this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I bet you are basing your concept of the "usual" Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the "West".
But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:
Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that's just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.
Out of that the US lacks health care for all, and it lacks transit pretty much everywhere outside of the large cities. Even the cities pretty much have nothing that reaches all the way out to the suburbs.
Where I live, you have to have a car to have a decent quality of life. People give up their homes before they give up their cars. So transportation needs to be addressed in order to have the quality of life promised. Most of the places that are food insecure are all about politics and bad people blocking food resources rather than the food not being available.