I suspect the US is much more of a target because there's many, many more overseas criminals that speak English than German.
Due to how ILECs and CLECs (incumbent/parent phone companies who own the infrastructure and then wholesalers/resellers who operate on top of them due to competition laws) integrate, how they share and allocate phone number prefixes and lists (this whole process alone is mind-blowingly arcane), and how all phone companies cooperate internationally, it's extremely hard - almost impossible - for them to identify and block these kinds of nuisance calls in real-time.
And don't get me wrong, they could do it.. But the amount of coordination and cooperation that would be required is a non-starter because most phone companies don't talk to each other enough to get this kind of initiative off the ground, even if the money and motivation was there.
Edit: Remember that most (Western) phone companies are 100-year-old institutions, and many still have 50+ year-old infrastructure that runs the underlying systems, and that they can't just throw that away and start over, due to how deeply integrated they are in the public/private communication infrastructure of society, and many of their modern systems are really just shims built on top of that older tech.
Unintended consequences are rampant.
Breaking up AT&T into regional bell operating companies[1] (the ILEC thing) was a very stupid decision in hindsight. I don't know what actually happened. Did AT&T simply have smarter people than the US Government did?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
[0]https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than...
Although this is in 2010, during the crisis, it would suggest a big difference in what I thought the outcome of such a study would be.
This doesn't include savings, it seems. Which are mandatory here.
* redefines poverty multiple times and then comes to the surprising conclusion that the results differ from the NY Times article
* uses consumption in USD as a measure, which is highly problematic, because a) different countries have different purchasing power, which is is the reason almost noone in poverty research compares international poverty using gross consumption b) consumption heavily reflects economic inefficency (e.g. health care costs: If a say Danish poor gets her broken arm fixed for free, she would consume 0$ according to this figure, while achieving the same quality of life out of it)
The usual threshold for poverty (for good reasons) is 50 or 60% of the median income in a country. Which the NY Times article used.
If you think half to 40% of people in the Congo are not in poverty you are delusional
But the usual measure of relative local wealth, works pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Relative_poverty
You are free to find that delusional, but if you want to partake in the scientific discourse about poverty, it would be advantageous if you don't redefine the core concept.
"delusion: an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder."
It is quite delusional to create new metrics on poverty because ones based on income or consumption don't get you to the result you like.
I mean, really, take a step back and consider these two possibilities:
a) Thousands of researchers have researched the topic for decades, and no one ever considered it problematic to directly compare the poverty in Congo and the US using the same metric. But finally, after als these decades, during a few seconds of flying over a blog link, commenter fuzz4lyfe on hn finds the error and renders decades of research obsolete.
b) You err.
What is more probable?