America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in the US.
But American progress is senselessly hobbled by a broken democratic model that has failed to rebalance policy making power toward the democratic center as people have moved into cities and away from the family farm. Until the country enacts reforms that fix this imbalance, other countries that find their way to greater dynamism by emulating the best of US policies may find they are leaping ahead of America.
And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution. Add in a well designed skills-based immigration process and you have the recipe for something great. I am not saying Canada doesn’t have its problems (First Nations reconciliation and poverty, protectionist industries such as Telecoms to name two), but the political system is more adaptable and these problems can be solved.
I’m less optimistic that the US will fix its democratic imbalance.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in the US.
I always viewed Canada as a similar blend, except with frigid winters, more snow, moose and yet still unpleasant summers except on the southwestern and southwestern coastlines.
> And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution.
Feel free to move to Canada if you want half the wages, twice as expensive housing, and a multi-year wait to get a family doctor. There is a reason why so many Canadians end up working in the US on TN or H1 visas.
Yep. I live in Canada and it just feels like our economic successes are due to natural resources and being close in location and culture to America. Couple that with the fact that like 80% of Canada is uninhabited. We may look big but we're a small population concentrated in only a few locations along the border.
I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Or rather, you don't quite realize that it's a feedback loop.
Canada heavily subsidizes the healthcare and post secondary education of all those people who then move to the US, often those people move back in retirement for the healthcare.
That no doubt has a detrimental effect on the Canadian economy as Canada pours resources into people and America reaps the benefits of that while Canada suffers.
They generally don't move back. Anyone who qualifies for Medicare (10 years of employment in the US) will get significantly higher quality healthcare through Medicare than they would receive in Canada.
The problem is that Canada's healthcare system is a command economy. The government decides how many med school spots there are, how many residency places, and how many procedures will be funded each year. In order to keep costs down this results in rationing. You can't even pay out of pocket - it is against the law for Canadians to purchase private care in Canada. The end result is that people with means end up going to the US, and everyone else waits 6-12 months for medically necessary hip or knee replacements. Even critical medical imaging is backed up weeks. I know someone who waited multiple weeks for urgent cancer screening. The same scans are available in the US in 24-48 hours, for a few hundred bucks.
As someone with a chronic condition who has had to make many appointments with specialists over the years, 6-12 months is a gross exaggeration. IME the typical wait time to be seen by a specialist in the US is between 2 and 3 months. The worst I've seen is 4 months.
:) I'm glad your experience hasn't been so bad. I've had to wait that long. My partner is a chronic pain specialist and wait times for new patients often exceed 6 months.
I knew I shouldn't have included the line "often those people move back in retirement for the healthcare" in my comment because it would derail any conversation about the point I was trying to make.
While some of the issues that Canada faces are definitely self inflicted as you describe, the ultimate source of all of Canada's problems are that it is an American vassal state. This relationship results in Canada subsidizing the development of many talented individuals who then make the totally rational self-interested decision to move to the United States where there is significantly more economic opportunity for them. Not only is this a massive drain on Canada's resources and it prevents Canada seeing a return on the investment that it makes in people who are often their brightest and best.
I don't see how "many talented individuals make the totally rational self-interested decision to move to the United States" follows from Canada being an American vassal state. Doesn't this phenomenon apply to every country in the world? If you're born anywhere on Earth it's probably rational to want to make your way to the USA.
It's far easier for Canadians to do this due to the geographic proximity, cultural similarity, and harmonization of immigration systems.
For many Canadians visiting America is a trivial drive across the border, in fact some Canadians make this trip weekly for access to cheaper consumer goods. Hell, I just looked it up and I can get a round trip ticket to Las Vegas for $160 CAD and I'm no where near the border. Hell, I remember a boss telling me that he used to get round-trip tickets to Vegas for $60 and him and his buddies would go there on long weekends. Canadians can travel visa-free and stay in the US for 6 months.
Many younger Canadians who are interested in immigrating may already have grandparents who spend the winter in places like Arizona or Florida[0] so they can draw on the experiences and resources that their grandparents have to make the transition easier.
Additionally most Canadians are native speakers or near native speakers of English usually with accents that are identical or easily masked to blend in with Americans. Canadians who have attended post-secondary have attended institutions that are quite similar to American ones and their accreditation is easily transferable.
I'm not too sure on the specifics but I know that it's easier for Canadians with certain post-secondary education or trade tickets to get work visas in the United States under NAFTA/USMCA.
Culturally speaking the sports are very similar, there are MLB, NHL, and NBA teams in Canada, music is the same, fashion is the same, the food is the same. It's less relevant in the age of the internet but when I was growing up I could watch many local TV stations from the US and watch the nightly news in obscure places like Spokane.
All of this is due to the cultural assimilation and defacto integration of Canada into the United States.
> All of this is due to the cultural assimilation and defacto integration of Canada into the United States.
Well except for Quebec, the Indigenous tribes, and the monarchists/loyalists, who definitely are more doubtful and will likely never allow a full integration.
The media environment is also still substantially different, previously even more.
"
America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible."
The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.
When you say “significant portions of the population” and then reference a segment of society that could collectively all fit inside one college football stadium, it feels like hyperbole.
Despite what you read online, the amount of Americans who see unsheltered homeless on a daily basis is very low.
- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1 to Congress. The report found 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2022 (https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...)
Experiencing homelessness for one night is very different than the chronic homelessness which people are picturing. That second population is much smaller and way more visible.
What’s your source for this claim? Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting. In no large city that I’ve ever been in can you go a day without seeing homeless people, unless you work from home and order all your food from an app.
Forgive the nitpick, but absolutely nowhere near 80% of Americans are encountering homeless on a regular basis. Homelessness in particular and inequality in general are major problems! I don't mean to sweep that under the rug! However, I don't think it's true that anywhere near a majority of Americans encounter homeless people on a daily basis.
Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting
Yes, for the Census Bureau's particular and extremely loose definition of "urban" which includes what anybody in America would call "suburbs" and even a lot of places people would call "rural": https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
The key TL;DR determination factor (there are others, read for yourself) is this:
In order for a block to qualify as urban, it must have a den-
sity of 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm).
That is not a lot. I live in a very stereotypical suburb (everybody has a driveway, and a small yard) and population density here is like 8,000 people per square mile... nobody would call this place urban besides the Census Bureau. (For reference, NYC's population density is 26,403 per square mile)
I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person outside a major city... you just don't see it in suburbs or rural areas.
Again, major problem, it's just that most Americans don't see it on a regular basis... which perhaps is part of the root of the problem. Makes it easy to ignore.
I just looked up the math and this is probably right. It looks like 1 in 3 Americans live in a city of >100K people, which, again, just in my experience, is where you’d be hard pressed to not encounter a homeless person. This however probably skews higher when we factor in things like working age adults vs the total population.
Even within large cities that have many homeless people, the homeless are not evenly distributed. Police often keep them out of "desirable" shopping and business areas, and homeless often cluster in camps.
I'm most familiar with Philadelphia where you'll either see multiple homeless people every day... or rarely. Depends on where you live and work. Every other city I've been to in my life seems similar.
Anyway, I don't want to get too far in the weeds with my nitpickery. I don't even remember what we were originally talking about!
I don't think the definitions quite line up. When you look at the linked definition for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_France for example, it says: "Homelessness in France is a significant social issue that is estimated to affect around 300,000 people - a figure that has doubled since 2012 (141,500) and tripled since 2001 (93,000). Around 185,000 people are currently staying in shelters, some 100,000 are in temporary housing for people seeking asylum and 16,000 live in slums." This is very different than the homeless living out on the streets of so many major American cities.
Reading the , the stat on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... for the US is ~500k, while the page linked in the table, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S..., starts with "In the United States, the number of homeless people varies from different federal government accounts. In 2014, approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted." so the higher ~1.5M would seem to correspond to the definition for number reported in the table from France.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.
It says it operates on that principle, but the stranglehold that establishment industry has on the country says otherwise.
Consolidation of capital and political power is exactly what we're seeing in banks, fossil fuels, mega-agri-firms, retailers, insurers, and healthcare providers. All of it results in a nightmare that is 'not working' for the public, but works very well for the people at the top.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.
Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad.
No... but having them spend two decades failing slowly isn't the answer, either.
I agree that utilities are a special case. The main point is that you don't want them to fail at all, ever. If they do fail, well, there aren't any good ways for that to happen.
Agree. I think there's a distinction between infrastructure that must be reliable, and first-order commercial enterprises that must be agile and risky.
Banks are squarely on the infrastructure side. They're a foundation that people rely on to do the really interesting stuff, and as such should be 1) low risk, and therefore 2) not profit-maximizing.
The bank argument is usually that banks cause a lot of collateral damage. If Peter loses his deposit at bank A then he can’t pay his landlord Peter who needs it to pay the mortgage with bank B, and his friend Bob might panic and pull his money at bank C.
How much of your 25 years in Canada did you spend doing each, and what's your reasoning? I was pretty unimaginative when I was 25 too, but the states isn't my vibe.
Canada has always had a lower performing economy than the US. Though with the current US government policies, the US economy will perform a lot less, and perhaps Canada will overtake it.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what's not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.
All of the empirical evidences indicates this slows economic development. Individuals being responsible for their own safety nets is more efficient, and creates better incentives, than large government bureaucracies socializing the cost of safety nets.
Economists have studied this extensively. Less substantial government social safety nets lead to higher personal savings rates. Personal savings rates reach as high as 40% in countries without social democracy.
This capital is managed by the individuals who will derive the entire benefit from it, so they are incentivized to manage it effectively, and not hand it over to inefficient union-run bureaucracies, which give their employees early retirement at 55 with massive pensions:
In aggregate, I'm sure that's true, but there are all sorts in society, including people who have little capacity to earn money in the first place, let alone save it. That includes, for example, orphans, people with severe physical or mental disabilities, drug addicts, elderly people who lose their savings to fraud, and so on. Taking care of these people does create an economic burden on society that might come at the cost of some economic growth. But that's a choice, and for many people, a public social safety net that takes care of people in need is deemed worth the cost.
When you're falling out of a plane, it doesn't matter how strong your incentive to fly is. You aren't going to grow wings by incentive alone.
Sure, but that's not the primary reason it's better for economic growth. A far larger proportion of social program beneficiaries would survive in an alternate timeline where these programs never existed. As for charity cases, there are vast private social support networks that emerge in a society with lower taxes and less government-funded social safety nets.
It's not a perfect system with no one falling through the cracks, but it is a system more resilient to systemic collapse as seen in the USSR when it went bankrupt, and one that produces greater economic/social development overall.
The zero-risk bias means people prefer to bring one type of risk to zero, even if it means increasing overall risk. I believe that is what's at work with government-provisioned social safety nets. Economic growth reduces a host of risks. But a social safety brings one type of risk - that is actually quite insignificant relative to the rest - to zero. So people are willing to trade economic growth for unconditional social safety nets.
I, for one counterexample, have gotten excellent healthcare on every occasion that I've needed it, and I have yet to be immediately dying. Obviously not everyone has had good experiences, and our healthcare system fails many people, but to say that you get no healthcare whatsoever unless you are immediately dying is absolutely hyperbole.
Vancouver. Occasions of excellent and free care include: general precautionary checkups and exams, blood and urine tests just to check on nutrition and general health, corrective surgery for minor conditions (eg. cyst removal), treatment for minor ear infection, hemorrhoid treatment, a great deal of care, MRIs, and x-rays after a bicycle accident resulted in a fractured bone, and of course several drive-through COVID tests throughout the pandemic.
But American progress is senselessly hobbled by a broken democratic model that has failed to rebalance policy making power toward the democratic center as people have moved into cities and away from the family farm. Until the country enacts reforms that fix this imbalance, other countries that find their way to greater dynamism by emulating the best of US policies may find they are leaping ahead of America.
And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution. Add in a well designed skills-based immigration process and you have the recipe for something great. I am not saying Canada doesn’t have its problems (First Nations reconciliation and poverty, protectionist industries such as Telecoms to name two), but the political system is more adaptable and these problems can be solved.
I’m less optimistic that the US will fix its democratic imbalance.