There are a range of comparisons around, and they're often not easy to use. The OECD gathers data but I think it's deliberately shy of making comparisons easy. The UK-based Nuffield Trust does a report comparing systems, which I think is based on the OECD data.

I'm sure I've seen some others but don't have time to look them up right now.

COVID 19 has made things more complicated, so I think most comparisons are two or three years old now. Not that I imagine much has changed - though I think the US had a particularly bad experience of COVID, which is not unrelated to the problems in its healthcare system.

As a general rule, compared to other wealthy countries, the US:

• has middling health outcomes

• has some really great healthcare. If you can pay for it, you can get absolutely world-leading healthcare in the US

• but access to healthcare is poor, and the system drives some perverse behaviour - the classic example is putting off dealing with a problem until it requires emergency treatment

• at a country level this is one factor that makes US health spending extremely inefficient in terms of outcomes - focusing a lot of attention on expensive treatment with marginal benefits, as compared to wider availability of lower cost treatment and prevention

• other aspects of US society and the economy contribute to poor outcomes - eg. Americans work longer hours, have fewer holidays, less access to sick pay and less security in their jobs than most rich countries

• it's also worth noting that even the rich can't completely isolate themselves from the effects of the health of others - if your housekeeper comes in to work when they're ill because they can't afford to see a doctor and can't afford a day off, you're at risk of catching whatever they've got

• the US spends far more than any other country as a proportion of GDP. Not only that, but government spending is higher than almost any other OECD country. Put another way: if you could magically transplant the NHS to the US, the US government would spend less on healthcare.

The general rule in international comparisons is that there are a range of ways of funding and providing healthcare and there's debate about which models work better - except for the US model, which nobody wants.

Without wanting to get too far into a massive subject: it's important to keep in mind that invading the Soviet Union was a key Nazi goal. In their minds, the land and resources were needed to make Germany strong enough to stand against the British Empire and the United States. So what looks like a strategic mistake was really a key goal of the war for Nazi Germany.

Those military planners were probably right that they wouldn't get a better chance later... Which just goes to show how far their goals were from their ability to reach them. (A mistake not entirely unrelated to the whole "slavs are subhuman, Germans are superior" thing...)

Common sense is often quite narrow and short-sighted though. It doesn't seem particularly hard for governments to give amnesties when they decriminalise things, so why isn't this the norm?

It's not hard to think of potential problems.

What if it looks like a law is going to be changed and people start breaking it anticipating that change? Even worse, what if it then isn't changed?

Does it undermine people's respect for laws and fear of punishment?

Does the law punish people based on the impact of their actions or their character? Eg. we might now believe there's little harm in selling weed, but if the consensus when someone sold some weed was it was dangerous, shouldn't they have paid attention to that? (This seems similar to how we don't apply new crimes retrospectively.)

What if the law changes because the situation changes? For example, the benefits and harms of drug prohibition differ in different circumstances.

With examples like this there are usually a bunch of reasons why things are done the way they are that aren't obvious or have been forgotten. They may or may not be persuasive reasons, but you don't know until you know what they are.

On the whole they will stay in prison. They still broke the law, and governments and societies generally view this as a bad thing in itself.

There are exceptions where a law might include an amnesty for those convicted, or people might be pardoned. That might be most common with 'political crimes' and changes of government. At the very least, parole hearings are likely to be more lenient.

In the UK media the pound is usually described against both the dollar and the euro, as those are the two biggest currencies for UK trade, and it's not uncommon for them to go in different directions.

> There's always been a cycle of conjuring a theory that needs to wait for experimental advancements to catch up. And I would agrue that this strongly propels science forward. If we name these theories as "bad science," then how would we ever advance?

There's a problem, though, isn't there, with a hypothesis that can be tested in theory but not in practice until some unknown point in the future? Especially if there's a risk of the theory being tweaked if the evidence doesn't come up - "ok, we didn't find what we were looking for with this particle collider, but if we build a bigger one we will..." (I think in Lakatos' terms that would be an "auxiliary hypothesis" created protect the core hypothesis.)

As the article points out this is a problem for Lakatos' ideas, as sometimes "degenerating" science does produce good results. Maybe that theory scientists have been pushing for a half a century without being empirically tested will turn out to be correct when the technology (or funding) is there. Or maybe you'll have wasted 50 years.

Thus this kind of science is risky. More risky than science which can be tested straight away, or in the near future. The article argues for honesty about this risk and a clear assessment of it when funding or supporting science.

To pick up on /u/ShalmaneserIII's comment, there's a difference between "can be tested now" and "can't be tested yet, but we can tell you how it should be done" and "can't be tested". The middle category falls somewhere between the ideal of the first and the junk of the last.

Funny that /u/IAloneTheyEverywhere suggests the author should do some science classes but hasn't done the simple research to support this hypothesis.

I think I'd recommend The Bell too.

I don't know which communicates her philosophy more clearly though; I liked both books but I've really no idea what they were saying philosophically.

Although the Eastern Orthodox church is officially the Orthodox Catholic Church. So I guess they might say the Roman Catholic Church broke away from them.

To spell this out a bit more, imagine you and I are the only producing, buying and selling things in the economy.

I grow five turnips for sale, you grow five carrots for sale. The government has printed £10 and we each have half of it. I want five carrots and I give you £5 for them. You want five turnips and give me £5 for them.

Now imagine the government gives each of us another £5 so we have £10 each.

What often happens is that an increased supply of money decreases its value. So now what happens is that I charge you £2 per carrot and you charge me £2 per turnip.

That's inflation. Now inflation has good and bad points - or rather it tends to benefit some and harms others. A careful increase in the money supply to help pay off debts can be a good thing for a country. The benefits can outweigh the costs. It doesn't automatically lead to runaway inflation.

There are also cases where inflation doesn't happen. Let's say I've got an unused field and I could grow more carrots, but you don't have the money to buy them. In this case the government creating more money can help the economy.

Knowing when this is and isn't the case is one of the big challenges for economists, central banks and governments. The US in the years right after the financial crisis is a good example: money creation stimulating economic growth and not driving inflation. Those conditions have probably changed now, though, and most developed countries are trying to restrict the money supply.

The only half decent answer so far... Some more points that seem important.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all monotheistic religions. That means they insist people worship only one god - in fact, they deny the existence of any others (though this wasn't always the case for Judaism).

Islam, Christianity and Buddhism are "universal" religions - believers believe that the religion is for everyone, and that they have a duty to spread the religion. This is not the case for Judaism.

Jews follows a (complex) set of laws and rules (although how strictly they follow them varies a lot). Muslims follow five key rules, like charity and regular prayer, though they have some of the same taboos as Jews, like not eating pork. Christians don't place this same emphasis on specific rules or even on behaviour. Generally what's most important is belief - belief in God and in Jesus as saviour.

If you do or believe the right things, when you die your soul will go to heaven (though you might have to go through purgatory first).

Buddhists believe that the world we perceive is an illusion and that the goal of life is to free ourselves from this illusion - what they call "enlightenment". They believe souls are reincarnated over and over until they become free.

Buddhists generally believe in a range of gods, demigods and mystical beings, who can help or hinder people on earth or in achieving enlightenment. Buddhism is very "syncretic" meaning it mixes easily with other religions, like Hinduism, Taoism and Shintoism.

In a fair few countries declaring independence will be considered treasonous or seditious, so people very much will be stopped, whether you're in China or Spain.

Also it is possible for the government to create this money, then take it out of circulation. It produces a billion dollar coin, and then raises taxes (but not spending) by a billion dollars.

Of course, if you pay me $1bn for my debt, then immediately hit me with a $1bn tax, I'm not going to be very happy.

The problem with that first plan is that exchange rates aren't fixed. Generally the more money you print, the lower your exchange rate will go.

First thing: this only works if your debt is denominated in your own currency. In other words, if you're the US and your debt is in US dollars, you can do this. If you're Argentina and your debt is in US dollars then you definitely can't mint a billion US dollar coin to pay it off.

>Presumably, because there's only 6 of them and they are taken out of the economy instantly, they wouldn't hyperinflate the currency?

There's the trick. Why do you say this money is taken out of the economy instantly? Let say the government owes me $1 billion and gives me one of these coins to pay off that debt. I'm not going to want to keep that coin locked away, I'm going to want to spend or invest it!

There'll be selection bias going on here - it's generally the divorces that are complicated or contentious that you'll hear about, and not the ones that are relatively simple.

This is really not true, for Greece at least. Greece's economic policy and performance pre-financial crisis certainly wasn't great, but it wasn't shocking. Post financial crisis, it had a disastrous economic policy imposed on it, known as "extend-and-pretend" - keep giving temporary relief for debt, insisting on public spending cuts (which tanked the economy further) and pretending that things were going to work. This was so disastrous (both for Greece and the eurozone generally) that the IMF, of all institutions, ended up coming out in opposition to it.

Exactly why these policies were imposed is a bit more complex than "German bankers" and links to institutional design and politics in the EU. Though "German bankers", and the reluctance of Germany to admit to how exposed its banks were to the financial crisis, is part of it.

Running out of money to pay the army or police is a good way to kick off a coup or revolution. It's fairly rare for this to happen though, since most regimes know who they rely on, so any money they do have will go to them. (Though there can be conflicts - which branch of the military should get the most money? Who's more important, the military or the police? The main bulk of the army or the elite units?)

> If the central bank creates money faster than the amount of goods and services is growing, then all prices will rise, in roughly the same proportion.

A small correction here: most money these days is created by private banks, not by the central bank. Part of the idea here is that it makes the money supply more responsive to demand - when there's lots of demand for borrowing, banks will create more money.

Central banks do have the main responsibility for overseeing this though, and can influence the money supply via interest rates and regulation.

>So you were really only left with a creeping barrage or a mass formation running to the other line.

I was going to make a technical and slightly pedantic point, but I've realised it might be one that illustrates something important about WW1 that /u/Version2dnb might be interested in.

What is a creeping barrage? A creeping barrage is an artillery barrage that moves forwards at a slow, steady pace (typically in 50-100 yard increments). If your opponents are sitting in some trenches, why not just keep hitting those trenches rather than moving your barrage?

A creeping barrage has three main goals: to keep the enemy's heads down while your own advance, to prevent reinforcements advancing or defenders retreating, and to throw up smoke and dust to cover the advance.

It "creeps" forwards so that it stays ahead of your own troops as they advance. There's no need to communicate with the artillery to say "we've reached this line, move the barrage", something that was difficult to do in the early days of field telephones. The troops just have to stick to the timetable of the barrage.

Of course, "just stick to the timetable" is anything but easy. But the whole idea shows how armies were trying to figure out ways to use combined arms and to deal with the problems they faced on the battlefield. Techniques for barrages became increasingly complex and effective as the war went on.

There are a bunch of reasons for this. I'm sure this is in no way an exhaustive list.

• Most countries still have growing populations. So if the GDP isn't growing then GDP per person is falling.

• Lots of people clearly don't have enough stuff. There are people in the UK going hungry or cold because they don't have enough money. Increasing GDP can offer a way of making things better for these people without making anyone else worse off.

• Even people who clearly do have loads of stuff tend to want more.

• Businesses usually expect to grow, and a larger economy generally makes this easier.

• Many plans for the economy and government finances assume economic growth. For example plans for paying government debt or pensions are projected many years into the future, and assume the economy will grow. If it doesn't then paying for these becomes much harder. Not only that, but the impact will be felt straight away, eg. by interest rates on government debt going up.

• Countries competitive with others about some things - if the UK's economy shrinks there's less money to spend on its armed forces, for example.

• On a more cooperative note, more GDP means more money to spend on international aid, for example.