François CholletVerified account

Counterpoint: Inequality between the working and middle classes has increased plenty in homogeneous nations like Japan as well. U.S. median income ranks 6th in the world. Crime is way down. The U.S. is less corrupt than Japan, Korea, Ireland, France, or Taiwan.https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1042758946010918912 …

Most of the weekly corruption stories that barely make the news in the US (both at the local and federal level) would be multi-year scandals in France or Japan. Which are pretty corrupt places.

Any metric based on "perception" is hopelessly flawed, as you would know. See: people's perception of the percentage of the population that's immigrants. Or this https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts … People's perception is a reflection of the news they watch. It does not represent reality.

Well, it's based on "expert assessments", whoever those are.

Sounds totally reliable then. I wouldn't take this stuff for granted at all. Everything I know about these countries is telling me the opposite. Everywhere you go, you will find endless scandals, but the scale of gravity varies enormously from place to place.

Should I regard your expertise on the matter as superior to theirs?

Rather, you should disregard metrics based on "perception" as being as reliable as reading tea leaves. Go find some data instead.