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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

#591

Post by anonzzzies »

networkchad wrote: post #507
anonzzzies wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I can afford it, I mostly do not need new imported stuff and second hand you can get a lot of things (mostly everything besides Apple stuff) at bottom prices. Many people unfortunately dump stuff after new shiny comes out and some even give them to me for free. My iPhone was a gift from a friend who bought the latest. It’ll go for many years still. My nreal (xreal) now was a gift because another friend di…

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Wasn't responding to the article, was responding to my commenting parent.

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

#592

Post by refurb »

dogma1138 wrote: post #320
scythe wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It doesn’t know how much money you have, it doesn’t measure the purchasing power of individuals. No per-capita metric does this. You have to use things like the median wage to capture the purchasing power of individuals. For example, Equatorial Guinea's GDP/c is among the highest in Africa, but due to insanely high inequality and oppression, people are better off in Senegal or Rwanda. Guyana, which recently discover…

Exactly, your GDP PPP can be double that of the US and it does you absolutely squat if the median wage is 10 times lower. I swear I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen this low level of topical knowledge in a post on HN as this one.

You can see this by the top countries in GDP per capita.

Countries like Ireland and Singapore have per capita GDPs that are 10-30% higher than the US, yet median wages are lower.

Wikipedia even has section explaining why:

Many of the leading GDP-per-capita (nominal) jurisdictions are tax havens whose economic data is artificially inflated by tax-driven corporate accounting entries.

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

#593

Post by wunderland »

The US has worked hard to engineer a recovery for the global financial crisis that counters any efforts for greater cooperation across Europe. Merkel believed strongly in a peaceful partnership for the Eurasian continent (which included Russia) and the US saw this as an economic threat greater than that of China’s rise. We’re living through the results of American intervention in Europe.

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

#594

Post by sharikous »

FpUser wrote: post #257
blibble wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was economical to buy the Russian gas delivered by pipeline. see I can understand this logic pre 2014, but post 2014 (i.e. Crimea), absolutely not the euros paid to putin were used to re-arm and those weapons are now being used in Ukraine and if he wins then Eastern Europe is next in line but yes germans saved 2% on their gas bills for 10 years

>"and if he wins then Eastern Europe is next in line" I doubt Putin is suicidal. Eastern Europe is in NATO, hence protected.

Eh but Wagner is not the Russian army, right? They are an "independent contractor" after all. And Russian speaking minorities may "suddenly" decide to rebel. And NATO may be not so eager to activate article 5 since they are not suicidal too.

Long story short I am not sure NATO Eastern Europe is protected 100%. Luckily for now Putin cannot afford another front but there is already some saber rattling between Belarus and Poland and Wagner is in Belarus.

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

#595

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ffhhttt wrote: post #491
nerdponx wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly it probably does not increase the quality of life for most of those hospital employees either by all that much, except the very upper management.

The gap between American doctors and those in some European countries is even higher than the one between software engineers.

Because public healthcare systems dictate how much a doctor is to be paid and how much each procedure should cost, in the public system, which is why the public system keeps getting more bogged down as the sums the state allocates aren't keeping up with the increased inflation and demand, so more and more people need to rely on the private system.

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

#596

Post by [deleted] »

yorwba wrote: post #434
FredPret wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PPP is usually meant to compare economies and control for differences in cost of living, not comparing time periods. Inflation is when you compare the same economy in two time periods. Furthermore, economic growth is measured in "real" dollars, aka, excludig inflation. If US prices doubled as you say, then their economy is therefore now four times as large in the new, inflated dollars. None of this has anything to do…

Economic growth is best measured excluding inflation, but the chart in the tweet uses "current prices" aka the 2008 values are in 2008-dollars and the 2023 values are in 2023-dollars, including all the inflation that happened in between. (I've seen actual economists get confused by this meaning of "current", mislabeling a "current dollars" chart from 2019 as being in 2019-dollars, even though it wasn't inflation-adju…

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

#597

Post by FirmwareBurner »

midoridensha wrote: post #445
dogma1138 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for them, I know plenty others who didn’t including my entire family. That still isn’t the point, the quality of life in the USSR wasn’t a close 2nd to the US in fact when the USSR economy started to fall apart in the late 70’s and 80’s it too switched to PPP because hey our bread is cheap even if you need to stand in line to get it. And Guyana today isn’t a better place to live in than France or Canada, and Bul…

>Good for them, I know plenty others who didn’t including my entire family. There's a YouTube channel where an interviewer talks to people in various Russian cities today about the war and other topics. Loads of middle-aged and older women and men (esp. women it seems) say they want the Soviet Union back. Your family was one of the malcontents that left. The people still there really do miss the authoritarian Soviet…

>Loads of middle-aged and older women and men (esp. women it seems) say they want the Soviet Union back.

Because they have no marketable skills in the current economy. During soviet times they were basically state parasites, paid to sit around and do nothing, or pretend to work in some unproductive factory, and got free housing from the state without worrying about paying for electricity or heating as the state took care fo that too.

Now that they actually need to work to support themselves they find out capitalism works for those with actual productive skills not for those who are good at pretending to work or used to work as informants to the secret police for a living.

The sudden switch from communism to capitalism without a proper long term plan to reintegrate those people into the workforce really shocked them.

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

#598

Post by alphager »

dougmwne wrote: post #497
euroderf wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if you let the aristocracy go on for too long eventually they claim divine right. Well, the US has become a bastion of neo-feudalism, so there's that.

Fancy term, but can you develop an argument to support it?

Do the laws apply equally to everyone regardless of wealth or do the rich achieve better results?

We don't even have to pick the extreme outliers where affluenca officially plays a role. Someone that can spend a million on lawyers in the US will get a better outcome.

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

#599

Post by Cymrukicks »

ffhhttt wrote: post #483
nostrademons wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what the PPP adjustment is supposed to capture. If a dollar buys half as much energy in the U.S. as the USD/EUR conversion does in Europe, that adjusts the EU PPP for the energy sector up by 2x. (Not exactly a great example, Europe has its own energy crisis.) I'm surprised at the number of people who are confidently arguing against mrb - they're exactly correct here. The point of PPP adjustments is to…

> status as reserve currency is exactly why the US GDP has been overtaking the EU USD was the reserve currency in the 90s and mid 2000s. Back then the Euro was very strong and some large European countries were close to overtaking US in GDP per capita. The last 10 years have more or less been a lost decade in most of Western Europe because (amongst other things) it almost entirely missed out on the tech boom.

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

#600

Post by arp242 »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #304
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…

These stats drive me up the wall because the US is more diverse than every single European country . The life expectancy in California is 81 and in Alabama it’s 74. That’s the difference between the UK and like, Latvia. This matters because when you look at these crude aggregate stats, people naively assume that it means that everything is a bit worse but the actual American story is usually more like broad prosperit…

> These stats drive me up the wall because the US is more diverse than every single European country.

Are you seriously to claim that the EU is a single country? Or that there are no differences between EU countries? That link actually has a table of all EU countries, and it ranges from 72 to 83. This is actually a LARGER difference than in the US: where it ranges from 74 to 82.

You need to read what's actually being said before climbing up the walls.

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