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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

It's because the most massive costs an American has like healthcare, child care, and higher education are free or vastly less expensive in Europe. Americans spend all their time at work for a very impressive number on their paystub while they're still one accident or illness away from homelessness or bankruptcy. Europeans get higher quality of life/happiness scores and spend far less time slaving away for their boss. Just because the number on your paycheck is bigger, it doesn't mean you're winning.

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Not sure we do have better quality of life in Europe. We may have in the 2000s, but we're in decline relative to the US. Even if you take things like healthcare into account:

US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).

The UK is still better a lot of ways but there's a reason it's called "the America of Europe"

Depends who you are. 16% of the UK is in absolute poverty (20% if you account for housing costs), while only 10% are in absolute poverty in the US.

I'd rather be an American on an average salary paying for healthcare than in the UK on a much lower average salary. Property costs/rents are much higher and our public services like healthcare are crumbling (my dad nearly died in a hospital corridor because there were no beds left).

I know that last bit is anecdotal, but it's a country-wide problem.

Citation? Median earnings is less than that. And median household income is only marginally more.

the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360.

According to the CPS, the median household income was $70,784 in 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

That's income, not disposable income. It's also median, instead of mean. It's also wrong. Median income in the UK is £39,039 which is about $49,500.. You linked to the US Wikipedia page twice.

OECD is the source for disposable income.

US: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...

UK: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...

Yeah, OECD is saying the mean disposable income is the US is almost the same as median household income.

Either some of the numbers are wrong, or your (OECD’s) use of mean is misleading… the mean of Bezos’ and my disposable incomes is a very large and mostly useless figure.

Mean personal disposable income being comparable to median household income isn't too surprising and doesn't necessarily indicate any error. Mean is much higher than median, individual is much lower than household, disposable is much lower than total. You are comparing numbers that are different in all three axes (in ways which do not point in the same direction), so really any relationship between them would be plausible without detailed knowledge of the exact distribution of all the relevant components.

They're completely different metrics. If you want to compare median income:

UK - $49,500 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...)

US - $83,750 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to prove other than that you don't understand statistics.

Point is the median person earns about the same as the mean disposable income. So the mean disposable income isn’t telling us too much about the quality of life, or financial state, of a typical American. From what I’m seeing, it’s just reflective of our increasing income disparity.

Taken to an absurd degree… the mean of my income and Jeff Bezos’ income tells is nothing about my income beyond “much less than Jeff”.

Okay, well the ratio of mean disposable income for the US to the UK is 1.59:1, while the ratio of median income is 1.69:1

So your preferred metric for quality of life actually shows a greater disparity between the two countries..

> higher education are free

Many of the states[0] have started offering free or low cost tuition for their public community colleges and trade schools, and low cost tuition for their colleges and universities. For example, Minnesota offers tuition at a state college starting at $6k a year[0] and free tuition at community colleges if you're earning under $80k[1]. Those prices are before financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc which are widely available from multiple sources.

[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/states-with-free-tuition/

[1] https://www.minnstate.edu/admissions/affordability.html

[2] https://www.nhcc.edu/free-college-tuition-nhcc

As for the rest of your comment, you have a very distorted of what life in the US is like. Also, nothing you list is "free" in Europe, there's just a lot of rather regressive taxes that are collected to pay for it all. The US federal tax structure is actually rather progressive, but that also means there's less money for the feds to pay for all of those "free" things.

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