Now if only a single major media outlet would report on these facts...
Trump won in 2016 because a large portion of america was angry and not doing well, largely, the rust belt. Maybe you should go to them and tell them how well off they've been.
I'm still waiting for my 'trickles' mouth wide open, just awaitin'.
https://www.nber.org/chapters/c12831.pdf
https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...
Also that second website you linked is a Koch "think tank" aka propaganda vehicle, lol
The second website just summarizes the first paper, which is primary source. For your sake, I recommend attacking the substance of the argument rather than the entity making the argument.
It sounds to me like "consumption" is approximately the same as "spending", which goes up whenever prices go up. Conflating consumption with wealth seems like a big mistake, if we are to truly evaluate the impact that materialism has on our long-term well being.
Why is the life expectancy lower in the US compared to developed countries?
Average life expectancy is lower for the same reason that average wealth in the US is higher than other countries: outliers.
The US has a higher homicide rate, a higher car accident rate, a higher opioid death rate, and a higher obesity rate. So you’re slightly more likely to die earlier if by gun, car, OxyContin, or Big Macs, which brings down the average.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/05/16/the-explanator...
Critically, the average life expectancy tells us very little about the state of the median American, or even a lower quintile American who avoids drugs and happy meals, and takes the bus.
Try to to give the exact page number.
Anyway I did waste my time to see what is on table 6.5, i see can year 2010, where is the more recent data?
If more people are dying by drugs, OxyContin and big Macs does that mean these people dont get access to healthcare/emergency services because they are poor or they are not educated because they are poor?
Isnt that a proxy to signal that people in other developed countries still have a better life compared to Americans?
> If more people are dying by drugs, OxyContin and big Macs does that mean these people dont get access to healthcare/emergency services because they are poor or they are not educated because they are poor?
It’s certainly reasonable conjecture, but there’s little evidence to suggest that lack of access to healthcare/emergency services is the root cause for the opioid epidemic. In fact, we now know the root cause to largely be the Purdue Sackler fraud — doctors were over-prescribing it. It’s ironically a proxy for abundant access to prescription medication.
Big Macs aren’t a necessity, it is more than easy to buy cheap and healthy food at the grocery store. This is especially true when you’re poor, because food stamps are currently prohibited for use at fast food restaurants.
> Isnt that a proxy to signal that people in other developed countries still have a better life compared to Americans?
No, it’s a proxy to signal that there exist a lot of Americans that exhibit poor personal lifestyle, and that America disproportionately allows individuals to live like that. Indeed, the data shows that if you live in America, eat healthy, and avoid drugs, your standard of living is comparable to, if not better than other developed countries.
In fact the median (PPP adjusted) disposable income in the US is among the highest in the developed world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
That link also says "The OECD data is particularly flawed because it is based on “income,” which excludes a host of non-cash government benefits and private charity that are abundant in the United States"
A nation should not be dependent on handouts from rich people.
So without the handouts as per this link we can assume the US bottom folks are in worse condition.
> lot of Americans that exhibit poor personal lifestyle
Which comes back to education, which means they dont get proper education compared to their peers in other developed countries.
> disposable income in the US is among the highest in the developed world:
Yes but then why is poverty rate high as well compared to other developed nations.
I'll have to find some more recent data — but the state of the world hasn't dramatically deteriorated since 2010. In fact, the opposite has happened: we've experienced recovery since the Financial Crisis of 2008, so we should expect the numbers to be even better. In many ways, 2010 represents the low watermark for most metrics.
As a data point, in 2019, the wage growth for low-wage earners out-paced that of the higher wage-earners: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/03/05/february-jobs-report-pr...
> A nation should not be dependent on handouts from rich people.
Eh? Why not? This is certainly debatable and not some axiomatic truth. The vast majority of the world works on handouts from rich people — it either comes in the form of taxes and transfers, or voluntary handouts. In the US, we see that both play a role in maintaining the high standards of living we enjoy. All that matters is the standard of living, given the current set of systems. The disposable income and consumption metric is downstream of all potential sources of material income, which enables access to goods/services/resources.
Also, "without the handouts", if the state of the US deteriorates, this impacts the political will to turn voluntary handouts into taxes and transfers: you can't change a variable in the system, then conclude that all other variables will remain constant. And even if you do account for all variable changes, it's still a hypothetical. It's impossible to refute or falsify hypotheticals and counterfactuals.
> Which comes back to education, which means they dont get proper education compared to their peers in other developed countries.
Erm, okay — but the US is one of the most educated countries in the world. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/30/the-10-most-educated-countri...
Total inflation adjusted per pupil education funding is the highest it's ever been: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
In any case, if you’re making the argument that drug abuse and unhealthy diets are caused by the K-12 education system rather than cultural differences, you’re going to have to back that up. Pretty much everyone in the US attends an increasingly funded (though perhaps inefficiently administered) public school, where we learn that drugs are bad and that eating your vegetables is good.
> Yes but then why is poverty rate high as well compared to other developed nations.
Because poverty rate is a relative measure within the country, not a comparative measure across countries. We measure it by drawing a line in the income/wealth distribution, and determining the percentage that live below that line. What it doesn't tell us is how the absolute standard of living for someone below that line in country A compares to their counterpart in country B (ask yourself what it means to live in poverty in Switzerland vs Swaziland). It also doesn't account for taxes and transfers. That's exactly what the analyses I've linked shows. After taxes and transfers, the bottom 20% of Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than their counterparts in comparable OECD countries — measured by PPP adjusted disposable income and consumption.
Taxes are not handouts.
Ultra rich people can change tax laws to benefit them so that they can throw some money on a charity. Why do you think that is good option?
> All that matters is the standard of living
> As a data point, in 2019,
Not sure why a random blog post is data point.
> the bottom 20% of Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than their counterparts
> cultural differences
What cultural differences make Americans do more drugs and be more obese?
And yet US is behind among the developed world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...
Taxes fund welfare/entitlements, which are literally handouts. Your beef is with the mechanism by which the welfare is funded.
> Ultra rich people can change tax laws to benefit them so that they can throw some money on a charity. Why do you think that is good option?
I'm not making a value judgement, I'm showing you the current result of it. You took issue with the observation that consumption metrics include "handouts", implying a hypothetical that such handouts might cease to exist. I rebutted that hypotheticals are impossible to falsify, and that the real world results speak for themselves.
> Not sure why a random blog post is data point.
It's not a "random blog post", it's data published by Indeed's labor market research lab. In any case, the idea that the collective standard of living typically improves with bull markets, and that the last 10 years have been a bull market...isn't controversial.
> What cultural differences make Americans do more drugs and be more obese?
Great question, we don't know! But it's a phenomenon that we observe empirically: Americans on average consume more sugar, eat less healthy, and abuse more opioids. Evidence in the link I shared shows that simply changing that culture can bring the average life expectancy to parity with OECD peer nations (modulo car crashes and gun homicides).
> And yet US is behind among the developed world.
Again, you're using a metric that internally compares income, and using that to somehow make external comparisons between cohorts. "Inequality adjusted HDI" does not tell us what the absolute standard of living is, and it does not tell us how the poor in the US fare compared to poor people in other countries — it just tells us how unequal the US is. The poorest people in America could be richer than even the median earners of every other country, and the inequality-adjusted HDI wouldn't change all that much as long as there are ultra-rich billionaires like Bezos, Gates, et al. The GP comment claimed: "Isnt the US poor people in worse conditions than the poor in other developed countries?". Inequality-adjusted HDI is ill-equipped to answer that question. The specific answer to that question is "No", based on the specific, directly related metric that compares the standard of living of the bottom 20% of the US with their counterparts in other comparable OECD countries.
Even median earners in the US are better off than their counterparts in most other comparable rich countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
You wouldn't know that by looking at the inequality-adjusted HDI, because what it measures is completely unrelated.
To remind you again: Internally relative comparisons compared across countries (like inequality-adjusted HDI and poverty rate) tell us close to nothing about how well off (or not) the poor are. To suggest otherwise is just poor data science. The important metric as it relates to the GP commenter here are those that directly compare standards of living across countries, by income level (apples to apples) — and that's typically done by measuring PPP adjusted income and/or consumption by quintile, and then comparing those across countries.
I still dont understand why do you think it better to depend on scraps thrown by rich people just because they are better at manipulation laws for their benefit?
>. I rebutted that hypotheticals are impossible to falsify, and that the real world results speak for themselves.
Maybe I missed that part where did you do that?
> it's data published by Indeed's labor market research lab.
So its just indeed's data which may not reflect the actual state of the market?
> Evidence in the link I shared shows that simply changing that culture can bring the average life expectancy to parity with OECD peer nations
Hypothetically everything is possible but in reality its not.
> The poorest people in America could be richer than even the median earners of every other country
Since you dont like the data, lets look at some actual use cases.
How much would a poor mother in US spend on pregnancy in a hospital, atleast in Australian Govt hospitals its zero dollars, is that the same in US?
I never said I think that, I never made any value judgements about charity. All I said was that: 1) it isn't some forgone conclusion that charity is inherently bad, or something we inherently have to replace entirely with government welfare, and 2) you have to look at the outcome of the system as it exists today, and per the OECD data, the poorest 20% of the US are richer than the average person in Canada, Greece, the UK, Sweden, Australia, etc — once you account for all forms of income, transfers, in kind benefits, charity, etc. When analyzing the standard of living for the bottom 20% in the US, it's a misrepresentation of reality to ignore charity because the US happens to be the most charitable nation on the planet: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou...
I also think it's a mischaracterization of the status quo to consider charity "scraps thrown by rich people". In general, you should try to articulate the best version of your opponents point of view before trying to defeat it. I'll do it for you: in the US, charity accounts for $427B per year — hardly "scraps": https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2019-americans-gave-427-71-....
> Maybe I missed that part where did you do that?
By showing you the OECD rankings of per-person consumption, including the average consumption of the bottom 20% of US persons.
> So its just indeed's data which may not reflect the actual state of the market?
It's a compelling data point because Indeed is one of the largest job boards on the market today, and has income and employment data. In any case, because you don't like the data, I've found another source that corroborates Indeed's findings: the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-workers-are-getting-bi...
> Hypothetically everything is possible but in reality its not.
Just declaring it doesn't make it so. Per the actual data that I showed you, the majority of the variance in US's average life expectancy is attributable to lifestyle choices and cultural factors (obesity rate, opioid deaths, car travel, homicide rate). That data isn't a hypothetical. It stands to reason that changing this culture will provably bring the US's average life expectancy close to parity with OECD nations. It is also a demonstration of the folly of "averages" in general. When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average wealth of everyone in the bar increases many-fold. Likewise, when an opioid addict walks into a bar, the average life expectancy of everyone in the bar falls.
> Since you dont like the data, lets look at some actual use cases.
No, I never said I "don't like the data", I pointed out that the data that you cited is completely unrelated to the question at hand: how do the poor in the US compare to the poor in other first world countries. "Inequality adjusted HDI" doesn't answer that question; it's totally unrelated. It would be like me citing the average SAT score among high school students in the world when answering the question: "which country has the best universities?"
> How much would a poor mother in US spend on pregnancy in a hospital, atleast in Australian Govt hospitals its zero dollars, is that the same in US?
A mother in the bottom 20% in the US would spend close to nothing on pregnancy in a hospital because they would be covered by Medicaid, in addition to receiving the Child Tax Credit for every child the mother already has (which was doubled in 2017). If the mother in the US was employed, they would also receive cash in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit. If the mother was unemployed, they would qualify for unemployment insurance, and during the pandemic that's actually higher than the median wage.
In fact, one of the bigger problems with the US's healthcare system is that it's fragmented: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1234510323425652737 — 60% of Americans have some of the best healthcare in the world, and that includes Medicaid recipients, all of whom are in the bottom 20% in the US.
This is also why you need to look at total PPP adjusted consumption AFTER transfers and in-kind benefits, which is what the OECD data does.
Your link says charity given by individuals decreased while scraps thrown by rich people increases, thanks for defeating your own argument.
> the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta:
Which says wages are rising partly because the states are increasing their minimum wage. So you can thank the law not the employers for that.
> the majority of the variance in US's average life expectancy is attributable to lifestyle choices and cultural factors
Yes you claim that but when I asked you the reason, you dont know the answer and yet if the these hypothetical reasons are fixed it will magically fix the life expectancy. Do you see a flaw in your logic?
> A mother in the bottom 20% in the US would spend close to nothing
Is it nothing or close to nothing, it its close, what is it? Poor people and even middle class people atleast in Australia dont have to jump though all these hoops, the cost is nothing.
Is jumping though all these hoops the reason why US has the highest maternal mortality rate among the developed world.
Why would a nation whose poorest 20% are richer than average OECD people have the highest maternal mortality rate?
What? My link shows that charity is more than just "scraps from the rich". It doesn't defeat the argument at all. It means that it's a reliable source of transfers for the poor, and therefore an amount you need to account for when computing standard of living and consumption. The NBER does this in a systematic way.
> Which says wages are rising partly because the states are increasing their minimum wage. So you can thank the law not the employers for that.
Sure, nobody ever claimed that the increase in standard of living is SOLELY due to economic growth, just that economic growth is a necessary but not solely sufficient condition for it. The central question at hand is how prosperous the poorest in the US are, given its institutions and welfare systems — BOTH public and private. It's why OECD metrics account for taxes and transfers, because as you rightly point out, you can't ignore them.
> Yes you claim that but when I asked you the reason, you dont know the answer and yet if the these hypothetical reasons are fixed it will magically fix the life expectancy. Do you see a flaw in your logic?
No, what I claim is that the variance in life expectancy is measurably attributable to lifestyle and cultural factors. Therefore changing the culture and lifestyle can provably close the gap. What I don't know the answer to is why the culture is the way it is, or how best to change it. Why does the average American cook cheeseburgers and casserole and drink Coca-Cola? Why does the average Japanese eat vegetable rice, healthy omega-3 fish dishes, and drink tea? Why do first-generation immigrants eat healthier than middle-class white Americans? These are cultural questions that are harder to answer.
> Is it nothing or close to nothing, it its close, what is it? Poor people and even middle class people atleast in Australia dont have to jump though all these hoops, the cost is nothing.
It's "close to nothing" because there are still co-pays for visits, just like in Australia. It can even be "literally nothing" depending on the circumstances because, in addition to Medicaid, the poor qualify for other transfer programs that can be used to cover even the cost of co-pays.
You don't "jump through hoops" to qualify for Medicaid, you just have to show that your income is below a certain level. I myself have qualified for Medicaid when I started a company after college and had no income. If your argument is that we ought to make it easier for poor people to get welfare, I don't disagree, but it's a serious mischaracterization of the status quo to suggest that we're not already generously funding welfare for the poor.
> Why would a nation whose poorest 20% are richer than average OECD people have the highest maternal mortality rate?
Because the flaw in your statement is assuming that the mortality rate is concentrated among the poorest 20%. In fact the poorest 20% have some of the best healthcare in the US. The fundamental problem in America is that if you happen to not be one of: {below poverty, employed, old}, you slip through the cracks and have inadequate healthcare. THAT is the problem.
Per my linked source, 30% of Americans have poor quality insurance (gaps), and 10% are uninsured — but importantly, the bottom 20% do not intersect with that set because they qualify for Medicaid. But this isn't a "the poor in the US are worse off" problem, this is a "the healthcare system in the US is a byzantine mess" problem, and there are various ways to specifically fix that (and not just the one proposal you keep hearing about).