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Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

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Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#671

Post by skirge »

hunglee2 wrote: post #590

GDP is a measure of the marketisation of society. If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ah…

if you hired care assistant then you have time for some other activities like work which is more profitable than cost of care assistant thus economy has more goods. Life expectancy lowers when young people die, most often in work accidents which is related to low unemployment.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#672

Post by rdm_blackhole »

clarionbell wrote: post #652
DanielHB wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing the other day. Like how much of the US GDP is tied to their suburb-living car-dependent lifestyle. What percentage of the GDP is all that infrastructure (sewage, heating, power plants, power transmission, car production, road maintenance)? Sure that create jobs, especially lower-skilled jobs which are important for society. But at the same time they didn't really need to exist. It feels…

Defense spending is necessary, if you want to keep your globalised markets and reasonable level of international security. Europe is now experiencing what happens if drop the "useless" defense spending too low.

I agree with you. I will go even further by saying that the EU being caught with it's pants down is by design.

Everybody rushed to join NATO and decided since the US was there as a backstop, they no longer needed to invest in their own defense.

It's a little bit like what happened in 2008 with the too big too fail banks and the bailout. If someone else is always there to pick up the slack, then what is the point of changing the status quo.

The EU countries were happy about this because they are broke. The US was happy to keep it's status as the global cop of the world making sure everybody stays in line. This line of thinking worked since the fall of the USSR but the rise of China, India and the global south is changing the world order as we speak.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#673

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

keybored wrote: post #339
majormajor wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the US is that it's very unevenly distributed. So it depends on what you'd be doing and how much money you'd be making / already have. If you have a professional-class job the US is often the best place in the world to be for illness. You'll have a fairly high salary (especially comparing globally) and an insurance plan with an out of pocket max that is probably 10-15k per year (or much less, for most…

> The thing about the US is that it's very unevenly distributed. So it depends on what you'd be doing and how much money you'd be making / already have. The Veil of Ignorance, anyone? Even invented by an American. People here need to consider the state of a society without spending 80% of the bytes on the what-if of being a 135+ IQ individual with a passion that coincides with the work tasks of amazingly successful m…

>The Veil of Ignorance, anyone? Even invented by an American.

As long as we're talking about the veil of ignorance, let's also consider the "veil of birth country ignorance". What if you were born in Africa?

From that perspective, one of the most altruistic things a developed country can do, arguably, is increase its rate of immigration from developing countries.

Of course, if you do that, your average citizen gets poorer ;-)

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#674

Post by anovikov »

Slartie wrote: post #651
pelorat wrote: post #632

Us Europeans are more 'detached' from the economy than people are in the USA. We basically coast along. We don't live on credit, but debit, and most people have zero investments outside their house. We're content and risk adverse and don't care much for the stock market (even though many people's pensions are tied to it). In places where higher education is cheap, or even sometimes free (like Sweden), there's less pr…

> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed. That's not exactly true. The single market has been a great thing for companies producing physical products. That's also what was in mind of the people who designed the single market. They wanted to unify standards for physi…

Simple way to eliminate language barriers is to introduce English as main language of schooling, thus making all next generation bilingual. It's done by middle and upper classes anyway so idk why commoners are intentionally left in the dust by the System.

Let's face it: our culture (all across the EU), is American, anyway. It's stupid to pretend otherwise.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#675

Post by rdm_blackhole »

mrtksn wrote: post #623
hunglee2 wrote: post #590

GDP is a measure of the marketisation of society. If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ah…

Seriously, just looking at the examples of "stagnated and failing economies" like Japan should be a give away that this measure is total BS. In Germany a life saving brain surgery creates 5K USD of economic activity and the same surgery creates 500K USD of economic activity in the USA. True story, a YouTuber I'm following recently had her mother operated in Germany and then again in the USA and she made a video about…

Revolutions are neither good nor bad, they just are.

It's what you do after that matters. If you keep on repeating the same mistake and never change the systems that led to the political instability in the first place, then you are bound to have the same results.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#676

Post by kergonath »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #644
pelorat wrote: post #632

Us Europeans are more 'detached' from the economy than people are in the USA. We basically coast along. We don't live on credit, but debit, and most people have zero investments outside their house. We're content and risk adverse and don't care much for the stock market (even though many people's pensions are tied to it). In places where higher education is cheap, or even sometimes free (like Sweden), there's less pr…

This is so true. I’m a software engineer in Berlin, and I’m from Sri Lanka. It amazes me how many young people are still pursuing bachelor’s or master’s degrees in business management or related fields instead of specializing in STEM fields, where they’d have a better chance of securing a high-paying job and making a meaningful impact. It seems like everyone wants to work for big four audit firms, but they often end…

> In essence, the EU is simply a massive tax burden on European citizens, benefiting only a handful of countries within the continent.

The tax burden is absolutely not "massive", either in relative or absolute terms. Money going to underdeveloped parts of the EU is by design. Helping them helps everyone. It creates a huge internal market and companies and people benefit, even from net contributing countries. There sure are issues to solve, but in pure monetary terms, the EU is a no brainer, just look at the UK.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#677

Post by rdm_blackhole »

pelorat wrote: post #632

Us Europeans are more 'detached' from the economy than people are in the USA. We basically coast along. We don't live on credit, but debit, and most people have zero investments outside their house. We're content and risk adverse and don't care much for the stock market (even though many people's pensions are tied to it). In places where higher education is cheap, or even sometimes free (like Sweden), there's less pr…

The EU is not a federal state (yet) so the problem of having a EU wide company that could operate in all the member states is who gets the money and what do they do with it.

If I live in Portugal but my customers are mostly located in Ireland, what share does Portugal get of the corporate taxes? What share gets Ireland? What about the other countries? What if my country of residence changes in the meantime?

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#678

Post by Retric »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #664
hunglee2 wrote: post #590

GDP is a measure of the marketisation of society. If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ah…

How's that related to the magnificent 7 and then SpaceX/StarLink and the AI revolution (which is nearly virtually only happening in the US: even if there are a few models in France, China, etc. it's a US game)? I don't think you realize what's going on in the EU (failing into a third world continent at an alarming rate) or in China (where "little" cities of 30 million inhabitants are all about tech and feeling like y…

You’ve got an overly rosy view of what’s happening in the US and underestimating Europe. AI is big in the tech world, but it’s hardly moving the needle on the overall economy. Every 1% GDP growth roughly requires the equivalent of adding a new Google sized company every year, or as actually happens a more widespread increase.

Just as an example, Tesla’s 2024 Q1 deliveries where below 2023’s Q1 deliveries hardly a sign of rapid growth. https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...

SpaceX is facing the limits of how much people want to send into orbit. Plenty of growth in the next few years, but Starlink is only generating ~6 billion a year in revenue and not much else really wants to put that much stuff into orbit. Worse, Starlink is facing ever increasing competition from cheaper ground based providers especially cellular internet, so that business may start to shrink.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#679

Post by mathverse »

caseyy wrote: post #655
pelorat wrote: post #632

Us Europeans are more 'detached' from the economy than people are in the USA. We basically coast along. We don't live on credit, but debit, and most people have zero investments outside their house. We're content and risk adverse and don't care much for the stock market (even though many people's pensions are tied to it). In places where higher education is cheap, or even sometimes free (like Sweden), there's less pr…

> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed. This is simply not true. There is freedom of movement for workers which means it's easy to recruit top talent across the continent. Remote work is also much simplified. There's no friction moving goods and company assets acr…

This is absolutely not true. Moving across Europe is significantly harder than in US. On top of that companies hiring across Europe need to go B2B or EoR. The countries are absolutely not harmonised in terms of regulations, labor law or employing people.

I am sorry but you absolutely have no clue what you are talking about.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#680

Post by oblio »

pmb wrote: post #648
pelorat wrote: post #632

Us Europeans are more 'detached' from the economy than people are in the USA. We basically coast along. We don't live on credit, but debit, and most people have zero investments outside their house. We're content and risk adverse and don't care much for the stock market (even though many people's pensions are tied to it). In places where higher education is cheap, or even sometimes free (like Sweden), there's less pr…

> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed. [citation needed] because I think this is extremely false. It is easy to underestimate the pain caused by having all the pre-euro currencies and pre-EU tax laws (yes there was the Schengen zone and EEC, but the EU uniformity…

They're most likely talking about digital.

Look at Netflix, a different catalog in every country.

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