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Comment by allarm | Hacker News Reader

> you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China

Whether this is true or not is still open to debate, but the fact that it’s presented as some kind of absolute truth that needs no substantiation is simply ridiculous.

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Quality of life seems clear enough to assert:

https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...

Freedom is harder to quantify and certainly the US is regressing quickly, so China may well become more free without any domestic policy changes.

Well no.. regardless of anything else the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe). While compared to e.g. Germany or France those in the lower percentiles are probably doing worse China specifically still has a huge amount of poverty. Even if you happen to be legally allowed to live in one of the major cities and have a decent job.. well 966 is still a thing and you don’t get paid $500k like the OpenAI employees allegedly forced to sleep under their desks.

> the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe)

If you say so. I visit the U.S. quite often, and the homeless and mentally ill people on the streets there don’t seem particularly happy. I haven’t seen anything like this on such a scale either in the country where I was born, in the countries where I used to live, or in the country where I live now. But yes, the index suggest otherwise, so I suppose it’s just my misconception, sure.

Yes, that’s exactly what I said. The median and above are doing very well in relative terms, the bottom line 10 percent or so are often doing much worse compared to other developed countries.

> I suppose it’s just my misconception, sure.

I don’t think you are actually arguing with me.

> I don’t think you are actually arguing with me.

I'm not. I just know for a fact that statistics (and indexes) are lies.

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