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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high standard of living".

It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that...

E.g.

http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.h...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...

And those countries have much less megacorps and "economies of scale"....

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I'm certain we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the West's distance from the depravation of the state of nature (capitalism certainly causes), and you're talking about some cherry picked metrics that make some countries in the West look better than others.

The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not because it disproves your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms.

[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

EU includes some poor countries that were recently under Soviet occupation.

And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it.

At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin.

Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.

1) You can cherry-pick US states too, and;

2) Just look at the chart I linked to - on decadal timescales, the EU was catching up to the US rapidly and then plateaued, in more than one cycle. No idea why, but something significant was happening and then stalling. Obviously history wasn't retroactively occurring and being eradicated.

2) It's good data, the graph shows 2008 as an inflection point. I think that's the disastrous austerity programme chosen by political leadership throughout europe. Instead of investing they decided to cut spending in a recession. That's my take anyway.

1) You can't brush off foreign occupation 29 years ago as cherry picking. This dataset starts in 1960s, when all of Eastern Europe were soviet puppets. There is nothing comparable in recent US history.

"There is nothing comparable in recent US history."

Of course there is. What transition happened in the US in the 60s, that the country is still not completely out of? You'd know instantly if an American was using it as an excuse (as is quite common) for not matching various European metrics.

I actually don't know what you could be alluding to. Civil right movement?

>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists

For one, the EU has dozens of ex Eastern Bloc communist countries (including areas of ex-USSR) which still play catch up and wages are still much lower.

Second, money is not everything. If the state, every day life, cost of living, etc is set up in a good way, you can get 2x or more the quality of life for half the money.

>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K

This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US which is what your average citizen truly cares about

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/few-see-eu-...

Post-Hard Brexit it will probably change, EU PPP has already been damaged by the current Brexit scandals, and the last few years of increased US Dollar interest rate has increased relative US PPP, but because of income inequality those financial changes aren't really transferred to the everyday US citizen

Also, the difference in raw incomes is mostly based of the so called "Exorbitant Privilege" the US has for having its currency be the default world reserve currency, it is quite easy to understand when one comprehends that the US central bank basically "prints gold", and that like ~60% of all international transactions are done abroad but with the US dollar as transaction medium

"This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US"

I find it rather unbelievable that things are cheaper in Europe. A few years back, I used to work for a multinational, which opened an office there, and some people I knew went and at least one or two stayed, which lead me to idly consider the idea of being an expat, and my cursory research indicated salaries are lower and the cost of living is higher.

I mean, from my perspective, just the fact that you had the chance to work abroad for a multinational would put you way ahead of the wage the median US citizen has to survive on, so your experience is not representative of the median, let alone PPP stats

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