The US has one of the highest median incomes in the world, and no one with higher is even a tenth as populous.
It's perfectly fair to call us the richest country. That we don't have institutions to match is a shame all the more because of our richness. We had/have the resources. We foolishly didn't use them.
Not the worst, but definitely not the richest, not for most people. It's an astonishingly poor showing considering how much money is available to the USA overall.
Or, you get the politicians you were served by one of the two major parties. Almost all of whom are bought by special interests.
But that said, there are things the US stockpiles: corn, petroleum, and weapons.
When I look at the whole situation it looks like a bunch of meatheads whose answer to everything is brawn and military superiority.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32173811 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Raahat [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/21/washington-to-americans... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/08...
This was discussed by Max Brooks on Fresh Air yesterday:
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...
What Brooks doesn't discuss is the extent to which those countries have varying degrees of authoritarianism or the tendency for citizens to voluntarily comply with public orders.
In the US however, our military stockpiling is geared toward propping up defense industries. This has value to a point, but only when its objectives are actually defense preparedness, but not when the objectives are profit maximization.
The military is no substitute for having properly resourced and coordinated national institutions to deal with huge public health issues.
And COVID19 is turning that assumption on its head. The only question that remains is whether the US can buttress what's left of its public health institutions to keep it at bay, and prepare for the next wave that comes, whether of this pandemic or the next one.
Borders are absolutely a defense, they're just not an absolute defense.
That SARS-CoV-2 was able to spread globally as a pandemic has more to do with its transmissibility and latency characteristics.
Which is what proves that the US isn't unassailable from a pandemic. It would be a mistake to assume that SARS-CoV-2 or something with similar ability to breach geographical barriers won't occur again. Also, nature doesn't care about political entities, and a pandemic could also start in the US.
Budgeting is a zero sum game.
Stockpiles of essential PPE, sure. Pervasive monitoring for early detection? Not worth it.
That's 'magical thinking'.
No doubt the Japanese thought pretty much the same in 1942. That's why the Dolittle Bombing Raid on Tokyo was such a shock to their systems.
Even in 1945, with the Imperial Japanese Navy suppressed or destroyed and their supply chain in tatters, an invasion would have been incredibly costly.
Occupying enemy territory, across an ocean, with a large population of civilians disinclined to cooperate, is never easy.
I'm not overly familiar with how the US medical system works at a detail level, but is it illegal for individual hospitals, clinics, dental offices, etc to independently stockpile critical supplies?
I wouldn't be surprised to see some serious DHS money redirected to hospitals, after this is all over. They could certainly put it to better use than police departments.
Assigning such tasks to a central body seems like an extremely fragile design, and as evidence for this assertion, I offer the current state of reality. I find it a rather convincing argument, but then I'm probably quite biased.
My question was regarding the other poster's proposed explanation: "When I look at the whole situation it looks like a bunch of meatheads whose answer to everything is brawn and military superiority."
Simple profit maximization seems like a much better fit to me.
I suspect if we were to sit down and do an actually proper post-mortem on this debacle, it would mostly reveal a giant pile of simple explanations like this. I doubt this situation is nearly as complicated or conspiratorial as most people are making it out to be. Rather, it is simply optimizing for a particular variable, and if people aren't smart enough to realize that other variables are going to suffer correspondingly, and this low quality of thinking becomes prevalent enough that it becomes a literal existential threat, then I think it's about time the citizens of planet Earth put down their weapons for 2 or 3 months, and had a serious conversation.
I believe that if people continue to communicate in literal untruths, often knowingly, it will not be long until our demise as a species. Covid-19 feels to me like a warning from a different dimension. Whether this is literally true, if conceptualizing it in this way helps people to actually fucking think for a change, I say let's roll with it, or whatever other weird psychological sleights of hand get the job done. And I suggest we do it fast, because if we continue on this same downward trajectory (with increasing speed), it may not even take an anomalous event like this for us to wipe ourselves out.
I think we need some new ideas. I feel like we have to form a new internet community of some kind, not unlike what we have now (reddit, the software itself with a few minor feature additions & subtractions, would be more than sufficient). The main change, the change that I believe would make the difference, would be extremely strict new guidelines around acceptable behavior, that are enforced with extreme prejudice.
I actually believe there is one single rule that could fix the overwhelming majority of these problems, and here it is:
> RULE #1: It is completely forbidden to say things that are not true. Ever. Violations of this rule will result in increasingly severe punishments, ultimately resulting in a permanent ban.
Read that sentence, and be careful your mind doesn't start automatically generating ideas that prove it "impossible" (this word, like so many others, no longer has a common shared definition) - if it does, just make it stop and return to reading the sentence. Try to bring a sense of peace into your mind, it is likely not going to like that so it will be a struggle, but hang in there. Try to contemplate what is truly being said here, truly consider if "only say things that are true" is really such a ridiculously high goal, at least for us to aim towards.
Is this not very similar (but more stringent) to what our parents taught us when we were growing up? Is truthfulness too much for us to even try for at this point in humanity's evolution? If I am the only one that sees this as an attainable, righteous, and pragmatically useful goal, then I'm not really sure if I want to be here any more. I feel like I don't have anything in common with anyone. I don't like what Earth is becoming. I feel like an alien here, like I am of a different kind of some sort, like I don't belong here, like I have somehow wound up in the incorrect dimension.
Can no one else see what I'm talking about? Have I completely lost the plot? Someone has to do something. I wish someone would at least try. I wish someone could at least even admit that there's a problem. If we can't even agree that there's a problem, and roughly what the nature of that problem is, or even agree that this is something worth looking into, I feel like we should just wrap this whole thing up, because our days are numbered anyways.
Where are the private institutions trying to extract profit from selling facemasks. I cannot find one at any price.
a few people are very rich, and many people are well off. but the institutions of this country are, despite being the product of the "richest country", entirely poor and weak.
public institutions have been hollowed out by decades of intentional neglect and austerity. the CDC has no help to offer hospitals in need and is still like a deer in headlights, months into the crisis. before their weakness was exposed, the national stockpile was mostly empty. the cracks in the system were never filled, and many were barely papered over.
private institutions have been optimized to extract profits rather than to serve their stated social purpose. hospitals are now on the brink of going out of business and closing down as the pandemic starts to ramp up. their readiness was low beforehand, too, as there's no money to be made in being prepared for a public health emergency.
so, how did the world's richest country run out of face masks? easy: we organized our society around the idea that buying them and keeping them around was too expensive to bother with.