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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

#171

Post by zerodensity »

sonicshadow wrote: post #163
janalsncm wrote: post #158

This is a bit of a frame trap. Here’s another metric: ==2021== Life expectancy in EU: 80 Life expectancy in US: 76 ==Rolling back to 2008== Life expectancy in EU: 79 Life expectancy in US: 78 What’s the point? Maybe GDP isn’t the most important indicator. The US can double it’s GDP by making healthcare more expensive and extracting every last dime from the elderly, but can it actually improve quality of life for peop…

What's the point of living an extra few years either? I'd rather die at 70 after having lived a healthy life, than 80 and suffered the last 10 years

You say that now. I bet you are going to be dancing by a different tune at 70.

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

#172

Post by dougmwne »

blibble wrote: post #151
lyu07282 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US’s secret sauce is that is an empire that can, will and does constantly project its massive military and clandestine power around the world to further its interests at all times, while never having to deal with any of its blowback. And then americans laugh at the EU welcoming refugees you created in the first place, or pretend the EU is socialist while laughing at its massive energy crisis caused by its complet…

pretty certain it's the germans that decided to use the russian gas meanwhile the US was pretty upset about the idea

It was economical to buy the Russian gas delivered by pipeline. The US wanted to sell its more expensive LNG. And it ended up getting its wish after it supported a western aligned Ukraine and while no one wants to claim responsibility for blowing up nordstream, someone definitely blew it up and it helped cement the US as the gas supplier of Europe.

I think the message is clear that it’s best not to upset the US.

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

#173

Post by fullshark »

gitfan86 wrote: post #76
seydor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but so many Americans are on Instagram and Tiktok that they feel poor since they are inundated with stories about people doing better than them.

Comparing your life to tiktok celebrities is toxic but comparing it to the impoverished halfway around the world is healthy?

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

#174

Post by landemva »

sonicshadow wrote: post #163
janalsncm wrote: post #158

This is a bit of a frame trap. Here’s another metric: ==2021== Life expectancy in EU: 80 Life expectancy in US: 76 ==Rolling back to 2008== Life expectancy in EU: 79 Life expectancy in US: 78 What’s the point? Maybe GDP isn’t the most important indicator. The US can double it’s GDP by making healthcare more expensive and extracting every last dime from the elderly, but can it actually improve quality of life for peop…

What's the point of living an extra few years either? I'd rather die at 70 after having lived a healthy life, than 80 and suffered the last 10 years

Your body, your choice.

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

#175

Post by rootusrootus »

mrtksn wrote: post #81
legitster wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently talking with a friend who moved to Germany and loved it. But now that he is raising a family he is planning on moving back to the states. There's definitely a quantity/quality difference. Things in Germany are just nicer . But at a certain point, the "niceness" of things doesn't matter to you much anymore when you are trying to raise a family of 4 in a 800 sq ft apartment.

Europe is densely populated in general but there are villages all over the place where you can have a large house like in an American suburb. I think cultural expectations are more defining, for example Turks are frustrated with the healthcare in Europe because they expect to see a specialist ASAP even for the smallest thing and they want antibiotics for it. In Germany you won’t get all the antibiotics you want unles…

> I’m hearing about Americans complaining on similar stuff. IIRC Americans feel neglected during pregnancy in Germany despite that the US infant mortality rate is almost twice the German one.

To my understanding, infant mortality has less to do with quality of care, and a lot more to do with environmental and genetic factors. The biggest causes of infant mortality in the US are congenital defects and complications due to premature birth.

There seem to be enough confounding factors that I'd question comparing infant mortality rates across borders to begin with.

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

#176

Post by Alupis »

Supermancho wrote: post #106
Alupis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage. This is false if you spend even a few seconds thinking about it. Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of. Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time. The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level p…

> Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time. This is some soft language hiding some bad assumptions. "supposed to be" - what does this mean? because it's a lot more interesting...low skilled jobs, are probably what we're going to be talking about. However, it's not the 1950s anymore. eg Staffing a movie theater is not a part-time job (which you would know if y…

> If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive

This is the issue - the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion.

Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. If someone can be trained to replace you in a few minutes (i.e. unskilled labor), then the truth is your labor is not worth a lot.

We need more people moving up into skilled labor. It's really hard to imagine someone working 30+ years at a job and not developing skills... yet that is what's happening more often today than ever before.

Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. They need flexible hours, and schedules that fit their available time (night shift, swing shift, whatever...).

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

#177

Post by htfu »

dogma1138 wrote: post #101
mrb wrote: post #96

Note this chart shows nominal dollars, not PPP-adjusted. The EU has certainly kept up with the US when looking at PPP GDP from 2008 to 2022: US grew from $14.8T to $25.5T EU grew from $14.3T to $24.3T What that means is that the prices of goods are inflated in the US compared to similar goods in the EU. That's all. Want something interesting? Look at China who grew from $10.0T to $30.3T over the same period (!) Sourc…

No one uses PPP for measuring growth, GDP PPP can increase whilst your economy contracts. PPP isn’t a good measure for population’s wealth or quality of life especially for developed economies either. The economy of the US is still twice that of the EU and its global purchasing power has also pretty much doubled.

In 2008 the dollar was historically cheap (70% of current), now it's pretty expensive. This swing is the main driver of this whole thing and means that yes, PPP is superior for looking at growth. Not ideal, but much better.

Cheap imports are great for consumers, but a currency losing 20% certainly doesn't mean its economy has magically contracted 20%. If anything a weakish currency stimulates internal economic activity as it's good for exports.

The US economy is also not nearly "twice that of the EU", in nominal terms either - it's about 50% bigger. The (silly) chart is for the eurozone.

Seriously, the US always had a somewhat bigger/stronger economy, but a cheap dollar at the time made nominal almost equal, which was misleading. Now, the US still has a slightly bigger economy, and has had better growth, while the price of the dollar makes it look like a massive difference, which is also misleading. The true output difference is high single digit. Why are you pretending otherwise?

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

#178

Post by TeMPOraL »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #32
midasuni wrote: 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?

What about: - Your access to mRNA vaccines - Your access to cleaner air due to electric car adoption - Ditto for energy security and renewable sources of electricity - Your chance of dying in a car going down due to new safety features - Your access to crazy advanced cancer treatments that are making progress at almost miraculous paces - Your much improved ability to work from home, cutting out ~2 hours of commuting…

> - Your access to mRNA vaccines

Ain't disputing that, but that's an outlier because it's a government provided thing, at least where I live.

But look at the rest of those things from a POV of people from lower and middle classes:

> - Your access to cleaner air due to electric car adoption

Yeah someday, maybe; right now it only means my perfectly good car is no longer good, and I have to somehow find money to replace it - and since this tech is new, there aren't many cheap used replacements available.

> - Ditto for energy security and renewable sources of electricity

Energy security? That's not what TV says. Renewables? You mean like those PV scam companies popping up everywhere? Or government forcing me to replace my cheap heat source with an expensive one?

> - Your chance of dying in a car going down due to new safety features

Feels like a pretty remote risk at this point (if it weren't, people wouldn't be driving at all). But sure, nice that safety improves over time, even if I'm always 10-20 years behind on the features.

> - Your access to crazy advanced cancer treatments that are making progress at almost miraculous paces

US: what access? Can't exactly afford it.

EU: what access? The queues are so long I'll die before my appointment comes up.

> - Your much improved ability to work from home, cutting out ~2 hours of commuting each day

That's thanks to COVID dragging the market kicking and screaming into this new reality, and with the pandemic over, the businesses are trying to decide which jobs to force back into office, and which to offshore. Neither is really a win.

(Also, it was hardly an ability - everyone was forced into it. Commute doesn't look all that bad compared to two working parents and all the kids trying to simultaneously remote-work and remote-learn in an apartment not sized for this.)

> By every metric, the world is DRAMATICALLY better today for virtually everyone than it was in 1960

What about it no longer being possible for most couples to live on a single income?

> maybe you're depressed

Funny you should mention depression - yes, support for dealing with it is better than ever, but it's also not accessible to most.

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

#179

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

Was the UK included then excluded from the data? Perhaps explains the stagnation in the data

How much does the FED has printed vs the ECB?

How much of EU's economy was affected by the US extraterritoriality legislation?

https://www.rferl.org/a/1095057.html

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1665370246126125060

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

#180

Post by nonethewiser »

mrb wrote: post #122
dogma1138 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one uses PPP for measuring growth, GDP PPP can increase whilst your economy contracts. PPP isn’t a good measure for population’s wealth or quality of life especially for developed economies either. The economy of the US is still twice that of the EU and its global purchasing power has also pretty much doubled.

" GDP PPP can increase whilst your economy contracts. " Still, if PPP GDP increases, with all else being equal (eg. stable population) it would imply the standard of living is increasing. That is why PPP GDP captures a more accurate measure of the real world. Said another way, what truly matters isn't "GDP growth", but changes in purchasing power/quality of life.

Despite a shrinking economy. If we’re measuring economy size we’re not measuring purchasing power. I cant tell if you recognize this and just think we shouldn’t care about economy size or if you are actually conflating PPP with economy size. Mainly because you keep presenting it as a rebuttal to claims about economy size.
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