Comment by wyager
14 days ago
This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.
14 days ago
This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.
People die from inability to afford something as fundamental as healthcare in the US. You are poorer than any European ever could be.
> You are poorer than any European ever could be
Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
Most Americans grumble about paying for healthcare, and we are getting ripped off, but it's also very rare for someone to actually die because they can't afford it. Anyone in the top, say, 80% of American society has some form of employer-subsidized insurance.
> The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
This is due to the garbage GDP numbers. Based on these, the quality of life in the Mississippi is better than in Japan. Not a single chance. The US numbers are highly inflated by the financial sector and real estate. It'll take a financial crisis and dethroning of US dollar to show how truly poor these places are.
1 reply →
> some form
These words are doing some very heavy lifting.
> This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies.
Source? Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
> Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
> Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
Yes, yes, and no (irrelevant because it barely shifts the result)
GDP and GDP PPP are almost irrelevant with regards to personal wealth or lack thereof. A factory making billions to its owner doesn't improve the revenues, wealth or standard of living of more than 1 person. A factory producing luxury Louis Vuitton handbags is good for GDP and the wealth of the factory owner, but is irrelevant to the living conditions of the workers. A private equity firm making wild bets is very "productive", GDP wise, but again , entirely irrelevant at a personal level. Even the worker's salary is tough to compare in isolation between countries because of the vastly different costs of living - an American having to pay tens of thousands of student loans back, with obscene housing prices, absurdly expensive healthcare... $200k/year in San Francisco might not get you as far as e.g. 100€k/year in Berlin (throwing numbers for illustration, haven't actually done the math).
Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
3 replies →
I’m an American. I wish we had these protections.
And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home, 70+ yo still working their ass off in McJobs, crumbling public infrastructure, homeless and billionaires laughing all the way to the bank...
Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP or the presence of billionaires and unicorns, as if between you, Zuck, and Musk you have an average wealth of $500B. There are much poorer GDP-wise countries where people live better and are happier than the US :)
> And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home
The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough to compare. Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US.
Most of the top colleges are American. American homes tend to be much larger and nice than European homes.
> Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP
The distribution is really not that skewed. In most states, median income is within 40% of mean income.
Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
>The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare.
How about the median Western European (including nordic)?
>Most of the top colleges are American.
Yes, because that's where the money and companies are. Those concern a miniscule minority of the population - with most either not having access to education, or only through huge personal debt. And even there, take away the majority Europeans, Asians, Indians, etc doing the research in these (after having been educated in their local countries), and it would be a wasteland.
>Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US
The UK had better healthcare than the US for the average person, it only fell behind because of opening itself up too much because of immigration (without sufficient funding increases) and also because of following US-like neoliberal policies in the past 20 years or so that hurt the NHS.
>Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
Not exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
> Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
No. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
By median, the US is on par with Italy. If you adjust for property prices (cheaper in Italy), then it's definitively lower.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead. And this doesn't adjust for property prices.
>US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead.
Yep! And the European countries behind include like ex-soviet bloc countries and such (basically starting from very low in 1989-1991). And as you not, the cost differences (not accounted in the table) push European countries even further than this ranking.
Besides mean vs median, I'd point also quality of life factors not measured in dollars or euros.
Billionaires making more money sure helps pay my hospital bills.