Hacker News Reader

> 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.