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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

#671

Post by FirmwareBurner »

oblio wrote: post #665
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth inequality is higher in the richer EU countries than it is in the US, so is upwards mobility. You Wikipedia link does not disprove that.

Sources? The data I've seen says the exact opposite. Edit: Also my link has the Gini inequality index as the last column, where the US is literally sandwiched between Congo and Algeria, towards the bottom...

https://archive.is/Gg6k8

Also, in the GINI table on the wiki page, Netherlands and Sweden have more wealth inequality than the US.

Also, I find the GINI formula quite flawed as it puts India as being more equal than many EU states which I find hard to believe.

To me wealth inequality is how much of the country's wealth the top % own versus the bottom %, and at least in Germany and Austria it's pretty bad.

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

#672

Post by rootusrootus »

crote wrote: post #295
rootusrootus wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 du…

> congenital defects and complications due to premature birth Those sound like issues which could be avoided with better healthcare, no? Stuff like that can often be trivially caught with proper screening.

This depends on how you define the scope of 'better' healthcare. The US has state of the art prenatal care, but that only matters for people who access it. There is a significant fraction of people who for various reasons cannot or do not take advantage of that care.

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

#673

Post by FirmwareBurner »

oblio wrote: post #667
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are those people in Europe who find waiting times comparable to the US? Anecdotally I have to await much longer than my colleagues in the US (same field, same company) to see a specialist (months vs weeks). Also, the my public insurance doesn't cover my physiotherapy for my back pain, while the insurance my US colleagues get through their employer does. >Unless you have studies to back this up, I'd drop the waiti…

> Maybe you should drop it until you can provide any kind of argument or evidence, because you wrote some words but said nothing of value. Neither have you. My anecdotes contradict yours. I'll just drop this since I've seen your other comment about inequality where I literally provided numbers and you disagreed without providing any counter-data. Let's call this a day and move on.

>My anecdotes contradict yours.

Which anecdotes? You haven't even provided anecdote just baseless disagreement statements lol.

Might as well just plug your ears with your fingers and yell "lalalala I can't hear you lalalala" or just fart and call that an argument.

BTW, i did provide a source in the inequality comment. Check again.

Also how else do you want to measure waiting times in my country vs the US except comparing my experiences with the people I know living there on similar jobs? It's not like my government made statistics against the US health system to compare so comparing with my work colleagues from the US is the best I can do. You're just being contrarian for the sake of trolling.

Please provide some information if you disagree ,even anecdotes, because otherwise you're wasting everyone's time or you enjoy trolling.

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

#674

Post by ddd00001 »

pseudo0 wrote: post #401
vkou wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans with wealth or property have done great for themselves. They currently feel that the economy is in the dumps, but that's just because talking heads on Fox are telling them that it is. They can't articulate why the economy is in the dumps. Americans who are between the ages of 15 and 35 feel like the ladder has been pulled up out of their reach, and they've felt this way for the past decade. Mostly because p…

The top 10% of American households own 89% of US stocks, and the top 1% own 50% of US stocks. The benefits have almost entirely accrued to a small minority at the top. Some of the 35+ cohort are doing exceedingly well, but most just have a primary residence (with a mortgage), some limited retirement savings, and maybe a small investment account. Those people are still working for a living, and likely have experienced…

Since ~2012 disposable income for Americans has lapped that of Europeans. See for yourself.

https://dart.lisdatacenter.org/dart

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

#675

Post by ddd00001 »

vkou wrote: post #349
rayiner wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Americans would disagree with the implication that the US has done particularly well over the last 15 years, even though going by nominal dollars that seems to be the case.

Americans with wealth or property have done great for themselves. They currently feel that the economy is in the dumps, but that's just because talking heads on Fox are telling them that it is. They can't articulate why the economy is in the dumps. Americans who are between the ages of 15 and 35 feel like the ladder has been pulled up out of their reach, and they've felt this way for the past decade. Mostly because p…

[flagged]

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

#676

Post by ryathal »

Qwertious wrote: post #581
dmurray wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually called the broken window fallacy, from an essay by Bastiat in 1850. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

More specifically, some valuable types of activities are not even measured in GDP - if you build your own table out of roadside scrap, then you might be immensely satisfied by the table, but it will contribute $0 to GDP. If you follow free instructions online (and look various stuff up on Wikipedia), that will again improve your life but not GDP.

The big thing is childcare from stay at home parents. That counts as 0 GDP, but put them in daycare and give the parent a job that's a net loss financially to the family and GDP has grown considerably.

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

#677

Post by nocoiner »

happyraul wrote: post #650
nocoiner wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Against my better judgment, I’m going to make a statement that sounds incredibly crass, but is directionally true: those are all travesties that no decent society should accept, but at the end of the day, they’re rounding errors. There’s plenty that’s wrong with America, but there’s no other country within the same order of magnitude of scale (or, hell, expand that to either a population of 50+ million or an order of…

By what criteria do you judge the US to be "a pretty darn good place to live" compared to the EU?

Edit: the formatting on this is just atrocious, and I don’t have time to do more than take a quick shot at hopefully fixing it, but suspect it isn’t gonna work. Apologies in advance.

Just off the top of my head, I guess my short list would look something like this. I grant some, maybe all, of these have drawbacks, but these are the factors that I personally value and what I would miss by moving to any of the other places I’ve visited or of which I’m aware that seem like delightful places to live. 1. The sheer number of incredibly unique large cities (and the correlating lack of a single city that dominates national culture)

2. The ethos of individualism

3. The national park system

4. The sheer amount of diversity (racial, ethnic, national origin, religious, regional, etc.)

5. My personal access to, and quality of, healthcare (I grant that this is highly, highly subjective)

6. Other Americans (believe it or not lol)

7. Higher educational system

8. Economic dynamism and opportunity

9. Our foundational documents and subsequent amendments/improvements thereto

10. Our national tendency to do the right thing (after, of course, exhausting all other courses of action)

11. Approximately 10 trillion different regional cuisines (have you seen the number of strongly held opinions about different ways to smoke and serve meat?)

12. Every type of natural beauty imaginable

Not saying we have a monopoly on any of these! But I like where I live and think it’s a pretty cool place.

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

#678

Post by nerdponx »

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.

I was talking about administrators and other "non-medical" staff. Nurses and doctors are in short supply as the working conditions are absolutely brutal, offset only by the possibility (not a promise) of fabulous wealth later in your career for doctors, and offset by nothing in particular for nurses. And hospital bureaucracy and poorly designed EMR systems makes it worse, not better.

Let's not glamorize the American system just because the European system is struggling in its own way.

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

#679

Post by tnel77 »

freetime2 wrote: post #302
tnel77 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically posted as a reply to a comment cherry picking stats.

Fair enough - my comment complaining about the quality of content on Twitter was admittedly pretty low quality. When I said "Twitter is terrible when it comes to cherry picking stats out of context", I was referring to the fact that the Tweet doesn't link to its source, and that it only shows 2 years (instead of a line chart which would show all the years in between). It also doesn't make any attempt to interpret the…

I agree with you. It just made me chuckle :).

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

#680

Post by seanmcdirmid »

thomasz wrote: post #453
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, if PPP GDP increases, with all else being equal (eg. stable population) it would imply the standard of living is increasing. PPP is weird. Many of my costs were higher when living in China since imported things were more expensive, and there were lots of extra taxes to consider. It didn’t feel like I had more PPP except when eating out and consuming services. You definitely can’t use PPP to buy imports.

PPP is meant to account for things like a haircut in San Francisco creating way more economic output than a haircut in rural China, and therefore inflating the numbers. It doesn’t completely solve the problem of comparing the economic output of a 747 to the economic output of a haircut in rural China. If you are used to the lifestyle of the western upper middle class and consume the associated products, the effects o…

Average Chinese costs are lower, however, not because their PPP is higher, they just have lower LCOL. So that hair cut that is only 20 kuai is done by a guy outside in the alley who maintains one very long finger nail (and yes, I actually experienced that before). If we were to compare the average Chinese bought car with the average American bought car, you would see a similar effect.
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