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MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

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Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#231

Post by mason240 »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #212
throwasehasdwi wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might look terrible but the utilities work. Biggest differentiator in 3rd world is poverty AND non functioning government. 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

About 60% of people in the poorest, most remote parts of America don't have running water. So what do you say if the utilities work but are too expensive to hook up?

That is completely false.

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#232

Post by maxsilver »

throwasehasdwi wrote: post #174
CuriouslyC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen places in Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia that looked every bit as third world as rural Philippines/Vietnam. 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.

They might look terrible but the utilities work. Biggest differentiator in 3rd world is poverty AND non functioning government. 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

> The water, sewer, and electricity work well enough to be relied upon even in the poorest most remote parts of the US

Flint would challenge that claim. http://time.com/4634937/flint-water-crisis-criminal-charges-...

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#233

Post by alistairSH »

naasking wrote: post #188
alistairSH wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you? With the American primary election system, legislators are driven to cater to their most extreme constituents. With transparency, they can't work across the aisle AND also win a primary. At least with pork barrel, they get a tangible thing to point to while campaigning to attempt to appease constituents.

Legislators are driven by extreme positions because of the perception that these positions represent enough voter sentiment to influence elections. In fact most constituents are more centrist, which factual reporting standards would highlight.

I'm not sure that's correct for primaries.

Primary elections are by party, so are by definition more extreme than general elections. A candidate must win over an average Democrat OR and average Republican, not an average across all voters.

Further compounding the problem, many states/districts hold closed primaries and/or caucuses, which limits participation to those with a strong interest in elections (either enough interest to join a party and/or enough interest to give up half a day or more of time to join a caucus).

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#234

Post by maxerickson »

alistairSH wrote: post #233
naasking wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legislators are driven by extreme positions because of the perception that these positions represent enough voter sentiment to influence elections. In fact most constituents are more centrist, which factual reporting standards would highlight.

I'm not sure that's correct for primaries. Primary elections are by party, so are by definition more extreme than general elections. A candidate must win over an average Democrat OR and average Republican, not an average across all voters. Further compounding the problem, many states/districts hold closed primaries and/or caucuses, which limits participation to those with a strong interest in elections (either enough…

Yes, private organizations shouldn't have special methods for placing names on ballots, the rules should be the same for everyone.

Groups can still endorse candidates in that world, it just doesn't impact the names that show up on the ballot.

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#235

Post by naasking »

gnaritas wrote: post #208
naasking wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, mandate factual reporting standards and the news agencies will do the research for the people. That's their purpose after all. Studies have shown that moderate positions need evangelists just as much as extreme positions, as people tend to cluster around the positions with evangelists. Mandating factual standards ensures evangelists at least have justifiable reasons for their positions.

> Like I said, mandate factual reporting standards and the news agencies will do the research for the people. You can't mandate factual reporting and still call it a free press as those enforcing the "fact" standards now control the press. You seem to think that you can't lie with facts, but it's quite easy, watch fox news they do it all day long. Free press and free speech mean just that; free and that includes lyin…

> You can't mandate factual reporting and still call it a free press as those enforcing the "fact" standards now control the press. You seem to think that you can't lie with facts, but it's quite easy, watch fox news they do it all day long

They're often quite non-factual actually. And you can't call it "press" unless it's factual, free or not. You can't just ignore one factor in favour of the other.

Furthermore, you seem to be assuming quite a bit about what I mean when by factual standards. Anyone can broadcast whatever opinions they like, so free speech remains intact, but to call yourself a news organization requires satisfying stricter criteria on fact checking, data sourcing and biased presentation.

Perhaps one thing that's ignored a lot: equal time/space should be given to retractions due to factual errors. That better aligns the incentives to get things right the first time.

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#236

Post by nandemo »

blackguardx wrote: post #221
nandemo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such BS. Have you actually lived in a developing country? 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…

The US Census says the US has a literacy rate of 86%. This is a controversial metric, though. The CIA factbook defines literacy as having completed 5 years of schooling. By that definition, the US is at 97.9% literacy. Better than your 95% number, but not Nordic country levels. Also, shantytowns aren't really allowed to exist in the US. They are becoming more common in progressive cities like San Francisco and Seattl…

> Better than your 95% number, but not Nordic country levels.

People were talking about the US being "third world", you're clearly moving goalposts.

> Also, shantytowns aren't really allowed to exist in the US.

... so? You're essentially saying that the US government doesn't allow poverty to exist. Virtually all of the US lower class lives in places with a proper roof, proper running water and electricity. Might not sound much but the point is: there's no part of the US that is like a 3rd world country.

> Public benefits aren't very easy to get in the US.

21% of the US participates in governments assistance programs.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-97....

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#237

Post by naasking »

sqeaky wrote: post #201
naasking wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which do you want more: non-partisan cooperation or absolute-transparency? Except you can have both as long as you ensure factual standards for news reporting.

What about ignore how report works and fixing the gerrymandering? I don't know how, but lets presume there is some way to fix gerrymandering so that a legislators constituency was a statistically fair representation of their region/state. Then the extreme views would be canceled out and the best way to win a primary would be to win a primary would be to appeal to the moderates.

I agree, gerrymandering is also a big problem. John Oliver did a good segment about the justification behind bizarrely drawn districts, which kind of makes sense, so the real problem is leaving this power in the hands of the people who have an incentive to abuse it for their own benefit.

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#238

Post by sqeaky »

tptacek wrote: post #180
foldr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water used to get turned off for a few hours quite often when I lived in a project in DC. I mean, it was never a serious health issue, but utilities aren't as reliable for poor people in the US as you might think.

This may be the case, and be a serious problem, while still coming nowhere close to validating the comparison made upthread to the third world, where toilets are effectively a luxury.

But is does dismantle any objective attempt at asserting American Exceptionalism. We are not exceptional when it comes to water delivery, and there is no reason we couldn't be, like we once had been.

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#239

Post by accountyaccount »

earlyriser wrote: post #198
accountyaccount wrote: post #166

I definitely support paying more taxes to improve the infrastructure/rural areas of the country, but I also start to think that maybe the country is just too big. Are 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 t…

Canada is bigger and with just 30 million people and the infrastructure is good. I live in a small city of 30k and sometimes I'm surprised how deteriorated the infrastructure is in big cities like Montreal (I also lived there for some years).

I'd argue that majority of Canada essentially lives on the equivilant of an US coastline. The US population is larger by a factor of 10 and while we have population hubs, our overall population is less centralized than Canada.

Re: MIT economist believes U.S. is shifting to be more similar to developing nations

#240

Post by accountyaccount »

nightski wrote: post #191
accountyaccount wrote: post #166

I definitely support paying more taxes to improve the infrastructure/rural areas of the country, but I also start to think that maybe the country is just too big. Are 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 t…

It's amusing there is so much misinformation on rural America on HN. You'd think it was mostly 3rd world by reading most of the comments on this post. I come from ND, which is an extremely sparsely populated state. However, don't let the rural nature fool you - per capita tax revenue was one of the highest in the nation. It's filled with rich farmers making more than many engineers here on HN. Most of the income come…

I don't disagree with you, but ND is a bit of an outlier. There are huge swathes of the once-prosperous rural south and midwest that are slipping into developing nation territory as their infrastructures degrade over time.

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).

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