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Comment by anvil-on-my-toe | Hacker News Reader

Phrases like "the American economy is booming" or "America is out-performing Europe..." are simplistic and ridiculous. My least favorite part of getting a degree in economics was the endless story-telling that pretends to be scientific. "America" is not equivalent to the asset portfolios of the richest 1% of the population. Just say what you're measuring (rich people's wealth) and don't try to dress it up as a measure of a thriving nation. Don't call it "America" or "the economy", call it GDP.

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.

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Everything you've listed is apparent in other countries and even more so. Even today, anybody ambitious would kill for the kind of opportunities Americans have.

"anybody ambitious would kill for the kind of opportunities Americans have"

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.

It’s a better place to achieve something in than to live in… but how nice is Western Europe going to be to live in if it continues to be outgrown by the US and have to compete with Asia?

You're talking about the lottery winners, comparing the wealth and opportunities of the top 50,000 Americans to the average joes of the world and overlooking the reality of the other 369,950,000 Americans who have roughly the same quality of life that the people in your country do.

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.

This comment is as out of touch with middle class Americans as those "top 50k" are with the middle class.

There is a huge gulf between the poorest 10% and the top 50%.

Half of the American population are contained in the bottom 10% of wealth in America.

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 top 10%.

1 in 10 Americans are in the bottom 10%.

I'm pretty sure GP was talking more about which groups own which percentage of wealth in America

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...

Oh that makes much more sense, thanks for clarifying.

Still, a quick google search says Europe's bottom 50% own only 1.2% of the wealth there.

Maybe. But they have free healthcare and a better living.

American exceptionalism is strong in this one.

No, most of us would not like to live and work in the USA.

As always, you guys think too high of yourselves.

I disagree.

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).

Switzerland is great and I live there too, but the USA is hardly dysfunctional and we shouldn't overpraise Switzerland. This is a country that now has basically only one big bank, for a country that was once famous for banking! And look at how many well paid tech jobs in .ch are with US firms. Try and create a tech startup in Switzerland and you will quickly figure out why.

Switzerland is no good because they don’t have enough banks or tech startups? I’m not sure everyone would agree that those are the most important metrics.

Switzerland actually has plenty of banks still. Not sure why parent was making such a big deal out of Credit Suisse going bankrupt.

That's not what I've been hearing from European co-workers. Switzerland and London being somewhat of an exception, the vibe I get there are few if any good jobs and few good and ambitious developers left in Europe. Everyone who is any good and ambitious moves to London, or the US unless they have special circumstances.

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

Don't forget you are talking to the people who left and their reason for leaving, not the group that stayed and are happy.

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.

As an Italian, that's the reason I left. The salaries have been the same for like 20 years

Yup, most countries in Europe are better to live in than USA. Americans just don't want to be told they're not special.

We have 45M+ immigrants in the US. This does not count children of immigrants, only people who were born in another country and now live in the US.

That is 5x the total population of Switzerland.

And no offense taken, I've heard Switzerland is an amazing place!

I’m not for sure what you are trying to say with that statistic, but Switzerland has a much higher percentage of immigrants.

40% have a migration background, you can see the stats here: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...

I wasn't really trying to compare immigration between the two, more just trying to illustrate the scale of US immigration vs the OP's anecdote

What's your point?

Your personal immigration preference is not worth mentioning since we have actual statistics on the subject

Life expectancy is definitely not trending down in a lot of other developed countries, that's quite unique to the USA in that cohort.

Purchasing power is up, actually.

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.

No, purchasing power is down. Costs of living have gone up more than median wages. How much gold can you buy with USD today vs. 10 years ago? Less because the USD is worth less than it was. How much housing can you buy with $100,000 or with 1,000 hours of labor? Less housing.

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, purchasing power is down. Costs of living have gone up faster than wages.

No, you're wrong on the facts. CPI-adjusted wages are up.

Not only is he wrong, but folks with his worldview consistently ignore the dramatic improvement in what it means to be alive today vs any time before.

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.

Agree. No amount of hedonic adjustment in calculations accounts for this.

Taylor Lorenz is also 40 and spoiled. Not a young adult, she's middle-aged.

I agree with your sentiment though. I just want to point this out because Taylor is a dogshit human being.

Let's not forget:

- 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

The US gains far more than it loses. Shut down the Suez Canal and the Malacca Strait and the US economy would collapse. Not as badly as everybody else's economy would collapse, but it would collapse none the less.

The world economy would collapse *

This phrase gets repeated a lot, “U.S. patrolling the worlds a shipping lanes” but what does it mean, concretely? Which shipping lanes and how? They’re certainly not doing a stellar job of it in the Red Sea, for instance.

The US has been borrowing money from the world to pay for the world policing duties. Leaving the debate over those for another day, I'm worried the world will stop borrowing dollars that subsidize that service, and the US will be left holding the bag for the cost of it.

The terrible reality for the world is that the world needs the US more than the US needs the world. Unless of course the idea of China running the global stage is appealing.

If the US military won't patrol world's shipping lanes, I'm sure the Chinese military would take over that job.

then why aren't they doing so now? it's a zoo in the red sea...

Why waste money/resources if their cargo still gets to its destination?

I think you might underestimate how much this is an important factor in the strength of the US economy.

As a non-American I also really wish you left the World alone :)

Sometimes, I wish the U.S. should suddenly leave the world alone, including NATO. That's when people will realize that the EU is too militarily weak to tackle Russia's aggression, and the Middle East will fall into chaos.

People who yap so much about America frankly deserve a real-life lesson to correct their brains.

As someone from the Middle East, I honestly wonder, when Americans say things like that, have they ever read a book, attended a lecture, or even done online research about the history of American intervention in the Middle East? It’s baffling to me that someone would believe that, given America’s track record. I’m not asking sarcastically, I’m genuinely wondering.

Well this is about comparing with other countries, isn't it?

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.

Actually in the US, real wages increased in the last several years (adjusted for inflation) so actually purchasing power is up on average. The data is always changing, good to keep up to date!

Then take note of GDP-per-capita growth. The whole of the developed world had to deal with inflation and financial repercussions of covid. What's exceptional is the US recovery and the fact is economic conditions in the US has improved at a more rapid pace.

> 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

Since US firm invented and mastered the improperly called 'shadow banking' (they're not banks, banks issue and destroy new money. Shadow intermediary maybe?), GDP is a worsening indicator of consumption+investment (or overall production if you will).

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)

You seem to be totally overlooking the fact we had a major once a century or so event—the Pandemic. Purchasing power is quickly recovering, birth rates have been down for decades, life expectancies are only down because of covid and quickly returning to where they were before, young people will do fine and adjust, or if they vote they can get more populist policies on the books rather than wring their hands over it. When people realize it’s the 99% vs 1% they will do quite a bit better.

Those phrases refer solely to how well the stock market is doing.

Right. Our food lines are merely shorter than those in other countries. Sigh.

> birth rates are down

Good. Zero population growth is what the world needs. Not more of a people that consume far more than everybody else.

This is like claiming to know the future.

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.

> In the future we might not have enough bright minds around to solve our resource crises.

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.

Except you literally have no evidence of this.

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.

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