Why Don't Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are?

[but please look at the actual article, not the link in the header· NB: I have no knowledge about the author other than that article. But the article is what's being discussed here.]

He is, for example, pointing out that history shows that the way to progress is by "lifting one another up, not keeping anyone else down" and rejecting the "I rise by pulling you down" philosophy, which is exactly the reasoning of the groups that are currently destabilizing factors in some Europan countries.

In other words - it's the opposite of hate bait.

There is a persistent social churn in the US. It is a side effect of what we consider progress. Progress is generally an outcome of building businesses that emerge, grow and die. Employees that are valuable to one business may not be valuable to the next, and that transition takes them from being prosperous to being poor and struggling.

One example is the shift from a primarily industrial economy to a primarily service economy. All the factory workers who provided for and raised families in the 50s - 70s came into jeopardy in the 80s-90s as US companies off-shored manufacturing. The families that could not make the transition suffered. They had to buy based on price and low cost won, in spite of the quality.

At the same time, new companies with different business models emerged and the workers of those companies prospered. Consider the semiconductor industry. In the 70s and into the 80s, the US dominated. Then, again, the technology spread globally to Europe and Asia and US fabrication facilities shut down, families were again in jeopardy.

Today, the wealth creation and prosperity is centered on technology companies, which dominate lists of the most valuable companies globally. It is likely that as in the past, these firms will ultimately give way to global competition, and their employees will need to shift.

> One thing I love about America is that people still get shit done here. One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry.

I mean, you're disagreeing with yourself here: first you say that many don't sit in a coffee shop writing poetry, only to then try to make a point basing it on everyone sitting at the coffee shop writing poetry.

There's plenty of innovation in Europe - but there's also limitations that go beyond the personal limitations of people, e.g. lots of regulation and market fragmentation. And often enough, that innovation finds its way into foreign companies, where it then seems as they got shit done.

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/kriminalstatistik-125.html

"One of the safest countries in the world"

Interior Minister Seehofer expressed his satisfaction with the 2018 crime statistics, saying that the number of crimes had decreased by 3.6 percent. It is lower than it has been for decades, the minister said.