Comment by superultra
10 hours ago
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
As a lucky European, I have US labeled as “richest third world country”.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.
But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
> It’s typically GDP per capita.
If so, then the US is ~7th, or 5th among nations numbering in the millions. Still very high, just not at the top.
Communities passing the plate for someone in need isn’t new. It's been done in churches for centuries, and crowdfunding is just a modern version of the exact same thing.
As is often said, capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others. When it comes to things like advanced cancer treatment, capitalism is why something exists worth raising money for. If this situation is an indictment of anything, it is the U.S. stubbornly refusing to implement some form of single-payer baseline healthcare, like most other capitalist economies have had for decades.
As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
> As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
> this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
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The UK has socialized healthcare, and that's not going so well. Societies excel at stuff they prioritize. Pretty much all societies don't prioritize other people's tragedies.
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I think the sentiment is not that generosity to those in need is bad, but that something bad must be causing so many to be in such desperate need.
It may be relevant that the US has higher health-care costs than every other country in the world except for Switzerland, but not because it's providing better care. Many countries have better outcomes.
The fact that you need intimate knowledge is evidence of the Kafkaesque nature. It describes a world where virtue doesn't exist except for the case of financial planning (which often equates quite well to luck).
> evidence of the Kafkaesque nature
Based on my understanding of Kafka, to fit the definition, funerals would be essential goods whose costs should be socially guaranteed. In reality, a funeral is a discretionary event about the deceased and for the living. Crowdfunding for the benefit of the crowd is not an inversion of responsibility, it's simply voluntary collective spending.
You could say it's an inversion of societal norms, but that's not Kafkaesque.
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> As is often said, capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
I've only heard it said that "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", not capitalism and economics: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
The Churchill line is about democracy, but the adapted version is a common variation. It works as a standalone maxim without need of attribution to some famous person.
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> It's been done in churches for centuries
I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?
And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?
As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.
> Maybe she was really bad with money
I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.