21–30 of 119 posts
This confirms my brother's stories. He has a penchant for dating Scandinavian women--thusfar he's dated women from Denmark and Norway and has visited them and their families. Denmark was, of course, expensive by US standards. But upon returning from Norway, he remarked on the absurdly high cost of living. He made lasagna for his Norwegian girlfriend's family and it ended up costing around $60 US--just for the ingredi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets not take it out of perspective - no one will starve here, this isn't Uganda, and Domino's has $5 Pizzas.
Actually, people do in fact starve in the united states every year. Edit: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_14.pdf Page 33 says roughly 2500 people die of malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies.
Furthermore, what about debt? How much credit card debt do Americans have relative to Europeans? When I lived there, almost no one even had a credit card. They spent money they had.
This is really a very bad picture of the situation. I spent a lot of time in a lot of places in Europe from Italy to the arctic circle and from spain to Poland and I found it to be a generally richer place over all.
In fact, I was amazed at what I saw. I thought, "Wow, look at how amazing this place is. They have everything!"
I find this article really hard to believe. Really, I couldn't care less about the numbers, I've been there and I've seen it and Europe is a richer place than America. It doesn't matter if we spend more on cars or not. They don't put value in those things like we do. Europe isn't about what you have or where you work, it's about who you are and enjoying life.
I remember once asking someone in a group, "What do you do?" just curious. The response was, "You're so American." I didn't even realize how much status we put on people's jobs. It's how we define ourselves.
What an eye opener.
It's fascinating to see how even a nation with a free media can still have total buy-in to an entirely delusional self-image. Scary stuff.
It's a testament to the differences between perception and reality. The NHS in the UK regularly gets poor ratings, in fact they're regularly flat out abysmal on national satisfaction scales, yet all out-patient questionnaire's regularly return with satisfaction rates >90%. People perceive the NHS as this behemoth incapable of performing, but the reality is that it performs amazingly well and provides one of the best…
Are you serious? Check the poor cancer survival rates in UK compared to the rest of world:
"Since that time, cancer survival rates in England have been steadily improving for but we (Department of Health spokesman) accept that there is further work to do to reduce the gap between us and the rest of northern and western Europe and America."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7510121.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6955545.stm
It's fascinating to see how even a nation with a free media can still have total buy-in to an entirely delusional self-image. Scary stuff.
It's a testament to the differences between perception and reality. The NHS in the UK regularly gets poor ratings, in fact they're regularly flat out abysmal on national satisfaction scales, yet all out-patient questionnaire's regularly return with satisfaction rates >90%. People perceive the NHS as this behemoth incapable of performing, but the reality is that it performs amazingly well and provides one of the best…
I also like many things about the US, but on the whole I don't like the US especially because of their foreign policies.
Individuals are often very nice people (not just in the US), but in large groups their mentality can change drastically, developing a "herd behavior" ... and part of a mob people are capable of doing stuff that aren't thinkable. This is pretty scary since we've seen where this can lead.
The statistics are misleading and muddy: - Comparing adjusted disposable income between Scandinavia and the US is highly misleading. The disposable income in Scandinavia doesn't need to cover any healthcare, education and other public services. I wonder how much, if any, the difference is once you adjust for that. - The argument mistakes distribution of wealth with average output per capita. Portugal is in the bottom…
I think you're letting your terminology run away from you in your first point. It's true that "Disposable income" doesn't need to cover educational, medical, and other social expenses in Scandinavian welfare states, but those expenses still have to be paid out of tax receipts.
I don't see how the Scandinavian governments can get $35000 per person in value out of $25000 per person in income.
It's fascinating to see how even a nation with a free media can still have total buy-in to an entirely delusional self-image. Scary stuff.
It's a testament to the differences between perception and reality. The NHS in the UK regularly gets poor ratings, in fact they're regularly flat out abysmal on national satisfaction scales, yet all out-patient questionnaire's regularly return with satisfaction rates >90%. People perceive the NHS as this behemoth incapable of performing, but the reality is that it performs amazingly well and provides one of the best…
Also, the Norwegian bottom 10% makes twice as much as the American bottom 10%. Again, it's a matter of choices, how much of your income would you give up to not have poor people in your community and the associated crime and social problems?
The statistics are misleading and muddy: - Comparing adjusted disposable income between Scandinavia and the US is highly misleading. The disposable income in Scandinavia doesn't need to cover any healthcare, education and other public services. I wonder how much, if any, the difference is once you adjust for that. - The argument mistakes distribution of wealth with average output per capita. Portugal is in the bottom…
> The disposable income in Scandinavia doesn't need to cover any healthcare, education and other public services. If the study's honest, those should already be factored into "cost of living", not "disposable income".
- Compare GDP between US and Europe and show that US is higher per capita on average. No debate there.
- Compare private consumption between the US and Europe, specifically stating that it does not control for healthcare and education. From page 14:
Different countries’ choices of public commitment influence, through taxation policy, the scope available for private consumption, at the same time as high taxation countries, through their public sectors, offer some of the things recorded in low taxation countries as private consumption. There is no easy way of getting round this, but it is an important point to bear in mind when comparing private consumption.
- It does then compare retail consumption which shouldn't include any of these things and thus be more objective. That one still shows the US as higher than Sweden. Another table shows that US households have more home appliances. So on that count Americans do appear to be richer, assuming of course they are getting equal average amounts of education and healthcare on their private purchases as the Europeans are getting on their tax dollars. Otherwise you'd just be displacing money from healthcare and education into buying retail goods. An argument can surely be bade that this is in fact the case and that although the higher end healthcare and education in the US is top notch the average over the whole population is not as good as the average in Sweden. Anyone know of any good data on this?
I did notice however that the disposable income argument was made about countries within the EU based on another study. So it is possible that the public/private mix in the several EU nations actually doesn't favor Scandinavia in terms of efficiency. All these things are hard to argue because there is no comparable definition of the extent of public services in the economies and how those are replaced or not by private spending.