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Comment by viro | Hacker News Reader

As they live the life of the global 1%.

I mean; stats wise, maybe. But many wage/costs are relative and proportional and not everybody in USA is equal.

I was born in a developing country and lived through a brutal civil war; and there are certainly millions of people in USA, working hard, but staying poor, whose quality of life is comparable in various categories in terms of suffering. You can fall through cracks in a very cracked system very easily. It's not like all 330mil Americans have it great.

> It's not like all 330mil Americans have it great.

But for the most part it’s pretty nice

How many of those 330mil would immigrate to a developing country with a brutal civil war?

You are right that the US is better than a “developing country with a brutal civil war”. That isn’t a very high bar though.

The United States has the highest Immigration rate in the world... aka the most desirable place to live in the world.

I feel that statement gets tricky.

Applicants vs approved, per population or absolute, documented vs undocumented, etc.

I imagine that a very large country with more liberal immigration policy will by default have more absolute immigrants than a small country with closed door policy - regardless of which one is more desirable to live.

Note further: "In 2019, with 11 percent of the United States’ population, Canada receives 32 percent of the number of legal immigrants that of the United States receives."

https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-multi-year-immigration-pla...

or finally Wikipedia, where USA isn't in the top 20 per-population immigration rate, no matter the source you check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

Conclusion - that statement holds minimum to no liquid water

Those two statements are not necessarily correlated. The worse your neighbour countries are, the more eager people are to immigrate to any nearby country that is less bad. The US is definitely more desirable than Mexico. But that doesn’t prove that the US is more decidable than other non-developing countries. I was offered a green card and 6 digit salary to move to the US. I chose to move to Australia instead. That was a great move.

That very much depends on who you’re talking about. Top quintile of American society? Sure. Bottom quintile of American society? Definitely not. America is a pretty tough place to be poor in, and I think calling the working poor in America “the global 1%” is a pretty hard to defend statement.

>"To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. "

.... The median average salary for workers in the United States is $49,764 per year.

What quintile do you think the median salary is in? Hint: it’s not the bottom one.

The bottom quintile of US households made anywhere between $0 and $25,600 in 2018, with the mean being $13,258. All of these numbers are well outside “global 1%” range you quoted.

And that’s before we begin to adjust for cost of living, because you can’t just compare income without considering the cost of food, housing, health care, and transit.

You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.

> You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.

Milanovic's figures do account for overall purchasing power. It would be pretty amateurish of an economist not to.

The distribution of the price level among verticals is a separate question though, and it's possible that it's suboptimally skewed in the US

And in many of those countries expensive things like cars and smartphones are usually discretionary items, not absolutely or near-absolutely necessary to get and keep a job, pay taxes, get your children to school and so on.

> You aren't accounting for purchasing power.

Which is pretty easy to account for if one is being serious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

And Milanovic does so in his figures. It's "unserious" (and bizarre) to assume that an economist failed to make this adjustment, and then claim that it's super easy to do so; the latter statement should mean that your baseline assumption is that PPP adjustment was performed.

The median salary tells you nothing about impoverished Americans. 20th percentile household income in the USA in 2018 was $25k. Comparing incomes between countries as straightforwardly as this ignores differences in cost of living, too.

That's not possible. There are 7.5 bullion people in the world, so 1% is 75 million people. Ipso facto it's impossible for most people in the US to be the one percent because 170 million is more than 75 million.

A wage slave is a wage slave, it doesn't matter if you have a tesla and a 75" oled TV if you're going to work all your life you're just as good as having a 20 years old Ford and a 32" tv.

what are you yipping about? Every economic system requires working.

Just saying that the "1%" doesn't matter much when it's based on bs metrics. Quality of life != how much you can consume

lol, Look at what most Americans complain about when it comes to Quality of life... Most of it is related to how much they can consume.

This is proof that being in the 1% doesn't mean shit in overall happiness if you're basing it on purely materialistic metrics. They're in the top 1% worldwide and still complain

Sure. Go ahead and tell the homeless or poor working Americans how lucky they are to live in a wealthy country. I am sure they will appreciate it.

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