Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

US has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world yet:

- it's behind Poland and Lebanon or Barbados for life expectancy

- it's behind Poland or Morocco for safety

- is behind Poland or Slovenia or Turkey for work-life balance

- is middle of the pack for environment (despite its gigantic size most people live in so and so unhealthy places)

- is below average for civic engagement

- is middle of the pack for social mobility

- somehow US is among the highest in education rankings globally, something I have a hard time believing considering the emphasis on standardized tests and overall simplicity of US curricula (I guess research gets conflated with education, but ranking high schoolers for their math proficiency or functional literacy gets US middle of the pack)

- is among the highest ranking for depression and other mental illnesses

The best ranking countries in the world in all of those are...European social democratic countries that have never put GDP growth over social or environmental matters.

Facts are that being born in LA and coming from a high GDP family likely won't give you a better life by most metrics than being born in Latvia. You're not gonna be happier nor healthier nor more fulfilled.

And yet, there is no significant migration from the US to the European social democratic countries. Why not? Latvian population shrunk by a quarter since 1990.

I am genuinely curious, as this often comes up in these discussion. Often, an argument would be that moving away from family and friends to a country where you do not speak the language is difficult. And yet, millions of people move to the US, which is a lot more difficult. So why not?

> And yet, there is no significant migration from the US to the European social democratic countries.

The reverse is also true. There isn't really a huge migration from Sweden or Switzerland to the US.

> And yet, millions of people move to the US, which is a lot more difficult.

We live in a society and world where you're brainwashed since your birth into thinking that money is the most important thing in the world. Thus people that already make good money move to the other side of the world (say to Silicon Valley) because they will make much more money there.

Then they find they aren't necessarily living a better life, just that they can afford more things.

I've been in places and cultures where there isn't such an emphasis on money and material things, like in central asia, and I think people there live much happier lives than most of us in high income countries do.

What you say is completely true. But you compare rich countries with other rich countries, and you are looking at exceptions rather than the trend. Morocco, the poorest country you've chosen, is richer than India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe...

Once you get past $20k/yr GDP per capita, there's indeed limited additional benefit (there are diminishing returns). Which country is ahead of which other is essentially random. It depends on other factors, not GDP.

But if look at the scenarios for Middle East and Africa, it would take roughly 10 years longer for the Green Road scenario to get to $20k/yr, compared to the Highway.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios?facet=no...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com