41–50 of 52 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what your point is. Mississipi has many, many problems, but smog isn't one of them.
I'm not sure what your point is. Greenhouse gas emissions (chiefly carbon dioxide and methane) don't cause smog (caused by ground level ozone and nitrogen oxides). Edit 2 Moved reply into reply.
That is the problem with PPP - it depends on making hundreds of such subjective valuations, all of which defy the actual market value of the currencies of the various countries. Why not simply compare the standard-of-living of 2 countries using the fair market value of the currencies?
I think such an honest approach is unpopular in the US because such an approach shows how much the US has declined over the last 40 years, relative to other nations.
On the face of it, this comparison seems pretty absurd. I haven't been to Mississippi, but I have been to many European countries, and can attest that Germany is pretty rich on the face of it, personal incomes aside. I wonder how such comparisons value public goods, and how well their basket of goods (for PPP weighting) is balanced.
Well, where in Germany have you spent serious time?
I should hasten to add that this isn't an exhaustive list, I've been on a number of train trips too, but I wouldn't count the handful of hours in those places, e.g. Lübeck, Kiel, Flensburg.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what your point is. Greenhouse gas emissions (chiefly carbon dioxide and methane) don't cause smog (caused by ground level ozone and nitrogen oxides). Edit 2 Moved reply into reply.
Fine, Ryan. s/smog/air quality. The air quality in Jackson is not detectably poorer than that in most of Germany.
Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global climate change, and the per capita GHG emissions of Mississippians are more than twice as high as the per capita GHG emissions of Europeans, regardless of the local air quality.
Also, that was only one part of my comment. The other part is that most Europeans enjoy all kinds of public infrastructure intricately related to living standards that Mississippians do not. The US has decided that impeccable road infrastructure is the sine qua non of public nonmilitary expenditure, but there is an enormous opportunity cost tied into a national land use and transportation model based on ubiquitous motoring and related low densities.
See, for example:
* http://www.newsweek.com/id/76929
* http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime
Total car dependence plus industrial food and big box retail minus actual neighbourhoods, family farming or even gardening equals an ecological and public health disaster in slow motion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...
PPP is a very inaccurate measure of quality of life and cost of living. Countries with a bigger income inequality leads to far higher cost of living and much poorer quality of life. So suggesting that having a high PPP is good when the US on the Gini indices (which measure income inequality) rates a 45 and the EU rates a 31 is seriously screwed up and seriously misleading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_Hum...
Ignorance goes a long way, and Americans (both through blogs and the American media) repeatedly release BS like this, claiming the US is 'better' than Europe for an endless list of reasons. There was one of these racial BS things posted a few weeks about how Europe was worse off than the US because it doesn't have Wal-Mart. Ironically the UK does have Wal-Mart and it's being beaten by Tesco, and Tesco since 2007 has opened stores in the UK to directly compete with the US. Carrefour is the largest supermarket retailer in the world and far out beats the US in terms of hypermarket square footage. Two of the Big Three Supermarket chains are from Europe (Carrefour and Tesco). France also has a huge established systems of Cooperatives that far pre-date the founding of Wal-Mart and who have had hypermarkets long before Wal-Mart even owned a store overseas.
The promotion of these articles repeatedly is showing a very disturbing trend in the US posters on HN. I'm unsure if this is a reflection of the US as a whole or not, but it appears to me to be a strong effort by Americans to say "well it was already worse elsewhere, so it's not so bad here" to the economic recession. I find it worrying.
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Uhh . . . Do you guys know how PPP is calculated? Using PPP the people of Mississippi are more wealthy than the people of Nebraska, New Mexico, Delaware, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Idaho, Maine, Rhode Island, Alaska, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and Vermont. In fact, they are more wealthy than the people of Hawaii and Vermont COMBINED!!! Another one an econ professor loves to throw at his s…
Neat. Why does it work this way?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fine, Ryan. s/smog/air quality. The air quality in Jackson is not detectably poorer than that in most of Germany.
Greenhouse gas emissions are not smog, and they're not air pollution in the normal sense of hurting people in their immediate vicinity. Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global climate change, and the per capita GHG emissions of Mississippians are more than twice as high as the per capita GHG emissions of Europeans, regardless of the local air quality. Also, that was only one part of my comment. The other part i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's easy for Americans -- especially the educated and cosmopolitan-minded -- to idealize other countries. Speaking as one, we're most likely to see their wealthy, urban, tourist-friendly areas. We're most likely to interact with foreign elites who travel here or work in international businesses. We only pay their internal higher prices -- from their smaller and often more-oligopolistic domestic markets, and…
Some of us Americans live in foreign countries and are well past idealizing them, but take them for what they are; both things that are, in our opinions, way better than the US, or much worse. It's a complicated enough matter that I could talk about it all night over a bottle of wine. Suffice it to say, however, that "Mississippi is richer than Europe" is stupid flame-bait. It's more or less on the level of snotty Eu…
Stated without nationalistic puffery, "According to a respected economic measure (purchasing-power parity), Mississippi produces more, per-capita, than almost any country in Europe", among the right audience, is a very interesting thing to talk about.
Let's choose to see it as an invitation to subtle discussion among respectful participants, rather than patriotic pissing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin... PPP is a very inaccurate measure of quality of life and cost of living. Countries with a bigger income inequality leads to far higher cost of living and much poorer quality of life. So suggesting that having a high PPP is good when the US on the Gini indices (which measure income inequality)…
