Quote (bogie160 @ Sep 18 2021 12:27pm)
The HDI difference between the United States as a whole and the richest places in the EU is negligible. And the United States has delivered that wealth across a diverse, continent sized nation. European prosperity is unfortunately limited to the privileged few, while the Eastern and Southern European members of the EU remain in comparative poverty. And this is all without addressing that the research, medicine, and technology which makes your life possible are all largely the products of an American system that specifically promotes the ingenuity that makes those inventions possible.
This suite of claims is pretty dumb.
HDI is a very poor metric for what you're discussing since it explicitly doesn't take into account wealth disparity and access to basic things like healthcare.
Research, medicine, tech, etc. is not "largely products of an American system". Medicine specifically, since R&D is my field of expertise, is a hugely international effort and "inventing" basically just correlates with GDP, which also correlates with population. I.e. more people = more inventions. Strong economy = more inventions. We aren't disproportionately creating medicine relative to our population and GDP, and the countries that do massively outperform us on these metrics are places like the UK. Additionally, lots of drugs get classified as "American invented" even though it originated in Chinese research and was partnered in America to take it to market. My lab does this a lot actually. We get a lot of that juicy chinese money.