try to find answers, even if it means admitting relative shortcomings to other people's systems. America's got a lot of cohesion and potential and I could see a lot changing in 10-20 years in regards to our dogs of social policy.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I don't know if i'd call myself a liberal or a conservative, the whole label thing kinda throws me off. I am a member of the military serving overseas in the desert at the moment, and the thing i like most about our country is that I am free to burn the American flag and the worst anyone will do is say "that's very disrespectful." In my opinion there is no symbol that shouts how free we are to do what we want than to burn the American flag. At the same time, i recognize it is disrespect, and just take some pride that i'm allowed to do it if i felt like it.
Posts: 21 | Registered: Nov 2004
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