I have visited the US most years out of the last 5-10, including a trip through 25ish US states a couple of years ago. It's easy to get the impression that competing interests maintain a problematic or worsening status quo - infrastructure that has to be OK until it collapses because no one wants to prioritise the money to fix it (many roads in California are shocking). A voting system (as mentioned by @kristofferR) that makes it difficult for a viable third party to emerge. Health, education, private prison industries, etc.
There are parts of the United States that feel like they are struggling to survive - including areas that are quite eye-opening like Bombay Beach and Wonder Valley.
In Australia, we see lobbying groups dictate terms increasingly often too and I don't know that our country is better for it.
Having said that, I think it has absolutely nothing to do with the article.
Wonder Valley also has an interesting story: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-last-homesteads-o...
There's a theme here of Southern California desert wastelands.
There are larger towns and cities in the U.S. which more accurately depict the broader economic challenges the country is facing.
What the US lacks is urban poverty in the form of shantytowns. This is because unlike most third world nations, we quickly raze them when and find excuses to incarcerate the people who live there. If we were more permissive, we'd certainly have them too.
If you're American and you care about poverty -- as in relative poverty -- in your country and you want to do something about it, more power to you. It's not like someone being much poorer elsewhere prevents you from caring about a problem in your country. But please don't trivialize abject poverty by implying that the American working class have it as hard as the lower classes in the developing world.
It doesn't matter what some parts of the US anecdotally and subjectively "look like", they don't measure nowhere near as poor as rural Philippines or Vietnam. Or urban Philippines/Vietnam for that matter.
In those countries, the literacy rate is around 95%. Imagine 5% of people around you are illiterate. Even in Brazil, a so-called "emergent" country or "upper-middle income" country, the literacy rate is only 92%. So 8% are illiterate; not "functionally illiterate" as in unable to correctly interpret certain texts, mind you, but actually unable to read. You cannot get a fast-food job or work as a Walmart greeter if you're illiterate! In contrast, in developed countries the literacy rate is >99%.
In the Philippines, 1 in 3 children are malnourished.[0] This isn't some vaguely defined "food insecurity" concept; it's actually malnourishment, kids being severely underweight and stunted.
In the US millions of people can take advantage of welfare benefits. So even the non-working poor in the US have much, much better living standards than the working poor in the developing world. Also, when exactly did the US bulldoze a shantytown? And so on.
[0] http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/hunger/141134-philippi...
In the same way there's a lot of wealthy places in let's say Mexico City and other capitals of 3rd world countries
The water, sewer, and electricity work well enough to be relied upon even in the poorest most remote parts of the US. This is not so in any 3rd world country
If these aren't shanty towns, I don't know what is. Other Portlanders beside myself have taken to calling them shantytowns.
Of course the US wont be a "third world country" anytime soon. But it can regress closer to one than it was before.
That said, there are places in Mississippi, South Dakota, Alabama, Colorado, the Appalachia, etc. that are not that better of (if at all) than some developing nations.
Again on a recent trip this year, I met two young children that were selling shells on an island near the food market. They should have been in school, but they were not. There has been an effort by the government to get all children in larger cities to attend school. The rural areas still have plenty of children who never see a classroom.
I think the US is very far from developing countries. Yes I have seen some extreme poverty in the mountains of West Virginia, but nothing like the Philippines.
I think this is a standard trick employed by elites. That to make a very serious claim that paints USA in a bad light and then propose themselves as the "problem solver".
> The antidote, as prescribed by Temin, is likely a tough sell in today’s political climate. Expanding education, updating infrastructure, forgiving mortgage and student loan debt, and overall working to boost social mobility for all Americans are bound to be seen as too liberal by many policy makers.
At the risk of being down-voted I think the MIT economist is playing political games here. In the absence of stronger contrary evidence I would simply call him a shill.
You see a post with a title like, "Study by MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed to a Third-World Nation for Most", and you naively assume that the link will take you to... a study. By an MIT Economist. With actual data, about how the average or mean American has recently crossed some number of economic metric thresholds.
Instead, it's a book review. Really just a collection of mushy factoids (e.g. social mobility is lower today than it was just after WWII)... and political talking points worthy of a Facebook or Reddit comment (e.g. rich people are awful, and putting criminals in jail is racist).
Is the actual book a bit more data-oriented, or is the whole thing just ideological comfort food?
This is very different from third world nations where the middle class wants lower taxes and the poor vote for more spending but don't succeed.
> In the developing countries Lewis studied, people try to move from the low-wage sector to the affluent sector by transplanting from rural areas to the city to get a job. Occasionally it works; often it doesn’t. Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
The article focuses on education is a class divider that is becoming increasingly unobtainable or when obtained, burdened with debt. This is strike against social mobility. Do you buy that?
For what it's worth, I was talking about this following excerpt:
> In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector.
The first version of something is rarely the best version, and while the US constitution contained a lot of fantastic elements and freedoms that every educated American knows about, it also contained a democratic system (first past the post/two party system) that is mathematically bound to breed divisiveness. [1] [2]
Since the American system forces people into two camps/parties based on ideology instead of the delivered results, the results suffer while the ideological conflict is enhanced.
If you want representation you need to be able to meet and talk to your rep - more importantly they need to be able to acquire your vote without the need for advertising. Remove the need for advertising and you remove the need for money and the corruption that flows.
Almost certainly. The US was doing fine for most of the 20th century.
Globalism is what has brought wages down. Globalism combines the economies of the richest countries with the economies of the poorest in an attempt to "help" poor countries. As rich countries and poor countries combine economies, they move toward economic-equilibrium, which means the people from the poor country get brought out of poverty at the expense of the people in the rich countries. This is fine for the "1%" on the coasts of the united states, but if you're part of rural America you're getting hit very hard by globalism.
> but if you're part of rural America you're getting hit very hard by globalism.
i.e. if you're part of rural America, you're being out-competed by superior market participants located in poorer countries.
It's not that unfair. It would be much more unfair to apply protectionist policies to subsidise the rural Americans at the expense of the truly-impoverished people in poorer countries.
The stereotypical example of a global economic pattern is a t shirt factory providing goods for a western brand that operates in a third world country because the economic equilibrium is such that raw material acquisition, labor and transport to market costs in total are lower than if the factory was situated for example next to the brand owners head office. I don't see where a will to help someone steps in there.
What has been devastating for the mid-west is that the exporting of jobs was politically and financially supported. Companies would receive subsidies to "globalise".
(And this is ignoring the idea of the judiciary reading into the constitution new rights that weren't there to begin with.)
Then I actually researched it a bit, and it turns out that quite a few countries have actually moved away from FPTP. [1] That's interesting, and something to be hopeful about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Lis...
Representatives do spend time in their own states. They also need a central place to meet. No country or system does this differently.
> The party system is also destructive - I advocate against any legal recognition of political parties and against campaign ads funded by anyone outside the state a person is running in.
I think rolling back Citizens United, which allowed corporations to donate unlimited amounts to candidates' [unaffiliated] campaigns, would be a big practical step in this direction.
The US has an interesting constitution:
- First past the post. Such systems tend to favour fewer parties. The UK (also FPTP) barely has more than two parties. In most of continental western europe, there's considerably more, due to proportional representation. On the continent you end up having a bunch of different opinions, and you don't have to squish every issue onto a liberal/conservative axis. For instance you get socially conservative big state parties. Or socially liberal big state parties. Or socially liberal small state. And there's other axes too.
- A separate executive. In the UK even though they have FPTP, they have a government formed by the leader of one of the parties, and they "whip" the MPs to vote according to the party line, subject to various forms of sanction depending on how important an issue is. In the US, you choose two legislatures and a separate president. If they're not in agreement, it de facto entrenches the existing status quo by making it hard to change the law.
The other issue is which system to change to. There doesn't seem to be a single ideal system. IMO, in terms of the voting itself, ability to resolve an election in one ballot, limiting the usefulness of strategic voting, and getting at least close to a Condorcet winner would be the most useful properties.
I recently started to try to put together something based on five value range voting but I'm not sure it is even possible to derive a system from that which has the above properties. I haven't found any existing methods that seem to fit the above properties well, although some are much closer than others. Another option, easier in a lot of ways but more expensive, would be two ballot elections.
There is also the structural part. IMO, a parallel system has more appeal than mixed member proprotional, but it has some significant disadvantages as well. Anytime a significant change is proposed there will be strategic maneuvering for a system that benefits particular interests.
As someone else mentioned, states need to change first. The west coast in general would be a great place for that and I think Oregon may be taking the lead in political disfunction at this point (well, on the west coast at least, even though California is very innovative in that area)...
exactly. The most disconcerting part about the state of American politics is the focus on a predecided ideology of the other party being wrong.
proving the other party wrong is apparently worth everyone suffering over.
When each party is increasingly controlled by less people, then we now have a country where 300million people are willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of their party, with the ruling groups of each party having the interests of neither in mind.
Now youve just created an ideology of sacrificial progress in the name of a party.
There is more loyalty in this country to ones party than there is to the country and the progress of the country. The emotions and irrationality of attachment, and continual degredation of the other party just to be in the right, approaches religion.
The only thing more demoralizing than this is the fact that this conversation is continually broadcast on two news stations each owned by billionaires, who curate the "news" themselves. The biggest progress I've seen in news lately is Bill Oreily being fired for 11 pending and accumulating harrassment lawsuits. Must be nice to get paid $75million to be fired. True journalism shines through again.
It's extremely....disconcerting.
But these things are not realistic with a first-past-the-post system, so there are two large, internally divided, dysfunctional parties that "represent" a lot of people whose voices are ultimately not heard and whose interests are not represented by anyone.
Disagreement is a human condition, not a democratic one. Democracy is just a way to let some ideas win some of the time.
There isn't a system in the world that's freed people from disagreement. Humans like disagreement. We want to be creative, original, and unique at times. That requires setting your own path.
E.g. I disagree with you on that point, but I'm not using my hypothetical army of sock puppets to downvote every single of your comments into oblivion from now to eternity. Sometimes, US politics feels more like the latter.
Because the beneficiaries of the system get to make the rules, there is also a push to change regulations more and more to favor the two-party system.
There are other parties (e.g. greens) it just doesn't make any practical sense to vote for them.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
It doesn't have anything about parties in it at all, and leaves it up to the states to decide how to choose their electors. If California or any other state wanted a different system, it could decide to use ranked choice voting right now just like Maine chose last election.
Two senators per state is pretty kick-ass if you live in North Dakota.
It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.
More seriously, our problem is a metastasised federal government. Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways.
The US is not the first democracy or democracy-style entity. The US constitution was certainly something interesting and with new stuff for its day, but democracies had been around in various forms for a while. But yes, a large part of the problem in US politics is the inevitable two-parties, which engenders a 'with us or against us' mindset. I wouldn't lay the blame for 'most of the problems' on that, but it seems to be significant.
Second, actually
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation
As another comment mentioned, it's arguably greater if you include subsequent amendments.
The US Constitution has its share of flaws, but it ignores quite a bit to call it a first version.
Which rules?
My point was actually this: In a better democracy the people who believed income inequality was a big problem would vote for the "Bernie Sanders Party" instead of being forced to vote for Clinton. Let's say that just 20% voted for the BSP while 31% voted for the Hillary Party.
They would be forced to govern together, and create the best solutions in order to retain or grow their parties. The constantly changing dynamic between all the different parties would in turn lead to better solutions for the voters instead of the current solution in the US - where people on the left are practically forced to vote democratic and the people on the right are forced to vote republican, no matter the job performance.
Since the US forces people into camps based on ideology instead of the delivered results, the results suffer while the ideological conflict is enhanced.
America has an aristocracy emerging in it's political/business class, but it still attempts to have every voice heard in elections, and as a result you'll always have people who feel hardly done by attempting to rebel against the status quo.
I'm also going go take the opportunity to share CGP Grey's videos on First Past the Post voting[2] and the electoral college[3], and the issues with those. He also has videos directly the electoral college, without his opinions, if you need some background[4].
[1]http://www.bartleby.com/168/305.html
[2]http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-problems-with-first-past-the...
[3]http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-trouble-with-the-electoral-c...
[4]http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/how-the-electoral-college-works....
Are, it's impossible to have that at all points. The point is to strive for it, not achieve perfection.
If we don't strive, then with people like DeVos in charge of federal funding, public schools will be gutted and the problem worsens.
And what goals and principles would that aristorcracy govern by? Who is deciding about the goals and who makes sure they are actually enacted?
What if said leaders decide that, in order to combat overpopulation, parts of the "surplus class" need to be removed?
The reason many people migrated to the US centuries ago was to get away from aristorcracy. So how do you avoid repeating the problems?
Nearly all the problems can be traced back to where politicians are ignoring the constitution in part or in full and thereby eroding the public protections built into the republic.
The other answers remind me of my son as a toddler: FURIOUS as he explained: "It is NOT green. It is ROUND!!"
"It is not a democracy, it is a republic" is every bit as mistaken.
Read the rest at: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-a-dem...
Although of course the US is also a relatively fractured country by its nature, so perhaps can't rely on a vague, shared sense of what is good and decent, in the same way as a small European country, with more or less a common ethnic and cultural identity.
That's like saying it's a dog not an animal; our republic is also a democracy, they are not mutually exclusive terms so please stop saying this nonsense.
But an abnormal period, and we are now returning to the normality of capitalism described by critics like Marx or Dickens over 100 years ago.
The distinction between "developing" and "developed" is a dubious distinction anyways especially now. "Developing" implies that liberal capitalism has a linear narrative towards something (presumably something that looks like "the west"). There's a lot of hubris in that statement, and I don't think it is supported by any evidence.
It's sort of the opposite of a favela, people left housing behind because of the lack of economic opportunity (whereas a favela is people dealing with poor housing in order to seek economic opportunity).
It looks more to me, as I had somewhat theorized a decade ago, as the emergence of a 'new medieval age' politically and economically. The US being one of the most advanced countries on earth, it seems quite logical that they would pave the way forward towards new social orders in this century. Sadly not a desirable change, but history is made of ups and downs in quality of life.
However the top-down approach allows corruption to be managed and ensures that important business isn't derailed because some random bureaucrat has a drug habit or is in a bad mood.
You might be interested in this article http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/08/the_nature_of_the_gri... which tries to explain the difference between corruption in first and third world countries.
I don't know if his thesis is true because I only know the third world kind. If the article is of interest to you, can you tell me what you think of part VI? Does the story with Sally at AT&T sound true? I only have experience with what the author says happens in Hungary, and that part is spot on.
disgusting.
Could this be a case of "I don't think that word means what you think it means"? :-)
De jure "Third World", would mean that the country is either poor, or developing, possibly industrialized[2], and rightfully such[1].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=de+jure&oq=de+jure
de jure - denoting something or someone that is rightfully such.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
"Because many Third World countries were extremely poor, and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to poor countries as "third world countries", yet the "Third World" term is also often taken to include newly industrialized countries like Brazil, India and China now more commonly referred to as part of BRIC."
"Over the past few decades since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the term Third World has been used interchangeably with the least developed countries, the Global South, and developing countries, but the concept itself has become outdated in recent years as it no longer represents the current political or economic state of the world."
A more serious answer: each country has impoverished neighborhoods. The difference between developed countries and developing ones is the magnitude of the impoverished neighborhoods.
So far I haven't seen any really big slums in Germany, for example.
3rd world means non-NATO aligned states (or communist aligned states).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
Unless the US turns communist, it can not be a 3rd world country.
If you import your population from 1800-Ireland and 1800-Germany in the 1800s, in 2017 you end up with a country like 2017-Ireland or 2017-Germany. In other words, pretty nice.
If you demographically replace the existing population (and what, precisely, was wrong with the existing population, such that we have to replace them, other than their race?) then you end up with the immigrant's country, but located here. Surely Somali in 2117 is not going to be a paradise, likewise USA in 2117 will be the same as Somalia, no paradise, thats for sure.
There is no magic dirt. Anglos taking over Hawaii didn't turn anglos into Hawaiians. Anglos taking over the midwest USA didn't turn the anglos into native americans. Likewise the replacement of native cultures with imported cultures means the annihilation of the former cultures and replacement by the invaders. The USA will be a moderately poor Spanish speaking hispanic nation. Europe will be a moderately poor Muslim caliphate.
Everything just goes that way my friend,
Every king knows it to be true,
That every kingdom must one day come to an end,
- Ben Howard, EverythingAre there any countries that are nearly this large that have a consistent quality of infrastructure for everyone? I live in a large city and it seems that even we have trouble maintaining up our roads/bridges/grid/telecom systems and we pay a lot of state taxes comparatively — I can't imagine how a much larger, less dense, less wealthy area filled with people staunchly against taxes could even begin to keep up.
I regularly visit CA/SF as I have clients there. It's a beautiful place, but many things about living in ND are much more attractive.
Many of the prominent examples of a successful rural area are either very self reliant (parts of NH serve as good examples, but the opioid epidemic is taking a toll) or reliant on a single industry that might just up and leave (airline manufacturing or fracking come to mind).
Or more accurately compare any of the non-oil related rural areas in the country. Or any of the particularly poor rural areas of the black or white southern US.
The Republican philosophy means rapidly shrinking public services. These area already have super low taxes and the conservatives who moved there don't want to pay anything that might benefit someone who isn't them. Such is the price to pay when selfishness is the primary political philosophy.
If spending and benefits are primarily local, shouldn't the decisions be as well?
If one were to hold to the original meaning of "third-world", then one would have to class Namibia and Angola as "first-world" countries while classing Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, and Finland as "third world". Something that clearly goes against the current general usage of the term.
But based on original meaning Switzerland is third world country which also does not sound right.