The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust
economist.com
economist.com
Purchasing power is down, birth rates are down, life expectancies are down, young people's expectations of the future are down. We should account for things we care about when we talk about how the country is doing.
That's probably true for the very ambitious. I think the US doesn't work as well for people who just want to have a decent life.
I'm from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the poorest location in America. I have memories of my uncles sleeping in the snow, 14 people stuffed into a 2 bedroom home, dirty streets and boredom being the norm, no jobs and what little money was to be had spent across state lines in White Clay for cheap liquor.
There are far more of people like us than there are the people living the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. Don't stab your brother in the back in hopes of being one of them.
There is a huge gulf between the poorest 10% and the top 50%.
Every other American is in the bottom 10%, and 1 in ~7,500 are in the top 10%.
If I were a gambling man I wouldn't take those odds.
1 in 10 Americans are in the bottom 10%.
i.e., the bottom 50% of Americans population-wise own 10% of the overall wealth, while the top 7,500 people (0.002% population-wise) own 10% of the overall wealth.
That said, those numbers are actually overly optimistic. The wealth chart offered up by the federal reserve show the bottom 50% population-wise only own 2.5% of the wealth. Particularly alarming (though not surprising) is how much that share has shrunk in the last 20 years.
See: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
Still, a quick google search says Europe's bottom 50% own only 1.2% of the wealth there.
I am ambitious and from Europe. I live in Switzerland and I love it here.
There is no way I would wish to move to a dysfunctional country like the US(no offense).
That is 5x the total population of Switzerland.
And no offense taken, I've heard Switzerland is an amazing place!
40% have a migration background, you can see the stats here: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...
People from France, Spain etc. tend to be more polite about it, but specifically 3 people from German speaking regions in Bay Area - 2 natives and one who moved to the US via Germany from Eastern Europe - basically said the above directly :)
I myself looked into moving to Austria / North Italy for the nature and good cities, but the salaries and cost of living are just too much of a joke, even for non-developer. In Austria back then I'd be making less than my wife makes as a teacher in the USA. Switzerland is somewhat better, but still pretty bad, even for a developer
I loved London for nearly 2 decades, but moving out to the countryside was the best thing I've done - huge house, cheap mortgage and nearly (but not quite) as many well paying job opportunities. I could go back to London and maybe even double my wages. But to have the life I love now in terms of just housing and location I'd have to quadruple or more my outgoings.
But I'm sure I'd give you a great story for why I was in London if I ever moved back there.
No, most of us would not like to live and work in the USA.
As always, you guys think too high of yourselves.
- US Military patrolling the world's shipping lanes-- with US Citizens & Companies tax dollars directly subsidizing the price of oil & international goods for a significant portion of the world (the prices would be higher without some outside country prividing protection)
- US Military bases-- 750 in 80 countries-- with US Citizens & Companies tax dollars directly subsidizing the security of a significant portion of the world
As an American, I really wish we left the world to their own devices, and paid for their own security and shipping lane protection. The world takes the US for granted. I think we should let them squabble for a few years, then beg us to come back-- when we have them leaning over a barrel, then we charge high fees :P
People who yap so much about America frankly deserve a real-life lesson to correct their brains.
> young people's expectations of the future are down
Relative to?
> birth rates are down
Absent GDP, this matters because...? The country is growing as a matter of policy through immigration.
> Purchasing power is down
Wages are recovering
The reason is simple: GDP grow with money velocity, and 'shadow banking' artificially increase that number, with very low impact on the real world (I'm not saying null, this boosted the US car consumption a lot with easy car credits, but the effects aren't in the same order of magnitude)
Life expectancies are not a conventional measure of "the economy" but also (IMO) likely to improve in the medium term with widespread use of GLP-1 drugs.
As far as young people -- I'm not sure. There is certainly a Taylor Lorenz adjacent crowd of "doomers" but I don't think they're representative of the median young adult.
Young people are objectively doing bad. Not trying to be depressing, but economically, behaviorally, health-wise, (at the median) they are worse off than their parents.
No, you're wrong on the facts. CPI-adjusted wages are up.
It's incredible how much purchasing power the average middle class person has when you look at what you're buying and what you're able to buy compared to previous generations. The power and functionality of consumer devices like computers and TVs to the fuel efficiency and cleanliness of transportation options have all drastically improved, but people tend to become numb to how amazing things are very quickly. Magic becomes mundane in days or weeks or months, which is really sad.
It also completely ignores how valuable it is to have a mobile supercomputer in our pocket, wirelessly and globally connected to every other computer, with access to the sum of human knowledge. To not factor this stuff in is to completely skew any real perspective of how far we've come.
There are people who are excited to see global poverty and child mortality plummet, and there are those who whine about anecdotes and artificial metrics. It's true that houses are less affordable, but there was no reality in which earnings were ever going to keep up with the housing bubble which is fueled by an entirely different set of perverse incentives.
TL;DR: yes, things are pretty good, actually. And trending towards better every day.
I agree with your sentiment though. I just want to point this out because Taylor is a dogshit human being.
Good. Zero population growth is what the world needs. Not more of a people that consume far more than everybody else.
Nobody knows how much population growth we need. In the future we might not have enough bright minds around to solve our resource crises. We might have a global epidemic that causes us to miss critial population thresholds that severely drop our quality of life.
I think that if we want our species to escape this rock before our sun wipes us out (or sooner), people should be having kids.
This myth/meme also needs to die. It is ignorant beyond belief.
You don't just get more geniuses when you increase population, you also have to free people from the drudgery and suffering of survival in a resource-poor environment.
Given a constant population, humanity would have fewer geniuses if our energy consumption dropped by half.
We're experiencing less drudgery than ever experienced by humans on this planet... Our energy output to labor ratio is the greatest it has ever been... And yet there's no evidence that we're advancing exceptionally faster than previous generations.
If you view through the lens of history it is typically warfare and societal upheaval that provides the environment for significant advancement.
Let's just compare the pace of technology today to 60-100 years ago. I'm ashamed to hold up fucking cryptoshit, javascript frameworks and high volume distribution of pornography in comparison against all of THAT.
Also [citation needed] for purchasing power is down. Again, comparing with other countries, US disposable incomes are in a completely different ballpark. I wasn't aware of them going down.
This doesn't sound right.
Googling around, the median income (a much better metric than average) between Mississippi and Germany are about the same.
A huge difference: Britain, Canada and Germany don't have to pay for health care and education. I'm not sure how to factor that in, but something tells me if you do you'll find our Canadian and European friends are doing drastically better than those in Jackson, MS.
This will show a lot of selection bias. Any Europeans with American friends who are in the forum are unlikely to be representative of the median German/Brit.
I have a cousin who is a mid-level manager in a steel plant in southern Illinois near near Missouri and he lives like a petty king. I've known FedEx drivers with lake houses in low cost of living areas. Middle income people in low cost of living states often live quite well in the US.
It can be argued that Europeans are happier than Americans, but not that they're wealthier than Americans.
This does not mean the US is healthier (after all absurdly high spending is in part to cover health issues). But money per se is not remotely the problem and public health expenditure very loudly exists.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_h...
what's he going to be putting his money to, if not being healthier and smarter?
otherwise he's just fatter, dumber, and full of plastic kitch manufactured overseas, much of which is now floating around his bloodstream in microscopic form.
but hey, at least he's got a big truck.
GDP Per Capita is overall the best metric when thinking on a long-term economic scale.
As to how the people in Jackson, MS are doing - a lot of this comes down to what communities are doing with that wealth. There are lots of young professionals having decent lives, even in Mississippi - but a lot of that wealth disappears into cars and big private properties and other unequally distributed things.
That is not true: British taxpayers have to pay for the health care and education of Brits.
The point is that when you add the money the government spends on you plus the money you spend on yourself, America has significantly more money per-person to go around.
What you should have written is that although America spends more money on health care per person than Britain does, Americans have worse health, so the money is spent less efficiently than in Britain.
(It is also true that America spends more on "criminal justice", e.g., prisons, but has more crime, so the criminal-justice money must be being spent less efficiently.)
Perhaps true, but also keep in mind that Canada and the US were on more equal standing until the last five years or so, when we started to see a significant divergence emerge. You can ride on the past for a while. Assuming the trend continues, it may simply be that it is too early to see Canada turn into Mississippi.
There used to be something like 3 MRI machines across the entire province. The province containing 1/3 of the country's entire population. Wait times for screening procedures could be months. My exe's entire family drove down to New York to get their dental care, paying out of pocket, when it mattered. (UB's College of Dentistry became the 7th best dental school in the nation & 11th in the world largely on the back of this trade)
It's better now, but not better _than what can be bought_ in the United States. Does the US need to improve? Certainly.
Instead, OK guy gets to have a Ford F-150, so he can drive a truck when he's not driving his truck.
And he doesn't have to pay high taxes, which is nice because it means his kids only get school 4 days a week: https://okcfox.com/news/local/rural-school-district-district...
Of course that means he has to be thousands more in daycare, but at least it's not the gubrment!
E.g. beautiful real estate that is owned by the same family that owned it hundreds of years ago. An American tourist can rent space there and enjoy but a resident can never hope to earn enough to buy a piece of that.
or amazing public transit, which to a resident is just a commute to work but an American tourist sees the novelty in
The US housing market is ossifying rapidly and will likely be exactly the same within a generation. Canada and Australia are as well.
Visitors usually get a warped view of the places they visit. You can't judge the UK by London, for example.
A well diversified economic powerhouse with a friendly neighbor to the north and a cheap labor neighbor to the south, comparatively politically stable, and annnddd its energy independent?
America is ridiculously OP from an economics standpoint. Even more over it only looks like the position is going to strengthen, at least until either AI or climate change upend everything.
Take the book with a massive grain of salt, but the mechanisms are well described in The Accidental Superpower.
ten percent of people are vastly wealthier while fifty percent plus of people are worse off and more so ..
the machinery of economics are driving their own numbers. ref Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
America has lower transaction costs, a better regulatory environment (e.g the EU with AI), better access to lending and investment, and a more robust consumer market. The US is clearly doing some things better.
And if it pays off some day, well there you go.
very few of the workers in the economy outside of the data center and tech-bro market will ever see any money from this
If you look at incomes for graduates in the US vs the UK, it's far higher. [0]
For non-graduates it's the same, and the social safety net in the UK is far better.
This ties into median wage in the UK being barely above minimum wage.
What this tells me is "don't bother educating yourself, just leave school asap and get a crap job stacking shelves"
The UK just isn't an attractive place for graduates to work in, and the few that are there (mainly in London and the south east [1]) massively subsidise the wealthy retired and the minimum wage jobs.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/570d23b3-d286-4cb9-a319-b49cc4056...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/e5c741a7-befa-4d49-a819-f1b0510a9...
Completely wrong as roughly 25% of the UK population has a university degree. The U.K. has lots of problems but a lack of graduates isn’t one of them.
A graduate of pretty much any degree working in Hull in pretty much any job is not attractive. They would earn far more in other countries, and earn little more than a minimum wage school dropout.
A graduate working in fintech in London is fine, but they are subsidising the rest of the country and bring up the "graduate salary" and "total earnings" across the board.
The problem isn't the lack of graduates, its the lack of well paid jobs. We don't value an educated workforce (which is at a similar level to France, the US, Ireland, Australia etc)
The end of the article handwaves away this criticism.
> Many critics of America’s economic model contend that it is intrinsically flawed, beset by extreme inequality and ever-more dominant companies crushing competitors. But these are exaggerations. There may be scope for a fairer distribution of the country’s wealth without undermining America’s growth, but the widely held belief that the top 1% are taking it all is overdone.
Handwaving.
> As for tech behemoths such as Apple and Amazon, their potential for dominance must be watched and, if necessary, curtailed, but it is also true that they have generated incredible value in daily life and shaken up stodgy industries. And they face fierce competition to stay on top.
Where's the fierce competition? Apple and Google have a phone duopoly.
Measuring the economy is not measuring quality of life or health of the population.
Johnson told the AP that economic pressures were alienating many Americans.
“A lot of people who were previously in the middle class were hit very hard by the combination of globalization, automation, the decline of trade unions, and a sort of shift more broadly in corporate philosophy,” Johnson said. “So instead of workers being a resource to be developed, which they were in the 19th and early 20th century, they became a cost to be minimized … Now, that squeezed the middle class.’’
“We have, as a country, failed to deliver in recent decades on what we were previously very good at, which was sharing prosperity,” Johnson said.
One key for the future, Johnson said, is how societies manage new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
“AI could go either way,” he said. “AI could either empower people with a lot of education, make them more highly skilled, enable them to do more tasks and get more pay. Or it could be another massive wave of automation that pushes the remnants of the middle down to the bottom. And then, yes, you’re not going to like the political outcomes.’’
Average GDP per capita looks good on paper, but heathcare and education are really expensive. They increase the GDP because money is spent but in Europe it's a lot cheaper so they seem poorer but by purchasing parity they are richer.
If you earn in USD for US company and spend in another country, then yeah the money goes further, otherwise median American isn't doing that much better.
Many people argue the stricter business and environmental regulations hampered European growth, but these things were mostly even stricter 30 years ago.
Whatever the cause is, it's something that's happened in the last 15 years or so.
Is it now any different?
I.e., that it indicates our "wealth" could be pulled away from us on very short notice.
Contrasted to, e.g the wealth being from sales of some commodity that the rest of the world will need for the next decade: crops, certain metals, or (maybe) oil/LNG.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/worlds-largest-deposit-lithiu...
[2]https://www.theearthandi.org/post/estimated-2-34-billion-met...
I do, currently, think there is some level of “subsidizing” (wrong word) happening in the west.
USD is the wests reserve currency. It’s held by many western countries and much of western trade is denominated it in.
When the US prints money, they dilute the western reserve currency. It lets the US spend the value of every USD holder (including the value of debt denominated in the currency).
In other words, I think the US can spend the value of a large slice of the western economy (not just its domestic economy) on its own infrastructure and military projects through inflation by printing money.
Kinda. US treasure bills are the main world's reserve actives.
But the world also holds other kinds of active, and none of that is exactly caused by the dollar denominating trade.
Trade denomination causes some inflation exporting that can mess with other economies due to price stickness. But again, that's nothing like the OP claims.
It'll be hard for our economy if we stop exporting it, but that's true of any export.
Then consider that Luxembourg and Ireland only top the list as a result of being tax havens for the world's rich. The picture looks grim.
Mississippi isn't well populated but most European countries are...so while those countries may be nicer places to live now, Mississippi's future looks brighter.
20 years of totally flat GDP growth capped by a brutal recession was more than enough for Sweden to switch gears and backpedal on an enormous amount of social welfare policy in the early 90s.
The American economy is generating massive amounts of goods and services. This is a relatively hard fact.
The effect of the dollar being a worldwide currency is complex and not so straightforward. Strong demand for dollars actually would increase dollar value, which would increase borrowing costs, ceteris paribus. The US then increases money supply, to accommodate. It’s unclear that this dramatically increases GDP.
Unless your assertion is that the financial industry is overdeveloped? I don’t think it’s more than 10% of GDP off the top of my head.
Lies like this story, which I can't afford to read, are why absolute bullshit artists like Trump are able to get votes at all.
Consider this, and the more than 1 gun per person state of the US population, and things don't look good for the future.
Civil wars are horrible, but they do boost the profit of the arms industry.
As I said
> this story, which I can't afford to read
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Really makes you think.
I now make $215K/year and can spend $500 on a really nice dinner on a whim for me and my wife and not even feel the need to budget for it. I can have a top-of-the-line gaming PC and play all my games at 100+ fps with maximum detail settings.
I'm a fuckton happier now than then.
The way I see it, there are really only two people that truly believe (or at least claim to believe) that money doesn't buy happiness:
1. Business owners that use it as an excuse to keep wages low. Just convince the workers that a higher wage won't make them happier!
2. Poor people that tell it to themselves to cope with being poor.
Certainly, you reach a point of diminishing returns. $100M won't make you 10x as happy as $10M. But I know there's some article that's been passed around a LOT that says the diminishing returns begins at $70K/year, and that's just flat out wrong. $70K/year won't even buy a house in most cities.
Here's another anecdote: many ultra-rich people have committed suicide because they were unhappy. If money bought happiness, they wouldn't have done it.
Happiness is a complex thing. You can visit remote third-world villages and find people living very difficult lives yet very happy because that's all they know and don't bother comparing their situation with others.
US ranks pretty high in GDP-per-capita. Given the remaining factors, I imagine the obesity rate and intensified political polarization is skewing the result. The perceptions might be informed in large part by rate of consumption of news media content on social media (other developed countries have this problem, but lesser polarization may mute the impact).
Among good news is that the obesity rate has stalled in recent years, iirc.
Who would've guessed?
Probably if you look at dollar gains of stocks, land prices, etc you'll find Americans leading, but look at the actual lives of average people, and they are not so much better off, if at all. In other words it's mostly accounting/financial mirages.