The U.S. Is Lagging Behind Many Rich Countries. These Charts Show Why
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Companies and private moguls wont create good infrastructure out of charity, and what little they will create, it will be created to be milked as much as possible, and milked as much as possible. Think cost-cutting and short/mid-term profit, not vision and future thinking.
And having the state "incentivizing" private companies to build such infrastructure (paying, cutting taxes, letting them reap the profits, create oligopoliges, etc), as opposed to build it itself or pay companies to do it (but design, control, and run it as a public infrastructure) is even worse... Kind of like why Korea or some such countries have the fastest internet on the world, and places like New York despite 10+ million densely packed citizens don't, after trillions given from the state to telcos...
How is that meaningfully different to what NYC and NY have been doing themselves with regards to infrastructure? Crossing the George Washington Bridge costs $10.50. There's so much congestion all throughout but legislatures are happy to sit on the laurels of infrastructure investments many decades ago instead of aggressively building more, thus deepening income inequality.
There's a great analysis of transportation infrastructure costs that came out in the New Yorker, as part of a story on the new head of the NYMTA, Andy Byford (Bynum?). The bottomline is that we can't blame any specific political section, like saying that it's all the unions' fault, or all because we regulate the environment too much. Other OECD countries have the same concerns, in terms of protecting worker safety and the environment. But in the US, the number of competing groups has gotten past some critical point that it's making the whole system move way too slowly.
Merely not having private interests build them is not enough - it's just the second, different, point I've made.
I'd like to see an accurate correlative model that demonstrates high correlations within the US to see what the winning strategy is.
Having open eyes and a point of view trumps data -- it's just difficult (and of course you can think you've achieved that when you haven't).
Less easy to do so for roads to working class neighborhoods, school districts in Mississippi, and so on...
Where I'm from is a monument to private works. There are signs showing what areas looked like through the decades, and while barren for most of it, great parks and buildings once existed for the local wealthy who razed swathes of the city rather than allow them to be converted to public use by blacks and the poor.
The names of the neighborhoods are the only remains of those times. Parks and Halls and Clubs downtown sit with no parks or halls or clubs nearby them, roads torn up or blockades built to cordone off access.
One park that the rich didn't eat is nice, but I wouldn't run out to put any utilities or infrastructure in their hands because of it.
"The share of Americans in unions has plummeted from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to about 10 percent today. The rate is even lower — about 6.2 percent — for private-sector workers. The decline has happened largely because employers have become more aggressive about keeping out unions and government policy has made it easier for them to do so. The decline in unionization is one reason that the share of total national income flowing to corporate profits has risen — and the share going to worker pay has declined. The trend is starker in the U.S. than in Europe."
Another thought on unions is that it doesn’t look at qualitative differences between US and E.U. unions. For example US unions tend to protect drunk members from punishment. EU unions don’t (at least not on the same scale as the US). Did unions decline due to power struggles or because they were worthless and workers though they’d fair better on their own. All the article says is “here’s a graph” and “trust me”.
For example, my pet theory on wealth inequality is that it is largely attributable to the rise of the "investor class" after Bretton Woods was invalidated and your average mom and pop could no longer grow, or even maintain their wealth by simply saving cash [0][1].
[0] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
In my opinion, the decline in worker unions has been largely due to the relocation of factories abroad.
A nation without its own manufacturing based and non-existant import protections will of course lose union jobs.
Europe has high import tariffs that protect their own agriculture and manufacturing base (as well as raise the cost of goods). ...but that's the trade off.
Blaming some sort of corporate culture seems agenda-driven speculation.
The EU has a weighted import tariff of 1.79% vs 1.66% in the US. For comparison, China is at 3.83% and Japan at 2.51%. Canada, New Zealand and Australia are all lower than the US, at 1.52%, 1.18%, and 1.27% respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...
This is mostly 2017 data, which means the recent US-China tariff war could very well have resulted in the US having a higher weighted import tariff than the EU by now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_D...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/whats-w...
e.g. Yes, the U.S. does spend a large GDP share on health care; and you can make legitimately make the argument that it gets poor value. However, the single comparandum relied on is overall life expectancy.
Union membership dropped from over 30% in the early 1950s to about 12% by 2000, during which time the U.S. labor share was pretty much range-bound - but the article ignores that and simply asserts that the change in union membership is the cause.
That chart on "hours worked per year" is based on OECD data published with the following health warning: "the data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation" ... emphasis is mine.
Original source here: https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
Like CEO pay ratio. How does that in anyway correlate to a better life. if you look at gdp per capita growth in places like germany who have only grown from 45k to 47k since 2008. The US grew from 45k to 62k. Thats an insane jump and its lead is getting bigger not smaller..
The US also has more CEO per capita, more startups per capita, more unicorns per capita which is a more apt reason CEO pay is higher. The CEO in the US are generally better and their companies make more money than European counterpart especially startups.
You can apply this to shares of economy going to workers pay too. Is the US pie just bigger. If so why does share matter.
Whats the annual average wage? If the minimum wage is low but the average wage is high which is is why does it matter where the bottom is.
Some of this is correct like incarnation rate, but a lot of seems to point to where other first world countries have got it wrong when you look at the results you really care about.
I think the issue is that values in those different countries are very different.
Theres much less freedom in terms of housing and income in Germany which makes it easier to have equality of outcome. By the very definition of a free society the free-er you are to succeed, the free-er you are to fail and to the sadness of most people, the distribution of success is a pareto distribution and not a normal distribution .
The usually doesn't want to do this mostly because 1. limiting freedom comes with Germany's very obvious downside. 2. The belief of a lot of Americans is a Government of the US scale typically implements those things poorly. We have states that would comparable but in general the idea is the bigger the governmental body the dumber it and simpler their tasks need to be so that it can't mess it up.
Germans would not be any better off if they each got an extra 20k/year and their health care and housing costs were also 20k/year higher. This is the core flaw of GDP, well-known among economists since GDP was invented. It does not measure well being.
Also I don't think dismissing something that differs from your ideas is a good way of going about things. Regardless if it is right or not theres a reason why those idea subsist. I don't think that there is a mistake that cultures with both right and left ideas seem to thrive. I don't think our ancestors were dumb
I did a Google search for "germany gdp per capita 2008" and Google actually displays a graph of gdp per capita in USD since 1970 comparing the US, Germany, and some other country.
The US is a smooth line that hiccups in 2008, at the same time German gdp per capita spikes. So that's an interesting year to pick as the point of comparison.
But I'm also intrigued by what doing the comparison in USD appears to show. Smooth, managed growth for the US. Weird, jolty growth for Germany. This seems likely to be an artifact of the fact that US dollar-denominated GDP is fully controlled by the US, while German dollar-denominated GDP is controlled by, among other things, the exchange rate between dollars and Euros. (Or, if you go back far enough, dollars and deutschmarks.)
This actually makes me think that you'd get a better picture of what's going on by comparing them in gold or some other commodity.
If you adjust PPP and inflation with your chosen starting point (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?end=2...), Germany grew from 47.6k to 53.7k USD (+13%), while the US grew from 55.4k to 61.5k USD (+11%) until 2018 (which is the latest endpoint and makes an even decade).
But why not look another decade back further (1998-2018) (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?end=2...): Germany (+115%), US (+91%).
Also from 1998 is bit hard cause germany was moving from a way lower base. Germany just became a whole country in 1990. The east germans had to do with a lot of that growth because there was basically so much to improve.
In the US, you can't always get what you need (healthcare, decent job, etc.), but if you try sometimes, you might just get what you want (a big screen TV, iPhone, etc.).
A graph that start at zero
Italy USA
0 * *
Italy USA
* *They throw a lot of numbers around, but they don't establish causality anywhere.
One simple way of saying this is that the US is a much bigger, more diverse, country than at least some of the countries it gets compared to. So the comparisons are not entirely "fair."
I'd be interested to see a comparison of the individual (US) states interspersed with the OECD countries - at least some states might break out and compete with the higher echelon of OECD countries on some of these metrics.
What is "fairer" is to compare the US to itself, across generations. The work that Robert Gordon did in this regard is extremely powerful, showing how, post-1970, the US has not been able to maintain various economic equity indicators. As someone else commented, this could be attributed to a shift in buying power from the "consumer class" to the "investor class," a shift that, contrary to the myth of "trickle down economics" does not lead to more accumulation of capital. Instead, it tends to flow to financial assets and international investment which don't raise domestic demand as much as if you had put that money into individual paychecks.
Then there's the gradual decline in new firm formation as well, which adds to this mess - again, this is a comparison within the US, and is "fairer" in assessing what's going wrong.
What's interesting is that no one's disputing the premise, that time/money = political power. That's deeply anti-democratic, but here we are.
It doesn't really establish that, since the causality between these data points is entirely speculation.