America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD
fortune.com
fortune.com
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Oh and sorry because this is HN and people will automatically assume I mean owning the property and renting rooms out to others, I mean both people are renters in this case.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
If you are not in the US, there can be a lot of surprises in these comparisons.
You might see that you make $X in tech and in Silicon Valley someone makes $3X for same job and that sounds awesome on paper.
But how much is health care coverage, both insurance and out of pocket after insurance? In SV I pay over $20K in insurance and the additional out of pocket depends on what happens but can be $10K-$20K. But if you have some catastrophic health problem, can be in the millions of dollars. Compare this with health expenses outside of the US.
How much is daycare, school and university for the kids? The costs in the US are mind-blowing, vs. either free or cheap in other countries. Here in SV I pay ~$45K/year just for high school, university will probably be a lot more.
Home insurance? If you can even get it, will be outrageous. Car insurance, think 4K-10K year depending on details.
And so on.
Don't compare gross salary, compare net leftover salary after ALL required expenses.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
When everything is dangerous, nothing is dangerous.
Have you read the health warning in detail and disagree from an informed point of view or are you just generally opposed to regulation?
Even better, can you link the bike model and health warning and let others take a look at it for you? Or just your neighborhood chat bot :-)
You can also search for studies that compare the societal cost/benefit of using a car vs a bicycle. The generally accepted conclusion is that cars have a cost while cycling has a benefit for society.
See, that's the thing... what "over-cautious warning label nonsense"? What are they actually warning about? Which chemicals/products?
I don't know about aloe extract, but pregnant women are also discouraged from taking aspirin.
Here's a random online store selling it, with a big warning for "usage during pregnancy and breastfeeding" (French only): https://lasante.net/nos-medicaments/douleurs-et-fievres/aspi...
Where I am, they all are known to cause birth defects. I never met woman with children that didn't take measures to avoid them (and a dozen of other products with similar effects) during pregnancy.
If you liken your bike to them, that's, uh. That's one hell of a bike. Probably should stay away from pregnant woman while riding it, huh
https://www.cervelo.com/en-GB/bikes/s5
So I’m in the clear. I’m pro good regulation. This warning is ridiculous and it’s plastered all over things in California such that it’s useless. Yes, there are toxic things on a bike. How many riders or their offspring were harmed as a result of them?
Annoying legislation is just... meh.
Now, what would be ideal if they would actually list the harmful chemicals and where exactly they are used. There are certifications that require that kind of disclosure and for people that do care, they're gold.
It’s a waste of time and money, so yes.
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself.
And as a reminder, Europe sees more people die to heat than America sees people die to guns.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/heat-death-europe-ac-american...
Maybe your guild should figure out how to beat the PvE server before lecturing the players on the PvP server on how ridiculous you think our freedom is. Major skill issue, noob.
Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel. You're welcome.
Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Speaking of giving - since 2014, the EU has purchased approximate €700-€900 billion worth of oil and natural gas alone from Russia (total EU imports from Russia exceed €1T in that time period), while offering less than €300 billion in support to Ukraine.
The EU is responsible for funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and has given more than twice as much money to Russia than it has to Ukraine.
America, on the other hand, has appropriated nearly $200B to Ukraine (over $100B in direct aid), yet paid only a tiny fraction of that to total Russian imports since 2014.
In other words, America is a net economic supporter of Ukraine, while the EU is a net economic supporter of Russia.
You are not "the good guys" that you think are.
Global warming didn't start two weeks ago, nor two decades ago. Most of human generated CO2 and most of the calories accumulated by greenhouse effect are still directly caused by Americans, both in absolute numbers and relative per capita.
>Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel.
Americans also elected PV panel haters, and are still destroying whole regions to extract more oil, both overseas and at home.
>Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Hi, cool, are you going to give AC units to Europe? And the Middle East? And India/Bangladesh etc.? Maybe we should prosternate at your feet and thank you for you magnifiscence, oh great solvers of problem you caused.
Tell me how you would install AC units for all of 2 millions inhabitants of Paris, a city older than your country, the third most visited city in the world, without destroying its character, but more importantly: a stone city, at the bottom of a sedimentary basin, without making the heat problem worse to anyone in the streets or unable to buy an AC?
You can then yap again about how easy and cheap it was to punch AC ducts through the flimsy walls of your McMansion in the soulless suburbia you live in, an hour of boring highway from your "scaling, creative, value creating" job.
So, you can get over your cities' "character" or be hot, whichever you prefer. Sorry bud. (Not that Paris's character is intact these days, anyway.)
The head killing Europeans right now is caused by everyone pumping CO2, including Europeans.
Between 2013 and 2022, a total of 77 students in grades K-12 have been killed in 11 school mass shootings, in a country with 50 million school children.
A child in America is about 500-600x more likely to die in a car accident than a school shooting.
A child in America is about 90-120x more likely to die from a pedestrian fatality than a school shooting.
A child in America is 70-90x more likely to die from choking than a school shooting.
A child in America is 50-60x more likely to die from drowning than a school shooting.
A child in America is 40-55x more likely to die in a fire or from smoke than a school shooting.
A child in America is 10-15x more likely to die in a bicycle accident not involving a motor vehicle than from a school shooting.
Comparable risks to dying in a school shooting include a fatal sting from a bee or wasp, (about twice a likely), or dying from being struck by lightning (about half as likely).
School shootings, while tragic, do not pose nearly as much of a statistical threat as you think they do, even if they still pose more than they ought to.
If you remove shootings committed by African Americans (which are overwhelmingly against other African Americans), America's gun violence rate per capita drops below that of Canada, below the Czech Republic, close to the EU average. See: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7242a4.htm
Gun violence is something that the vast majority of Americans will never personally witness or experience, and will never even know anyone who has personally witnessed or experienced it.
From ages 1-19, that means the cumulative risk varies by about an order of magnitude even just at the state level before diving into specific cities or communities - there's cumulatively about a 1/750 chance of a kid dying from firearm violence in Louisiana or Mississippi from 1-19, or about a 1/7500 chance of a kid dying from firearm violence in Massachusetts.
The national figure might look scary (even though it's still a tiny, remote risk that most people never have to seriously worry about), but that's only because it blends a high-incidence minority with a low-incidence majority.
Looking at the national figure alone as representative of the whole country is like looking at the number of people who are imprisoned across Europe for being LGBT and being shocked at how much higher that figure is than in the USA - it's really all just Russia, a minority of Europe as a whole, responsible for a majority of the mortifying criminalization. It's disingenuous to insinuate that Europe as a whole is anti-LGBT because of Russian criminalization, just as it's disingenuous to insinuate that America as a whole is a dangerous place filled with gun violence, largely because of one demographic subset that is itself concentrated across a few small areas.
About 20% of all deaths in that age range. Dying from any cause at that age is extremely rare.
> largely because of one demographic subset that is itself concentrated across a few small areas
eg the geographically adjacent and culturally/ethnically indistinguishable states of Mississippi, New Mexico, Alaska, Alabama, and Wyoming? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/state-stats/deaths/firearms.html
What you're seeing in Alaska and Wyoming and New Mexico is overwhelmingly suicides correlated with social isolation (Alaska, Wyoming), high rates of poverty (New Mexico), and SAD (Alaska), not an epidemic of violent shootings.
The correlation coefficient between gun ownership and firearm homicides at a state level is 0.22.
The correlation coefficient between gun ownership and firearm suicide at a state level 0.84.
Note that Illinois (Chicago) and Maryland (Baltimore) both have above-average firearm homicide with below average firearm ownership, while Idaho and Maine have above average firearm ownership and significantly below-average firearm homicide.
The drivers of homicide are overwhelmingly urban violence, poverty, and illicit markets, not the firearms themselves.
Yes. My earlier comment was "often from a gun"
https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings#:~:text=NUMBER%20OF%20SHOO...
One could suspect that the number in the next decade should be between 2000-3000 incidents. Since 2000 is a bigger number than 1 yes more than once a decade.
Mass shootings more broadly are even worse with 167 in Jan-June 2026.
We can't do anything to fix the root cause because the root cause is an inviolable Constitutional right.
So we simply must accept that school shootings/mass shootings/gun violence in general are the price we pay to be able to shoot watermelons and the occasional politician and remain the only truly free nation on earth.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world[0], and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?tab=line&coun...
1. Past policies don't dictate current policies. And current policies are wildly different from policies of 5 years ago, which are again different of policies of 20 years ago and even before that.
2. Amount of immigrants doesn't say anything about standard of living. And we all know immigration (and even illegal immigration) was promoted by all parties because this meant cheaper labor costs. And often also, exploitable labor.
And finaly... it's not a surprised that the third largest country in the world, who was considered an immigrant nations for well over 2 centuries has the most immigrants?
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.
Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.
When we lived in Germany, we got TBE shots (area with a lot of ticks that carried it). IIRC we could also get an appointment in a few days.
(Though I think with vaccinations it's similar in the US.)
[1] Not eligible yet, so I pay 25 Euro to get one every year. Worth it for not getting the flu.
In this case GP probably knows that e.g. Italy has a life expectancy well above that of the US. Still, when he read that well-off people in the US have much better health coverage and it takes months to see a doctor in Italy, he believed it. How is it even possible to believe such a thing when you know the numbers?
There is also the same private healthcare that americans enjoy. You have the option of spending $50 to $100 to go to a private clinic and get same-day admission. In the US services like that cost nearly 10 times the price due to the whole insurance bullshit.
I got free same-day heart check-up and $80 paid same-week heart monitoring check-up.
There are horror stories and footage of the UK NHS, but that's mostly just london and in reality pretty much every city that large suffers from that.
Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
Secondly, I would also debate the better health care. I recently had two health scares in my direct family (one time cancer, one time another tumor) and in both cases care was quick and excellent. Of course, there is quite a lot of variance between countries. We lived in Germany for a while and I was less impressed by health care there (though it's probably still much better and definitely cheaper than the average health care in the US).
Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Sorry, this is totally false. I checked the local established norm (49 days) and stats (generally between 30 and 150 days, depending on the hospital, which you can choose). And this doesn't depend on private insurance, because it does not exist in the county I live.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
I am able to see my general practitioner generally the same or next day and waiting time at the GP is typically less than 10 minutes. I can also visit my dentist the same day in the case of an emergency.
It's the same in many other European countries. I got kidney stones when we were on vacation in Denmark (I don't recommend). I visited a doctor twice, both times I called and I could immediately come to their practice and they ran tests, etc. I don't think we even got a bill for either visits. I only paid something like 10 euros at the pharmacist for a good stock of painkillers.
We can argue if that is fair or not, but if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC, America is [one of] the best places to be for medical care.
My parents also lived in the US (and IIRC they were on private insurance), but no way would they want to trade European healthcare/education for the US counterpart.
At any rate, all the statistics show that the US pays ~twice as much for health care with worse outcomes for the general public.
if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC
It's always so surprising that people from the US do not see the issue with this. Let's say, assuming that you are in tech, I hope you don't get laid off in the next round.
[1] I have to add a bunch of qualifiers here, because the EU or Europe is not a single country and some countries have private insurance, private clinics, etc.
If you are 50+ with a average job in an average town, America is much worse now that it was prior to the 2000s. And nobody cares because 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you have a good job, aren't really all that sick or are on someone elses insurance plan, and if you are under 50'.
It's the same everywhere in the US. Colloquially called "collecting unemployment".
You get unemployment benefits. For a little while. In some places there may also be something like rent compensation, but generally unemployment benefits are supposed to be all-encompassing. (They are nowhere near enough to be all-encompassing.)
Once the unemployment benefits end, you better have a job.
My wife lost her job in the summer of 2020. We were incredibly lucky that the lockdowns meant extended unemployment benefits. They still lasted....I forget exactly, but I believe it was no more than about a year.
I'm not familiar with all of them, but here in "free, socialized healthcare" France, if you don't have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to "employer-dependant healthcare" in the US, you're going to have to pay out of pocket quite a lot of money. Maybe not as much as in the US (not familiar with that country), but very much not free. Think dental, glasses, needing to spend a night in a hospital for whatever reason (even public ones!), etc. On top of your salary being much lower.
Sure, you don't need an employer to have a mutuelle, you can pay for your own. But it's usually pricier and worse coverage.
As an American who's had to deal with the ramifications of employer-based health insurance first-hand, I can confirm that this strikes me as accurate. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where even being out of work for most of last year did not hurt my financial situation very much (my wife and I were actually able to buy our house during my unemployment), but even being in that fairly privileged position, due to her autoimmune condition, we've had to go through quite a lot of annoying bullshit from a lack of healthcare options due to basically being stuck with whatever my employer happens to offer.
With my previous health insurance (from a startup where there were around 10 employees during my time there), we were able to get the semiannual procedure she's been getting for years from her specialist doctor approved relatively quickly, but with the insurance from my current job, it took months earlier this year to get it approved because they kept denying it due to her condition (which is pretty rare in general, and even more rare for anyone to have it as long as she has; one of the first doctors she saw for it years ago told us "you're not going to find a support group for this online", and we've literally yet to find anything online about anyone else ever having it for as long as she has) not being on the list of pre-approved conditions. This was typical across several insurance companies for the initial request, but with this insurance company, they put us through an extremely convoluted process for appealing. First, they told her doctor that he couldn't email or fax them his letter of medical necessity and had to send it through snail mail, which even a month later they claimed they had never received. They told me I could email it to them, which I did, only for them to later claim I didn't have authorization to do that on behalf of my wife (something that never came up in the call where they told me to email it to them despite us both being there on speaker phone), and she had to fill out and email them a form authorizing me. She did that, but then after a while they still just sent us a blanket rejection for it not being on the initial list (as if there were any chance of it magically appearing on the list between when they initially denied it and when they finally processed the appeal?), and they could not provide us with any evidence that an actual doctor looked at the letter where her doctor stated definitively that he would expect her to likely experience permanent and potentially fatal organ damage with the treatment due to none of the other options having mitigated her symptoms in the past. After filing a grievance, they insisted that if her doctor filled out the information in a separate form that they had never mentioned to either him or us before, they would take it into account, so he did that, and then after a while they still rejected it with identical language to before. Finally after three months, they gave us the ability to have her doctor talk directly to an actual doctor on their end, and then it got approved within the next week. No one was able to provide any sort of coherent explanation as to why they kept putting us through such bullshit procedures that had no effect instead of letting us just do that in the first place.
I don't pretend to have any first-hand experience with healthcare in other countries, but no sane system would end up with such disparate outcomes for the exact same condition for the exact same patient due to literally nothing but how much bullshit the insurance company feels like putting you though. There's literally no way for us to have stayed with the insurance company that managed to actually read the information her doctor sent them and approve it within a few days the first time because they're based in a different state that the company I was employed by happened to be based in, and my current employer has no other insurance companies as options for me to pick instead. Even without all of the potential awful things that you mention people might go through with a subpar employer, the situation actually still sucks even when you do like your employer because your insurance options are tied to them. I like my job, and other than the insurance company sucking, it works well for me, but I also can't reasonably expect them to pick up an entire new insurance option for the entire company because of the bullshit I went through, so as much as I'd love to literally never have to deal with this specific insurance company again, there's no way to do that without giving up the job as well. Realistically, that would end up causing a lot more stress and uncertainty that my wife and I don't want to go through (especially when there's no guarantee that whatever insurance we'd end up with from a new job would be any better). At least in another country, we'd have some level of consistency in trying to get her treatment approved.
It absolutely is.
America is great if you make at least 150k a year and never get sick.
The moment you get sick with anything serious your employer might fire you. Labor protections in America are a bad joke. Your boss wants to fire you because your taking time off to look after a sick relative, I guess you can sue, but they’ll blame something and probably win.
Your boss lies to your face about pay and benefits, ohh well sucks to suck.
Very minor illnesses turn catastrophic. Several stories have emerged of otherwise healthy young people going without insulin and not doing so well…
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...
Even if you have insurance, ohh well…
> Parents sue over son's asthma death days after inhaler price soared without warning Cole Schmidtknecht, 22, had insurance but couldn’t afford to refill his asthma inhaler after the cost jumped from $70 to more than $500.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/asthma-death-pres...
Half the country cheers this on. The idea of some ‘lazy’ person getting something they don’t deserve rationalizes this dystopian system.
Of course the American system ends up costing significantly more for worse outcomes.
Access to therapy is usually gate kept to those with expensive insurance plans. Medicare, if it covers it at all can easily have a 1 year wait list for therapy.
Not to mention that most people get no meaningful vacation time.
Want to quit because you’re burnt out. Even if you have savings you won’t have health insurance. You won’t be able to afford therapy without it.
Get back on the hamster wheel.
I do regret not making a better effort to leave earlier. It’s not going to get better
For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.
Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.
I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.
For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.
Furthermore, I would say that it's wrong to look at the situation in terms of "reducing the burden on the NHS Dental", since that is literally what's there for. If people don't opt for cosmetic surgery, then it's a healthcare issue and we created this institution/branch for this very purpose. Otherwise we can easily end up speaking in terms of how much of a burden being alive is, and how eating (regular) food and drinking water are poor economic decisions, a topsy-turvy way of looking at the very reason to have an 'economy'.
Respectfully that is completely wrong, do you even live here? Nobody wants to pay for private healthcare here (takeup is ~10%) and people don't care about teeth as much as they probably should.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/02/19/uk-nhs-doctor-s...
https://privatisation.everydoctor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/...
Employer health plans are only good as long as you pay - if they are good. Lots aren't and they require you to pay so much upfront. Waiting time for specialists and surgeries depend on the area you live in: Not common to wait months for a specialist in the US. You won't get seen if you can't pay for the doctor upfront and medicines are expensive.
I moved from the US (Indiana) to Norway. I've never had an issue seeing a doctor or dentist if I'm sick or in pain since I've been here. I can plan routine things in advance, but I don't need to plan months in advance. I'm just not getting in the same day because they save those times for folks that are sick and need seen sooner. I'll never have a bill if I'm hospitalized. Doctors tend to offer less invasive treatments first - they would have tried to avoid a knee replacement. And if the wait was long (which again, really isn't different from the states, depending on where you are and if you have money enough), the safety net helps out. Reduced work hours and paid time off work and stuff like that. The emergency room sends folks home with medicine instead of expecting you to go to the pharmacy afterwards! ER waiting times aren't longer and honestly, I can call ahead and suffer at home instead of in a waiting room if it isn't actually an emergency, but need urgent care. My partner was seen immediately when he cut off part of his finger, I was seen immediately when I had severe pain, but you'll wait longer for an uncomplicated broken bone and things like that.
And this is all relying on the public system - People can get shorter waiting times if they use the private system.
I am in the EU and I can do that too?
Just to help out there :)
This has been the case in every country I've lived in within Europe (3 and counting). And a mix of rural (50,000 town) and big urban areas.
Can you share a reference for that statistics?
FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.
This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.
Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.
I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.
Even if it's true now, I wonder for how long—insurance is getting worse and worse every year.
Last month had to get my son in to get checked out, turned out he just had a nasty cold, but they were able to get him in day-of. Mind you, that's not the emergency room, that's my _family doctor_.
Two weeks ago my mother had kidney stones, went to the ER. Had a stent put in, sent along her merry way in I want to say 4 hours?
When my sciatica flared up several months ago, I was in the ER for several hours just because there were much more severe cases ahead of me, which makes perfect sense. I got xrayed that day, bloodwork, among other shit.
I could go on and on, but these cases aren't outliers for us, they're the norm.
I call BS. I have a great healthcare plan and appointments with my PCP are weeks out if at all; I was lucky to find some other random PCP who was available for a Telehealth consult only. Our kid has a rare disability that requires lots of different doctors, and we have to book literally months in advance for consults.
My (now retired) parents live in Ireland and get better healthcare than we do in the US.
When my brother was in Columbus, OH, (pop. 1.5 million) he got a referral to a neurologist for a pinched nerve in his neck and was scheduled 9 months out. The situations are far too varied for easy generalizations.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him.
Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural power of their demographic majority and identity. People forget how much of a joke candidate he was until racists took him seriously.
>if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare
If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.
That's by design.
The billionaires who own the media conglomerates have spent decades airing propaganda to that effect, as well as perpetuating the myth that anyone can become wealthy if they just work hard enough, with the implicit contra-positive being that the poor are poor because they are lazy, thus deserving their poverty.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - Lyndon B. Johnson
I am mostly comparing these places to all first world countries, rather than just the anglosphere.
Agree about the rest. Can I come live in your country? :)
For over a year it has actually been the official recommendation to bring a burner phone to the US if you area a European citizen. To me personally, this feels like an invasion of privacy that makes me feel deeply resentful.
That said - I moved to the States in the late '80 as a teen (NYC/Brooklyn/NJ) from Ukraine. I lived all over the country since, except for PNW and the Midwest. The US was different then. Perhaps my glasses were rosier then. Perhaps it's because the net was in its nascent phase. By a strange twist of fate, I ended up working for a Ukrainian company until recently. When my ex-colleagues asked me "should I move", I told them no, stay in Europe. Culture, infrastructure, medicine, work-to-live. It takes me 9 hours to fly to Barcelona from Miami + customs, as opposed to a 2 hour train from Paris to London without any TSA shenanigans. I'd move to Europe in a sec, but it's too late, too many roots. One thing I'll add, as banal as it is, one can become an American, but one would probably never become French or German or Polish.
I don't know their heritage, but both Renee and Alex were very white (not that it should matter) US citizens, savagely murdered by ICE.
So yes, ICE is gunning down pretty much everyone they see.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ $22 for a package of toilet paper that has 1/3 less paper than before.
Prices are out of sight. 3 years ago, 1lb of real deli roast beef was $7. Now $20. Costs almost $30 to make a pot of stew. Used to cost $10.
I could write for hours on this subject. The garbage produced is that prolific.
I'm not sure what bakeries you're visiting but that's not my experience; there's nothing cheaper than flour and yeast and baking soda. If the bakery bakes things in store, rather than getting shipped in, it's pretty likely to be made with those. Of course if you want to buy the sandwich bread that lasts 4 weeks on the shelf then it's not going to be 2 ingredients.
The rest is just global inflation. EU doesn't have cheaper cocoa or wood pulp imports. Every problem begins with inflation. COVID QE fucked it all up.
UK: Tomatoes, spirit vinegar, sugar, salt, spice and herb extracts, spice
About the same total sugar per 100g. Of course Heinz also sells "no sugar added" and "Simply Tomato Ketchup with No Artificial Sweeteners" versions in the US. Complaining about food being loaded with sugar/salt as a national issue is pretty dumb, because you can just buy the healthier stuff if you want that. What it amounts to is "US mainline premade foods are not to my tastes." That's fine, but... have you seen an American grocery store? There are infinite options all along the health spectrum. It's not hard to eat cleanly, it's just slightly less automatic.
And no, it is not cheaper to eat healthy in EU either. The cheapest US food is generally cheaper than the cheapest EU food because the quality is worse. If you buy the EU-quality-equivalent foods they are EU-price-equivalent as well. Compare across price brackets, not across the worst possible legal quality of item.
Sure, none of these are a problem if you earn a shitton of money... but where doesn't this apply?
Look, I'm not saying the US is necessarily a bad place to live in but I really enjoy live in a high wellfare societies and will happily trade away a good chunk of my salary for higher quality of living.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
What makes this analysis tricky is disposable vs. discretionary income. The US clearly comes out on top when it comes to disposable income (labour is taxed too much in Germany compared to capital income and wealth).
The picture gets more complicated when you look at discretionary income, which also accounts for regular bills, such as rent, college tuition, out of pocket expenses for health care, childcare, and such. All the taxes you pay in Germany do also pay for something, after all. There is unfortunately very little data for this type of comparison.
Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.
But the reply to that is that it is orthogonal to the discussion. Power should be distributed in a way that increases efficiency and not just for the virtue of doing so.
Removing it and weakening sociopathic predators is correct. They will cauase less damage when they are not constantly given advantages.
yes, "destroy hierarchies" is utopian. But that's a complete straw man version of "reduce very high levels of inequality that have highly visible political impacts".
really? Have you ever met anyone like this?
Cool story, but also another straw man - not relevant to the article and to "We should absolutely aim to lower this gap".
The only agency it reduces is the agency for people to make decisions about what should be done with other people's wealth. Which is not a productive agency for them to have as they've got an incredible conflict of interest to just waste it on themselves.
Medial and pre-medieval times, debt cancellation was also broadly necessary and done. Why?
Yes!
> But the reply to that is that it is orthogonal to the discussion.
Bafflegab.
> Power should be distributed in a way that increases efficiency
Sophistry. Why is "efficiency" a goal and how would you even define it?
Look at the current pollical great power of Oligarchs. Does this strike you as "efficient"? I see it as producing poor outcomes, and that's all.
[1] 1.99 % if we want to be precise.
No, it really is the wealth inequality.
Why is this better factually, not ideologically.
Also narrowing the gap is a way to raise the floor including in absence of growth while raising the floor without narrowing the gap depends on growth. But I think this is not too relevant in practice because taking a lot of money from a few wealthy people will often result in rather small changes as the money has to be spread among a lot of people.
But that still isn't a convincing reason (I want to be convinced)
1) Raise the floor for everyone
2) Work to make sure that the path for talented (however you define that) people to go from low earners to high earners is as simple as possible.
I generally agree that if it was true that the inequality would lead to consistent floor raising it would be fine, but it doesn't.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
Wealthiest 1% of earners - 50.1%
Top 90-99% of earners - 37.3%
Top 50-89% of earners - 11.7%
Bottom 50% of earners - 1.1%
Source: Federal Reserve/Reuters
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
if you paint a masterpiece worth millions and keep it in your closet it has negligible impact on GDP. only once it is sold does it have an effect.
Services to facilitate selling [auction fees, commissions, shipping, etc.] are new services and so get counted, but the underlying asset's resale is not.
“The first is linked to something showing the author knows it’s an apple.”
“Agreed.”
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
"then why not make sleeping illegal? obviously there's a limit"
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
Only ~1% of people in the US make federal minimum wage. ~58% of that 1% are serving related occupations who collect tips that are not counted in BLS wage data.
You need to use median wage - which is ~$24 for all occupations.
Edit: to the down voters, what is your answer to the question?
Brilliant argument you have there.
Your water example actually reinforces my point. If GP ignores the reality around drinking too much water, they will poison themselves, just like ignoring the reality around minimum wage would destroy things.
Yet here you are stating that because a higher minimum wage is good, it must be more good to make the minimum wage "a million an hour" too right? Which doesn't follow at all based on literally any other example of things that are "good". It's mind-numbingly stupid. It's a ridiculous straw-man made by someone either disingenuous or ignorant.
I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
You ran right past the GP's statement too:
> yet with terrible distribution
applies to the quality of a suburb too. Obviously. You wouldn't catch me dead in a Texas suburb or Florida suburb.
My argument is that not even nice dense neighborhoods are that nice compared to nice suburbia.
It's a matter of the person's life values and I believe the majority wouldn't necessarily pick the nice dense neighborhoods over nice suburbia. Also, I'd pick bad suburbia over bad inner cities.
Also, I was, for unknown reasons, under the impression tptacek had taken hiatus around here. Half glad I was mistaken.
Don’t be distracted by the shiny suburbs — pay attention to the ideas contained within the broader comment.
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.