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Wealth is very hard to accurately measure and is impacted a lot by demographics (e.g. age distribution). Consumption is a better measure of how people actually live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

I disagree simply because expenditures are completely different for more socialist countries. Eg. Total healthcare expenditure per capita is well below the USA in Australia. Less than half in fact. https://onthewards.org/the-inside-scoop-part-one-a-compariso...

So that's $4500 a year more the average US citizen has in total expenditure that isn't some type of luxury good or indicator of a better life. It's just survival.

I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index

If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher.

> I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there.

I don't think it's worth it to get into an argument about which country is "better", except to say a lot of indexes are designed to advocate for the creator's goals rather than as a useful comparison. E.g. your linked ranking uses "the share of women holding seats in national Houses of Assembly". Is that really a useful comparison point for quality of life?

>If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher.

Yes but the point is that's one example. I'm not going to got through the full list but i can't think of one USA government provided service that's better quality or requires less private intervention compared to social democracies like Australia and it shows up in so many intangible ways. eg. little things like the Australian government provided online tax filing. In the USA people need to pay to file taxes online (sure paper is free but ugh what a hassle). More private toll roads in the USA. Public housing is more common per capita in Australia. Australias national broadband network (i still can't get fibre here in the USA but i had it in regional Australia), etc. Again i'm not going to keep going except to say that i've lived in both nations and it's really obvious.

In more socialist countries per capita spending can be seen as lower but the services are better despite no spending from consumers going to them. The spending comes from the government. You can't compare spending between the USA and Australia for this reason.

Online tax filing is free for everyone under the median income. Private toll roads may or may not be "more" common but they are certainly rare. Average internet speeds are twice Australia's. https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou...

Very odd to hear from someone who lived in both. I’ve lived in both as well.

> More private toll roads in the USA.

And more public. More roads period. The interstate highway system is one of the modern wonders of the world.

> Public housing is more common per capita in Australia.

I’m not sure if this is true, but I’d argue it’s not a good thing.

> Australias national broadband network (i still can't get fibre here in the USA but i had it in regional Australia), etc. Again i'm not going to keep going except to say that i've lived in both nations and it's really obvious.

This is an extremely strange one. Internet in Australia is so bad it’s painful. The national network is a joke.

Yikes. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is a VERY American perspective.

Consumption is the income and wealth that you end up using. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is the standard economic perspective, since it describes how much of society's goods and services one ends up using.

More simply, if you save then spend, wealth-based measures will rate you as better off than a person with higher income who just spends. That doesn't make sense.

A wealth measure will give a higher rating to someone who spends on assets than someone who spends on Fortnite skins. What it doesn't do is arbitrarily favor someone who lives in a HCOL area or in a country (sorry, the country) that forces individuals to spend their own money on things like health care.

Someone living in a HCOL area who happens to have bought their house before the price inflation era, would have a high wealth figure but unable to do anything with said wealth. Australia has high house prices.

This is confusing. If you save, you have more wealth. If you have more wealth, you are more resilient to hardships (economic, health, etc.) - a population of people with large savings accounts and low debt seems obviously better than a population that makes a ton of money but lives close to the wire or carries large debts

The problem though is that personal savings grows over time -- a nation full of young people with high incomes will eventually become a nation full of weathly old people, but if you were to compare the two nations, the yard stick matters.

edit: if you want to cook up some evidence, look at a scatter plot of some indicator of age (national average age?) vs national average wealth. I suspect, given the countries at the top of the list, you'll end up with a pretty good r.

Resilience is unnecessary in countries with a safety net. Are individuals in those countries who make the rational decision to save less somehow worse off than those who have to carry a large savings buffer to guard against misfortune?

>Resilience is unnecessary in countries with a safety net

Not entirely. Having a safety net might be the difference between having a home/food and being on the street but having savings and a safety net allows you to live your previous comfortable life while not working. If you have a healthy savings then you can afford to willingly leave your current job and have some time to yourself while you look for a better job.

Safety net usually come with caveats. Foodstamps are as their name suggests not general purpose dollars. Sometimes you have to perform tasks you don't want to do to benefit from the safety net.

Your own money can be used for whatever you want and no need to beg and justify before a government employee.

I think you're double counting the advantage for wealth if you consider resilience an advantage, but don't consider not spending money to be a disadvantage.

Keeping money reserved for hardships is a lot like having spent the money, since you can no longer use that money to increase your standard of living. If you put away $50,000 in case of job loss or health problems, you've bought resilience at the opportunity cost of $50,000 worth of something else. If you change your mind later and spend it, you just traded in your resilience for other goods and services. You have the benefit of resilience or the benefit of whatever else you might buy with that money, but not both at the same time.

When you look at consumption numbers for a country, they already include what people have spent to deal with hardships. Wealth, however, doesn't tell you how much in poverty someone had to live in order to save that wealth.

Insurance is a formal way of spending money on resilience. Insurance, though, has the advantage of pooling risk among a large number of people. You don't actually have to save up millions to be insured for millions in healthcare bills. Someone with excellent insurance but little savings can have both more resilience and a higher standard of living than someone who lives in poverty to save every penny, but doesn't spend on insurance.

> Measuring wellbeing by consumption is the standard economic perspective

Behavioural economics has long focused on more sensible sets of metrics.

And how would you measure it?

But median wealth per adult is okay?

It's not an American perspective; it's an economic perspective. The parent comment isn't talking about people's psychological wellbeing, but "how people actually live" (in terms of do they live in poverty or like rich people).

Wealth doesn't capture that. For example, you might have someone living in extreme poverty in Guatemala who has no electricity or running water, a small home with a mud floor, and eats mostly rice and beans and similar. If this person has no debt, they might have a very small but positive net worth. Meanwhile, you can have someone from America with negative net wealth living a middle class life. The Guatemalan might be spending the equivalent of $600 per year, while the American might be spending 50x that. Looking at spending better captures who is living in poverty.

Wealth can also fail to capture how the wealthy live. Warren Buffett is notoriously frugal. Looking at wealth, you'd find he's about 180,000x wealthier than the mean American adult. Yet he has one house which he bought for $31,500 in 1958, and apparently eats breakfast at McDonald's each morning for no more than $3.17. The vast majority of his wealth will be going to charity. Looking at his spending gives you a more accurate picture of how he lives than looking at his wealth.

We would need to see median consumption, rather than per capita, to compare to the wealth figures above. The US rates very highly in wealth per capita as well.

The consumption distribution is a lot more flat than income or wealth (~5x difference in consumption for bottom quintile vs top quintile compared to ~20x in income). You can see consumption broken down by income here[1]. One thing I’d point out is that the bottom quintile in the US has a higher consumption than the Australian average, although the Wikipedia numbers don’t quite measure the same thing so it’s not perfectly comparable. Also note this uses 2018 dollars rather than 2011 dollars.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/combined/decile.pdf

Does that take into account cost of living?

In America you can buy a gallon of milk for $1.50 at Walmart. In Australia (after some brief googling[0]) it's more like $4.50. Same with gas, video games, you name it, a lot of things seem to cost 2-4x more in Australia.

[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...

Yes, you probably want to look at the Purchasing Power Parity Median: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...

Or the household version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

Not quite that extreme. ~AUD$4 for the fnacy brand which is under USD$3. Less for the loss leader store brands.

Looks like 10% difference in cost of living by official figures but regardless the median wealth being so much higher isn't due to a few percent difference in cost of living or a small difference in average age as some suggested. Australia is objectively doing better on the wealth gap leading to a higher median (but not a higher mean). You can look at USA wealth historically too and see the USAs decline in median wealth over the years (but again mean wealth is doing fine). It all comes down to the thing we all know and have heard a lot. The wealth gap in the USA is increasing a lot. The lowest paid workers are now well into the poverty zone. The arguments against minimum wage are similar to the arguments for Asian clothing sweatshops.

Back in the days, when I saw Walmart fail in Germany, I had the impression the US isnt known for having cheap food.

In America you can also decide whether to be able to afford to pay rent or whether you'd like to not live in agony because having teeth is a luxury.

On an article about wages (not wealth), did you consider looking at median income per adult?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Median wealth says absolutely nothing except how many homeowners you have and to what extent the housing market is out of control.

The metric that actually reflects people's lives is consumption adjusted for purchasing power. Disposable income (again, adjusted for purchasing power) is useful as well.

> having to live off food stamps as is common for wallmart workers for example is just horrendous.

Why is using food stamps horrendous?

I think the point is "The pay is so bad, you qualify for welfare while working."

I live in Aus also, and there are people here who work full-time and still need to avail themselves of local charities, for food boxes and such, but the relative size of that demographic seems to be smaller here compared to the US.

It's a clear indicator that the wage is below survival levels.

> But i believe we should start doing this for US companies as well.

We can "call out" whatever you want. People vote with their dollar. Target, Walmart, cheap resellers on AliExpress/Amazon are "winning" every day because the most important thing most consumers care about is rock bottom price. I don't think "calling out" will do much other than virtue signal.

Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available.

That said, there are a ton of areas where we still have choice. In those cases, people do need to become more aware of the impact of their purchasing decisions - but in those cases I agree with you: making different decisions is the actual required action.

> Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available.

Aside from actual monopolies (utilities, etc) what is one example of having no choice? Whenever I hear this argument, it’s not that there’s no choice, it’s that there’s no cheap, convenient alternative...hence Walmart’s domination. It’s like people never stop to ask why Walmart is so successful: people would rather have abundant selection at low prices rather than support their local mom and pop shop.

Take a look into how Dollar General is actively displacing and destroying local grocery opportunities in small towns: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/when-the-...

> We can "call out" whatever you want. People vote with their dollar. Target, Walmart, cheap resellers on AliExpress/Amazon are "winning" every day because the most important thing most consumers care about is rock bottom price. I don't think "calling out" will do much other than virtue signal.

People also vote with their votes. If voting with dollars was the only thing that counted, we'd still have rivers so polluted they'd regularly catch on fire (see http://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire).

All all "voting with dollars" does is sum up an unfathomable number of myopic, usually short-term decisions. Sometimes the overall result is counter-intuitively brilliant, but other times the terrible result of myopia magnified.

You can't vote with a dollar you don't have. You can't vote for something that's simply not on the ballot.

Many can only afford to shop at those places, or they're the only stores that provides certain classes of necessities within the travel time constraints imposed by their work (multiple minimum wage jobs) and home schedule (they often are obligated to bear the burdens of assisting disabled, elderly, or young members of family or social groups).