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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

#461

Post by MisterBastahrd »

csomar wrote: post #383
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is wrong. Food is very much linked to culture. Many countries eat better than the US. Most countries in the world (except some in Africa in some situations) don't have problems feeding most of their society.

Except it isn't wrong. Indigenous food cultures know how to get their nutrition and built entire cuisines and cultures around that. Americans who live in concrete food deserts are forced to eat what's cheap and available, which is usually fast food.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#462

Post by tambourine_man »

CydeWeys wrote: post #456
tambourine_man wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I prefaced the statements with “most decent countries”, etc. The U.S. health care system doesn't qualify as decent for the richest country on earth in the XXI century, unfortunatly.

No True Scotsman arguments aren't particularly interesting.

Canada, England, Brazil are far poorer and have way better health systems. I don’t understand how that’s a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#464

Post by inglor_cz »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #344
WalterBright wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider Japan: (fact) a single market with a single language (fact) geographically isolated (fact) not much space (fact) burned to the ground in WW2 and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage. Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories. So what is the common thread? Free markets.

While I agree with you that free markets are a very powerful benefit to any state, you're biased in favor of it being the driver of America's success. America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and…

"America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and unimaginable amounts of diverse resources."

If those matter so much, Mexico should be much stronger than it is. Unblockable access to two oceans, big population, reasonable amount of resources.

What is lacking is rule of law...

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#465

Post by woobar »

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.

Once we start talking about "a lot less" the options to not work become scarce.

For instance, my estimate is that with the minimum number of millions ($2M) one can support a family while unemployed in the USA and pretty much the rest of the world. With 4% SWR such family will have $80K per year, which is more than the median household income. They will pay little taxes and will qualify for a subsidized ACA health plan.

If you are talking about less than a million, you won't be able to support a family in US. It is possible in a 3rd world countries, but it is not always an option for a lot of people.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#466

Post by chrisco255 »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #411
chrisco255 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's true that unions are so valuable, why is it that in most industries in the U.S. workers are far better compensated? Take tech as one example of a non-unionized industry that has still secured for itself work-from-home, sometimes unlimited PTO, extensive maternity and paternity leave, sometimes five to six plus figures in bonus and stock compensation, etc plus pre-WFH the dankest office accomodations which reg…

I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S. Tech is probably an outlier. Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S. As far as why tech workers are better compensated in the US? Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensat…

> Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.

No, they're not. The median income wouldn't be higher in the U.S. if the majority of its workers were not compensated more. In particular, with regards to commercial, full-time farming, farmers make far more in the U.S. (median commercial farm income was $186K in 2021 [1]).

Truck drivers in the U.S. earned a median income of $47K in 2019 [2] while truck drivers in France as of 2021 report around 25K EUR [3]. Many such examples.

> Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US.

Sure, but we can compare tech hubs in France (are there any besides Paris?) to tech hubs in the U.S. or we can compare overall U.S. vs France. It doesn't matter how you slice the data: U.S. salaries come on top and by a large factor. This is also generally true across all engineering professions. As an example, take Civil Engineers (37K EUR vs $71K USD base) [4].

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps... [3] https://www.salary.com/research/fr-salary/benchmark/truck-dr... [4] https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala...

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#467

Post by CydeWeys »

tambourine_man wrote: post #462
CydeWeys wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No True Scotsman arguments aren't particularly interesting.

Canada, England, Brazil are far poorer and have way better health systems. I don’t understand how that’s a No True Scotsman fallacy.

The US has the best healthcare in the world, period. It's just not cheap. Brazil isn't even remotely comparable.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#468

Post by jutrewag »

anon291 wrote: post #329
jutrewag wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let in a lot more immigrants, and not the refugee kind. Vetted, high skilled immigrants. Let those immigrants have something at stake i.e. provide a path to citizenship. Provide automatic citizenship to children of those immigrants born in Europe.

America takes in more poorer immigrants though

Poor but qualified? Unless it’s through the green card lottery I guess and I’m not sure what percent of new immigrants that makes.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#469

Post by revelio »

epolanski wrote: post #447
refurb wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm speaking of professional white collar jobs. The kind of jobs where you can work independently, nobody is really keeping track of what you're doing and it's not hard to blow off work without causing concern. I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.

Could you make examples? Do you think European bankers work less hard than their american counterparts? Or who does that? European software engineers? Or is it European lawyers that do less? Or accountants? It seems to me like you're overgeneralizing. While I don't doubt that US can have a more competitive nature compared to many countries (in Europe we care much less about status or what other people think about our…

Bankers might not be a good example. US investment banks work their staff notoriously hard to the point of people actually dying on the job from overwork. But, I've repeatedly heard from people who have lived through it, that the work they were doing was largely wasted make-work and the whole thing had a large degree of hazing ritual about it. One guy I talked to had quit and moved to SF to try and join the tech world because he felt the work/life balance was a lot more sane there.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#470

Post by revelio »

HWR_14 wrote: post #368
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 have never seen any evidence that Americans are more ambitious than people from other nationalities. No studies, nothing. Not have I even ever heard a theoretical reasoning why this would be the case. I assume it's just the general "my group is the best" baseless bragging.

Not sure studies would be particularly helpful for that, anecdotes and feelings are the best you'll get. But FWIW it's been my experience that Americans are more ambitious than people from other countries, including myself.
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