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The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

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Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#22
post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

Does all growth go to the same rich people, or do more people become rich?

See the chart at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh....

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#23
post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#24
post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

[flagged]

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#27
post #4

I'd rather this be displayed on a line chart than a pair of bar graphs. 2008 is an oddly specific year, a year when the US was in the midst of the housing market collapse and ensuing chaos. Yes, Europe was impacted too, but this chart doesn't show how much, relatively speaking.

The housing crisis is interesting. Post-crisis, Europe adopted austerity measures and the US went the other way. I bet that explains this gap more so than (from the article) unions and Europeans being lazy.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#28

And yet with all that money you can’t buy European quality of life in the USA

My sister in law is from Spain, had a guaranteed government job at a state run hospital (or some affiliated org) for life, and could retire in her 50s. She chose to bail and come to the US. She hated her boss (who could never be fired), the work was boring, the take home pay was awful, and she lived in a village where she grew up in a tiny apartment.

Sure she had enough to eat and wasn’t going to be homeless. But she decided that life really wasn’t very exciting and she had no opportunity for growth whatsoever, just waiting for her boss to retire so she could take over her similarly boring job. But hey she could take double the vacation that an average US employee gets!

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#29
post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

while it's true and it s very unequal the difference has become so big that even the poorest americans are richer than most europeans.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#30
German here. Austerity? Over-regulation? An oligopoly of tech-incompetent local enterprises? Just guessing here.

As a student in 2007, I started being an avid follower of what Big Tech was doing and was flabbergasted that local tech enterprises didn't seem to notice or change anything. In CS at university they didn't teach programming (only as an aside) but all the funny theoretical OOP fluff that the community rightfully started ditching and frowning upon.

Given software is slowly eating everything, I am not surprised in the result. Probably 7/10 of my fellow CS students will not be remotely able to explain how a given software works under the hood.

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