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Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

economist.com

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Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#331

Post by flangola7 »

PostOnce wrote: post #268
tambourine_man wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade. My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and…

Let me answer you honestly and in depth: Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge. I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to…

This is wildly unhealthy and un-selfaware.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#332

Post by robocat »

tambourine_man wrote: post #225
woobar wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what does one need that requires “millions of dollars” Stop working?

You can with a lot less. But the problem is, after a while, you get addicted to working. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

> Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

Status seeking is independent of economic system.

I find “capitalism” has become a placeholder word for “emergent systems we don’t like”. After all, ≈50% of GDP is government spending which is closer to socialism than we might like to admit.

The single biggest drive that seems to grease the wheels is our natural desire for status. For the middle class this often is shown by our property purchases - bidding against others until we can only just afford the repayments for a house in a nice neighbourhood. We then spend many working years trying to pay off the mortgage, and we often upgrade if we get more income.

It appears most obvious when we look at other cultures, where the drive for status shows up in other ways. For example a truck owner in Northern Pakistan spending equivalent of 7 months of wages adding custom bling to his truck: https://youtu.be/1quNm7Ctd-Q?t=21m58s although he justifies it “such decorations are good for business: shows the client I am doing well”.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#333

Post by asperous »

anon291 wrote: post #314
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #183

It's true the US knows how to succeed. The top x% is doing really well. The mid is doing well in terms of being able to acquire everything they need to live at a reasonable level. The big question is how do we get the bottom percentage to have a life where they don't have to struggle to find a place to live and making sure they never go hungry? Success can never be success if we have homeless encampments in our citie…

> The big question is how do we get the bottom percentage to have a life where they don't have to struggle to find a place to live and making sure they never go hungry? I'm sorry this sort of thing is ridiculous. Are you European? The vast majority of American cities have multiple organizations attempting to give away food and unable to find takers. Our own church throws away so many pounds of food that we receive fr…

There is also food stamps (SNAP) which is meant to be supplemental, but technically speaking is enough to survive off of if you do not have any income.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#334

Post by MisterBastahrd »

csomar wrote: post #270
RestlessMind wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. That's a great bunch of cherries you picked there. If you are comparing Europe to the US, comparing France and Mississippi is disingenuous. Compare best-to-best or worst-to-worst [1][2]. The worst European countries are Azerbaijan (66.9), Moldova (70.2), Ukraine (71.2). The worst US states are W Virginia (74.8),…

You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are comparing a US state to say, eh, Moldova. The countries you named are only European by geography. They are on par or worse than North Africa. That being said, life expectancy is a very bad measure in my opinion. Americans consume a shit-ton of junk food.

It's almost as if people who can afford to eat better, do eat better.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#335

Post by dv_dt »

pb7 wrote: post #327
rqtwteye wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible." The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... The US is below most of Europe per capita in homelessness.

I don't think the definitions quite line up. When you look at the linked definition for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_France for example, it says: "Homelessness in France is a significant social issue that is estimated to affect around 300,000 people - a figure that has doubled since 2012 (141,500) and tripled since 2001 (93,000). Around 185,000 people are currently staying in shelters, some 100,000 are in temporary housing for people seeking asylum and 16,000 live in slums." This is very different than the homeless living out on the streets of so many major American cities.

Reading the , the stat on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... for the US is ~500k, while the page linked in the table, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S..., starts with "In the United States, the number of homeless people varies from different federal government accounts. In 2014, approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted." so the higher ~1.5M would seem to correspond to the definition for number reported in the table from France.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#336

Post by MisterBastahrd »

marianatom wrote: post #65
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>affordance for more food and richer food yeah, the U.S eats richer food than the French.

More available produce year round. Cheaper imported food from around the world due to dollar's strength. More diverse cuisines in big cities, with a lot better Asian cuisines (sushi!) in general than France, due to large immigrations.

Sushi isn't a great food to point to in all of this.

American sushi is full of sugar and most of the specialty rolls are soaked in even more sugar and five different varieties of flavored mayonnaise.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#337

Post by anon291 »

pcrh wrote: post #313
jandrewrogers wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be conflating “standard of living” with “quality of life”, they are not the same thing. While I think quality of life is typically better in Europe by many metrics, there is no doubt that the standard of living in the US is commonly higher. They are not as tightly correlated as I think people assume. EDIT: As an example, I split my time between Seattle and London. Cost of living is quite similar, but…

"Standard of living" would include access to education, healthcare, work-life balance, the public environment (e.g. within cities), vacation, parental leave, etc, not just material goods. While access to material goods and size of housing is normally certainly higher in the US, education and healthcare are notably more expensive for the same quality in the US compared to North and West Europe, and the public environm…

Work life balance is much better in the United States. The salaries are much higher so anyone who wants to can save enough to quit and take a vacation whenever they want.

I mean I regularly take more vacation than most Europeans do in a year and every once in a while I've just quit for a break.

America is what you make of it. Many Americans like grinding it out. I like making a shit ton of money and enjoying my life.

Europeans are obsessed with what benefits their governments will grant them and Americans are just not wired that way. This is not unique to me in a high earning tech job. Even qualifying for free health care is not as difficult as some people think. Case in point, I accidentally signed my family up for Medicaid when I was recently laid off. I paid nothing. So many of my fellow colleagues paid their own way because the common narrative is that healthcare is not free in the us.

I was making 240k a year but because my income was zero for one month my kids got free medical and my wife and I was a hundred something a month. If I truly had earned nothing that year it would have been free for everyone. Unfortunately, my colleagues, due to the common narrative that America does not have free healthcare, chose to spend money on cobra or private marketplace insurance when it would have been free if they just applied. did I mention the state also gave me free money during my sabbatical and that finding a new job was absolutely no problem due to how hot even the bad tech economy is.

What do I realistically have to complain about? Everyone in my family, despite their job and I come has retired early and loved out their life on their own terms (all immigrants here too if that matters). I truly sympathize with those who are shackled by debt and other issues, but they are largely choice of their own doing. For any arbitrary person choosing to live in the eu or the us, the only question is who is better at finances... You or your government. If you are better than America will work out great. If your government is better. Maybe europe.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#338

Post by dopeboy »

ip26 wrote: post #253
PostOnce wrote: post #166

My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds: (fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entiti…

I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.

I chuckled and cheered at the same time. It is who I am; it is who we are. "The chief business of America is business." - Coolidge

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#339

Post by dopeboy »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #277
ip26 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.

To outsiders, this dogmatic 'exceptionalism' appears revolting. My 2c.

I don't think it's any different from the French being proud of their work life balance.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#340

Post by friend_and_foe »

PostOnce wrote: post #166

My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds: (fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entiti…

I think you're right, but I'd like to add, a lot of rhetoric surrounds this idea that America is as successful as it is because of freedom. And I like freedom, and it has played a role, but it isn't really true.

America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the original local inhabitants of which mostly no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when it was settled. It has direct access to both the edges of the great old world continent of Eurasia in the form of coasts on both oceans. It has an absolutely massive population, and the government has smartly invested in the past in infrastructure to transport between them both over land.

In past times, america drained the population of the leading power center at the time, Europe, to populate itself. This held back it's competition at a time when the ability to produce depended on the number of hands and minds at your disposal. It currently has the third largest population of any one government in the world. It is also currently doing this to other regions of the world, although comparatively less with the population boom resulting from largely American technological advances decreasing infant mortality.

There have been various theories about the grand chessboard throughout history, ideas like "whoever controls central Asia controls the world", " whoever controls the seas controls the world" and "if one power has control of all of Europe they can then move on to control the world", all with various levels of truth to them (Genghis Khan controlled central Asia for example), and the grand chessboard was tossed into the air when the continent was discovered, but that wasn't really realized until the west coast was discovered. There are ways to threaten America's position, but as long as one polity controls both coasts and the land in between it's mostly safe. You can institute any form of government and it will be a major force, maybe not the big guy, but just the territory and population itself is built to be powerful.

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