The reality is that the US is a harsh place to live. Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.
It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.
There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
The #1 rate of incarceration (by far):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
The #1 healthcare costs (by far):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h...
There are a lot of problems here that you are glossing over.
You aren't going to get a clear picture by cherry picking statistics that support your conclusion. You need to contextualize. Of course, if your goal isn't to get a clear, honest picture then we're aiming for different things and we may as well part ways now.
EDIT: From wikipedia, regarding measures of inequality:
> Gini coefficients are simple, and this simplicity can lead to oversights and can confuse the comparison of different populations; for example, while both Bangladesh (per capita income of $1,693) and the Netherlands (per capita income of $42,183) had an income Gini coefficient of 0.31 in 2010,[53] the quality of life, economic opportunity and absolute income in these countries are very different, i.e. countries may have identical Gini coefficients, but differ greatly in wealth.
In short, your claim is too subjective to be useful and is directly contradicted by multiple metrics.
Maybe you're arguing that I have no way of knowing that poorer people would be envious of richer people; fair enough, "envious" was figurative language on my part.
- Rate of incarceration may also mean that USA does a good job of imparting justice / catch criminals.
- Healthcare costs looks like an issue, but socialized systems also have their problems (bad quality, wrong economic incentives for doctors to improve their practice, etc.)
The rate of incarceration is largely due to the war on drugs. There’s nothing just about it.
I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
I actually favor a stronger social safety net and I agree that we need to reign in inequality (because an egalitarian society of very wealthy people and very poor people strikes me as completely infeasible in the same way that a prosperous socialist or communist country is completely infeasible), but that will almost certainly mean the professional class is worse-off. Reasoning soberly about tradeoffs is imperative IMO.
Yes, and I have! What I missed most when not living in the US:
* variety of everything
* large appliances
What I missed least:
* driving/car culture
* overwork
So sadly I found I was actually a typical “consumer” who wants things that are pretty crappy for the environment (except for the car thing). I was fine with getting paid less than I would in the US because as a senior technologist, I was making way more than most of the locals and the economy was tuned to their pay.