I hear it all too often…
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The 2% non-binding target is a fairly recent concept (2002). NATO dating back to 1949, I don’t know that the fact that some European countries (most notably Germany) are not currently reaching this target fully explains why Europe and the US are so far apart on social issues.
More tooth, less tail: Getting beyond NATO’s 2 percent rule | McKinsey
As I read your post, it struck me that the subgroup of kids who are the antithesis of all the negatives you list are recruited athletes. (For the most part – of course there are exceptions.
They have learned grit, determination, that hard work pays off, drive, resilience. Those kids get immediate and negative feedback if their work isn’t up to par. And those traits 100% carry over into other aspects of their lives.
This is tangential to the larger discussion, except that it is much more difficult now for a working class kid to get recruited in most sports. This is because youth sports have been monetized, and besides affording club fees (if they even know of the club system) they may not be able to take the time to drive to practices/matches/tournaments for a few years.
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Military spending and the implied subsidy from the US to other NATO countries is not the only difference. Some of the differences are self-inflicted, such as the much higher spending on medical care in the US.
US government spending on health care as a percentage of GDP is similar to that of other rich countries:
But total spending on health care as a percentage of GDP is much higher in the US (a burden borne by individuals and their employers), indicating that the US is getting much less for its dollar on health care than other rich countries:
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I won’t spend too much time on this as it gets away from the main topic in this thread.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that this difference in defense spending explains the entire difference in social spending. But to achieve rough parity, the USA would be spending 1% less of GDP on the military, and NATO members would be spending roughly 1% more on defense. That would narrow the gap in terms of social spending.
Completely agree. The USA model provides excellent healthcare for the well-off and generally worse healthcare for everyone else, at a much higher cost than the rest of the world.
But getting back to the central point. The USA is not Europe in terms of social services, and most people living in the USA don’t want it to be. Sweden for example provides ample social services, but does so by taxing its middle class at between 50%-60%, which would cause a revolt here.
I’ve seen both types of recruited athletes - a good friend’s child was recruited to Williams and this kid is everything you could want as a student and athlete (and person). Just a fantastic kid in every way. I’ve also seen the others - entitled jerks whose bad behavior is overlooked because of their elite performance on the court. In the best cases recruited kids have the kind of drive most kids lack these days - in the worst cases, well, you have situations like someone posted about Blair. I totally agree about the recruiting issue - with the professionalization of youth sports (and all the associated costs) it is hard for kids from modest backgrounds to be noticed. Of course, this is a moot point in my family as my kiddos are casual athletes at best.
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By about 2% of GDP…
The medical care spending gap between the US and Sweden (to use your example) is about 6% of GDP, largely a private burden by individuals and their employers (note that making medical care spending a cost of employing someone in the US makes US employees more expensive and therefore less competitive compared to those elsewhere).
According to Tax - Tax revenue - OECD Data , Sweden taxation was 42.91% of GDP in 2019, versus the US at 24.47% and the OECD average of 33.84%. Increasing to Sweden levels plus the 2% extra for US military spending would be 44.91%. However, adding the burden of extra medical care costs (as either the current private burden or moved into a government program with the same inefficiency) would push it just over 50%.
Arguably US healthcare spending provides a free rider benefit to the rest of the world which is not dissimilar to US defense spending (and may be a similar order of magnitude). US companies invest vast amounts in medical research because they can charge huge sums to US patients (or actually their insurance companies). But drug prices in particular are usually capped at much lower levels in other countries. So patients in those countries are being cross-subsidized by the US.
Again, not something with simple solutions, however attractive it may be to impose Medicare price controls or allow importation from Canada, because if there’s lower investment and it takes longer to discover the next treatment for HIV or Hep-C etc then more people will die from those diseases.
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As I read more of this thread, I am coming to the conclusion that the OP does not want solutions to her problems. She has been offered some reasonable and thoughtful alternative points-of-view and she has an excuse for all of them. It is possible she feels her biggest asset are her unsolvable problems.
I don’t know why her posts disturb me, but it goes beyond the grass is always greener. The victimhood, constant complaining and negative attitude are suffocating and I worry about the mental health of the OP’s household. That being said, the points of view from many of the very experienced CC community members have made this thread worth reading.
One of the great things about this country is the possibility of social mobility. This possibility and the freedom to pursue it is not available in all countries. All immigrants know this.
While the lack of money can be an issue, it is not The Issue.
People can make it happen in many different ways. I was gratified to read in the NYT two years ago that many restaurants in Chinatown were closing. Was it due to anti-Asian hate? No.
In NY’s Chinatown, the next generation has made the most of their parent’s sacrifice and drive to secure educations and careers that don’t include knowing how to prepare Beijing Duck. While many of these kids may have gone to elite HS and colleges, most did not. And while there are some that are still smarting they did not get into their first choice Ivy League school, I think they will likely get over it because they are too busy with their lives, careers and families to complain or point fingers.
It is worth noting that in today’s world, some injustices have little to do with money. For example, the discrimination against a population of people due to overachievement. Harvard and Yale’s discrimination against Asian students and the removal of merit-based testing for specialized high schools such as Lowell in SF and Stuyvesant in NY are just a few of the topics worthy of any discussion of injustice in our educational system. These often highly-qualified students are not turned away because they don’t have enough money.
Obviously, this topic is one for another thread, however, I take this opportunity to ask this question:
how is discriminatory admission practices against Asians not another form of anti-Asian hate/violence? (notice that I did not use the word crime…The SFFA has to win before that becomes a proper use of language).
To bring this conversation back on track, positive mental attitude can important in overcoming many of life’s obstacles. This is especially important for young people.
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If someone’s posts really bother you, and I admit some poster’s posts bother me, let me gently suggest you are unlikely to change them. If someone still gets under your skin, why not skip their threads? At a minimum you will be happier anyway. This is advice I take myself btw.
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Your post brought this op-ed to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/a-formula-for-happiness.html
Perhaps there’s even more angst during the pandemic but it doesn’t seem that before last year the results had changed all that much since 2013 (GSS Data Explorer | NORC at the University of Chicago ) and most people are actually quite happy.
So is it really true to think that most people’s jobs are awful and they lead “lives of quiet desperation” as Henry David Thoreau suggested? Or is a lot of the angst stirred up by the media (especially social media) as clickbait and amplified by those who’d like to make radical changes to society (it’s interesting that the survey result showed liberals are more unhappy than conservatives)? Not that improvements can’t be made, but maybe we shouldn’t despair after all.
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A partial summer abroad on a state-U or state-U-promoted plan usually costs around $12K; a semester clocks in at around $25K. Fin aid for summer-abroad travel comes in at single thousands. A Gilman is up to $5K (Pell-eligible only). If you don’t have a load of excess cash, you ain’t going unless you get a Fulbright. (You also have to include the opportunity cost of not working over the summer to pay part of next year’s college expenses, so in effect a summer abroad costs something more like $15-18K.)
That is indeed how it’s supposed to work. A great deal of economics goes into studying it, year after year. And social mobility in this country has declined markedly over the last few decades, which is part/parcel of what I’ve been talking about.
I’m sorry if that depresses you, but it is a reality that those on the far side of the “used to be a middle class here” gap must live with daily. I concur, it’s not marvelous for mental health. You will note that in flyoverland, where I live, opioid addiction is an epidemic. The two phenomena are not unrelated.
While a positive attitude is important, an unrealistically positive attitude usually is not, and it’s a thing I see time and again here. I mean people do try to stay sunny. But when the reality is that no, competitive training for x is not available in any accessible way for a student who shows a glimmer of talent, and no, the quality of the education at y will not allow students to compete for (slew of fancy jobs), but the poor kid actually believes the “you can do anything” talk, when the kid hits the wall, the kid also believes that it’s their fault. And it isn’t their fault. So they spend years thinking something’s wrong with them because why would their parents and teachers have lied to them? Or…or maybe they were just being nice because they didn’t think the kid was any good really?..or…Emotionally, it’s very destructive. Which is why instead you see my students’ parents modulating ambition instead of stoking it. Just get x, don’t worry about a more ambitious y. They don’t want their kids hurt by fantasies that almost certainly cannot come true.
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It’s more to do with their not actually paying for ordinary necessities of life. Most people don’t have enough saved for an “emergency” that’s just an ordinary expense of lower-middle-class life. It’s not that they’re profligate; it’s that their wages haven’t gone anywhere in decades while costs have increased and so has debt load, esp wrt over a generation’s worth of student loans. Which is also why you’re seeing such high default rates.
I make a low-average fulltime wage at my university; I’m professional staff. It’s 8% higher than the fresh-out-of-school consulting salary I had in 1989. Non-tenure-track faculty have seen their wages actually decline, both nominally and in real terms, over the last decade. A chirpy “find other work then” works only if barriers to better-compensated work are reasonably low, and for many people they are not. Part of why that’s so is that we still rely heavily on the free labor of women in multigenerational family care, meaning that moving or changing work endangers the care of the elderly or disabled. There are other factors as well.
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You certainly can and should complain when the reason they’ve shown up this way is decades’ worth of defunding their opportunities. Crumbling K12, senescing public Us. They don’t show up this way by accident, you know, and it’s not as though they’re going around with mouths hanging open and vacant eyes, nothing upstairs. They’re certainly as bright as kids in far more expensive schools. But I guarantee that if your kid(s) grew up as they did, where they did, they’d be far behind wherever your kids are now.
May I point out, roycroftmom, that over and over your recommendation is to give up on a very large number of young people who’ve been treated poorly by this society throughout their lives.
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Why then are they in college? Is the college just taking their money (or state money) knowing full well that they are not educated to college entry level? If so, that is perhaps a bigger part of the problem. If they are “bright” they will find a way, unless they are continually told how they can’t due a system that’s keeping them down (perhaps another disservice).
My kids definitely did not grow up as your students did, but I certainly did (if you ever want a short course on how to keep cool in the fields of the Rio Grande Valley as you’re picking green chili let me know). I made it out, and so can others. Or perhaps it’s only the new immigrants that still have that drive?
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That is probably not so universally true as @bennty 's posts seem to suggest, but it is probably a lot more common than what members of the successful class (the predominant demographic of these forums) see.
Or perhaps we are imposing our own preconceptions on them? That survey also showed that poor people are generally happier than rich people. And when you read books like Dignity, you realize that forcing everyone to follow a path determined by those in “elite society-defining jobs” (for example suggesting everyone needs to go to college) is a pretty terrible idea:
https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/dp/0525534733
Or watch the movie Nomadland. It’s incredibly sad, but what is hard for most of us to comprehend is that the real life people it’s based on, are actually happy with their lives, and the movie director saw it as an example of the American spirit ‘Nomadland’ Director Chloé Zhao Captures Truth Of Modern-Day Nomads – Deadline
In contrast I see a bunch of elite commentators in my social media feed bemoaning those Amazon workers who voted against unionization as victims of Stockholm syndrome who don’t know what’s best for them…
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Many of the students in your college would not have been admitted previously, OP, and while I am glad schools are more understanding of learning disabilities and opening up to a broader section of society, the fact remains that few anywhere are qualified for elite jobs. Perhaps you should drop that fantasy and focus on attainable solid middle class jobs which the kids could actually achieve, rather than the academic version of pro-athlete dreams out of the reach of most.
Their families, relatives, and neighbors have failed these kids most, and that is where to start changing things if you want to address the problem, not 20 years later.
It may surprise you to learn that family matters a lot even for the privileged. My kids did attend a fancy private high school which tried mightily to instill values and work habits. Some of the parents were deeply dysfunctional despite affluence. Their kids did end up in jail (felonies), or dropped out or had severe substance issues within a year of high school graduation. Schools can help a lot, but can’t be expected to make up for failed families.
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