We know because the most common comment on anything done by any non-American place that is superior to an American place is to remind us that the achieving place is: more diverse, less diverse, larger, smaller, denser, sparser, more homogeneous, more heterogeneous, or whatever.
Fortunately, the reason I love America (the real culture of aggressive exploitation of gaps and inefficiencies) is alive and well in the real world as much as the culture of excuse-making is alive on the Internet.
In time, I wonder if Americans will split into categories of low-agency online commenters who believe that the greatest factors are environmental and high-agency real-life operatives who believe the greatest factors are things they can control.
This is an absurdly loaded response. I never said anything about America being great. I live in London. I was just making a point for a largely American readership which has a tendency to presume the rest of the world is far better (as you do) without having actually experienced anything else but the US.
There are many small cities in the US fairing very well, just as there are here in the UK. But you’d never read about them because they aren’t sovereign nations.
Sweden is a great example of this. Typically held up by Americans as some sort of utopia, until they became the poster child for cavalier covid handling. Now people just move on and pick some other new comparison.
I've lived in London, Mumbai, San Francisco, and many American cities.
Your original comment is nothing more than the standard "Correlation is not causation" comment of these stories. It's exceedingly low information content and ever-present.
Possibly. I'm trying to get you to stop doing this, however. One can hope that we can talk without repeating endless cliches. If it doesn't work, then we've all paid the cost and gained nothing. If it works, I've paid the cost this time and we never have to pay it in the future.
Alternatively, I'm working with a friend on a way for me to browse HN without encountering these.
You don’t see articles written about how Aurora, Colorado dealt with covid, despite the fact that they are the same size.
Things that work for small, homogenous systems rarely work 1:1 on large, heterogenous scales.