there are people who also are in similar bad conditions if not worse who don’t go on killing sprea.
There are people who have completely enviable lives and do go on killing sprees. Who can explain what drove OJ to self-immolate like that? Utter insanity.
But that’s a separate issue from cognitive decline driven by social factors. If you want a crime wave, you introduce lead into the environment. Its been proven out time and again to spike local crime rates within the next 5-10 years.
west is probably biggest propagator of helping poor countries
The primary form of western aid is military hardware. And this “aid” is often delivered on behalf of a dictatorship attempting to quell a restive populace. Case in point, the top five recipients are:
Afghanistan, under direct military occupation (we clawed back all the “aid” the moment we lost control of the government and kicked off a massive famine as a consequence)
Israel, one of the wealthiest nations on earth and also consistently in our top-five military hardware importers
Jordan, one of the wealthiest nations on earth and also consistently in our top-ten military hardware importers
Egypt, a military dictatorship
Ethiopia, currently in a civil war with its province Tigrea, and home to CENTCOM’s African HQ
Number six on the list is Iraq, ffs.
To claim we’re “helping” these countries is to imply the demolition of their neighbors and decimation of restive populations is a charitable endeavor.
Aside from US westerners have solid social systems which is so good it attracts migrants from poor places in hundreds of thousands
The primary method by which the US attracts immigrants is our education system. The plurality of US long-term migrants are here on student visas. As foreign countries ramp up their public education spending, migration from these communities falls. Japan used to be a huge source of US immigration, and now its down to a trickle. China used to be a huge source of US immigration, that’s also fallen off. India is peaking, with year-over-year migration shrinking since COVID. The Philippines and Indonesia are picking up, but we’ll see how long that lasts.
It has nothing to do with our social systems, overall. We have a massively overpriced health care system, which is why medical tourism to India, Taiwan, Canada, Spain, and Mexico remains common place. We don’t have good public transit. We don’t have good criminal codes or policing, as evidenced by the chronic surging of local crime and the endless exodus to gated remote communities by anyone with the money to afford it.
We’re a failing state. Cost of living continues to outpace wages. Speculation is locking larger and larger portions of the population out of home ownership and trapping more of them in medical debt. Elder poverty has been rising year-over-year since the 80s, despite the promise of 401ks and market-based retirement accounts yielding returns consistent with a rising rate of profit. Look at what’s happening to the UK. We’ll be there in another five to ten years. Some corners of the country - New York, Miami, Chicago, Austin, San Fransisco - are already there.
What this means for our future is anyone’s guess. But it ain’t gonna be good.