It’s ok to wish, but don’t you forget that the Dutch government has to solve problems for only 17 million people whereas the American government has 333 million people to take care.
Yes, America can learn from The Netherlands and other countries that are doing well, but it’s also reasonable to acknowledge how hard the American problem is.
That seems like an acceptable excuse until you recognize that America also has about 23 times the GDP of the Netherlands - about 15% more money per person.
It's not just about dollars per person - the difference in size of the countries makes country-wide solutions much more challenging. The Netherlands are about 16,000 square miles. The US is 3.8 million square miles.
Taking something like medical treatment as an example, it's not just that you have to scale up the number of beds and doctors in each hospital - you need to build many, many more hospitals, staff them, ensure they have critical infrastructure, etc.
That's not to say that the US is doing even close to enough, but the fact that GDP per capita doesn't do anything to capture the differences in magnitudes of solutions required by the two countries.
Building one hospital costs the same no matter how many hospitals are already in the country, or am I wrong? Because of this, if the USA has 23 times as much money as the Netherlands they should be able to build 23 times as many hospitals as the Netherlands. (Or am I wrong??)
The issue is that you need to build more than 23 times as many hospitals - if you only build 23x the hospitals in a country that's over 200x larger in terms of geographic size, that means a huge number of people will be hours away from the closest hospital. The majority of those people will be in very rural areas, who are already generally underserved by social and other government services and who are often quite poor.
Given this example, the ratio in square miles US to NL is approximately 237 / 1. So 23x the money and 237x the size leads to one order of magnitude less money per square mile when comparing the two situations.
> > It's not just about dollars per person - the difference in size of the countries makes country-wide solutions much more challenging. The Netherlands are about 16,000 square miles. The US is 3.8 million square miles.
> I’m not hearing concrete evidence of a gulf that can’t be bridged by money.
The land area differences provided is part of the concrete evidence: I can invest a lot of value onto a small plot of land, but it will take many times more money in order to do the same for an area the size of a small town. The costs for infrastructure skyrockets as the amount of land in need of servicing increases. 15% more money per person is relatively useless if the people are spread thousands of miles apart.
Government might scale, but people's willingness to give up their own resources to help someone else does not scale indefinitely. As an extreme example, I'm much more willing to help my immediate family than my extended family and I suspect the same is true for most people. That same property extends to being more willing to pay for my local schools than for struggling schools 1300 miles away in Mississippi or being more willing to pay for support for a homeless person that I can see and interact with than to pay that same amount for one hundreds or thousands of miles away.
You could easily solve that by having social/redistributions measure on a municipality/state level... The Netherlands is also part of the EU, very little social welfare measures are effectuated through the EU, most of that happens on a state level.
Democracy in the US has always been flawed. The situation has been steadily improving in some areas (voting rights) with set backs in other areas (gerrymandering, legalised bribery of politicians). There's a lot that needs to be done, but the US has always pointed in the direction of democracy.
At creation US leaders were selected from a subsection of the population in all land governed by the nation. With Puerto Rico, DC, etc that’s no longer the case making the US an empire not a republic.
Controlling who has the vote has long been an issue, but denying political power to a region is a different category of thing than denying it to poor people etc.
Maybe, but then the US is a weird kind of reverse-empire, because it's exactly the capital where people don't get to vote, at least for the senate. An empire is usually where only people from the core region have any representation (if anyone does, because I don't think empires need to be democratic at all).
One of the biggest issues that prevents this is that states cannot require residency requirements (e.g. must have lived in state for 2 years) as part of the criteria for access to such social safety nets.
Where's the evidence this difference is specifically due to the population or "size" of the country rather than history, culture and any other factors? It's like you put two countries on a scatter plot and drew a line from them.
The Netherlands have been flooded multiple times over the centuries and this has contributed to the idea of helping the people in difficult situation. I don't recall exactly, but after the flood of 1825, a fond was started to collect money to help the ones who lost everything. And a large part of the population contributed money into it as everyone knew a relative or friend who lost some property, his home, or some family members. So geography and history have a part in the way the Dutch care against adversity.
Here is a list from English Wikipedia about the floods. The Dutch Wikipedia has much more info on the flood, as well as a museum in Leyden (from Rijkswaterstaat if I remember well). Not everyone can read the Dutch language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_the_Nether...
Personally I would rather help people in a poorer area as people in my area are fine.
Anyway, money is fungible you could say you’re helping Mississippi schools just as people in Mississippi schools are helping your local schools. Or you can think of it like the electric grid where money doesn’t get sent around the country just shifted left and right regionally which smooths things out.
Richest country in the world but apparently ungovernable according to some.
The problem is that the US isn't really trying, and there's a large movement that's actively trying to make the government worse. Fix that, and I think a lot of problems will disappear.
I am not buying the assertion at face value. The bigger the government is, the harder it is to scale it. Like any bureaucracy, it quickly gains its own life, customs and belief systems. If anything, the reason small d democracy works is because the government is local, everyone is participating and invested in outcome.
The absolute worst case is you break it into independent entities the way US cities operate, larger scales can help solve problems but you don’t need to operate on them.
The freedom of movement between states in the US makes this a challenge. States with better social safety nets end up attracting the low-income residents from other states.
There is free movement between countries in Europe. I suppose there are generally some language barriers, but to me the situation seems fundamentally the same.
Nope, the countries put up significant barriers to access social safety nets (permanent residency durations, proof of working during time before that, etc).
In the US you can generally establish residency in a different state in the amount of time it takes to get a USPS change of address notice and a billing statement of some sort showing that you’re able to receive mail there.
No, there is only a limited the freedom of travel between countries in EU (not Europe), but not of movement. For many years people from the newly admitted countries in EU had no right to work in the rest of EU. Most of the diplomas are not automatically valid in other countries and in some cases, not at all - example: pilot license for light planes, I have a Romanian license and I can fly in Greece a plane registered in Romania, but not a plane registered in Greece. If I switch to a Greek license, with training and exams, I am not allowed to fly Romanian planes :(
Very different systems, very different safety nets, and non-trivial language barriers.
Yeah you can move wherever but you're not eligible for benefits, and the hiring managers want to know you speak fluent $LANGUAGE and have the right certifications from whatever credentialing system exists there.
Common currency and regulatory standards, but it's not like you're just moving from Spain to Poland, at least not without serious hurdles.
This is the kind of response that makes back-end devs fume. "Why is our website going down with 100x the users we had last week? You guys must have built it incorrectly.".
In fact, bureaucracy benefits from economies of scale. You can only get so small (population wise) before you can’t shrink the number of bureaucrats any further.
It's not so much the size of the group, but the size of their problems and conflicts. USA is a very diversified country, with many different groups, cultures, interests and conflicts. Probably more than any other country in the world.
Exactly, America is unique in that sense. China, India, Brazil and Nigeria also have +100 million people, but they are far less diversified, nevertheless, they also struggle with challenges that come from massive scale.
The US spends more of its budget on healthcare for its citizens than it does on its defense budget.
As a person who works for a defense adjacent company, I can tell you confidently that government adjacent healthcare is the closest thing this country has to socialized medicine.
I do agree that it doesn't seem to be a priority. I have to assume there's a bunch of slack and waste in the system given the amount of money that goes into it.
> The US spends more of its budget on healthcare for its citizens than it does on its defense budget.
Yes but most of that is medicare, most of which is really part of social security for the elderly (a very good thing, but not at all comparable to what European countries do in terms of providing access to health care for all their citizens).
It's important to distinguish between discretionary and non- discretionary spending. WH/Congress can't (easily) change the amount spent on medicare because its non-discretionary and therefore somewhat protected. It can however decide how much to spend on defense (which it continues to increase).
After thinking about such large challenges for a while, I’ve concluded that money alone isn’t enough. Money solves money problems, too much money flowing in the wrong direction solves nothing.
+1 too much money flying around just causes inflation, since the underlying resources that the money is trying to allocate remain constrained.
West coast US cities are a perfect example of this, not enough housing means labor resources are constrained which is the biggest input for actually getting things done (fixing problems, creating value, etc).
I think the issue is in regards to who is in charge of the money and what are their incentives.
Overall I believe that free and good(!) basic education independent from status and location is a solution for many problems but it seems that as more capitalistic a system becomes as less incentive there is to actually educate and teach the population.
More specifically the Dutch do not have multiple different multi-million strong underclasses with specific histories of dominated adversity. If you restrict the count of 333 million down to people who more closely match the financial and social background of the majority of the Dutch, you actually find a sub-nation inside America that's doing pretty well.
The program in the article linked is specifically targeted to some of the poorer neighborhoods in Amsterdam. These neighborhoods are known for them being largely inhabited by the descendants of former slaves and colonized people from the former Dutch empire.
No, they're from various parts of the world, not just former colonies. Amsterdam has sizeable populations from Morocco, Turkey and Ghana, none of which were ever Dutch colonies. All those groups suffer from racism and poverty to various degrees.
America is very unique in that sense, given its scale, history and status quo, the Americans will have to find an American-way to deal with some of its own challenges.
Yes, apologies for the short sentence. You further explain what i meant. My point is that one can consider oneself to be part of the earth, a city, the universe or a small group of tech interest people who enjoy reading HN. I find often and specially when good social system are found outside the US, the comments in HN turn immediately US centric, but instead if you think yourself as a citizen of earth, conversation could broaden. Just an idea. Thanks for the feedback to let me elaborate.
Yes, America can learn from The Netherlands and other countries that are doing well, but it’s also reasonable to acknowledge how hard the American problem is.