> Contrast this with the American culture of honesty; fraud and cheating are national scandals, not the norm.
Fraud is basically the biggest national industry in the U.S. Just look at:
- The 30% of all medical spending that is wasted.
- The rise of for-profit colleges with super low graduation rates and even worse employment prospects. Same with law schools.
- The fact that the majority of people who graduate high school and college are functionally illiterate.
- The massive pharmaceutical settlements for faking safety/efficacy data, illegal marketing, bribing doctors, etc.
- The complete lack of food safety regulations and/or enforcement. E.g. a third of fish sold aren't even really the species that they are claimed as, 80% of supplements sold don't contain any of the ingredients they are claimed to have, etc.
- The crumbling of the train systems, city water systems, etc.
- The massive subsidies on fossil fuels that are causing climate change and destroying the oceans.
- The financial system
- The fact that the vast majority of science isn't replicable, or isn't accurate even when it is replicable.
Etc. The main reason corruption seems worse in China is because of the billion dollar propaganda campaigns that use schools and the media to systematically blind people to the underlying issues, and the fact that the vast majority of activists get arrested and threatened with life in prison if they ever protest again.
You're going to have to backup that claim that the majority of people that graduate from college are functionally illiterate. I call bullshit on that being true.
The American food system is one of the safest and most regulated on earth. You may disagree with some of its practices, but that does not make it unregulated nor unsafe. The claim that America has a complete lack of food safety regulations is laughable, you couldn't be more wrong.
America has always had for-profit colleges, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. They work perfectly fine. America has had by far the best university system for many decades and still does. The rest of the world has nothing like it.
Massive subsidies for fossil fuels? In fact the subsidies are not massive compared to the industry and dollar figures in question, even if those subsidies should not exist. If you want to talk per capita fossil fuels and the destruction of the environment from that, let's talk about Norway's output - that bastion of everything America is supposed to aspire to.
America merely contributes upwards of half of all global science and innovation. Given the immense output record the US possesses, you're going to have to do a lot better to discredit it than throw out an empty soundbite.
You're wrong in your claim that the majority of college graduates are not functionally literate.
2% of college graduates fall below a basic level of literacy.
14% of total adults fall below basic on prose; 12% on document; 22% on quantitative. The numbers of college graduates are vastly lower than those.
And further, digging into the data, I'd be willing to bet that half of those numbers of people that struggle on basic literacy - in english - do so because their primary language is either not english and or they have very little command of the language (first generation immigrants etc).
It is certainly interesting that the "National Assessment of Adult Literacy" report indicates that only 13% of adults can perform that sample task of "computing and comparing the cost per ounce of food items".
Same for comparing and contrasting two newspaper articles, which is probably even more relevant -- if you can't do that, then you're immediately disqualified from pretty much every profession that pays a living wage. And that's not even a very high bar, considering that newspapers are written at what's supposed to be a 6th - 8th grade reading level.
Sure, the bar of 'fully understanding' is ridiculous. People don't have 100% accuracy with anything. Most people would also fail the same measure if the document was spoken vs written so despite the name it has little to do with literacy.
Note: The bar for functional literacy includes banking paperwork which is intentionally designed to be confusing. If more people understood it they would rewrite it to be less clear. Also, your failure to understand what you linked precludes you from the ranks of 'functional literacy'.
PS: While high, you might reasonably interpret at least intermediate as an acceptable level for college graduates and that's well over 80%.
Talk about fraud. The site mentions "proficient" in quotes trying to make that sound like a low level of performance when in fact it is the highest rating on the assessment (2 spots higher than "Basic")!
I'm guessing the rest of your bullet points are a stretch as well (at least they seem like stretches and now we know you cite bogus sources).
> The complete lack of food safety regulations and/or enforcement.
There have been some major recalls due to food safety in the last 5-10 years(1).
In the last 5 years, the Food Safety Modernization Act was passed (2).
In the last 5 years, the "Egg Rule" was passed (3). "Over 15 months, FDA inspectors visited about 600 facilities nationwide that produce about 80 percent of the country's eggs to determine if they are in compliance with the Rule, which went into effect in July, 2010."
You can also find thousands of warning letters the FDA has written to companies over the last decade on their website (4).
I searched through the warning letters for "supplements" and found exactly 500. (5) The letters were issued for all kinds of reasons, from outrageous claims, to products not containing the advertised chemicals. (6)
I'm not going to argue the other points you list, but when it comes to the FDA, your assessment of "completely lacking in regulations and/or enforcement" was overreaching.
Fraud is basically the biggest national industry in the U.S. Just look at:
- The 30% of all medical spending that is wasted.
- The rise of for-profit colleges with super low graduation rates and even worse employment prospects. Same with law schools.
- The fact that the majority of people who graduate high school and college are functionally illiterate.
- The massive pharmaceutical settlements for faking safety/efficacy data, illegal marketing, bribing doctors, etc.
- The complete lack of food safety regulations and/or enforcement. E.g. a third of fish sold aren't even really the species that they are claimed as, 80% of supplements sold don't contain any of the ingredients they are claimed to have, etc.
- The crumbling of the train systems, city water systems, etc.
- The massive subsidies on fossil fuels that are causing climate change and destroying the oceans.
- The financial system
- The fact that the vast majority of science isn't replicable, or isn't accurate even when it is replicable.
Etc. The main reason corruption seems worse in China is because of the billion dollar propaganda campaigns that use schools and the media to systematically blind people to the underlying issues, and the fact that the vast majority of activists get arrested and threatened with life in prison if they ever protest again.