Hacker News Reader

Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Well, only if the total amount of wealth in the US is equivalent to the EU does your second statement follow.

Obviously this is not the end alm be all of how good life is, but there are numerous studies indicating the average of goods and services provided to the poorest 20% in the US is higher than the amount of goods and services provided to the median EU citizen.

View on HN

Link those numerous studies, sounds like BS

https://mises.org/wire/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...

Here's one analysis, but there are others. I would prefer a less conservative source.

When the Mises Institute publishes articles arguing that "drunk drivers cause accidents but so do sober drivers, and many drunk drivers cause no accidents at all," and therefore drunk driving should not be outlawed, it's hard to take this type of source seriously [1]. Note that the article above was published by the institute's founder.

[1] https://mises.org/library/legalize-drunk-driving

I hear what you are saying, although I would prefer an engagement on the merits of the specific points.

That said, it is of course possible I overstated my case - the provenance of sources I am finding is not as strong as I would have expected.

I feel that attacking the credibility of a source is fair game. I don't expect someone to refute every single point of an argument if the central thesis of the argument is erroneous.

How did we jump from attacking the credibility of a source to the central thesis of the argument being erroneous? I'm missing the part where that was shown.

The thrust of the article [1] is that the income defined as "Poverty Level" (60% of disposable income), is higher in the US than in many European countries. This definition is based on disposable income, which does not account for spending on childcare, healthcare, housing, etc., many of which are heavily subsidized, or simply less expensive in these European countries that are being compared to the United States.

[1] https://mises.org/wire/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...

Note: I appreciate your calm responses and engagement of the arguments. I concede that I should have included some refutation or concession based on the merits of the article themselves in my original reply.

Edit: to add another source refuting the Mises thesis, stating that income inequality is highest in the US among G-7 countries (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...)

That's not an analysis, that's a polemic.

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

Even if they got the numbers right, which I doubt, they completely miss that US income has to pay for a lot more than in most of Europe, healthcare and education just as the most prominent examples, also lack of public transit etc.

And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.

if you read the article, you would see that they account for social service transfers.

> And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.

mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but that is intense material deprivation relative to latter 20th century US.

> mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but that is intense material deprivation relative to latter 20th century US.

Take a tour of rural Alabama or Appalachia today and you will see plenty of extreme poverty like that. We have a whole industry of NGOs and bin manufacturers [1] just to supply them with used clothes and shoes, massive subsidies to provide them with internet and electricity, and so on.

Once you get out of the big cities, especially in "fly over" states, the poverty in the US can be downright staggering.

[1] https://d2jald4mo73t7v.cloudfront.net/banners/_1200x630_crop...

> they account for social service transfers

They claim to account for them. Whether they actually did so in any way that makes sense is not documented. Given the credibility of the source... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, their claim is "social benefits paid to households". That wording strongly suggests that they only took into account those social benefits that result in a payment, of money, from the government to the households, such as social security payments or unemployment benefits.

Which would miss the vast majority of benefits, including all the ones I mentioned, because those benefits don't work that way.

One should probably account for a margin of error as well as different measurement standards as well as timing differences, but by Europe and the US's own governments, Europe has double the poverty rate of the US:

- Europe: 21.7% (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)

- US: 11.6% (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo...)

So a very very generous adjustment would put them at roughly similar poverty rates?

USA's poverty threshold is significantly lower that Europe's. Comparing against median income, of course.

So I would assume poverty rates are roughly similar, indeed.

OECD poverty rate is 60% median income.

Post-transfer median income is higher in the US than in Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com