Of course poverty exists in many places outside the United States, and people in poverty are universally exploited. But much of that poverty outside the US, at least so it seems, to be rooted in much the same causes: poor governance and corruption. This book seems to question how poverty persists in a country which seems beyond such "third-world" concerns.

I’m guessing you haved lived in many places outside the US? Those are common in a lot of countries.

If someone were to post “How McDonald’s makes their burgers” would it be a hot take because In-N-Out also makes burgers?

https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...

If somebody were to post their personal experience with chlamydia would you reply with be “It’s a hot take to not mention the very serious problem that chlamydia poses to koala bears. When I read about something happening somewhere, I assume that that means it isn’t happening elsewhere.”

So you can't really do a hot take on a personal experience. Because a personal experience generally isn't "hot". You'd just be an a-hole. You might be able to have a hot take specifically about chlamydia in koalas though... ouch. Lets try...

"Koala bears keep dying because they cant keep it in their pants"

See the difference?

AKA Click Bait.

The entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many?

Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries?

If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.

The millions of folks traveling from all over the world to enter the US, often enough illegally, suggests that lots of people would choose the US.

Don't impugn my motives.

> People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar.

That's not representative of the whole.

Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves.

Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.

The effect is the cartels are dumping the families and "other than mexican" to intentionally get caught (they want to get caught to claim asylum. Legit asylum seekers go through the process and fakers just disappear after release), overwhelming the resources of the CBP, and then while CBP is overwhelmed the Mexicans and others like migrant workers cross the desert. Such action would seriously skew the statistics.

>That's not representative of the whole.

I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.

... but I bet you will never answer for that. Beggars SHOULD BE CHOOSERS.

Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well.

I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people.

People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.

can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand

But the comments on this are still pretty crazy and maybe miss the point. Even if the comparison isn't quite exact, wouldn't you expect the worlds richest country to do the best? Even the life expectancy is declining in the US. And even if COVID had an impact on life expectancy, again world's richest country.

Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation.

America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.

Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade.

One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

Being at the bottom of the social pyramid, even if not poor, has its own problems. Circumstances obviously change from person to person and place to place but some individuals seem to react better to being the middle a country of poor than being poor-rich in a much rich country.