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Comment by hnav | Hacker News Reader

You're looking at GDP when comparing Missouri to European nations. Bulgaria has higher life expectancy than half this country.

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It's unfair to compare the US, which is incredibly and wildly diverse in race and culture, against monocultural Europe.

I grew up in the South. You'll have to kill these people to take away their sweet tea and fried chicken. And that's just one dimension.

In fact, America's wealth (and our fairly generous welfare programs, despite what Europeans might think) actually enables the massive obesity rates we have, which is one of the main reasons we have lower life expectancies. If Europeans were richer they'd likely be eating themselves to death more like we do (though cultural and other factors play a role too).

You don't think Europeans can afford to eat the cheap crap that makes one fat? Healthy food is expensive, garbage food is cheap. Obesity is a poverty problem in the whole western world.

No it must be that Europeans can't afford corn fed omega-6 beef, corn syrup water and baked extruded corn mush coated in MSG so they have to get by eating real bread, tomatoes and ham.

The OP is about wealth, not life expectancy.

The standard of life you get is one you can afford. GDP PPI does a better job of capturing this than GDP, but better yet look at how long people live. The best raw GDP is gotten when you drive your working class until they collapse and die and thus is a shitty metric for measuring quality of life unless that means the ability to acquire globally manufactured trinkets to you.

Americans have homes roughly twice as big as European homes, and a far higher percentage of Americans are homeowners than Europeans. Home ownership rates are within a few percent of each other too.

Part of the reason we're fat as fuck is that giant parcels of land make driving everywhere mandatory.

Better then living in a crowded city where they let rabid hobos attack you on the bus with effectively no consequences.

Never been attacked by one, but was taught the difference between "then" and "than" in elementary.

Heh I was almost forced to face the fact that my argument was bad but I see here that you made a typo hahaha tough luck pal

https://img.ifunny.co/images/d542d2d7e1830ef76a29483dd498245...

Nobody ever gets assaulted or murdered in the country, eh?

At far, far, far lower rates than in the city, so I really don't know what argument you thought you just made.

I live in the countryside. In 2018 our small neighboring town of about 13k residents had their first murder since 1965, and none since. That works out to about 0.12 homicides per 100,000 residents annually. By comparison, Baltimore has 22 per 100,000 annually.

Baltimore is also like top 10 nationwide for murder, you might as well have cherry-picked some Southern city like Birmingham to really drive the point home. The odds of you being murdered in NYC are 1/10th of dying in your car in Mississippi.

My point is mostly that cherry picking a city-specific assault scenario and acting like it’s super common is no different from me saying “better than living in bumfuck louisiana where cletus will sexually assault you in the back of his pickup truck.”

The murder thing is also an error of faulty generalization. As a counter example, Opelousas, Louisiana, a nothing town with barely more people than yours, has a murder rate of 39/100k, higher than your example of Baltimore, and much higher than New York (3.92/100k).

I guess this is the difference between people existing for the betterment of the economy vs the economy existing for the betterment of people.

And which do you think is which? Whatever the "intent" of either the US or EU economies, the US has produced far greater wealth and material prosperity for its citizens than Europe has for its citizens.

Material prosperity. Euros don't have the newest iPhones, 3 row SUVs or a gas dryer that gets your load of laundry crispy in 30 minutes flat. They have third spaces, public transit that actually covers cities/intra-city transport and in southern countries actual food (for now).

And infant mortality rates 2/3 of the USA.

If you move health care out of the US economy (as it largely is in the EU), you are at quite similar gdp.

Nope, even adjusting for health care costs the average American is still roughly 20-40% richer than the average European. This may come as a shock to you, but roughly 20% of Americans are on Medicaid, our state-sponsored healthcare insurance. America does actually provide healthcare for its poorest citizens.

Source?

When I run the calculations and take vacation, health, education for the median person they are close to similar.

But these calculations does not take into consideration: less noisy cities, walkable neighborhoods, longer life expectancy, higher quality food, better workers protections, education, etc.

An honest study would need to include the value of the commons.

> roughly 20-40% richer

This is likely wrong. Americans have better purchasing power, but are not necessarily richer.

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