How to make a great country

[Wilson23]

If we just look at he countries that ARE the greatest places to live, what they all have in common is social democracy,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

I notice nobody contradicts this.

 

[Hel_Books]

Hel_Books said:
But the one thing that isn't working in the USA is healthcare.

One of many. Some will eventually work at reduced scale and expense, and others will be discarded as insanely stupid.

The USA spends more than other civilized countries and gets far less.

If all that money were spent in a good system, like in other civilized countries, just think what could be done!

 

[Chernosoth]

Two more:
Reduce national parks. Leaving the national park business entirely may become necessary. States can decide what to do with the land: sell, lease, more state parks, let homeless move in, etc.

Continue rebuilding the domestic economy. Anyone who has ever said "Those jobs aren't coming back" is dumb and/or corrupt enough for politics, but we can do better than settle for dumb and corrupt. There are many possible economic pledges, starting with tariffs.

 

[Rightguide]

Sometimes people wonder whether life was better in pre-industrialized societies or in the modern, industrialized one. But we don't actually have to wonder: there's hard data because there are many cases of people who have lived in both types of society. And it's no contest. When given the choice, people almost always choose the pre-industrialized way of life.

You can argue they're wrong to have made that choice but that's what all those people did in fact choose.

They also have given us clear reasons for their choice: they had more freedom, including sexual freedom, but especially freedom from constant toil in pursuit of wealth (people work far more today, in fact, than humans have ever worked before: the modern 9-5 office drone works cosniderably more than the average serf, for example); then there's the reluctance of those societies to let anyone fall into poverty, hunger or destitution; equality of opportunity is also a significant draw, where even outsiders achieve acceptance and prominent positions; but far away the most common reason was the intensity of the social bonds - basically, the security of knowing other people care about you.

That's what we refer to as romantic anthropology bordering on fantasy. If people “almost always” chose pre-industrial life, industrialization would never have happened, yet history shows the opposite: whenever people were given real choice, they flooded into cities, factories, and modern economies despite the hardship, because the alternatives meant disease, famine, violence, and early death. The idea that serfs worked less than modern workers ignores subsistence reality: dawn-to-dusk labor, seasonal starvation, no mobility, no legal rights, and no exit. What gets mislabeled as “freedom” was usually dependency enforced by kinship, custom, or brute force.

Modern life traded tribal security for individual autonomy, longer lives, vastly lower violence, and unprecedented material abundance. You can miss community without pretending the past was a humane utopia. Nostalgia isn’t data, it’s selective memory dressed up as sociology.

 

[Wilson23]

That's what we refer to as romantic anthropology bordering on fantasy. If people “almost always” chose pre-industrial life, industrialization would never have happened, yet history shows the opposite: whenever people were given real choice, they flooded into cities, factories, and modern economies despite the hardship, because the alternatives meant disease, famine, violence, and early death.

The picture is more extreme than that: People throughout history moved into cities when they could even though living in CITIES -- at all times before the 19th Century -- meant disease and early death, even for the elite, just because of the crowding and primitive sanitation and pre-scientific medicine.