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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Economic outliers, you mean. Or really the top 10-20% of those who "perform", because the rest really aren't that statistically special either. Because, no offense, if there is anything the US does not seem to value it's social outlying. After all, try being a socialist, or "having" a deviant sexual identity.
Additionally, there are quite a few Europeans that do fairly well even on the economic & innovation fronts (our GNPs aren't that much lower, after all), just on the front where it comes to accepting wealth redistribution.
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Not necessarily. Consider the following since 1900. Music - who invented Jazz (in it's many-splendored variants), Country and Western, Blues, and Rock N Roll (which has bounced back and forth across the Atlantic). The visual arts - (if you want to call them art). Say what you will about Hollywood and it's US cousins, they've had a bit of an impact on the rest of the world. Written word? With a serious tip of the hat to Wells and Verne, look what the US love of outlier has done to Science Fiction, an outlier literature if there ever was one. Shall I go on?
I concede the US is sexually hung-up, it always has been. I guess that's an artifact of wanting to get to the top of the heap, instead on top of each other...
Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Sure you can. The only problem is that result comparisons are not deemed "valid". If the european system yields 5-10% living below the poverty line, whereas the american system yields 15-30% living below that same poverty line, you could very well argue that one system is more humane (although both murder and love are human behaviors, so the word is admittedly a bit weird) than the other. Similarly in income discussions. Sure, for a few it might be preferable to live in a country where it is possible to earn a $1 billion a year income, but seeing how that happens to what, a couple thousand people out of 300 million, the odds you'd be betting against would be horribly long.
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Hmmm. Which system has created more brakthough technologies. Which system has an embedded system (greed driven!) to take new research and ideas and produce marketable products with them. For example, the fiber optic telecom that drives this forum was driven by the US greed system. Ask Indian programmers about whether or not their lives have been changed by US greed...(Or the IC, PC, Internet ....)
But we pay a price for this, as you note above. Our workforce takes technological obsolecense first, ahead of everyone else in the world. There's nobody stopping you from failing here, or succeeding...