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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

> The very bottom of America is (of course) much worse off

Are you sure?

According to [1] (page 139), 36.4% of US adults have net worths between 100k an 1M, and 8.8% are millionaires. 26% are under 10k, 45.2% are over 100k.

But 32.8% of Europeans are under 10k, and only 29.5% are between 100k and 1M, and only 2.7% over 1M. So 32.2% are over 100k.

Median wealth for the US is 83k, and for Europe, it's 26k. (page 130).

Looks like Europeans have a far larger proportion of poor people, and far smaller upper middle + millionaire class.

[1] https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

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This is all likely true, the claim was that Europe is far better at translating wealth into quality of life.

Not relevant.

Even if Europeans are twice as good at turning a dollar into a smile (and how could anyone believe such nonsense), the middle-class American still has three times as much money.

And either way, the problem to solve is creating the most overall wealth and well-being. Being better at a sub-problem (money->happiness efficiency ratio) is less important than overall effectiveness.

"The middle-class American" is going to get bodied into penury if they get sick. A Dane will, generally speaking, not.

I know I'd trade a very large portion of my very large salary for assurances that that wouldn't happen. I don't have the option, though.

Very relevant. Again, personal wealth does not equal quality of life. That's a very American thing, since the US lacks so many basic quality of life tenets that Europeans already have.

You can't compare wealth as simplisticly as you imply, for a multitude of reasons, the top three being:

* Wealth includes house ownership, but in many EU countries living in a rented apartment is normal and even preferred, mostly because strong regulatory protection of tenant's rights. As an example our family could easily afford owning a house in the suburbs but still lives for rent in the city, because quality of life is better here.

* In the US, wealth includes savings for pension, whereas in many EU countries pensions are organized collectively, like an insurance. In other words most EU pension schemes are not visible in wealth statistics.

* Same for healthcare. I know of noone in my social circle saving for eventual healthcare crises because that is cared for by health insurance.

Higher education is also similar

You’d need to look at PPP for all goods and services and not just networth (paper networth). EU countries provide a lot of social based lines, like education, childcare and healthcare. Also there is a huge variability between EU countries - Swiss are quite wealthy for example.

The difference in the 100k-1m range was a lot smaller than I expected, given the tone of the post.

Guessing the way retirement works in the US is a large part of the difference in net worth and millionaire calculations.

Either way, lots of the difference is sure to be among the elderly (they’re who have any net worth of note, the actually-rich excepted) and you need a whole lot more money in your private accounts to have a comfortable retirement in the US than in the EU.

The degree and scope of poverty in American are vastly overstated. The most popular metric in this regard is the official US Census estimate of poverty, which explicitly excludes the vast majority of welfare transfers. It excludes all in-kind transfers (Housing, Food Stamps, Medicaid, etc) and all de-facto cash transfers (such as "refundable tax credits", which are deemed "negative taxes" and so are not counted as cash income, even if they result in a check in the mail). In other words, if your pre-tax income puts you $1 below the poverty line, the US government announces that you are in poverty--even though you are eligible for (and presumably receive) tens of thousands of dollars in welfare support in the form of free housing, free healthcare, free food, free early education for your kids, free cash through tax credits, and subsidized cell phone and internet access.

Once you account for in-kind and de-facto cash transfers, America's poor are supported at a lifestyle which is close to the median American household and significantly higher than the median European household.

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