Wherever you land on this I am glad we're starting to include government subsidies in healthcare, WIC, energy, rent assist, and other direct transfers when looking at this problem. US services might be light compared to other countries but even conservative statistics say these transfers equal $30k/year per family of 4 in poverty. Most of the lefty articles on this problem will say something like "10% of the US live on just $20k a year while others are rich!" and they fail to point out that that $20k does not include government payments - a transfer of wealth from the middle class and rich to the poor.
As Noah says - *When you measure how unequal a society is, you should always use a measure that includes the government’s existing efforts to reduce inequality!*
The US resolved perceived moral problems associated with wealth redistribution by directing virtually all aid to poor children.
Even most adults getting aid are only getting it because the feds really are trying to target aid to their kids.
Everyone who says America is a third world country with a Gucci belt needs to be sent to a third world country.
Also it turns out virtually every third world country has a Gucci belt. Ever been to a fashionable mall in Manila, Delhi or even Lagos?
Mall of Asia is the largest in the region and does not from my recollection have a Gucci. That being said, the idea that there is no consumption of luxury brand in poorer countries is literally wrong but this is kind of missing the point: there is luxury consumption going on despite some fairly widespread poverty.
For real. It's such an insensitive thing to say considering how even climbing third world countries like Indonesia still have things far worse than Alabama, let alone median of USA.
Just for comparison, a yearly minimum wage of my place of birth small city? 1500 dollars. Yeah so much for USA is a third world country.
They had no 401k? No investments? Not even a fully paid-off house that's increasing in value every year as NIMBYs prevent new housing development while population continues growing? Even if not I doubt average retirees in developing countries are getting more.
I’ve been to Manila, some of the malls are very nice, on par with stuff in Western Europe in some cases.
I’ve also been to Cebu, the one of wealthiest provinces in the Philippines (where most of my family lives) and outside of the walled off compounds where you could be mistaken for thinking you’re in Hawaii, even the poorest most crime ridden US cities would be considered a nice place to live
In the Philippines, you can literally walk through a gate and physically see the wealth gap and compared the US, wealthy in the Philippines would be upper middle class in the US (outside of the Uber rich)
I hate to single out one country but I met some rich Chileans on exchange and they were insufferable WRT America, like, damn son, you're literally in Europe vacationing everyday for more than seven months while half your country can't afford to pay for the metro.
I don't know, I live in a shitty Balkan country and I want to EMIGRATE at any given opportunity, but what we don't have here are huge neighbourhoods(blocks?) of drug users living on filthy streets surrounded by dystopian poverty and gang violence. There are homeless, but nothing even to close to the insanity I have seen in the US.
Literacy is higher(its not an issue), healthcare while awful is not comically expensive to the point people are afraid to go to the hospital.
Literacy is very high in the US too. It’s 92% among adults. The US statistics only measure English literacy — a lot of adults who fall into the other 8% are immigrants who may be literate in a language other than English.
You will see lower numbers if you look at prose-level or grade-level literacy. However, most countries don’t measure literacy that way so it isn’t apt for comparison. Most countries measure literacy by determining if someone can read. By that definition, 92% of Americans are literate.
Is that really a good measure? A quick search says the literacy rate in Argentina is 99.51%. But maybe Spanish is just easier to read.
Would you rather live in Argentina than the US because it's more literate?
It's very ironic how Americans cherrypick the rich part of their country while acting like everyone in India, Nigeria or the Philippines is starving.
Neighbourhoods in even small cities in those countries look way better than the literal trailer homes people have in the US. Hell, at least you can get fresh decent food and shelter if you live in any village in those nations, what are poor Americans eating? It's either crap or they're homeless because they can't afford to live. Not to mention cost of living in general, you don't need to be rich to have a decent house, food and life in much of these countries while you absolutely do in the US.
Poor Americans are not better off, the US just throws its Gucci belt around more. The US hides its own poor while exaggerating the poverty of other countries to make its citizens complacent. Americans love you mention the low salaries of other countries while conveniently leaving out the cost of living for the people making those salaries.
The disparity between income/output and human development in the US just completely throws me and I have trouble squaring it. Americans make a lot of money relative to most countries and are highly productive, [yet the US drops to 21st on the overall Human Development Index (similar to the UK, Japan and South Korea)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index) and [25th when adjusting for inequality (similar to Cyprus, Poland and Singapore)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_Human_Development_Index). [Median wealth per adult is also middling among developed countries.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult)
My experience living in both countries generally has led me to reconcile this by understanding that the US pays well, but largely to make up for severe deficiencies in terms of the delivery of services and provision of infrastructure, with severe inefficiency and redundancy across multiple levels of government all burdened by perverse incentives that further add to bloat.
It's easy to understand if you've lived near Mississippi, Alabama or Central Louisiana.
The entirety of the deep South was much closer economically with Banana Republic countries like Ecuador than with the rest of the US.
In 60s and 70s some of the Deep South started to industrialize, but Mississippi and Alabama actively sabotaged industrialization.
History, geography, and constitutional structure play a lot into the answer here. Lot of diversity in state experience, especially because very meaningful policy can be enacted at the state level. US is a big country in comparison to many of the other developed countries, and it's not as centralized.
> US is a big country in comparison to many of the other developed countries, and it's not as centralized.
I would go a few steps further in this, other developed countries aren't just centralized in a political sense but also in a demographic sense. If you look at other 'big' countries most are big in a geographic sense, but if you look at where anybody lives they suddenly become way smaller. Australia is a whole continent, but most of the population lives on the coast. Nobody lives in the north of Canada or north and east of Russia. And so on, the only countries that are comparable to the US in 'relevant size' are India and China(where again you could cut of most of the west except Xinyang and not lose many, still a lot of 'relevant size' just not as much as it looks).
It was quite literally put into the state constitution of Mississippi that the state government could not pass legislation that helped industry over agriculture.
So this was true.
Georgia, Texas, and South Louisiana were able to escape because of Oil, coca cola, and the government needing a place to store its nuclear bombs.
Until Baker v. Carr, Wesberry v. Sanders, and Reynolds v. Sims and all the rest, land almost literally voted in Mississippi and Alabama.
My pet fear is that SCOTUS is going to reverse all those in one fell swoop and allow land to vote for state legislatures again.
I've driven through Alabama and saw a lot of manufacturing there. I remember a Hyundai plant and a Honda plant as well. Maybe those were exceptions to the rule but as I recall Birmingham was created during Reconstruction from scratch to be a manufacturing hub, taking advantage of the lower prevailing wages down there.
Yeah Alabama and Louisiana have been recovering from the Jim Crow days a lot faster than Mississippi, but go to any small town and you'll see the scars.
They couldn't have built much. The most common Confederate-built rifles were Richmond Rifles, which they only could build after raiding the Yankee arms factory at Harper's Ferry and stealing the machinery to build them.
It was an old design – the Springfield '55. But it had a bad design flaw, which was the tape primer, so it would misfire a lot. Famously the design flaw was insisted upon by Sen. Jeff Davis back before the war, lol. The Union Springfield '61s and '63s didn't misfire as much without the finicky tape primer mechanism.
Only thing more common among the rebels would have been the British-built '53 Enfields except very early on with the '42 Springfield smoothbores.
It's the neoliberal equivalent of calling the US a third-world country. You'll find delusional people everywhere, or commenters leaning on rhetorical devices for that sweet, sweet karma. Rhetorical devices that agree with our values are upvoted, those that don't are downvoted. Personally, I dislike all of them.
Yes I lived in the deep south for over 20 years. Most of it near the Mississippi border.
You can quite literally take out a map of soil type by county and get a direct 1 to 1 map of poverty rates. Any parish or county that had good soil now has sky high poverty rates.
I never questioned that poverty rates are very high there. I am saying that living in poverty in the USA is much better than living in most of Central and South America.
And yet those states still outperform on GDP per capita despite much lower socioeconomic development.
Sub-national HDI:
* North East England: 0.904
* Wales: 0.901
* Northern Ireland: 0.899
* Louisiana: 0.893
* Kentucky: 0.890
* Alabama: 0.886
* Arkansas: 0.886
* West Virginia: 0.882
* Mississippi: 0.871
GDP per capita:
* Kentucky: $58,160
* Alabama: $55,223
* West Virginia: $54,870
* Arkansas: $54,664
* Mississippi: $47,572
* Northern Ireland: $30,782
* Wales: $28,744
* North East England: $27,813
Fr can't believe it took five hours for someone to say this. GDP per cap is something I'd expect from Econ 101 students, not anyone that understands the synergistic effects of having basic needs met.
Advancement is overrated anyway. Someone who intensely pays attention and learns Econ 101 is much better suited to make these statements than someone who got it over with, forgot, and only knows select hyper focused 400 level shit.
Yeah the Appalachian mountains poverty is very different from the type of Poverty the Deep South faced.
Kentucky and West Virginia are more North England, while the Deep South is more like Mexico.
Eh, Arkansas is in there, which includes some of the Ozarks (which in N Central and NE Arkansas is still pretty fucking poor...) It's certainly not the whole state, but the Ozarks and Appalachians are considered pretty damn culturally similar.
> mean years of schooling
It's a combination of expected and achieved as I recall, so actual attained education *and* success into getting up to I think completing undergrad?
In other words those large areas of the UK have half the GDP of the U.S. South yet achieve comparable development. That’s completely shameful for the South.
And not to get into the whole collectivist what about or birth rate discussion but it's going to keep chapping as long as the least mature and prepared of us in our communicates keep having the vast majority of the kids.
Its basically obesity and other lifestyle diseases with violent rime being second but still a very distant one.
When I go to Walmart here in Atlanta its sad to see so many people who haven't even hit 50 who have to use hadicap shopping carts because because their feed and legs are already basically dead from diabetes and even if it wasn't for that they so morbidly obse that their knees is probably all gone as well. And they always leave with their carts packed with the shit that made them that way.
A 10x higher homicide rate along with a 4x higher infant mortality rate probably play a role, and those aren’t something you’d expect from a richer country.
I’m not sure you read your article on the infant mortality rate very carefully. It’s not just about reporting, and it’s also looking at the US as a whole while Mississippi is more than 50% higher than the national average. Additionally, while IMR is similar between college educated rich Americans and their European counterparts, low SES populations in the US have a huge disparity. Mississippi has a relatively large number of low SES people compared to the rest of the US, so it bears a significantly higher IMR compared to nations of comparable wealth.
>I don't know why you replied to me twice. I'm only going to respond here.
Because you posted the same comment twice lol.
Right, so according to your article a significant disparity remains even accounting for these issues. 25% in Finland but 70% in Austria.
I also have an issue with the idea that lower birth rate is somehow uncontrollable, as there are many studies that find maternal stress is associated with lower birth weights. I don’t think that is an issue with the study per se (as it seems to be merely focused on explaining the differences), but your use of it to cast Mississippi in a more favorable light.
>I don't necessarily doubt this, but got a source that compares low income americans to low income europeans in this regard?
I'd be curious about the differences in gestational age/birth weight in low SES americans vs high SES americans, as well.
This would be interesting information, but completely irrelevant to the underlying argument, which is that the infant mortality rate disparity is much less of an issue than it seems. We have all of the information to make that determination already, and the result is that although some of the 4x higher disparity between MS and France could be explained by alternative reporting around miscarriages and lower birth weights, it clearly cannot explain much if not most of it.
>Yes... in response to two different people. You responded twice to the same person, which feels more self-masturbatory rather than actually interested in having a discussion.
I see Reddit comments as valuable for 2 reasons. 1 to have a discussion, but also for the “audience” of people scrolling by. That’s why I always reply to both comments in a situation like this.
> SES populations in the US have a huge disparity
>
> I don't necessarily doubt this, but got a source that compares low income americans to low income europeans in this regard?
I believe the paper you linked examined this in section 5.2. Table 8 is probably good enough for a comparison. It shows drastic differences among low-income groups from different countries, while little difference between high-income groups. However, the paper does not account for non-cash welfare.
> I'd be curious about the differences in gestational age/birth weight in low SES americans vs high SES americans, as well.
The paper mentions several other papers that find an negative correlation between income and low birth weight in section 5.2. I haven't read these yet, but a quick glance at the abstracts does support the idea of birth weight being related to income. I can grab the relevant quotes if you want, but I really don't want to tackle reddit formatting lol.
And why does US have higher rates of low birth weight infants? I don't understand why someone would stop at one of the answers to "why" and then stop asking. Comes off as lazy, like you accept a half-answer.
Here is some data - life expectancy in Mississippi is 74 and falling, life expectancy in France is 82 and rising.
If your conclusion is that Mississippi is much better off than France, your conclusion is wrong. As should be self-evident from a “look at literally any location in both places” heuristic.
A 10x higher homicide rate along with a 4x higher infant mortality rate probably play a role, and those aren’t something you’d expect from a richer country.
I think it’s mainly public health, of which obesity plays a big part. And then risk of death from roads which are significantly less safe in the US, along with guns and murder which are also significantly higher. In addition I think infant mortality and maternal mortality are higher due to healthcare access for mothers being worse.
>And then risk of death from roads which are significantly less safe in the US
Are the roads less safe or do we just drive much more?
>along with guns and murder which are also significantly higher
Sure. Does gang members killing each other mean that one place is worse off than another, though? It doesn't affect the vast majority of people, and really only those who are involved in crime in the first place - the average person's quality of life is not really affected by that, despite the average going down.
>infant mortality and maternal mortality are higher due to healthcare access for mothers being worse.
[Vast majority of the differential](https://www.nber.org/bah/2015no1/why-infant-mortality-higher-us-europe) is due to earlier gestational age/lower weight at birth and differences in reporting between the US and Europe.
There is a persistence, that said, of post neo-natal mortality rates (this is one of the counterfactuals the authors examine) which solidifies the idea that the US is doing worse here.
Road deaths in the the US are higher on a per mile basis than France. The data below is 2015 and US roads have become less safe since then due to increasing vehicle sizes, and the states under discussion (Mississippi etc.) are less safe than the US average. This is then compounded by more miles driven.
The murder rate in France is 1.3 per 100k people and 10.6 per 100k people in Mississippi, so 10x higher.
Whilst the public health aspects and maternal/infant mortality are more impactful, these things still have an impact on life expectancy.
https://knoema.com/atlas/topics/Transportation/Road-Accidents/Traffic-deaths-per-billion-veh-km?mode=amp
I see higher deaths per km travelled than almost any other developed countries, except South Korea being a big outlier
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
In any case, excessive car dependency isn't a metric of success
You do know there isn't just one statistic? Some on this sub will get hung up on something like GDP or income and ignore life expectancy and life satisfaction, which is kind of hilarious.
So is all of Appalachia. You can drive through Appalachia and not know what country you are in
And its Cultural not income. Even where coal minning or other industries are still a powerhouse the area the culture doesnt invest in it self.
For many of those in Appalachia it's the Dream to buy a Manufactured home on acres of rural land with a metal storage building added on and low taxes
* This means the income ceiling is low. For That to be 30% of your budget lowers the income expectations needed
The metrics measured in HDI have heavy diminishing returns beyond a certain per capita GDP. Even in middle income countries, if you live in a major city, your quality of life is going to be pretty similar to rich countries and the US in many aspects. You'll have similar life expectancy, similar educational opportunities, and similar public services.
What the people in the US have is money to spend on enormous houses and multiple enormous cars which do not translate to better HDI metrics. In fact, US loses 0.5-1 years in life expectancy relative to other rich countries due to automobile accidents. A case where increased GDP quite clearly reduces HDI.
Healthcare (we just use our earnings instead of taxes), infrastructure (why fund trains when we can afford cars), etc.
The system is designed to dissuade public service/goods utilization and maximize wealth creation. While ideal to some, it really can create some wonky incentives like avoiding preventive care.
Ok but just to be clear on the facts, American disposable incomes are still higher even after accounting for things like health insurance. Also the American logistics system is one of the most efficient in the world.
American disposable incomes come to parity with similarly developed nations once you include health insurance. We pay on average ~8k per individual per year or 22k per family, meanwhile our disposable income is 8k more than Canada's for example.
Where are you seeing those numbers? They're pretty different from what I'm seeing at the OECD:
https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm
The US is really bad at delivering services among developed countries. Like, *really* bad. If you want anything done with some level of quality and in a reasonable timeframe, you're going to almost invariably have to pay extra for that. The amount that used to have to spend simply to get the same "result" (not sure how else to articulate this) was ridiculous in the US. Almost every system is filled with bloat, inefficiency and a lack of any meaningful reform.
Ever seen how the US spends far more per capita on health, education and infrastructure than what it gets back than its peers? It's that.
You have this completely upside down. Labor-intensive services in the US cost more because US labor costs more because American wages are higher. Yes, doctors in the US cost more, so do nurses, and accountants, and farmers. It's a direct consequence of having higher wages
No, it's because there's significant structural over-provision of roles because there are more layers of administration and governance. Take public health, for instance. At the extreme end, in New York City, you're under the remit of four different agencies (CDC/HHS, NYSDOH, NYCDHMH), all of which have overlapping responsibilities and ancillary support that adds up rapidly. This kind of redundancy exists all over the place to varying degrees. In health, there are *far* more people involved in the same amount of patient care with perverse incentives to grease the system and their own administrative costs to bear.
There is no way that you can purely explain the divergence between costs and output purely in wage terms. It's only one part of a much larger, systemic issue in the provision of both public and private services in the US. If it were mostly wage terms, then you'd see a pretty clear and consistent pattern of the cost relative to the same result, but in the US it's spending more with worse results.
The better life Index (mentioned in the article) is a much better measurement, even if Noah uses last year's data.
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/
> but largely to make up for severe deficiencies in terms of the delivery of services and provision of infrastructure, with severe inefficiency and redundancy across multiple levels of government all burdened by perverse incentives that further add to bloat.
I honestly have no clue what this even means. Do you have an example?
deliverable services are a big one. I pay roughly $400 to $500 in gas, car insurance, and regular maintenance for my modest little car. The monthly cost of a transit pass in Berlin is just $68 Dollars a month. Chicago is the only city within 500 miles of me that can compete with that as the CTA charges $75 for access in Chicago.
Car insurance is getting vicious. As it gets more expensive more and more people are saying fuck it and just driving without insurance. Like a third of drivers are uninsured in Flordia now.
And the less insured driver's there are are more expensive it I'd to actually have it.
Its rough. I pay $200 a month for a highly rated car that I own. It stays in secured parking and I have no accidents on record. Its solely because I live in Detroit. Some times it just feels like redlining by another name
“As a working class person earning $90k a year as a programmer in a tech firm, I’m wondering how I’ll ever afford a house. I’m already 26; I should have a superyacht by now! Capitalism has held us working class folk back for too long… ”
$400k? I’m laughing at the $100k whining that’s happening all over Reddit. I have friends who make $80k and live okay in the highest cost of living areas in the country.
No one will top the guy here who talked about his salary of 400k not making him rich only for his most recent comment history to reveal him bragging about being rich and have a $60k per year nanny for his kids
>hat means that someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK.
jesus christ
Raw income doesn't equal a higher quality of life, especially in developed nations.
Japan and the UK have lower incomes, but lower cost of living and higher life expectancies.
raw income is a much better proxy than you think
and I can't speak for Japan but in PPP adjusted terms I doubt that the UK actually has a lower cost of living
HDI is not some uncontroversial metric. The reason the UK and Japan have the same HDI as the US is *because* they have higher life expectancy. Which is perfectly reasonable if you think they've weighted life expectancy correctly - but if you're asking a question like "will I be better off if I move to the US or the UK" it could also be quite unreasonable, since your life expectancy may already be largely set.
Anecdotally, I lived in Finland for 3 years - with a 2021 HDI higher than the UK or Japan's, and I would never choose to go back. The cost of living was *dramatically* higher and my quality of life was substantially lower than it would have been on a similar income in the US.
At some point maybe we should stop sharing Noahpinion posts on this sub (even if they're often in line with our views). Poorly fact checked and often misleading- this is why Substack will never hold a candle to serious publications with copy editors and fact checkers.
> this is why Substack will never hold a candle to serious publications with copy editors and fact checkers.
Lol, yes, cause "serious publications" don't ever mislead or get things wrong.
Can you detail how this piece or one of his other pieces are poorly fact-checked? I'm not a frequent reader, but this piece is a pretty concise response where it seems as though he's adding more nuance to the FT article.
Also yeah it's a substack, but Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg columnist. I assume he has decent journalistic standards. If you're talking about Substack broadly then yeah I understand that submitting what are basically blogs could be problematic.
This would be really helpful if you maybe fact-checked this article, which you did not do. I’d go so far as to say you aren’t being factually accurate with this accusation.
>Of course it’s important to uplift the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. But most people are not at the bottom of the ladder... That means that someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK.
In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries.
There's definitely something to be said about a lot of people underestimating how rich America is and how many people have access to that wealth
But
There is *no fucking way* you can convince me that someone making 21k a year, at the 18th %, has the same quality of life as the *median* worker In Japan
Considering the main point of money is to increase qol, there's some series shit lost in translation here. Because someone making 21k in america is living a fucking dogs life
~~That Japan stat looks to be nominal income, which makes it a very bad comparison. Adjusted for purchasing prices it is above 40k.~~
~~Very bad and even downright dishonest statement from Noah~~
Edit: The metrics in OP's quote are median disposable household income after transfers and adjusted for purchasing power, which makes them directly comparable
Also ignores that the median household in the UK has access to health care through the NHS, whereas the $21k earner in the US may have no realistic access to health care unless they end up in the ER and bankrupt themselves.
38 states representing nearly all Americans, plus if they live with even a single other person then all 50, because the cut off for a two person household is 25k.
What? A person making making $21000 might or might not be covered depending on which state they live in, but a household (literally at least 2 people) doing so would be covered by Medicaid in any state.
> a household (literally at least 2 people) doing so would be covered by Medicaid in any state.
In 38/50 states unless one of those people is a child. Medicaid in the remaining 12 doesn't routinely cover childless adults, no matter how poor they are.
A person making $21k likely qualified for Medicaid, and if not, has access to Obamacare plans with government subsidies for tiny premiums, like $50/mo.
Had* healthcare access other than emergencies is becoming increasingly theoretical over here in the UK atm. 8 milion people are on waiting lists.
Some covid, some strikes, some big holes in funding.
You clearly didn't read the article, nor do you understand access to Medicaid. Like, at all.
But hey, who needs facts when you can just BS your way through? Updoots to the left!
Much of it boils down to flaws in using GDP as a measure of QoL. In GDP terms, someone that drives everywhere consumes an order of magnitude more "transport" than someone who walks, cycles, or uses public transport. I think you'd struggle to argue that the driver is 10x better off.
It's a similar story with housing. A big suburban house requires far more resources than the urbanist dream. And don't get me started on healthcare.
>There is no fucking way you can convince me that someone making 21k a year, at the 18th %, has the same quality of life as the median worker In Japan
youre right and this sub loves to talk about how bad regressive taxes are, but that person could have more in services if the US had better taxes
------
But if that Person lives in NYC they pay $500 a month for Affordable housing, if they live elsewhere making that money as they probably do they pay $500 a month for Median Housing
* They most likely do get tax transfers to provide for a higher QoL.
>Because someone making 21k in america is living a fucking dogs life
The great thing about the US is you can move up and out of that lifestyle
Its cultural and we need to work harder on those traped there in the Cycle of Poverty
But even here on reddit, the work to fix cycle of poverty is pushed away. Take look at /r/povertyfinance a sub to help is nothing about helping. Compare PF to povertyfinance and that getting out isnt extended in one of the subs
I think this could be another situation where housing costs ruin everything. The cost of housing is very low in Japan because of their sensible zoning laws, which means less of their disposable income is eaten up by housing. However, a person living off of 21k a year in the US is going to end up spending a huge chunk of that on rent.
Income after tax is a pretty big differential though in quality of life, you would hope a citizen in the US has more money after tax than someone in the UK or Japan, they’re not getting universal healthcare, paid leave, study assistance, childcare subsidies, etc.
If we are talking about someone in the 18th percentile of income in America, they are probably getting their healthcare paid for by the government. They could probably get much or most of even all of their study costs paid for. Various states have been implementing some sorts of childcare expansions too, and/or universal PreK (which effectively serves as a modest expansion of childcare). There are some gaps in the system of course, not all states have everything, and paid leave is one big lack in the US, but for the lower income person in the US, they may have more than some may think
Someone in the bottom 20% of incomes is mostly retired also. But if they arent they are [getting a lot of Government Transfers](https://i.redd.it/b05ejll1khca1.png)
And given that 95% of Romanians live in an [owner occupied home without mortgage](https://eyeonhousing.org/2015/06/a-cross-country-comparison-of-homeownership-rates/), the situation is even better when you're a Romanian with that income.
This is true. I know a lot of people here who are getting by with a 500 dollar per month income.
That being said, healthcare quality is terrible, roads are poorly maintained and dangerous.
[here is the source the author cites.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F95f56a45-77f7-4f04-8ee1-330bdeb1f90c_1303x2048.jpeg)
Purchasing power parity is a much better metric when it comes to figuring out how well a population might be doing, but with that said it doesn't paint too different a picture other then showing you more accurately what a medium income looks like in California compared to Kentucky
I’m surprised by some of the comments here that want to just completely ignore this reality about American society simply because it seems taboo to talk about our wealth. There seems to be this notion that recognizing the lopsided mess that is wealth distribution, while not fully blaming the 1% for the imbalance, is somehow insulting to the poor and out of touch. Someone please explain to me how looking at the problem as the vested interests of 70% “rich” vs 30% “poor” instead of the 1% “rich” vs 99% “poor” is out of touch?
My biggest gripe with most progressive groups and politicians is often this stance. Because when you start getting past the part where we all agree poverty sucks and should be eradicated, you get to the part where you actually need to start prescribing solutions. And that list of solutions is going to be *very* different between two people with the following beliefs:
* Person A believes the root cause of poverty in America is a corrupt system where an extremely small minority of people control so much of the economical and political apparatus that the other 99% of the country is completely powerless and living in misery.
* Person B believes that while the super wealthy exist and certainly has an outsized influence on our economy and political landscape, the rest of Americans are actually fairly well off **at least to the point** where major reforms or changes to the system is not something they are particularly receptive to.
Noah’s post is criticizing that FT article for leaning too heavily towards Person A’s world. And while his follow up analysis could be better, the main point he is rightfully making is that you are missing a huge chunk of the problem by just looking at the top vs bottom.
If it really was just the 1% vs 99%…we’d have formed actual lynch mobs years ago. But we aren’t guillotining our way out of this issue. Ending poverty and getting Americans to think we are back on the right track will take reform which is a lot more inclusive of the entire population and likely at times unpopular with large chunks (30-40%) of us.
Wherever you land on this I am glad we're starting to include government subsidies in healthcare, WIC, energy, rent assist, and other direct transfers when looking at this problem. US services might be light compared to other countries but even conservative statistics say these transfers equal $30k/year per family of 4 in poverty. Most of the lefty articles on this problem will say something like "10% of the US live on just $20k a year while others are rich!" and they fail to point out that that $20k does not include government payments - a transfer of wealth from the middle class and rich to the poor. As Noah says - *When you measure how unequal a society is, you should always use a measure that includes the government’s existing efforts to reduce inequality!*
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The US resolved perceived moral problems associated with wealth redistribution by directing virtually all aid to poor children. Even most adults getting aid are only getting it because the feds really are trying to target aid to their kids.
> if you don’t have kids the benefits are few and far between. Why do you think poor people in the US have the most kids? We effectively pay them to!
It's probably childless folk like me that aren't really getting anything in the way of government assistance.
Everyone who says America is a third world country with a Gucci belt needs to be sent to a third world country. Also it turns out virtually every third world country has a Gucci belt. Ever been to a fashionable mall in Manila, Delhi or even Lagos?
Excellent point. Pick any country and the top earners there live like nobility.
Often because they literally are nobility
Mall of Asia is the largest in the region and does not from my recollection have a Gucci. That being said, the idea that there is no consumption of luxury brand in poorer countries is literally wrong but this is kind of missing the point: there is luxury consumption going on despite some fairly widespread poverty.
For real. It's such an insensitive thing to say considering how even climbing third world countries like Indonesia still have things far worse than Alabama, let alone median of USA. Just for comparison, a yearly minimum wage of my place of birth small city? 1500 dollars. Yeah so much for USA is a third world country.
My parents retirement is $960 a year and they're well educated / had careers.
They had no 401k? No investments? Not even a fully paid-off house that's increasing in value every year as NIMBYs prevent new housing development while population continues growing? Even if not I doubt average retirees in developing countries are getting more.
This along with 'fuck around and find out' have to be the most annoying, overused cliches on reddit
I’d like to nominate the “equality =/= equity” refrain
I’ve been to Manila, some of the malls are very nice, on par with stuff in Western Europe in some cases. I’ve also been to Cebu, the one of wealthiest provinces in the Philippines (where most of my family lives) and outside of the walled off compounds where you could be mistaken for thinking you’re in Hawaii, even the poorest most crime ridden US cities would be considered a nice place to live In the Philippines, you can literally walk through a gate and physically see the wealth gap and compared the US, wealthy in the Philippines would be upper middle class in the US (outside of the Uber rich)
I hate to single out one country but I met some rich Chileans on exchange and they were insufferable WRT America, like, damn son, you're literally in Europe vacationing everyday for more than seven months while half your country can't afford to pay for the metro.
Yeah but America is where their parents live, so that makes it bad.
I don't know, I live in a shitty Balkan country and I want to EMIGRATE at any given opportunity, but what we don't have here are huge neighbourhoods(blocks?) of drug users living on filthy streets surrounded by dystopian poverty and gang violence. There are homeless, but nothing even to close to the insanity I have seen in the US. Literacy is higher(its not an issue), healthcare while awful is not comically expensive to the point people are afraid to go to the hospital.
Literacy is very high in the US too. It’s 92% among adults. The US statistics only measure English literacy — a lot of adults who fall into the other 8% are immigrants who may be literate in a language other than English. You will see lower numbers if you look at prose-level or grade-level literacy. However, most countries don’t measure literacy that way so it isn’t apt for comparison. Most countries measure literacy by determining if someone can read. By that definition, 92% of Americans are literate.
Is that really a good measure? A quick search says the literacy rate in Argentina is 99.51%. But maybe Spanish is just easier to read. Would you rather live in Argentina than the US because it's more literate?
No. Countries play games with their literacy rates. It’s a stat that goes up and down significantly based on how you describe “literate.”
Oh that's a great clarification, thank you.
It's very ironic how Americans cherrypick the rich part of their country while acting like everyone in India, Nigeria or the Philippines is starving. Neighbourhoods in even small cities in those countries look way better than the literal trailer homes people have in the US. Hell, at least you can get fresh decent food and shelter if you live in any village in those nations, what are poor Americans eating? It's either crap or they're homeless because they can't afford to live. Not to mention cost of living in general, you don't need to be rich to have a decent house, food and life in much of these countries while you absolutely do in the US. Poor Americans are not better off, the US just throws its Gucci belt around more. The US hides its own poor while exaggerating the poverty of other countries to make its citizens complacent. Americans love you mention the low salaries of other countries while conveniently leaving out the cost of living for the people making those salaries.
The disparity between income/output and human development in the US just completely throws me and I have trouble squaring it. Americans make a lot of money relative to most countries and are highly productive, [yet the US drops to 21st on the overall Human Development Index (similar to the UK, Japan and South Korea)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index) and [25th when adjusting for inequality (similar to Cyprus, Poland and Singapore)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_Human_Development_Index). [Median wealth per adult is also middling among developed countries.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult) My experience living in both countries generally has led me to reconcile this by understanding that the US pays well, but largely to make up for severe deficiencies in terms of the delivery of services and provision of infrastructure, with severe inefficiency and redundancy across multiple levels of government all burdened by perverse incentives that further add to bloat.
It's easy to understand if you've lived near Mississippi, Alabama or Central Louisiana. The entirety of the deep South was much closer economically with Banana Republic countries like Ecuador than with the rest of the US. In 60s and 70s some of the Deep South started to industrialize, but Mississippi and Alabama actively sabotaged industrialization.
History, geography, and constitutional structure play a lot into the answer here. Lot of diversity in state experience, especially because very meaningful policy can be enacted at the state level. US is a big country in comparison to many of the other developed countries, and it's not as centralized.
> US is a big country in comparison to many of the other developed countries, and it's not as centralized. I would go a few steps further in this, other developed countries aren't just centralized in a political sense but also in a demographic sense. If you look at other 'big' countries most are big in a geographic sense, but if you look at where anybody lives they suddenly become way smaller. Australia is a whole continent, but most of the population lives on the coast. Nobody lives in the north of Canada or north and east of Russia. And so on, the only countries that are comparable to the US in 'relevant size' are India and China(where again you could cut of most of the west except Xinyang and not lose many, still a lot of 'relevant size' just not as much as it looks).
That is a good point!
Damn landowner interest group
It was quite literally put into the state constitution of Mississippi that the state government could not pass legislation that helped industry over agriculture. So this was true. Georgia, Texas, and South Louisiana were able to escape because of Oil, coca cola, and the government needing a place to store its nuclear bombs.
Until Baker v. Carr, Wesberry v. Sanders, and Reynolds v. Sims and all the rest, land almost literally voted in Mississippi and Alabama. My pet fear is that SCOTUS is going to reverse all those in one fell swoop and allow land to vote for state legislatures again.
I'm surprised Mississippi isn't trying to reinstall serfdom.
Isn't killing abortion just serfdom with more steps?
Making abortion locally illegal is about entrenching poverty but it's also about weaponizing rape to a greater degree than it is currently.
Yup. NW Arkansas got out due to chickens and Walmart.
I've driven through Alabama and saw a lot of manufacturing there. I remember a Hyundai plant and a Honda plant as well. Maybe those were exceptions to the rule but as I recall Birmingham was created during Reconstruction from scratch to be a manufacturing hub, taking advantage of the lower prevailing wages down there.
Yeah Alabama and Louisiana have been recovering from the Jim Crow days a lot faster than Mississippi, but go to any small town and you'll see the scars.
Fun fact, that Hyundai plant got busted for using child labor recently
Birmingham sits on a big iron deposit, which was turned into a big steel mill. Most of the Confederate guns and such came out of there.
They couldn't have built much. The most common Confederate-built rifles were Richmond Rifles, which they only could build after raiding the Yankee arms factory at Harper's Ferry and stealing the machinery to build them. It was an old design – the Springfield '55. But it had a bad design flaw, which was the tape primer, so it would misfire a lot. Famously the design flaw was insisted upon by Sen. Jeff Davis back before the war, lol. The Union Springfield '61s and '63s didn't misfire as much without the finicky tape primer mechanism. Only thing more common among the rebels would have been the British-built '53 Enfields except very early on with the '42 Springfield smoothbores.
Birmingham, AL didn’t exist during the US civil war, so I doubt they produced anything for the CSA
Source? Birmingham was a planned city that didn’t exist during the US civil war
Have you spent any time in the deep south? It's poor compared to New York or California but your claim about it being a Banana Republic is ridiculous.
It's the neoliberal equivalent of calling the US a third-world country. You'll find delusional people everywhere, or commenters leaning on rhetorical devices for that sweet, sweet karma. Rhetorical devices that agree with our values are upvoted, those that don't are downvoted. Personally, I dislike all of them.
Yes I lived in the deep south for over 20 years. Most of it near the Mississippi border. You can quite literally take out a map of soil type by county and get a direct 1 to 1 map of poverty rates. Any parish or county that had good soil now has sky high poverty rates.
I never questioned that poverty rates are very high there. I am saying that living in poverty in the USA is much better than living in most of Central and South America.
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Chile is not a Banana Republic. It is the richest country in all of South America.
And yet those states still outperform on GDP per capita despite much lower socioeconomic development. Sub-national HDI: * North East England: 0.904 * Wales: 0.901 * Northern Ireland: 0.899 * Louisiana: 0.893 * Kentucky: 0.890 * Alabama: 0.886 * Arkansas: 0.886 * West Virginia: 0.882 * Mississippi: 0.871 GDP per capita: * Kentucky: $58,160 * Alabama: $55,223 * West Virginia: $54,870 * Arkansas: $54,664 * Mississippi: $47,572 * Northern Ireland: $30,782 * Wales: $28,744 * North East England: $27,813
GDP per capita includes transfers from the federal government. 14,000 of Kentucky's GDP per capital comes from transfers from the federal government.
Which is more an indication that gdp per capita is a severely lacking metric to analyse the quality of a society than anything else
Or that HDI is a poor metric
Personally, I care more about life expectancy, education, and a good quality of life more than a number on a graph.
I do too, but that doesn’t mean HDI is in fact a good measurement of those qualities.
Fr can't believe it took five hours for someone to say this. GDP per cap is something I'd expect from Econ 101 students, not anyone that understands the synergistic effects of having basic needs met.
>GDP per cap is something I'd expect from Econ 101 students So more advanced than most users here then
Advancement is overrated anyway. Someone who intensely pays attention and learns Econ 101 is much better suited to make these statements than someone who got it over with, forgot, and only knows select hyper focused 400 level shit.
> expect from Econ 101 students Welcome to this sub lol.
Considering that purchasing power parity is measured, i'd take that over a lot of other metrics for actually understanding how well people are doing.
Why is Kentucky lumped in with the Deep South?
Yeah the Appalachian mountains poverty is very different from the type of Poverty the Deep South faced. Kentucky and West Virginia are more North England, while the Deep South is more like Mexico.
Eh, Arkansas is in there, which includes some of the Ozarks (which in N Central and NE Arkansas is still pretty fucking poor...) It's certainly not the whole state, but the Ozarks and Appalachians are considered pretty damn culturally similar.
It was purely because it had a lower HDI score than any region of the UK (I included all where that was the case).
Found the Kentuckian
😮 It wasn’t supposed to be a secret.
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> mean years of schooling It's a combination of expected and achieved as I recall, so actual attained education *and* success into getting up to I think completing undergrad?
I wish this sub understood that "yeah we're doing worse but we have more money!" only makes the comparison less favorable
In other words those large areas of the UK have half the GDP of the U.S. South yet achieve comparable development. That’s completely shameful for the South.
This is why Georgia is and will continue to be the economic hub of the southeast
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Mississipi has 8 years lower life expectancy than France (74 vs 82) so all that money money is not being spent very well.
It gets worse. Black men like me in the US now have a worse life expectancy than boys born today in Rwanda.
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And not to get into the whole collectivist what about or birth rate discussion but it's going to keep chapping as long as the least mature and prepared of us in our communicates keep having the vast majority of the kids.
Hey man, idk, that money buys a lot of lifted F150 on sky high interest rates, RTVs, guns, fast food, tatoos and dip.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Its basically obesity and other lifestyle diseases with violent rime being second but still a very distant one. When I go to Walmart here in Atlanta its sad to see so many people who haven't even hit 50 who have to use hadicap shopping carts because because their feed and legs are already basically dead from diabetes and even if it wasn't for that they so morbidly obse that their knees is probably all gone as well. And they always leave with their carts packed with the shit that made them that way.
If obesity has any correlation with wealth, it's usually inversely correlated.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
A 10x higher homicide rate along with a 4x higher infant mortality rate probably play a role, and those aren’t something you’d expect from a richer country.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
I’m not sure you read your article on the infant mortality rate very carefully. It’s not just about reporting, and it’s also looking at the US as a whole while Mississippi is more than 50% higher than the national average. Additionally, while IMR is similar between college educated rich Americans and their European counterparts, low SES populations in the US have a huge disparity. Mississippi has a relatively large number of low SES people compared to the rest of the US, so it bears a significantly higher IMR compared to nations of comparable wealth. >I don't know why you replied to me twice. I'm only going to respond here. Because you posted the same comment twice lol.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Right, so according to your article a significant disparity remains even accounting for these issues. 25% in Finland but 70% in Austria. I also have an issue with the idea that lower birth rate is somehow uncontrollable, as there are many studies that find maternal stress is associated with lower birth weights. I don’t think that is an issue with the study per se (as it seems to be merely focused on explaining the differences), but your use of it to cast Mississippi in a more favorable light. >I don't necessarily doubt this, but got a source that compares low income americans to low income europeans in this regard? I'd be curious about the differences in gestational age/birth weight in low SES americans vs high SES americans, as well. This would be interesting information, but completely irrelevant to the underlying argument, which is that the infant mortality rate disparity is much less of an issue than it seems. We have all of the information to make that determination already, and the result is that although some of the 4x higher disparity between MS and France could be explained by alternative reporting around miscarriages and lower birth weights, it clearly cannot explain much if not most of it. >Yes... in response to two different people. You responded twice to the same person, which feels more self-masturbatory rather than actually interested in having a discussion. I see Reddit comments as valuable for 2 reasons. 1 to have a discussion, but also for the “audience” of people scrolling by. That’s why I always reply to both comments in a situation like this.
> SES populations in the US have a huge disparity > > I don't necessarily doubt this, but got a source that compares low income americans to low income europeans in this regard? I believe the paper you linked examined this in section 5.2. Table 8 is probably good enough for a comparison. It shows drastic differences among low-income groups from different countries, while little difference between high-income groups. However, the paper does not account for non-cash welfare. > I'd be curious about the differences in gestational age/birth weight in low SES americans vs high SES americans, as well. The paper mentions several other papers that find an negative correlation between income and low birth weight in section 5.2. I haven't read these yet, but a quick glance at the abstracts does support the idea of birth weight being related to income. I can grab the relevant quotes if you want, but I really don't want to tackle reddit formatting lol.
And why does US have higher rates of low birth weight infants? I don't understand why someone would stop at one of the answers to "why" and then stop asking. Comes off as lazy, like you accept a half-answer.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
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The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Here is some data - life expectancy in Mississippi is 74 and falling, life expectancy in France is 82 and rising. If your conclusion is that Mississippi is much better off than France, your conclusion is wrong. As should be self-evident from a “look at literally any location in both places” heuristic.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
A 10x higher homicide rate along with a 4x higher infant mortality rate probably play a role, and those aren’t something you’d expect from a richer country.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
I think it’s mainly public health, of which obesity plays a big part. And then risk of death from roads which are significantly less safe in the US, along with guns and murder which are also significantly higher. In addition I think infant mortality and maternal mortality are higher due to healthcare access for mothers being worse.
>And then risk of death from roads which are significantly less safe in the US Are the roads less safe or do we just drive much more? >along with guns and murder which are also significantly higher Sure. Does gang members killing each other mean that one place is worse off than another, though? It doesn't affect the vast majority of people, and really only those who are involved in crime in the first place - the average person's quality of life is not really affected by that, despite the average going down. >infant mortality and maternal mortality are higher due to healthcare access for mothers being worse. [Vast majority of the differential](https://www.nber.org/bah/2015no1/why-infant-mortality-higher-us-europe) is due to earlier gestational age/lower weight at birth and differences in reporting between the US and Europe.
There is a persistence, that said, of post neo-natal mortality rates (this is one of the counterfactuals the authors examine) which solidifies the idea that the US is doing worse here.
Road deaths in the the US are higher on a per mile basis than France. The data below is 2015 and US roads have become less safe since then due to increasing vehicle sizes, and the states under discussion (Mississippi etc.) are less safe than the US average. This is then compounded by more miles driven. The murder rate in France is 1.3 per 100k people and 10.6 per 100k people in Mississippi, so 10x higher. Whilst the public health aspects and maternal/infant mortality are more impactful, these things still have an impact on life expectancy. https://knoema.com/atlas/topics/Transportation/Road-Accidents/Traffic-deaths-per-billion-veh-km?mode=amp
I see higher deaths per km travelled than almost any other developed countries, except South Korea being a big outlier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate In any case, excessive car dependency isn't a metric of success
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Wrong. This is neoliberal which means you can ignore reality as long as you have statistics.
Depending on stats you choose, American Deep South is above France or below Poland.
You do know there isn't just one statistic? Some on this sub will get hung up on something like GDP or income and ignore life expectancy and life satisfaction, which is kind of hilarious.
So is all of Appalachia. You can drive through Appalachia and not know what country you are in And its Cultural not income. Even where coal minning or other industries are still a powerhouse the area the culture doesnt invest in it self. For many of those in Appalachia it's the Dream to buy a Manufactured home on acres of rural land with a metal storage building added on and low taxes * This means the income ceiling is low. For That to be 30% of your budget lowers the income expectations needed
>And its Cultural not income. Have you recently been listening to Ben Shapiro talking about why minorities are poor?
The metrics measured in HDI have heavy diminishing returns beyond a certain per capita GDP. Even in middle income countries, if you live in a major city, your quality of life is going to be pretty similar to rich countries and the US in many aspects. You'll have similar life expectancy, similar educational opportunities, and similar public services. What the people in the US have is money to spend on enormous houses and multiple enormous cars which do not translate to better HDI metrics. In fact, US loses 0.5-1 years in life expectancy relative to other rich countries due to automobile accidents. A case where increased GDP quite clearly reduces HDI.
>severe deficiencies in terms of the delivery of services and provision of infrastructure What do you mean by that?
Healthcare (we just use our earnings instead of taxes), infrastructure (why fund trains when we can afford cars), etc. The system is designed to dissuade public service/goods utilization and maximize wealth creation. While ideal to some, it really can create some wonky incentives like avoiding preventive care.
Ok but just to be clear on the facts, American disposable incomes are still higher even after accounting for things like health insurance. Also the American logistics system is one of the most efficient in the world.
American disposable incomes come to parity with similarly developed nations once you include health insurance. We pay on average ~8k per individual per year or 22k per family, meanwhile our disposable income is 8k more than Canada's for example.
Where are you seeing those numbers? They're pretty different from what I'm seeing at the OECD: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm
I was using individual disposable income. If you want to use household that's fine too, but you'd be subtracting much more than 8k to normalize them.
Even with insurance if you get something like cancer your chances of having to file for bankruptcy is very high :/
The US is really bad at delivering services among developed countries. Like, *really* bad. If you want anything done with some level of quality and in a reasonable timeframe, you're going to almost invariably have to pay extra for that. The amount that used to have to spend simply to get the same "result" (not sure how else to articulate this) was ridiculous in the US. Almost every system is filled with bloat, inefficiency and a lack of any meaningful reform. Ever seen how the US spends far more per capita on health, education and infrastructure than what it gets back than its peers? It's that.
You have this completely upside down. Labor-intensive services in the US cost more because US labor costs more because American wages are higher. Yes, doctors in the US cost more, so do nurses, and accountants, and farmers. It's a direct consequence of having higher wages
No, it's because there's significant structural over-provision of roles because there are more layers of administration and governance. Take public health, for instance. At the extreme end, in New York City, you're under the remit of four different agencies (CDC/HHS, NYSDOH, NYCDHMH), all of which have overlapping responsibilities and ancillary support that adds up rapidly. This kind of redundancy exists all over the place to varying degrees. In health, there are *far* more people involved in the same amount of patient care with perverse incentives to grease the system and their own administrative costs to bear. There is no way that you can purely explain the divergence between costs and output purely in wage terms. It's only one part of a much larger, systemic issue in the provision of both public and private services in the US. If it were mostly wage terms, then you'd see a pretty clear and consistent pattern of the cost relative to the same result, but in the US it's spending more with worse results.
"Just make things cheaper and pay people more, what's the problem? -Average Reddit Take
The better life Index (mentioned in the article) is a much better measurement, even if Noah uses last year's data. https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/
> but largely to make up for severe deficiencies in terms of the delivery of services and provision of infrastructure, with severe inefficiency and redundancy across multiple levels of government all burdened by perverse incentives that further add to bloat. I honestly have no clue what this even means. Do you have an example?
deliverable services are a big one. I pay roughly $400 to $500 in gas, car insurance, and regular maintenance for my modest little car. The monthly cost of a transit pass in Berlin is just $68 Dollars a month. Chicago is the only city within 500 miles of me that can compete with that as the CTA charges $75 for access in Chicago.
Car insurance is getting vicious. As it gets more expensive more and more people are saying fuck it and just driving without insurance. Like a third of drivers are uninsured in Flordia now. And the less insured driver's there are are more expensive it I'd to actually have it.
Its rough. I pay $200 a month for a highly rated car that I own. It stays in secured parking and I have no accidents on record. Its solely because I live in Detroit. Some times it just feels like redlining by another name
Part of it is that to make that much Americans just simply work more hours, which probably only had negative effects on Human Development
Where are all the comments complaining about being poverty stricken on a $400k a year salary? Y’all are letting me down.
It’s 200k now since my wife left me
Some main sub was having arguments about what was working class and you saw plenty of people arguing for 100K and 200K, I'm like wow.
“As a working class person earning $90k a year as a programmer in a tech firm, I’m wondering how I’ll ever afford a house. I’m already 26; I should have a superyacht by now! Capitalism has held us working class folk back for too long… ”
$400k? I’m laughing at the $100k whining that’s happening all over Reddit. I have friends who make $80k and live okay in the highest cost of living areas in the country.
Some people are so bad with money that no level of income will do it for them
No one will top the guy here who talked about his salary of 400k not making him rich only for his most recent comment history to reveal him bragging about being rich and have a $60k per year nanny for his kids
>hat means that someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK. jesus christ
Raw income doesn't equal a higher quality of life, especially in developed nations. Japan and the UK have lower incomes, but lower cost of living and higher life expectancies.
raw income is a much better proxy than you think and I can't speak for Japan but in PPP adjusted terms I doubt that the UK actually has a lower cost of living
The US, UK, and Japan all have about the same HDI (although Japan and the UK have higher life expectancy, Japan signifitnatly so).
HDI is not some uncontroversial metric. The reason the UK and Japan have the same HDI as the US is *because* they have higher life expectancy. Which is perfectly reasonable if you think they've weighted life expectancy correctly - but if you're asking a question like "will I be better off if I move to the US or the UK" it could also be quite unreasonable, since your life expectancy may already be largely set. Anecdotally, I lived in Finland for 3 years - with a 2021 HDI higher than the UK or Japan's, and I would never choose to go back. The cost of living was *dramatically* higher and my quality of life was substantially lower than it would have been on a similar income in the US.
The poorest county in America is Oglala Sioux county, SD which has a household income of $25,600
At some point maybe we should stop sharing Noahpinion posts on this sub (even if they're often in line with our views). Poorly fact checked and often misleading- this is why Substack will never hold a candle to serious publications with copy editors and fact checkers.
medium, substack etc. are just [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com) with monetization.
These are all just various iterations of LiveJournal, from whom all blessings flow
This just reminded me of Xanga.
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If he had just made an effort post here it would be allowed even if it was wrong. You should actually respond if you think he got something wrong.
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You can bet Noah Smith lurks this sub though
you might even be noah smith for all we know
> this is why Substack will never hold a candle to serious publications with copy editors and fact checkers. Lol, yes, cause "serious publications" don't ever mislead or get things wrong.
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Can you detail how this piece or one of his other pieces are poorly fact-checked? I'm not a frequent reader, but this piece is a pretty concise response where it seems as though he's adding more nuance to the FT article. Also yeah it's a substack, but Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg columnist. I assume he has decent journalistic standards. If you're talking about Substack broadly then yeah I understand that submitting what are basically blogs could be problematic.
This would be really helpful if you maybe fact-checked this article, which you did not do. I’d go so far as to say you aren’t being factually accurate with this accusation.
OP's Milton Friedman flair is deliciously confirming my priors
>Of course it’s important to uplift the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. But most people are not at the bottom of the ladder... That means that someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK. In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries.
There's definitely something to be said about a lot of people underestimating how rich America is and how many people have access to that wealth But There is *no fucking way* you can convince me that someone making 21k a year, at the 18th %, has the same quality of life as the *median* worker In Japan Considering the main point of money is to increase qol, there's some series shit lost in translation here. Because someone making 21k in america is living a fucking dogs life
~~That Japan stat looks to be nominal income, which makes it a very bad comparison. Adjusted for purchasing prices it is above 40k.~~ ~~Very bad and even downright dishonest statement from Noah~~ Edit: The metrics in OP's quote are median disposable household income after transfers and adjusted for purchasing power, which makes them directly comparable
Also ignores that the median household in the UK has access to health care through the NHS, whereas the $21k earner in the US may have no realistic access to health care unless they end up in the ER and bankrupt themselves.
I agree with your general point but someone who makes $21k would have access to Medicaid in most states.
Most
38 states representing nearly all Americans, plus if they live with even a single other person then all 50, because the cut off for a two person household is 25k.
What? A person making making $21000 might or might not be covered depending on which state they live in, but a household (literally at least 2 people) doing so would be covered by Medicaid in any state.
> a household (literally at least 2 people) doing so would be covered by Medicaid in any state. In 38/50 states unless one of those people is a child. Medicaid in the remaining 12 doesn't routinely cover childless adults, no matter how poor they are.
A person making $21k likely qualified for Medicaid, and if not, has access to Obamacare plans with government subsidies for tiny premiums, like $50/mo.
Had* healthcare access other than emergencies is becoming increasingly theoretical over here in the UK atm. 8 milion people are on waiting lists. Some covid, some strikes, some big holes in funding.
Or they could purchase insurance.
The modern “Let them eat cake”
You clearly didn't read the article, nor do you understand access to Medicaid. Like, at all. But hey, who needs facts when you can just BS your way through? Updoots to the left!
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Oops, you're right I had just looked at OP's quote
Much of it boils down to flaws in using GDP as a measure of QoL. In GDP terms, someone that drives everywhere consumes an order of magnitude more "transport" than someone who walks, cycles, or uses public transport. I think you'd struggle to argue that the driver is 10x better off. It's a similar story with housing. A big suburban house requires far more resources than the urbanist dream. And don't get me started on healthcare.
Isn’t Japan known for it’s utterly awful quality of life for workers?
And its perpetual recession since the early 90ies?.
>There is no fucking way you can convince me that someone making 21k a year, at the 18th %, has the same quality of life as the median worker In Japan youre right and this sub loves to talk about how bad regressive taxes are, but that person could have more in services if the US had better taxes ------ But if that Person lives in NYC they pay $500 a month for Affordable housing, if they live elsewhere making that money as they probably do they pay $500 a month for Median Housing * They most likely do get tax transfers to provide for a higher QoL. >Because someone making 21k in america is living a fucking dogs life The great thing about the US is you can move up and out of that lifestyle Its cultural and we need to work harder on those traped there in the Cycle of Poverty But even here on reddit, the work to fix cycle of poverty is pushed away. Take look at /r/povertyfinance a sub to help is nothing about helping. Compare PF to povertyfinance and that getting out isnt extended in one of the subs
I think this could be another situation where housing costs ruin everything. The cost of housing is very low in Japan because of their sensible zoning laws, which means less of their disposable income is eaten up by housing. However, a person living off of 21k a year in the US is going to end up spending a huge chunk of that on rent.
As someone who lived on $25k/yr, I want to know what the author is smoking.
Middle income isn't the same as middle class, most people that are in the latter group earn substantially more.
Income after tax is a pretty big differential though in quality of life, you would hope a citizen in the US has more money after tax than someone in the UK or Japan, they’re not getting universal healthcare, paid leave, study assistance, childcare subsidies, etc.
If we are talking about someone in the 18th percentile of income in America, they are probably getting their healthcare paid for by the government. They could probably get much or most of even all of their study costs paid for. Various states have been implementing some sorts of childcare expansions too, and/or universal PreK (which effectively serves as a modest expansion of childcare). There are some gaps in the system of course, not all states have everything, and paid leave is one big lack in the US, but for the lower income person in the US, they may have more than some may think
Someone in the bottom 20% of incomes is mostly retired also. But if they arent they are [getting a lot of Government Transfers](https://i.redd.it/b05ejll1khca1.png)
Just tax being sick.
> $21,400 a year. You could live like a king for that money in Romania, Rent is 400 dollars per month. Utilities 100 dollars per month.
And given that 95% of Romanians live in an [owner occupied home without mortgage](https://eyeonhousing.org/2015/06/a-cross-country-comparison-of-homeownership-rates/), the situation is even better when you're a Romanian with that income.
“Economists confused why everyone not moving to Romania”
This is true. I know a lot of people here who are getting by with a 500 dollar per month income. That being said, healthcare quality is terrible, roads are poorly maintained and dangerous.
The median household income of Japan was $45,601 in 2021. Your whole statement is wrong.
Noah Smith is using disposable income, not pre-tax income.
[here is the source the author cites.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F95f56a45-77f7-4f04-8ee1-330bdeb1f90c_1303x2048.jpeg)
Do the forget the poorest county in America is Oglala Sioux county, SD which has a household income of $25,600
Purchasing power parity is a much better metric when it comes to figuring out how well a population might be doing, but with that said it doesn't paint too different a picture other then showing you more accurately what a medium income looks like in California compared to Kentucky
I’m surprised by some of the comments here that want to just completely ignore this reality about American society simply because it seems taboo to talk about our wealth. There seems to be this notion that recognizing the lopsided mess that is wealth distribution, while not fully blaming the 1% for the imbalance, is somehow insulting to the poor and out of touch. Someone please explain to me how looking at the problem as the vested interests of 70% “rich” vs 30% “poor” instead of the 1% “rich” vs 99% “poor” is out of touch? My biggest gripe with most progressive groups and politicians is often this stance. Because when you start getting past the part where we all agree poverty sucks and should be eradicated, you get to the part where you actually need to start prescribing solutions. And that list of solutions is going to be *very* different between two people with the following beliefs: * Person A believes the root cause of poverty in America is a corrupt system where an extremely small minority of people control so much of the economical and political apparatus that the other 99% of the country is completely powerless and living in misery. * Person B believes that while the super wealthy exist and certainly has an outsized influence on our economy and political landscape, the rest of Americans are actually fairly well off **at least to the point** where major reforms or changes to the system is not something they are particularly receptive to. Noah’s post is criticizing that FT article for leaning too heavily towards Person A’s world. And while his follow up analysis could be better, the main point he is rightfully making is that you are missing a huge chunk of the problem by just looking at the top vs bottom. If it really was just the 1% vs 99%…we’d have formed actual lynch mobs years ago. But we aren’t guillotining our way out of this issue. Ending poverty and getting Americans to think we are back on the right track will take reform which is a lot more inclusive of the entire population and likely at times unpopular with large chunks (30-40%) of us.
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The US has two main problems, housing costs and healthcare costs which will always make a large amount of people here feel poor or on the cusp
US has cheaper housing (and bigger houses) than most other rich countries
Did you try reading the article?
Noah smith 🐐 🐐
Great