Comparing the whole of the United States to England isn't as informative as one would think, given the wide variety of racial and cultural groups in the United States.
Comparing health outcomes of white Americans of Anglo descent to health outcomes in England would be much more informative. Even more informative would be data that look at white people (and other groups such as Chinese, Indians, etc.) in the US on a county-by-county basis.
The truth is that there are certain groups in the United States whose outcomes are much worse on many statistical bases, and those groups skew the data dramatically downwards. Black people in the US, for example, commit a majority of murders every year [1], despite being only about 13% of the population - almost 4x what the rate would be, if they committed murder at the same rate as white people.
Other disparities are present as well, which mean that there are many communities in the United States where you will live a life just as long and healthy, or even longer and healthier, than in European countries. For example, this article [2] shows a county-by-county breakdown, and many counties in America where life expectancy is over 80.
"at some point growing population is unsustainable"
This is a logical fallacy that has been bounced around, in catastrophic terms, for centuries. (see Thomas Malthus [1], "The Population Bomb" by Ehrlich [2], etc.) Ehrlich went as far to say that in the 1970s, HUNDREDS of millions of people would starve. Did that happen? No. These ideas about some theoretical limit on food or resources of the Earth are alarmist and do not benefit the public discourse.
Sure, maybe the Earth has a limit to how much population it can support, but it could easily be 100 billion. Who knows? Do you know that the entire population of the Earth can fit in an area the size of the state of Texas, in single family homes? [3]
In contrast to the disproven "unsustainable growing population" idea, depopulation and the aging of the population will have severe consequences within the next few decades, and already has had negative consequences in places like Japan [4], Italy [5], and many others.
We definitely need to deploy policies to increase the number of births to address these issues.
The fact that the malthusian catastrophe has not yet occured does not discredit it. In fact this can be explained by agricultural yield gains that were substantial in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to using hybridized cultivars and industrial fertilizers and pesticides. Where will the gains be in the future when we approach another resource limit? We will have to continue to use genetic modification to improve our crop yields, and these days marketing executives have poisoned that word in the minds of many who now seek out gmo free foods specifically. This is also to say nothing about the state of the environment, how we take out elemental resources from the land that took a very long time to deposit in this place, bring them to a distant market and never replace them, diminishing the fertility of the area. Or how we do the opposite to our aquatic environments through eutrophication.
The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
>The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
Your assumption that technology may not be capable of helping us enormously down the road is much more of an assumption than the pro-technology argument. Because unlike the anti-growth malthusian argument, the reality so far for centuries has been that technology did indeed make life easier and better for people despite an ever growing population.
There's actual, consistent precedent contradicting all malthusian predictions across several centuries of human development, with entirely artificial political disasters mostly being responsible for any failures. On the other hand, we've not yet seen any concrete examples of human development failing in the face of hard natural limits to growth. Wherever it has failed has been because of mismanagement in some form or another, not lack of possible solutions.
It did indeed make life better but thats because we never considered the externalities, then we would realized we erred too hard on the side of environmental exploitation. What takes millions of years of give and take to produce is squandered in a fortnight.
In biology, balanced relationships, mutually symbiotic relationships take orders of magnitude longer to evolve than parasitic relationships. We do not have a balanced relationship with this planet, we have a parasitic one. We are speaking the same things when you say that whenever we have failed was because of mismanagement, in other words being to parasitic to our hosts. To not mismanage something would be to understand all the latent variables affecting the system before we act. We never do that, we act, then only react after the system is so obviously affected by our actions.
Thank you, I could not have stated it better myself. When there are many real-life examples that contradict an idea, and only theories and logic that stem from certain questionable assumptions to support that idea, then at very least it is a very poor idea on which to base public policy
I don't know if 1000 square feet per person is the exact same as people living in single family homes as it wouldn't include roads, farms, retail or any of the other spaces you would need, it's just 268,581 square miles divided between 7 billion people.
Population growth has overall largely been a function of increased energy availability, from the industrial revolution onward through the consumption of fossil fuels which are inherently unsustainable.[1]
Also, assuming the number is for example 100 billion, it seems like you still have the same issue of infinite population growth being inherently unsustainable but just on a different timescale.
This idea - fixing systems that amplify mistakes into large, irreversible impacts-- is why I am against alcohol, marijuana and other mental-state altering drugs for recreational purposes. (I'm not talking about people who really need pain relief from cancer, amphetamines for ADHD, etc.)
If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be? 100,000 deaths come from alcohol use every year in the United States alone[1]. That doesn't even account for countless cases of abuse, broken families, crime, and other negative effects of alcohol and drugs.
So many people say "oh well it's fine if I do it, I'm responsible" but then at some point someone isn't fine and isn't as responsible as they think they are.
> If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be?
Perhaps that's true for your definition of "better off", which is perfectly fine, but it isn't universal. Even though I don't do drugs, I don't think it should be anyone's business to police what other people do with their minds and their bodies on their own time, as long as they don't pose a threat to anyone else.
One, those substances are fine for a lot of people.
Two, some of those substances are fine for most anybody. I've never even heard of a deadly marijuana overdose, and the evidence shows no increase in mortality for marijuana users.
Three, we already tried alcohol prohibition, and we are currently trying drug prohibition. It does not solve he problem you care about, while creating other large problems.
So really, you sound like somebody who has a personal hobbyhorse and uses pretty much anything (like say, losing stars on GitHub or mentioning a book on airplane safety investigations) to argue for it. And that sort of motivated reasoning around argument for societal change strikes me as way more dangerous than somebody eating a THC edible.
I'm scared to see what your sanitized world would look like. Some of the most interesting art, music, and personal perspective has come from the consumption of the substances you deride as unnecessary and destructive.
How much art, science and deep, personal perspectives were lost due to abuse and death stemming from substance abuse? In case of certain substances (like alcohol) we have rather hard statistics about it's overal impact on physical and mental condition of society. Slow change from alcohol to safer alternatives (ex. cannabis) is probably one of the best trends in current times.
How many lives were saved or changed for the 'better' through the escape of, enjoyment of or numbing with drugs and alcohol? Who knows?
Perhaps if we think more like adults instead of infants we can try to understand complex issues better instead of reinforcing black and white stereotypes of the world or rehashing whatever our favourite source of ignorance tells us.
I think that do-gooders who have a "Great New Idea" for how to make society better are 1000x more dangerous than any type of drug ever invented. People drunk on alcohol mostly fall asleep harmlessly. People drunk on power and how awesome their own ideas are launch prison-industrial complexes, dystopian enforcement schemes, wars, genocides, etc.
It may be an even worse drug. People on drugs mostly have some awareness that their ideas aren't very good. But for those drunk on power, the fact that their same great idea has already been tried and led to total disaster is no cause for concern at all. You see, they're obviously smarter and better than the last batch of power-addicts who tried that, so they'll do it right this time. Heaven help us if we ever discovered a chemical intoxicant that was capable of making people that deluded.
An interesting thought experiment - how many of us would be here at all if not for alcohol? Ignoring butterfly effect aspects, the number of people who were only conceived due to decisions made under the influence of drugs would surely be very large even today, let alone prior to the availability of birth control.
I think this is an interesting point to add to the discussion about tax rates by state. For example, Hawaii has high income taxes - but very low property taxes. Something else to consider when deciding which state is the best to live in.
Also worth considering that $200k in income in California with a couple kids probably doesn't pay the full 10% income tax, because the rates are progressive; but will pay the full 1.2-1.7% property tax on a new 750k-1 million dollar home.
A better comparison would be median single family home size in US, which is around 2,300 sq ft [1]. Over 60% of housing units in US are single family homes [2].
Another thing the US could do to reduce prices is to give people the option for certain expensive procedures (hip transplants, knee replacements, etc.) to be done outside the US by qualified doctors. Then the patient could get a discount on their insurance every month or get an incentive from medicare that splits the savings with the patient.
One interesting thing to note is that Medicare (US gov't paid healthcare for the elderly) pays hospitals DOUBLE the price for the same procedures that an MD can do in her own clinic. They pay this supposedly so that hospitals can take in patients who can't afford to pay in the emergency room, etc.
But to me this is another one of those cases where poor government policy boosts prices. Hospitals already have an incentive to buy up small practices to reduce competition, but if hospitals are paid double the price for the same procedure compared to an ambulatory clinic, the government is just incentivizing concentration in the market.
I feel you. Father of 3 here. My two year old always just runs as far as fast as he can pretty much whenever he gets a chance. Won't stay in the stroller either. Putting him in a carseat is much easier. Just went on a flight the other day with the kids and chasing him around the airport wasn't easy, although in the end it was somewhat manageable.
Car travel with kids is way easier compared to other methods.
We took the kids to Paris a while back and carting the stroller up and down the stairs to the metro was a huge pain.
You should read "Atomic Habits", by James Clear. Basically if you want to build new habits, you need to set realistic goals that you will actually do (and also have self-love, that if you don't get it done, you aren't a failure, every day and even every hour is a new hour you can do better) and then do those goals; then after you meet those goals and establish those habits, then you can move on and make that goal a little harder; or you can set goals in a different area.
Another element of this is that you need to establish when the habit will happen, and where. If you pick the same place every day, with time it becomes automatic.
Also important here is the aggregation of marginal gains - each little thing you improve in your life adds up over time to make a big difference. See this article from James Clear about this concept: https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains.
Remember as well - as Atomic Habits mentions - the goal isn't just to do whatever your goal is; the goal isn't just the outcome; the goal is to change your very identity. A person who wants to read every day, the goal isn't just the reading itself, it is to BECOME a reader. For the person who wants to eat well and exercise, the goal isn't just to lose weight; it is to BECOME a fit, healthy person. As you form new habits every day, what you do on a daily basis becomes part of you, and those actions you take are the evidence of your new identity.
It also mentions chaining your habits. Find something you do already every day, e.g. brushing your teeth, and then chain your meditation to that habit. After you brush your teeth, meditate for 10 minutes. That way as you are brushing your teeth, your mind will be primed to get ready to meditate afterwards.
But here’s the thing: if you haven’t had kids yet you don’t know what you’re missing out on. Yes sometimes having kids is hard. But it also enables you to experience happiness and joy in ways that you previously haven’t been able to.
And if you have kids and don't like it, too bad, you're honor bound to raise them for 20+ years.
Committing to something for that long based on fear of missing out or peer pressure or lots of people do it and seem happy(ier?) is terrible judgement. Perhaps it's hard to describe the joys and hardships of parenthood, but it's possible to get most of the information even if you can't necessarily feel all the feels before you commit.
Comments like this, whether pro-children or anti-children or any other blanket statement, are disingenuous imo. It should be written:
> if I hadn’t had kids yet I wouldn't have known what I'd be missing out on. Yes sometimes having kids is hard. But it also enables me to experience happiness and joy in ways that I previously haven’t been able to.
What's true for you is not true for everyone. Seems like having children was the right choice for you, but there are plenty of people who are miserable because of and outright dislike or hate their children. Yet that doesn't mean having children was wrong for you or that yours make your life miserable.
That’s tautologically true and, IMO, one of the least-convincing arguments to persuade someone who is on the fence about becoming a parent to make a child.
Comparing health outcomes of white Americans of Anglo descent to health outcomes in England would be much more informative. Even more informative would be data that look at white people (and other groups such as Chinese, Indians, etc.) in the US on a county-by-county basis.
The truth is that there are certain groups in the United States whose outcomes are much worse on many statistical bases, and those groups skew the data dramatically downwards. Black people in the US, for example, commit a majority of murders every year [1], despite being only about 13% of the population - almost 4x what the rate would be, if they committed murder at the same rate as white people.
Other disparities are present as well, which mean that there are many communities in the United States where you will live a life just as long and healthy, or even longer and healthier, than in European countries. For example, this article [2] shows a county-by-county breakdown, and many counties in America where life expectancy is over 80.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-riley-the-other-ferguson-... [2] https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/3/13/21177268/utah-citizen...