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Comment by st-keller | Hacker News Reader

So countrys with free education, universal healthcare, 24 days of mandatory vacation and a retirement age of 63 are loosers?

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There is a social meme going around about Mississippi being wealthier than Bordeaux, France [1] that relates to the “Mississippi Question" (the question is whether a country is poorer than Mississippi, which is used as a benchmark for low income and wealth within the U.S). Broadly speaking, it speaks to GDP and economic numbers being poor metrics for tracking happiness and quality of life [2] [3] [4]. Mississippi GDP per capita is higher than Spain, Italy, the UK, and France; where would you rather live as a human?

Edit: I do like that this uses time as a measure versus fiat; fiat can be gamed, time consumed to meet a need cannot.

[1] https://www.threads.com/@sarahbesingrand/post/DJGCx47sqPI/th...

[2] https://mises.org/mises-wire/britain-france-and-spain-poorer...

[3] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/poorest-us-state-rivals-ge...

[4] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/mississippi

Is Mississippi really that bad? The economy is indeed very bad somewhere like the UK.

I was born in Oklahoma. There is a phrase there.

"Thank God for Mississippi!"

Otherwise Oklahoma would be last in basically every single metric used to compare states. It was more true then than now. Mississippi made major changes to their education system and it has been paying off. I'm not to familiar with how they are doing on other metrics.

It also ignores quality of the goods.

But more importantly, it ignores what you can do with the extra hours you work.. same as with PPP it ignores that an iPhone isn't cheaper (it may not be a basic necessity), but many globally traded goods that go beyond basic needs aren't affected by PPP.

Scope note: This index is a floor affordability ratio for non-tradables (rent, utilities, basic food, transit). It doesn’t rate product quality or luxury/tradable goods.

Quality: True—quality varies. We use a fixed, minimal basket to avoid hedonic debates; I can add sensitivity bands by quality/spec.

“What extra hours buy”: Good point. We’ll add Discretionary Hours = paid hours/month − hours to essentials to show room for non-essentials, saving, leisure.

iPhone / tradables: Different lens. Many tradables price similarly across countries; essentials are mostly local/non-tradable and drive this metric. We can add a companion “tradables-hours” (e.g., hours to buy an iPhone/streaming bundle).

Takeaway: Essentials-hours ≠ welfare. It’s one clean piece—time to cover basics—best paired with discretionary and tradables views.

Don't get me wrong I think these metrics are interesting.

But not useful for comparing Bolivia and Sweden.

But comparing nordic countries this way makes a bit sense.

Comparing emerging economies this way might also make some sense.

But there is always lots of welfare not covered in these metrics.

Not a welfare ranking. This measures one thing: hours of work to cover a small monthly essentials basket (rent, utilities, basic food, transport) = price ÷ wage. Healthcare/education/vacation are mostly outside that basket or already baked into hourly pay.

So to put this another way, this is supposed to measure the avg absolute buying power of a worker and compares them by country? The part where I can see the disconnect here is a lot of European countries have their social programs baked into the wage (eg I expect to get paid less to work in Sweden as opposed to the US because I'm getting some of that 'back' through social services) however that isn't always the case for some countries. For example I'm not deducting healthcare costs from my salary in the US, but I'm still paying it after the fact which decreases my spending power.

There's too many specific variables to account for in this that I feel like the general comparison is almost hurtful at worst or doesn't tell the whole story at best.

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