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A comment on Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start. Parent comment

Re:Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the ... by rayiner on Saturday June 17, 2017 @08:39PM (#14578403)
Totally escapes me too. I suspect deep-seated cultural differences. America is a more contentious, less cooperative society so we add layers of complexity to mediate between all these groups of people who can't agree on even basic things. In most European countries, for example, it's very difficult to block development projects through things like environmental review lawsuits. But there is also this basic level of trust that whoever is running the project won't build a chemical refinery next to an elementary school. Nobody has that trust in the U.S.
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Re:Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the ... by jjeaff on Sunday June 18, 2017 @12:26AM (#14578964)
The real question is not why the US seems to lag behind it's peers in how effective our government is. It is, how is the US able to be so much better than it's peers?

You can't compare little state sized homogenous countries in Europe to the enormous, diverse landscape of the US. Compare the US to any other country of similar population and you will see a performance standout in almost all categories.

Cherry picking European countries and comparing them to the US is like asking why Vermont, Massachusets, Connecticut, or New York are so much better off than Europe.

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Re:Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the ... by rayiner on Sunday June 18, 2017 @12:20PM (#14581351)
I'm talking about countries like the France and Germany, etc. The U.S. continues to outperform those countries but I'm not sure you can chalk it up to the effectiveness of our government. I'd chalk it up to the U.S. having a head start from WWII and the major European powers being late to adopt market economies. Since then, they've caught up. For example, the U.S. had 50% higher labor productivity per hour of work than France and Germany in the 1970s. Today, it's identical: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in....
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Re:Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the ... by jjeaff on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @01:41AM (#14592436)
But again, both countries have less than a third of the US population. And no, I don't think our government gives us any special advantage. But my point is that you can't begin to compare the US to these fractionally sized countries that have the advantage of chasing off all the poor into other cheaper countries in Europe due to high cost of living.

Why are Bel-Air and Manhatten so rich? They are just doing so much better than the rest of the US. They barely have any poor! Must be their local governments and better market economies!

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