In USA, GDP includes the explosion of numbers of hospital admin staffers, energy prices doubled, and production of munitions which are given to Europe. That GDP does not increase my quality of life.
> For years, economists have defined the economic health of a country by its gross domestic product. Trouble is, every time a forest falls, the GDP goes up. With every oil spill, the GDP goes up. Every time a cancer patient is diagnosed, the GDP goes up. Is this how we measure economic progress? Economists must learn to subtract.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
This isn't totally farfetched: in some countries if you own your house you pay tax on the rent you would have paid to yourself [0]. Taxing someone for feeding or educating himself seems like a small and natural next step.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech#The_...
Complaining about this fact is as productive as complainig about gravity: if only we could float around effortlessly, imagine how much we would save on bridges and roads and fuel!
It can still be argued that it's worth the expenditure. But the cost should be weighted against the alternatives. Neither Russia or China can be said to threaten the US with their military, except with nuclear weapons, but no defence budget protects against those.
Also, the US Navy protects vital global sea lanes that benefit US trade.
Also:
> Neither Russia or China can be said to threaten the US with their military
China is arming up at a huge pace, even outside of nukes.
No one suggested that it isn't beneficial.
What I said is that the benefit has to be weighted against the alternative benefits.
> China is arming up at a huge pace, even outside of nukes.
I'd argue that one large reason they're doing so is the threat they perceive themselves to be under from the large US military.
Don't fall into that trap.
That sounds like a difficult position to maintain...
Are you from China?
They don't have a real need for a bigger army, they could for sure defend themselves against any neighbor, even India and Russia, with "just" the military from 20 years ago.
what?!? what do missile defense systems do then? nothing?
An article I picked at random:
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/no-us-missile-defense-sy...
To strive for peace is not near sighted, it is the only way forward.
You can’t prove that regional conflicts would erupt should the US become more isolationist but any history book should quickly show you human’s propensity for war.
It also turns out that human’s tend not to outright attack foes that will immediately decimate them.
The USAF is the greatest stabilizer this world has as far as I can tell, missteps and outright awful moves like Iraq taken into account in this calculation.
Both the US and Russia have used their weapons to decimate other economies. It is very hard for us to prove or disprove your point.
Americans don't even know what genuine "national defense" feels like. Instead, we have a world-class propaganda complex dedicated to rationalizing our unnecessary overseas military adventures and proxy wars.
The idea that blowing up a government or tribe in Africa or Asia to open up resource extraction (natural or financial) for a Western MNC will benefit the "freedom" of the average American is totally absurd.
I think it glosses over too much complexity to simply state that, because part (not all! Geography is the other part) of the reason why we are so secure is that people know that we have that strong military. If the US were known as a soft target, who had neither the will nor the means to defend itself, we would probably see other actors much more willing to do things to us, such as piracy, etc.
There's an in-between the US and Somalia when it comes to control of territory.
We spend far more than we need to, and Eisenhower is 100% correct in the things we are giving up when we overspend on military.
I'm curious what you know about Eisenhower and his career — it's hard to imagine anyone in the past century whose background and experience made him less myopic than he.
Do you think that Eisenhower, a professional soldier and 5 star general, doesn't understand that? You're not understanding / misrepresenting what he is saying in that quote. It's about the cost of a military and how it has to be balanced against the productive and social needs of a country. A country that is grossly over-spending on the military, as Eisenhower perceived it already back then, and particularly in the case of the US, when that military is used for force and power projection, not defence, is strangling the society that it pretends to protect. This has been the history of the US over at least the last 50 years (when Eisenhower made this fore-warning speech).
But that, while possibly more important than what I'm about to say, is not what I really did want to say. Which is --)
Eisenhower uses a phrase of considerable rhetorical power here --
> those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
-- because he is essentially quoting the Beatitudes, and anyone who is familiar with them will fill in the rest.
Slightly less powerful to me (because it seems to equally reference William Jennings Bryan), but still very strong is
> humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
which is again extremely Christian imagery.
I'm not sure these phrases resonate so strongly with people today, but in those days they went straight to the heart of the question: What is it that is good?
I also really like the sentence,
> This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
because it focuses on the dichotomy of life vs. death, which again I think is very important. One could go in very positive green directions also from here. Some adjacent words would be: flourishing, abundant, fertile, growing. Frankly pagan things.
And, things that our economic metrics again tend to discount.
Yes, obviously so! Diagnosing cancer early is one of the best ways to save someone from it. The cancer is there anyway, it's a natural occurrence. The economic activity that leads to and follows a cancer diagnosis is what economists call wealth: the things we do for each other than make each side mutually better off.
All the examples are like that. Nobody wants oil to spill, but accidents are a fact of life. The GDP created by mopping it up on the other hand leads to a cleaner environment, which is another form of wealth.
> smoothly transporting oil without incident makes less GDP than spilling it.
Oil creates huge economic activity when used. It does no good spread over the ocean. The cleanup generates activity, but it's clearly far better for GDP to smoothly transport oil around than constantly lose it, if only because ships constantly sinking would cause people to transport things way less and so markets would be less efficient, yielding less wealth.
I'm surprised at the number of people who are confidently arguing against mrb - they're exactly correct here. The point of PPP adjustments is to factor out the effect of having a strong currency, and the USD's status as reserve currency is exactly why the US GDP has been overtaking the EU. Adjust for what a dollar actually buys you domestically and the picture is far more muddled.
USD was the reserve currency in the 90s and mid 2000s. Back then the Euro was very strong and some large European countries were close to overtaking US in GDP per capita.
The last 10 years have more or less been a lost decade in most of Western Europe because (amongst other things) it almost entirely missed out on the tech boom.
I agree. As I said in my first post: "prices of goods [eg. healthcare] are inflated in the US compared to similar goods in the EU". So concretely, if healthcare prices increase in the US, but remain constant in the EU, this would increase the PPP GDP of the EU.
What I meant to write is: if the PPP GDP increases in the EU faster than in the US, with all else being equal (eg. stable population) it would imply the standard of living is increasing faster in the EU than in the US.
> What I meant to write is: if the PPP GDP increases in the EU faster than in the US, with all else being equal (eg. stable population) it would imply the standard of living is increasing faster in the EU than in the US.
No it doesn’t mean anything of the sort in fact high nominal GDP to GDP PPP ratio usually indicates a low standard of living and a developing economy the Eurozone is an anomaly in this regard mainly due to its developed infrastructure and social institutions.
And don’t forget that your GDP PPP can be twice that another county whilst your median income is can be 10 times lower.
Median income per capita adjusted for PPP would be a better albeit an imperfect measurement of it since the standard of living is dependent on so many other things.
In which case there are only 4 countries which have higher median income PPP than the US, UAE, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway.
AIC/household final consumption expenditure is another good indicator for standard of living and wealth in which case the US is #1.
For a tiny banking nation or petrostate to be rich is unsurprising.
But when it's half a continent, the world really ought to take out their notebooks and go into full copycat mode - at least as far as economic policy and attitudes are concerned.
> As luck would have it, the US achieved that right after conquering Iraq
Yes? A whole of of things happened back. I’m really not sure what are you implying here? Did they secretly ship Iraqi oil to the US and pretend it was extracted there?
> What petrostate should we liberate to becone self-sufficient
Uhm.. Libya? Or did everyone already forget that?
Yes, of oil and gas, and they're not producing as much as they could, for environmental reasons. They're holding off on production.
> And I think they're quite environmentally conscious.
They are, they could produce more.
Similar story for the UK and the Netherlands with North Sea gas.
> Also isn't Germany burning coal at record rates right now?
Not record rates, standard rates and declining very slowly (2023 is actually better than 2022, shown here):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...
They did mess up the transition with the early decommissioning of nuclear power plants, corruption is probably to blame.
That being said, the policy of austerity implemented during the Euro crisis was pretty catastrophic and arrested growth prospects for a whole generation.
It was an austerity policy in name only given government debts have only continued to increase since then. There's a demonstrated correlation between high government debt and lower growth.
Folks, please leave your notebook in your bag and search elsewhere for a role model.
There’s plenty that’s wrong with America, but there’s no other country within the same order of magnitude of scale (or, hell, expand that to either a population of 50+ million or an order of magnitude greater, even) that has long term prospects as promising as the United States.
China’s on the verge of demographic collapse. Europe, as much as I love to visit and would probably enjoy living there, is more or less the definition of sclerotic. Every other country that excels at both human and economic development is too small to move the needle. Yet the United States remains, overall, a pretty darn good place to live and a magnet for talent and capital all over the world (to say nothing of its own beyond-bountiful resources).
Just off the top of my head, I guess my short list would look something like this. I grant some, maybe all, of these have drawbacks, but these are the factors that I personally value and what I would miss by moving to any of the other places I’ve visited or of which I’m aware that seem like delightful places to live. 1. The sheer number of incredibly unique large cities (and the correlating lack of a single city that dominates national culture)
2. The ethos of individualism
3. The national park system
4. The sheer amount of diversity (racial, ethnic, national origin, religious, regional, etc.)
5. My personal access to, and quality of, healthcare (I grant that this is highly, highly subjective)
6. Other Americans (believe it or not lol)
7. Higher educational system
8. Economic dynamism and opportunity
9. Our foundational documents and subsequent amendments/improvements thereto
10. Our national tendency to do the right thing (after, of course, exhausting all other courses of action)
11. Approximately 10 trillion different regional cuisines (have you seen the number of strongly held opinions about different ways to smoke and serve meat?)
12. Every type of natural beauty imaginable
Not saying we have a monopoly on any of these! But I like where I live and think it’s a pretty cool place.
- In general, GDP PPP per capita correlates pretty well with quality-of-life.
- In the case of US versus EU, it doesn't for this precise reason.
The amount of GDP I need to be happy is decent food, housing, education, basic entertainment (e.g. a nice park with a free concert, or a pleasant beach), and medical.
I get all of those in the (lower-income) EU country I normally visit, cheaply, and without much stress. $10k / year provides an adequate quality-of-life. That's not hard to make there, so people pick the careers they want. In the (high cost-of-living) area I spend time in the US, one needs around $150-200k / year to be stress-free. People do work like programming, biotech, law, finance, etc. to make it here.
Are you, like, talking about the cost of a gallon of gas or something? Because I can cherry pick whatever numbers you like to craft a reductive substance-free assertion about the state of the US energy production and distribution system.
No argument on the hospital admins, tho (although it’s nice to have at least one in your social circle, so they can get you in with the top tier actual practitioners).
Unless you have studies to back this up, I'd drop the waiting time argument.
Anecdotally I have to await much longer than my colleagues in the US (same field, same company) to see a specialist (months vs weeks). Also, the my public insurance doesn't cover my physiotherapy for my back pain, while the insurance my US colleagues get through their employer does.
>Unless you have studies to back this up, I'd drop the waiting time argument.
Maybe you should drop it until you can provide any kind of argument or evidence, because you wrote some words but said nothing of value.
Neither have you.
My anecdotes contradict yours.
I'll just drop this since I've seen your other comment about inequality where I literally provided numbers and you disagreed without providing any counter-data.
Let's call this a day and move on.
Which anecdotes? You haven't even provided anecdote just baseless disagreement statements lol.
Might as well just plug your ears with your fingers and yell "lalalala I can't hear you lalalala" or just fart and call that an argument.
BTW, i did provide a source in the inequality comment. Check again.
Also how else do you want to measure waiting times in my country vs the US except comparing my experiences with the people I know living there on similar jobs? It's not like my government made statistics against the US health system to compare so comparing with my work colleagues from the US is the best I can do. You're just being contrarian for the sake of trolling.
Please provide some information if you disagree ,even anecdotes, because otherwise you're wasting everyone's time or you enjoy trolling.
https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/healthcare-wait-times...
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....
Let's not glamorize the American system just because the European system is struggling in its own way.
It sure as hell does for the millions employed thereby, as well as those who catch their spending.