Thread by @umairh

When I say “the modern world,” what do you think of? Probably a great city somewhere, with broad avenues, spacious parks, art and culture, old museums, people buzzing about, public transport thrumming.

Now think of America. (1/x)

In America, people die for a lack of insulin. Young people can’t afford to start families of their own. The average person lives perched right at the edge of ruin, one missed paycheck, one illness, one emergency away from disaster. More mass shootings than days. (2/x)

I'll tell you what I think. America is the modern world's first failed state. It became something like a weird, bizarre dystopia, replete with falling life expectancy, hand-to-mouth living, relentless and legendary cruelty, instead of a truly modern society instead.

But why? 3/

Why did America never join the modern world?

The answer goes something like this. Americans never learned the greatest lesson history taught. That poverty causes ruin.

You see, in America, poverty was seen — and still is — as a kind of just dessert. 4/

Poverty was seen as a form of deserved punishment, for being lazy, for being foolish, for being slow. For being, above all, weak — because only the strong should survive.

So Americans devised a very different kind of society. 5/

Americans didn’t make a social contract like Europeans — a set of public institutions which manage public goods for people, healthcare and transport and finance and childcare and so on — because its thinkers supposed it didn’t need one. 6/

So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill—it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, control.

The problem is that none of this was true—poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin. (7/7) eand.co/why-didnt-amer…