(By the way, I have a familial anecdote (really not significant, it's just pretty fun) on was I said about confidence in technological progress : my great grandfather was a blacksmith, as his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and so on. And what did he do when automobile replaced horses ? He became a car mechanic.)

I think so too. Not being French but reducing France to just being France if it keeps it's inefficiencies is what made it take the role of "Europe's sick man" from Germany.

As if having a permanent base of 20% unemployed youth (and 10% in general) is a price worth the cost of being a "well-meaning" nation.

PS: And no, youth unemployment is not a new thing in France as it stood around 27% in 1997. Pre-Euro and Pre-German-Labor-Reforms.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The only objective number mentioned in wikipedia's article is 43 million, but apparently that figure appears to be made up, as it is based on a single citation of an obscure and unavailable document published by an organization that calls itself Talk Poverty.

Nevertheless, even if we take that 43 million number at face value, that means that OP's exaggerated number would have an absurd margin of error of around 50%.

It's data from the US Census Bureau, it took me 7 seconds to find the correct reference: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

It does not matter the guess was a bit off, the argument still stands.

The claim was that ~65M people were in "who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world."

The actual figure for a poverty measure is 43M. However, that's not what the claim was - it's not simply that people are in poverty but those that are are in "the most abject poverty seen in the developed world".

Either we can find actual information and have a real discussion, or we can throw around vague unsourced claims and get nowhere.

So let's recap. France has: far lower median wages, far lower wage growth, a higher poverty rate, a higher homelessness rate, dramatically lower GDP per capita, and an economy that hasn't net expanded in over a decade.

In 1980 France had a higher GDP per capita than the US. In 1990 France was just barely behind the US on GDP per capita. Today it's about $40,000 vs $60,000; that gap is persistently widening, with France falling down the global economic ladder by the year. It also explains why wage growth has been so extremely low in France over that time.

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...

Furthermore, median wage growth has done much better there than in the US over that period. Also poverty rates are set by national standards not international, they're hard to compare unless when it's between EU members for example.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5668ba742340f8b1008b4...

"The level of discourse you're pursuing isn't tolerated on HN. It should come as no surprise to you that no one is engaging with you- that is, of course unless you're being serious...in which case I feel dreadfully sorry for you."

:D :D :D

But don't worry. This weekend I will start a HN-Exiles invite only alternative and there would be only creators and no "priests". It is obvious that coexistence is no longer an option.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

TLDR: Depending on the criteria, 12.7%/43.1 million or 14%/47.5 million Americans are living in poverty. About half of which in abject poverty (under 50% of the poverty level).

The false dilemma of Silicon Valley being the only possible model to "create the future" sounds like a classic pompous Valley view, maybe the US can afford part of a state to be like that, I don't know if I want that for France. And this is coming from someone who made a startup in France, and is currently working in the industry.

says the commenter on Hacker news, without a single ounce of irony.

Your claim about American poverty is beligerently false. The US poverty rate is below both the French [1] and Canadian [2] poverty rates. It's also below the rates of poverty in Spain and Italy.

France also has a higher rate of homelessness than the US. There are 550,000 homeless in the US, that's a rate of 1.7 per 1,000. France has 140,000 homeless persons, a rate of 2 per 1,000. The French homelessness problem has been increasing dramatically (a 1/2 increase since 2001), while the US rate of homelessness has been persistently declining for decades.

The French poverty rate is ~14%.[1] The US rate in 2016 was 12.7%, and will probably hit near or below 12% in 2018 at the rate it has been falling [3].

The rate of US poverty has seen a large improvement over the last 30 or so years (as one example, childhood poverty has been nearly cut in half since the early 1970s). It routinely goes unheralded, however government / welfare programs targeted at reducing poverty have been tremendously successful.

[1] https://www.thelocal.fr/20160907/over-14-percent-of-the-fren...

[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/census-children-make-up-one-qu...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2017/09/12/550492811/u-s-census-bureau-r...

[3a] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-25...

And in France, making less than 60% of median wage certainly doesn't make you rich, but you still get access to basic need (healthcare, even housing in some cases).

I'd rather be piss-poor in France than in the US.

Therefore that indicator doesn't reflect poverty, it only reflects income inequality. Income inequality has absolutely no impact on your ability to meet your basic needs or even having disposable income.

Just because your neighbor can afford to buy a boat it doesn't mean you're suddenly on food stamps.

I guess it is a way to make people to not complain, because...

* The widely praised "sécurité sociale" does not reimburse much and nearly nothing for common health problems and not everybody has acces to it. The CMU was voted in France only in 1999 when Medicare exists since 1965.

* Every employee pay for a "mutuelle" (it is mandatory by law!) even if employees pay already high taxes for the "sécurité sociale".

* As for the "retraite" (medicare) most young people will get only half of what people like me receives, because of a convergent string of laws that were initiated 25 years ago.

Especially now we are seeing what that really means: fake blood labs and the brakes on cars disabled. Do we want a world where nothing can be trusted because it was all just a fantasy to defraud gullible investors to start with? I think most people don’t want that.