Mighty doesn’t mean everyone gets free stuff via government redistribution programs. And maybe one can see that this is the reason America is “mighty.” We attract and retain the best of the whole world, who come here because they are tired of senseless redistribution campaigns by the have-nots of the world. Not to mention freedom generally, which is why my family came to the US: we were not seeking economic opportunities, but freedom from oppression and discrimination, which in 2018 is still much more the exception than the rule globally.
Russia can huff and puff all it wants, but Ed Snowden is still basically the only prominent American who has ever moved to Russia. This while millions of people from the FSU moved to the US, Israel, Europe, Australia and Canada over the past thirty years, which is the fundamental difference between the US and Russia, etc.
Now if only there was a way to send the people who want redistribution to places where they have that sort of thing. That would be great! But guess what: Norway doesn’t want these people :(. They have enough people jockeying for the dole.
Well, this isn't the 80s anymore, no one talks of Russia anymore. What I meant was based on looking at European countries like Sweden and Finland or even France.
Also, I am not saying the U.S. is a horrible place to live in, I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
Well the same is true for the rest of the world. I live in Queens, NY surrounded by the world’s best who came here from all over the place. For every 100,000 people from Bangladesh here in Queens, I wonder whether these is even 1 American living permanently in Bangladesh. I wonder how many expats there are out there total, and which country has the closest immigration balance to the United States, which probably leads the world by a lot in any metric of incoming immigrants.
I focus on immigration because where you choose to live seems like the single greatest vote of confidence that you can make. So I wonder why people here in the states want to make the states more like other places when clearly people from other places want to come here.
> I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
Yeah it definitely could and should be. There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
You're presenting a false dichotomy where the US can't have social welfare programs and be great - this is simply not the case. FDRs social programs and the labor movements of the last century arguably improved our country in its most noticeable way of all time - at least until it was dismantled by the people who benefited from it the most (the baby boomers).
> FDRs social programs and the labor movements of the last century arguably improved our country in its most noticeable way of all time
You can't discuss either of those two things without also recognizing the other half of those policies: the massive xenophobia, racism, and outright genocide that motivated and fueled them, all under FDR's watch.
This is it right here. A safety net(including healthcare, education, retirement) intended for all would be an awesome way to spend all of this money, but instead it gets squandered elsewhere.
Where does it get squandered? 60% of the federal budget goes to retirement and healthcare. That doesn't account for all of the local budgets which almost exclusively target human welfare projects.
There are only two stereotypical places I can think of it being "squandered". The first is the military which, who knows, could be NPV if you consider what the world could be like without it. Ultimately its unknowable. The second is the money not taxed. Which is a particularly frustrating mindset that I encounter on the internet.
In either case, we're not "squandering" money anywhere. You may disagree with the allocation of some resources but that doesn't mean its been squandered.
Gosh, what would the world be like if our troops and munitions weren't murdering civilians and prolonging conflicts in a monotonically-increasing set of nations around the world? It's not "unknowable"; we just have to start voting...
...haha what was I thinking never mind. Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
> Gosh, what would the world be like if our troops and munitions weren't murdering civilians and prolonging conflicts in a monotonically-increasing set of nations around the world? It's not "unknowable"; we just have to start voting...
Hah! I didn't say you couldn't have an opinion on it. Only that you can't know the world that "could have been".
> Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Squander is a word which means to waste. If a government project has a net economic (or public health) benefit then by definition the money was not squandered.
> If a government project has a net economic (or public health) benefit then by definition the money was not squandered.
Just want to point out that this statement doesn't account for opportunity cost. if it could go to something of greater net benefit, the difference between the two could be considered squandered.
>Gosh, what would the world be like if our troops and munitions weren't murdering civilians and prolonging conflicts in a monotonically-increasing set of nations around the world?
I imagine it'd be a lot more like the conflicts in the rest of Africa.
> It's not "unknowable";
Yes it is, unless you have a time machine.
> we just have to start voting...
Ah see, but we already do that. The US votes to keep a massive, mighty military.
In the latest election, the dude who won president had tweeted things like, "stay out of Syria" and "WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIVES AND $ BILLIONS?ZERO" Lots of people knew he was lying, but lots of other people voted based on those statements. Two elections before that, the dude who won president had promised to close the Guantanamo torture site, to get out of Iraq and not to start new stupid wars. Lots of people knew he was lying, but lots of other people voted based on those statements. Two elections before that, the dude who won president talked about a "humble" USA that would not be "the world police" nor take part in "nation-building". Lots of people knew he was lying, but lots of other people voted based on those statements.
I absolutely believe our money is being squandered on a military industrial complex that is a net negative on the entire planet. I also believe that we need more progressive taxes, and to sit here and pretend that capitalism is flawless is simplistic and a waste of time.
How do you figure? I've been to both Iraq and Oklahoma, and I can tell you the quality of life in Oklahoma is a hell of a lot better than Iraq, pre- or post-war, in spite of their similar GDPs.
I haven't been to Scandinavia, but I have been to some of the "wealthy" European countries, including Ireland. I now live in its GDP counterpart, Colorado. I would say their quality of life is comparable.
It would be helpful for you to explain how life in, say, Sweden is vastly better than life in Georgia. Before you cite poor uneducated Georgian hillbillies, keep in mind that Georgia is home to Georgia Tech, not to mention Atlanta, which was quite prosperous last time I checked. And if you're going to cite Sweden's "free" universities, you might as well go ahead and throw in a side-by-side comparison of Georgian/U.S. Federal and Swedish tax rates as well.
Utterly pointless and idiotic comment. I made no judgement as to whether those higher taxes or the things they pay for are good or bad. I am merely saying that these things are trade-offs, and if you're going to count the benefits, you must also count the costs.
It comes down to how you measure. People doing well have a high quality of life in pretty much the entire United States. People at the bottom, less so.
The US does have an awful lot of support for people, but our society is also hostile to poor people and we have awful workplace regulation for low quality jobs.
Well no, pointing out that the US strata are unusually and unnecessarily capricious isn't specious.
The US is a rich country and the lack of resources for people at the bottom is more likely to be arbitrary than it is to be contributing to that wealth.
It is when you conveniently fail to mention the vast list of countries, many of which are on this map, whose stratification is far worse than that of the U.S.
Comparing specifically to Sweden, there is no similarity at all between the US and Sweden when it comes to economic classes and their differences. We have our upper class and working class too, but even those who are working poor here manage with one job and they still enjoy benefits like day care and health care.
How many people are hustling two or more jobs to make ends meet in the US? How many of them afford day care? What happens if they break a leg and can't work for a month?
I never said the U.S. deals with economic strata better than every other nation on Earth. In fact, I explicitly said that there are countries who handle it better. So what's your point?
Which countries are you referring to? Of the 11 countries with GDP per capita no more than 10% below the US's, I see only 1 (Qatar) with social stratification worse than the US. Of the 26 countries with GDP per capita no more than 50% below the US's, I see only ~three (Qatar, UAE, arguably Singapore) with worse social stratification than the US.
So, your argument is basically, "Yay, we're better than two theocratic monarchies whose prosperity is based solely on oil wealth and importing a bunch of virtual slaves from poor countries, maybe better than one technocratic dictatorship, better than a bunch of undeveloped third world countries, but worse than every other single Western democracy. Go us!"
I like how you casually discard the vast majority of the comment. I addressed more or less every country in the world at some point in the comment.
It is not an accomplishment for the US to be doing better than a bunch of third world countries that are poor as shit because they were on the losing end of colonialism. It needs to be compared to the other comparably developed countries.
> It is not an accomplishment for the US to be doing better than a bunch of third world countries
I never said it was an accomplishment, just that the U.S. is better than many countries. That was in response to a comment that was implying that the United States is somehow worse than the majority of countries period, not just developed Western nations.
You shifted the conversation by arbitrarily declaring that the U.S. should only be compared to a select group of developed countries, which is not the point that I was originally arguing against.
But let's go with that for a minute. I assume you're measuring stratification by the Gini coefficient, since you don't say. In that case, what you failed to mention is that the list of countries "less stratified" than the United States also includes Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among many other decidedly unpleasant places. Your implication that some other countries are necessarily "doing it right" compared to the United States because they have a lower Gini coefficient assumes that a lower Gini coefficient is always necessarily a good thing, which is obviously false when you consider all of the data. A lower Gini coefficient does not equal a higher quality of life.
As a Swede living in the United States, I can agree that the average person has a higher quality of life in Scandinavia! I don't think it's possible to have that in the States, though; the country doesn't seem meant for it.
The Scandinavian model relies on many incompatible tenets that could be mentioned, including but not limited to immigration. The Swedish system is already practically collapsing from its first major influx of immigrants ever.
If we want a country in which everyone is welcome, it can't be a country in which we offer a fantastic quality of life automatically through living there. I mean, not until we have some post-scarcity economy, at least.
Another issue is that maybe part of the States' success is related to having more income to yourself, to spend at your discretion after taxes, rather than it being spent for you by the government. It inspires a lot of immigration from people with big ideas, and that could easily change if the U.S. surpasses other countries in taxes.
I think there are models the U.S. should adopt from Scandinavia, however they're smaller in scope and address efficiency with tax money. One example is that all your income tax goes to the local government up until a certain point (~65,000 USD?), and it's redistributed at that level, rather than being siphoned through so many levels of bureaucracy like in the States. It's funny, while being the polar opposite of the U.S. and its conservative values, Sweden still manages a smaller federal government!
The population of Sweden is 10 million vs 325 million for the US. The issues faced by each country are vastly different in scale and policies which work at one scale will not necessarily work at the other. In this context we should be comparing the policies of Sweden to the policies of New York (but even that doesn't really work because of the vastly more diverse population of NY).
I totally accept the argument that it's not the same thing to run a country of 10 milion versus 325 million, but why does demographics matter so much?
A lot of the differences between Sweden and the US comes down to things like whether health care should be a human right etc. Do you think people are less inclined to want "free" health care if they live in a community that's ethnically mixed? I don't buy it.
Australia is a nation of immigrants. About 30% of the Australian population are immigrants, and rising. Less than 50% of Australians have both parents born in Australia.
Australia still manages to have great quality of life (unless you are an Aboriginal). I'm not sure how they manage it, I haven't looked into it, but somehow they have.
The other thing has been the rise of China and selling them a vast supply of commodities.
In 2002, Australia's GDP per capita was $20,000, while the US was $38,000. A dramatic gap. China's GDP explosion began in 2003 (their economy went from $1.4t in 2002 to $4.6t in 2008, and on upward from there). Australia's GDP soared right along with China's economy.
Since we are just speculating, I hypothesize that not sharing a land border with relatively poor countries has something to do with it. Australia does take in immigrants, but since most of them come legally they can pick and choose. They don't get the huge number of illegal immigrants USA deals with. This is not a diatribe against immigration, I'm an immigrant myself.
One example is that all your income tax goes to the local government up until a certain point (~65,000 USD?), and it's redistributed at that level, rather than being siphoned through so many levels of bureaucracy like in the States.
A very intriguing idea. I like it on the surface, but it falls down a little bit because local taxation is varied. Some cities have their own income taxes, while others don't. Some states have income taxes, while others don't. Some states|counties|cities have sales tax, while others don't. It's a hodge-podge.
The local jurisdictions use this as an incentive to draw in new businesses. The idea is for local control of taxation. But your proposal seems to give the locals more control over taxes than the top-down structure we have now. It's worth thinking about.
Very true! This is only possible through Sweden's standardization of tax rates — it's more like if the federal government directed the taxes they receive immediately to the local jurisdictions, but the federal government still sets the specific tax rate. Local governments won't need other forms of taxation in this model, as the income tax received is more than enough to have perfect infrastructure and all.
It's currently infeasible in the US due to how substantial our federal government is, but it's funny as it's a libertarian dream to minimize the government; Sweden's success is in fact doing so, but also keeping tax rates high in the process.
I'm a Swede still living in Sweden, and I take issue with some of what you say.
We are nowhere close to collapsing, first of all. I don't know if you've been back recently or if you get your information from social media only, but really things are fine.
Secondly this was hardly the first major influx of immigrants ever. We saw a major influx during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the 90s, lots of people came here after the US started wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 00s. And back in the 60s there was a huge amount of workforce immigration, so much so that Finnish people are still the largest non-Swedish group in the country.
Fun fact: the second largest group of people to come to Sweden in 2016 were repatriating swedes.
Detroit is a mess, but the gap between it and Ukraine is not remotely comparable to that between Iraq and Oklahoma.
And obviously single examples are not representative of the whole, but they're far more useful than GP's blanket assertion which is based on nothing other than, I suspect, the fact that it's currently edgy/fashionable to whinge about all the "free" things Europeans get that Americans don't.
I was talking about the one that's been going on since 2003, but take your pick. I don't need to have been to Iraq before that to know that a very large fraction of Iraqis live in mud houses with no air conditioning, running water, or sewer systems, and always have. The reason those things are missing is not because American troops stole your air conditioners. It's because the average Iraqi doesn't have a standard of living adequate to afford them.
> the average Iraqi doesn't have a standard of living adequate to afford [such a standard of living]
Impecable logic, technically not even wrong, but ... you are saying the wars didn't cause colataral damage to a significant degree because ... you cannot live without air conditioning?
Your remark about air conditioning makes no sense at all, but I'll reply to the rest of your comment by clarifying what I mean.
GP was implying that Iraq would be nice if it weren't for American interventions. You appear to be making the same point, given your reference to collateral damage.
I'm saying that's highly unlikely considering that Iraq has always been quite poor compared to the U.S., even before any of these wars.
I see this whiny argument repeated over and over ad nauseam--"Iraq would be an oasis of civilization if only it weren't for those mean imperialist Americans coming in and breaking our toys". Utter nonsense. Iraq was a mess long before the Americans showed up.
But that's all beside the point anyway. This discussion is about relative GDPs of various countries and U.S. states, not an analysis of whose fault it is that the ones at the bottom are at the bottom.
I'm not rationalizing anything. Did I say I was in favor of American policies regarding Iraq? No, I didn't. I'm merely saying that invasion or not, Iraq would be underdeveloped, just as it has been for a very long time. You cannot blame every national failure and misfortune in Iraqi history on America.
Are you capable of staying on topic? Do you actually have an argument? Or are you just going to fling childish insults in lieu of one?
Economic development during the 1970's and in the run up to the iran-iraq war was promising by the numbers and by considering the nascent industrial centers in places like Baghdad. If you look at those numbers and say "nah, doesn't matter" when considering how American policy destroyed that picture then it's not worth arguing about. Especially the embargo which killed hundreds of thousands (or will you say 'nuh-uh'?). Your dismissive, aggressive tone doesn't exactly invite conversation, does it? Frankly, I don't think you know shit enough about economics to act as authoritatively as you do.
What-if historical arguments are always fluffy, but we have examples of similar sorts of states experiencing similar initial growth that weren't crushed by an empire's geopolitical interests. Where are they today?
Edit: In any case, the point I was going to make is that the reason why it is the way you observed is because the economies in Oklahoma and Iraq serve different purposes within the context of global capital, Iraq being a client state to the United States and primarily serving as a vehicle of resource extraction and exploitation, while in Oklahoma at least some of that economic activity is going towards the well-being of the people there.
Now, the upshot is that the relative wealth of normal schmoes in the United States and other nations of similar economic development shows the discrepancy that it does because of the same sort of forces in a less extreme way. Americans are more exploited per capita by the capitalist class than they are in, say, the EU. Other people in these threads have described how, e.g. deregulated healthcare is a manifestation of that exploitation.
But to be honest, after your reply I wanted to yank your chain :^)
Because calling people "bootlicker" invites conversation, right?
Ah, the 1970's--the decade that ended with Iraq opportunistically invading Iran and promptly getting its ass kicked. If you want to make the case that America's imperialism is the reason for Iraq's troubles, that's probably not the example you want to go with.
You're absolutely right. Not taking population size into account makes this entire comparison of QOL pointless, not just that between Iraq and Oklahoma. Considering GP is the one that initially made the comparison, I'm curious why you're making this reply to my comment and not hers.
GP wasn't specific about absolute vs relative GDP (American performance in QOL per GDPPC may not be terrible, but certainly not beyond all doubt), the Oklahoma/Iraq comparison was.
GP post is open to a benevolent interpretation wherein a cooperative reader fills in the missing "per capita" from the context of talking about quality of life.
Calling Iraq and Oklahoma similar closes that door, because those two are not similar at all per capita.
It cannot reasonably be interpreted that way. GP made a blanket statement about how in spite of our GDP being higher than many other countries, our quality of life is not. That is obviously false.
I choose to interpret GP's comment to mean what it actually says. You may choose to put words in GP's mouth so that their argument says what you wish it to say, but for me that's a waste of time. If they wish to clarify and restate their argument, they are welcome to do so. But then they will have to provide some evidence that per-capita GDP "goes farther" in other countries than in the U.S. So far nobody has done that.
Well, I do, and I hope this answers your question of why I replied to your post and not the the one above (which did not add much to the discussion to begin with).
You're making a judgement call. Americans value different things than Europeans (or Asians, or ...). For example I personally would rather live in USA than Europe.
I mean, it clearly does. The US is in the top 10 in terms of Human Development Index, above the U.K., France, Spain, and Italy. Germany is the only large, economically and geographically diverse European country that beats the U.S.
Where did you get the idea that Americans don't have a high quality of life?
If this is an outside looking in scenario, I'll just say that I'm amused and disappointed by international press coverage of the US whenever I travel abroad.
That's a really nice map! I made some graphs today comparing Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Minnan, Hakka, etc) to languages with a similar number of speakers. When I write up a blog post about it, then I'll share it here. (Hakka news on Hacker News!)
I also like this world map, scaled by population instead of land area. I think it would be interesting to edit it with major cities, and also use it as a base for other infographics.
Russia has ~40% of the population of the US, and one major export - oil. Oil in itself, surprisingly, does not contribute much to GDP[1] (Even though the modern world is built on it).
Outside from the major metro areas, Russia does not have a extensive - or expensive service economy, and it has very few exports. Between that, and the petro-ruble suffering from oil shocks/sanctions, its GDP is, unsurprisingly, quite low.
[1] Oil is, for example, 3% of Canada's GDP, but you wouldn't think it, given how hard the federal government is trying to prop it up, at the expense of other industries. Extracting it, like growing food, is an incredibly low-value industry.
>> Nominal GDP per capita does not, however, reflect differences in the cost of living and the inflation rates of the countries; therefore using a basis of GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) is arguably more useful when comparing differences in living standards between different nations.
If you live in a roach infested box in California you need to be putting dollars in the bank and have an exit plan to take those dollars to somewhere with a much lower COL someday, otherwise...you live in a roach infested box with a very high GDP!
Hmm not sure how you could take away such a poor interpratiaton of my comment. I’m actually having a great day and one of the best years of my life.
At the time of my comment, very early in the submission, all of the other comments were drawing false conclusions about what is being presented. GDP comparisons tell you nothing about the lives of the people living in those two areas being compared. My original comment was meant to point that out to an audience that may not have spent much time studying economics.
Maybe because you made reference to living in a "roach infested box in California" not just once but twice.
If your goal was just to educate people about the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of living standard, the social commentary about California's high cost of living didn't help.
Totals are interesting. It tells you about things like the US’s power in international trade, reminds is how big the US market is, why people focus on it, etc.
It doesn’t mean GDP per capita isn’t interesting either, but they’re different lenses used to view different things.
From the original article and chart (not the current linked site):
> "California has a labor force of 19.3 million compared to the labor force in the UK of 33.8 million (World Bank data here). Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output last year as California! ... Further, California as a separate country would have been the 5th largest economy in the world last year, ahead of the UK ($2.62 trillion), India ($2.61 trillion) and France ($2.58 trillion)."
That shows the power of immigration. I'm not even talking about immigration from outside the US, though that's significant too. California has such high GDP per capita because it draws well educated people from the rest of the US. If it was an independent country, it couldn't do that so easily.
Yes, and it's the main reason our economy hasn't tanked. But there have traditionally been more barriers to movement from the EU, not least language, so the effect is somewhat less, and easy immigration from the EU hasn't been going on for nearly so long. And don't get me started on Brexit...
> I'm not even talking about immigration from outside the US...
Migration, or internal migration is probably a better term here.
It isn't just the migration either - it is the nature of what happens. The top cities/areas for several industries are here, and many secondary ones as well. Film production, software/web, lots of aerospace. It also helps that a fair bit basic needs are provided back to the state by itself (Central Valley farming).
Indeed, it illustrates that immigration is a pernicious force that gives rise to extreme inequity, draining talent and skills from less prosperous regions and concentrating them in one area in a destructive cycle.
No it doesn't. California is 8th in terms of GDP per capita within the U.S. If you look at the list of states that are within +/- 10% of California's GDP per capita, you've New York and Massachusetts (which are suffering from out-migration), and Colorado, Nebraska, and Minnesota (none of which are major targets of internal or external immigration).
While your data are no doubt correct, this doesn't stop it being true for California. Just because a state is now suffering from out-migration doesn't indicate it didn't become wealthy from migration in the past, nor does it indicate it is getting poorer now due to that out-migration. To know that, you'd have to measure the economic contribution of the people moving in and of the people leaving. It is possible for the GDP per capita to increase and simultaneously for the population to decrease slowly.
Would be interesting to know where the wealth comes from in Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. I don't know enough about them to comment.
"The top relocation motivation for 65 percent of households arriving by van said they came to California for jobs. Only 43 percent of those departing by moving van described the move was work-related.
The jobs rush means your new neighbors are likely wealthier than the people they replaced. United’s study showed 68 percent of arriving households make $100,000 or more annually; just 63 percent of those departing by moving van make above that threshold."
OP made the assertion, they've got the burden of providing data in support of it. I'm just explaining that the data he did offer doesn't support his conclusion.
Wealth in Colorado, Minnesota, etc., comes from the same place as anywhere else. The U.S. is a rich country with lots of productive industries. Tech is actually a pretty small portion of that (5-6% of GDP, 3% of employment). E.g. Target is based in Minnesota, and has double the revenues of Facebook.
I think it just means CA has managed to outsource more labour than the UK. Think of all the workers in China making Apple phones, or all the Uber drivers in the world forking over a chunk of their business to people in CA. It would be interesting to see the results if we could compute a per capita GDP that was actually divided among all the workers that support a given region's economy, regardless of whether they live in that region.
I've always been curious to find out if there is a study of California's location relative to it's GDP.
How much of the GDP is based on coastline, major ports, access to imports from China/Southeast Asia that get distributed to the rest of the US, US based companies located there with manufacturing based in China and even Mexico.
Geographically, it seems like it's in an ideal location to hold business HQ's with access to less expensive labor for imported goods.
Is there a study like this out there?
You compare that to the UK that doesn't have any clearly accessible inexpensive labor force option and it makes you wonder.
California...and the West Coast of the U.S. is an interesting place in that it's geographically divided from the rest of the country by a couple of major mountain ranges and large deserts. In addition, something like almost 50% of the state is unusable federal land (national parks, military bases, etc.)
Despite this, it's one of the major agricultural producers in the world due to it's variety of climate zones and long growing seasons. I'm not sure of the current status, but agriculture used to be a larger industry for the state than tech and film combined.
One might think that its geographic location would be a problem, and cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic, but it's just so large and populated as a state, and it turns out that intra-Americas trade is far dominant to either oceanic competitor. Just selling its products and services to the U.S. alone brings it enormous economic activity. But it turns out that most of what it produces also has ample foreign markets as well (tech, film, food).
Where'd you find that? I googled for busiest ports and found LA is the 17th and Long Beach the 21st busiest in the world. And they are totally dwarfed by Shanghai and Singapore.
Yes. It was a poorly made claim. I should have looked it up.
I meant LA/Long Beach which are actually two ports, side by side.
I also overstated the domain. I should have confined the claim to the country, not the world. And as others have pointed out, even at a national level, the claim is disputable.
>Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.
Huh? Newport Beach? If you mean the Port of Los Angeles, which is next to Long Beach, but is actually in San Pedro, you're not even close. It's not even the busiest in America.
Measured by tonnage: Busiest port in the world is Ningbo-Zhoushan, China. Busiest American port is South Louisiana (#14 worldwide).[0]
Measured by containers: Busiest port in the world is Shanghai, China. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[1]
Measured by transshipments: Busiest port in the world is Singapore. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[2]
I looked up the stats on public vs. private land in each state and was totally surprised to see that your 50% figure is correct (actually 52% on that chart I was looking at). That said, much of that land falls into national and state parks, monuments, recreational areas, forests, lakes and reservoirs, all of which make the state a more pleasant place to live and recreate in so I'm perfectly fine with that.
I feel much the same. A big chunk of Oregon is federally owned, and a non-trivial amount of that is the national forests directly east of Portland. The idea of that all being privately owned makes me shudder. I love being able to go out and enjoy the wilderness without having it chained off an inaccessible to people not rich enough to buy a chunk for themselves.
No, because the quality of life is not similar. I think the parent of your post implicitly used that quality of life and poverty rates between the two are (relatively) comparable.
How comparable, exactly? If QoL in California is better in proportion to the workforce disparity then the UK isn’t any more efficient. If it goes the other way then the UK is even more efficient. Assuming they’re the same doesn’t make any sense.
The UK has 1.75x the number of people than California, but has 2.19x the number of homeless people (more than 250,000 as of 2016, compared to California having 114,000 as of 2017).
Hard to say about the UK for sure without further research.
During college in Utah I was sad each winter to regularly read stories in the newspaper about homeless people found frozen to death in parks.
After President Jimmy Carter closed the mental institutions in the 70s, the mentally ill people were just let out of the asylums without any plan or further support from the state.
Since then, homelessness has grown into a ubiquitous and rampant problem throughout the United States.
Especially true in sunny California, and doubly so in San Francisco. SF seems to have become the Homeless Capital of the world. A sad and embarrassing state of affairs for a "leading" first world country.
To be clear, the amount homelessness in California is not due to lack of improvement efforts. The City of San Francisco alone pours a quarter of a billion dollars annually into services for the homeless. Despite such efforts, more than half of the homeless in the city remain unsheltered.
Not sure why you think Carter closed the mental institutions:
"1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act to improve on Kennedy’s dream [JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care.].
1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines."
I'm on board with everything you said except about Jimmy Carter closing mental institutions; that's quite the opposite of what happened. It was his successor, Ronald Reagan, who was instrumental in closing many mental health services.
As far as California, specifically the bay area: it's a hell of a mess. Beyond people living on the streets, there is a growing group of people living in RVs. I took these pics near my office in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago:
Right. I don't think of them as homeless per se. They're certainly in an unenviable position.
Also: at least in Mountain View and Palo Alto, these are not all necessarily illegally parked. They need to be moved every couple of days, but at the moment, the cities aren't pressing the issue.
Despite that, UK life expectancy (81.2 years) is higher than California (80.8 years). Not that the UK scores especially highly on this measure - plenty of countries do better.
Americans have an anomalously high death rate due to injury, notably automobile accidents, that significantly drives life expectancy down. It is an adverse consequence of driving far more miles on average than people in any other country. Most Americans know someone who died in an auto accident.
An American that drives relatively few miles over their life changes their life expectancy to be one of the highest in the world. It is a high impact lifestyle choice that I made a decision to adopt many years ago in part for this very reason.
I am always skeptical of comparing numbers of homeless people, as different countries have vastly different methods of measurement.
For instance, New Zealand has the highest number of homeless people per capita. But this is only because in New Zealand, you're basically counted as homeless if you don't have a rental contract or own a house. I was technically homeless for 18 months or so, despite having a roof over my head and being perfectly happy with my living situation, I certainly didn't consider myself homeless until I read an article telling me I was. I still didn't consider myself homeless after reading the article.
Unless we know how the numbers for the UK and California are calculated, there's no point in trying to compare the numbers. Where did you source your numbers from?
I did a bit of research, and while on the face value, the numbers are correct, they aren't really correct at all. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The official number of homeless in the UK is 307,000 [1]. This includes "sleeping rough, or accommodated in temporary housing, bed and breakfast rooms, or hostels". There are only about 4,800 rough sleepers in the UK [2].
In California, there are 113,000 homeless people (2017), of which 88,000 are unsheltered, i.e. sleeping rough. [3, page 25]. HUD defines homeless differently to the UK Govt too, living in a motel or a hotel (if not paid for by the government) is not considered homeless [4]. So there's a whole category of people counted as homeless in the UK, but not the USA.
There are massively more rough sleepers in California than in the UK, even counting for the fact that the UK is much colder than CA.
Anyway, my rather long winded point is that it's difficult to compare numbers between countries, because countries have different ways of counting things.
It's all rather arbitrary. As with every other state, California's economy is tied to lots of workers outside its boarders. It isn't a country. It isn't surrounded by water. So it is harder to capture exactly how much activity happens within California in comparison to how much happens in an island nation like the UK.
California is also the economic engine of a larger region, where UK is a whole country. If you compare per capita GDP of London it is probably higher than California. But the truth is my native state is an economic and cultural miracle. Yay.
I won't do the map, but here are the reasonable direct comparisons in a list. Where names are repeated it's because there are no other high enough unique matches. It'd be difficult to do a nice map, because there aren't enough comparables for all the states.
Updated to 2017 figures and rounded (for the US figures):
The article lists Russia as the US's "nemesis". "Competitor" or even "enemy" would have been an appropriate designation, but "nemesis" means retribution, justice, or vengeance. Exactly whom is seeking retribution against whom, and for what?
Since the birth of the nation, Russia supported the US. It supported its revolution and supported the Union during the civil war. It even sold Alaska to the US. We brokered the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and about 3.3 million Russian Jews and Poles immigrated to the US by 1917. We then started down the path of trying to support the anti-communists, which of course backfired. We allied with the Soviets during WWII, but then we quickly started the cold war and formed NATO.
Since then, the Soviet Union basically wanted to control eastern (and possibly, eventually, all?) Europe, but it didn't work out, and the nations they had absorbed along the way eventually became independent again. So now their sphere of influence is smaller, but they still have a lot of nukes, and neither of us trust each other.
I would call us "frenemies", perhaps (a bit like China). But we really don't have some big grudge against each other. We're just two dicks who want to rule the world.
Weird, I've never come across this usage of the word "nemesis" (although the dictionary indicates it is correct). Still, I think the author would have been using the more common meaning of the word "nemesis" as a rival one can not defeat (or even in more dilute usage, simply a long standing rival).
I agree with you here. I think the primary divide was based on accumulating power and influence around the world post WW2. The difference in political ideology at that time may have been a convenient front but the real competition was economic. I'm not sure what drives the divide today other than old cold-war memories or just two very powerful countries competing with each other. I suspect there is animosity from the US because Russia won't really do what we want them to. Russia also tends to support causes opposing US interests due to protecting their own interests, balancing of power, and also just to stir the pot a bit.
That's what free movement of capital without free movement of people does. Military and economic dominance means USA has a lot of the capital and keeps out a lot of the people. That money is coming from somewhere, like e.g. Africa where you see the opposite trend:
In regards to both your's as well as u/returnUD 's comments, i never cease to be amazed at the insidious spread of the thoroughly debunked Dependency Theory. For a primer on how the developing world can get stuck in a poverty cycle, look into the history of Ghana and the utter moron Nkrumah. More damage is done by humanities majors pretending to understand economics than ebbil capitalists stealing magical resources from noble savages.
Well, of course. It is us, "developing" nations' populace that gets the shortest end of the stick with no hope and redemption in sight.
Honestly, injustice is just too great to bear. All you ever discuss is things like 10% gender-gap in payouts for the people within your arbitrary borders, yet the horrible exploitation inflicted on us by yourself is never ever discussed.
Developing nations benefit from the US dramatically more than the US benefits from developing nations. They get a massive, free technology transfer.
Or, see: China's several trillion dollar trade surplus with the US over the last 20 years.
25% of Vietnam's entire economy is currently made up of US imports from their nation, and it's almost all trade deficit for the US. Their economy is being constructed by US capital and US consumers, enabling them to dramatically lift their standard of living, exactly as China has.
Then we get to the free technology transfer, which enabled countries like China to rapidly leap forward without having to invent much of anything new. They get to focus on implementing things that are already known to work. The US invented nearly all the modern tech infrastructure, the list is hilariously long, here's the short version:
Internet, transistor, router, microprocessor, computer graphics, fiber optics, ram, most operating system tech, Unix, computer networking, the mobile phone, the smart phone, the hard drive, SSDs, the LCD, the LED, the laser, tcp/ip, hypertext, C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Basic/etc., the digital camera, qwerty keyboard, cable modem, the spreadsheet, the relational database, the fax machine, the GPU, 3D graphics cards, ethernet, hypertext, the mouse, streaming media, email, GPS, ecommerce.
Then we can go further back in time to all the older industrial technology invented by the US and Western Europe, which developing nations have been able to free ride over the last 50+ years.
And that's before we get to vaccines, medtech, biotech, pharma, genetech, aerospace, vast free research & data, process knowledge, and on and on.
The hole in your sarcastic premise, is the fact that the US was once a developing nation, dealing with vastly more powerful colonial powers. It was the colonial powers and their capital that provided the seed capital for the US to become what it is. Just as China was / has been a developing nation and is graduating from that status, built up by foreign developed nation capital. Just as South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were all developing nations at one time.
Japan and Germany had to rebuild themselves from complete obliteration. Eastern Europe had to rebuild itself from decades of Soviet occupation and forced impoverishment: Czech took their GDP per capita from $2,800 in 1991, to $22,000 by 2008. Lithuania took its GDP per capita from $2,100 in 1995 to $15,000 by 2008; Estonia went from $3,000 to $18,000 over the same time frame.
I guess you can either whine about the wealth and power of other nations, or you can turn yourself into a successful nation like all of those examples have done.
They were (probably are) and they did. One becomes smarter and more effective through learning and application, not whining and recrimination. S. Korea was demonstrably worse off than Ethiopia as well as many other sub-Saharan countries in the 1950s and look at them now. Did they achieve this through colonization, exploitation, and slavery?
Well, maybe you should stop supporting our dictatorial regime for your own interests and give us the same freedom afforded to the 50s S.Korea before you point your uneducated fingers at me.
There is no national government that does not A) act in its own self/best interest and B) does so with the express approval of all of its citizens. The fact that you decide to blame the population of an entire nation (who are largely ignorant of global affairs as well as having no stake/vested interest in big money deals between nationstates) is indicative of your knowledge base on the subject. The game of wealth has been going on for much longer than Thirdworldism (1970s), Dependency Theory (1960s), Globalism (1940s), Socialism (~1850s), or even Capitalism (1700s).* Resource exchange and the wealth derived from it are hallmarks of pastoral societies, potentially even out dating currency exchange given the obvious value raw material plays in terms of power. What may be considered unique to the late stage Holocene is the domination of raw material exchange by Western Societies, but only in terms of its global scale. The Chinese (there are many empires that can be called this but i hope you can suss that out for yourself) knew the value of spices and precious metals even as Europeans were trying to figure out why the Saracens lived longer and better despite being "satan worshipers." Global mass transfer is what cemented the Western ascendancy on the globe. But the idea that this ascendancy was appropriated from others is a bridge too far (unless one is making an emotional or faith based argument) given the destruction the West wrought on itself, as well as the fact that every single Western Empire did substantially better economically once shorn of their colonial possessions. What is more, non colonial nations like Sweden and Switzerland are demonstrably wealthier than the original western colonialists Spain and Portugal. This, in my as well as far more notable historian's opinions, is due to culture and governance. This can be seen in the staggering achievements of the East Asian tiger economies vs. the abject shitholes of sub-Saharan Africa. The tigers were resource poor, xenophobic, and overpopulated. the -holes were resource rich, comparatively open, and underpopulated. Yet somehow, East Asia is opulently wealthy and powerful while sS Africa can barley keep the lights on. It would be foolish to claim that there were no outside influences in either case, but to blame the disparate outcomes on a single nation is not only unhelpful to solving the problem, it is deleterious. One can always make a "lead by example" argument, but that is just a transposed American Exceptionalism argument which is silly. I'd be interested in any reading you could point me to on this subject, assuming you've actually done any. My sources are all antiquated paper media, but i will give you a truncated reading list should you defy my expectations. More your speed might be the doc Empire of Dust as a point of departure. Nonetheless... "Western Guilt&Third World Poverty" Bauer,"Dont Decry Colonialism" Drake, "Decolonization" Fieldhouse, "The Middle East: Geostrategy and Oil" Khalidi and many, many more.
Well, I thought the same about you - a typical first-worlder thinking he is smart because his culture initiated him into "intellectualism".
Few bubble influences there as well, with your willingness to defend a viewpoint with extreme bias without even any context of what the OP is talking about. It seems like you would go to any length to prove to yourself that you deserve to go to Harvard and spend your vacation money on NYC or wherever while the kids mine cobalt in Africa and middle-easterners get neglected by their "own" governments cuz selling oil to first-world is more lucrative than educating a nation.
I cannot reply directly, but i am neither sorry nor embarrassed my "culture" instilled a "read, don't rage" sentiment in me. It makes me sad that yours does not, apparently.
We ban accounts that show up just to start and repeatedly stoke flamewars like this. Please read the guidelines and start commenting civilly and substantively—same goes for the other accounts that brought their own gasoline.
I don't think you deserve to call anyone stupid with a bio like that. You are nurtured by an amazing country and all you could muster up is independent film and some essays.
I have done so much more ballsier stuff in less amount of time while being attacked by savages in all 4s.
You are a dumb pig with the intellectual capacity of a fucking earthworm.
Inventing fake argumentation points doesn't actually work. I said nothing about such and such nation being smarter or harder working. You said that.
I said, directly and indirectly, that developing nations benefit immensely more from developed nations than vice versa. It was similarly true for the US as well when it was a developing nation. It's factually true and very easily demonstrated: it's why the global median standard of living is at the highest it has ever been, famines are almost non-existent globally, the median life expectancy globally continues to expand, there is less extreme poverty today than at any other time in recorded history, global equality is at an all-time high and has continued to improve, food security is at an all-time high, infant mortality is at an all-time low, etc.
If you were right, none of that could be true, because all the wealthy & powerful nations would be busy oppressing all the poor nations, such that they could never climb the standard of living tiers.
Over five decades Vietnam suffered repeated occupation, genocide, famine, civil war, a brutal form of Communism, and overall had a large percentage of its population killed. Today they're on a booming express train toward a middle income economy. What excuse could you possibly present next to that? Countries like Vietnam (and China before it), or Czech, or Estonia, demonstrate very clearly what's possible and they deserve credit for their accomplishments.
I'm surprised just how far up the chart the tiny 61 square mile city of Washington DC is. A lot of the contractors are out in the 'burbs in different states and a big chunk of that is taken up by disadvantaged neighborhoods. So the concentration of wealth is even more extreme than it looks at first.
I'm guessing the majority of that is the millions of people on GSA payroll sitting in office buildings all day. That and of course lawyers and lobbyists.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadRussia can huff and puff all it wants, but Ed Snowden is still basically the only prominent American who has ever moved to Russia. This while millions of people from the FSU moved to the US, Israel, Europe, Australia and Canada over the past thirty years, which is the fundamental difference between the US and Russia, etc.
Now if only there was a way to send the people who want redistribution to places where they have that sort of thing. That would be great! But guess what: Norway doesn’t want these people :(. They have enough people jockeying for the dole.
Also, I am not saying the U.S. is a horrible place to live in, I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
What now?
I focus on immigration because where you choose to live seems like the single greatest vote of confidence that you can make. So I wonder why people here in the states want to make the states more like other places when clearly people from other places want to come here.
> I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
Yeah it definitely could and should be. There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
You can't discuss either of those two things without also recognizing the other half of those policies: the massive xenophobia, racism, and outright genocide that motivated and fueled them, all under FDR's watch.
There are only two stereotypical places I can think of it being "squandered". The first is the military which, who knows, could be NPV if you consider what the world could be like without it. Ultimately its unknowable. The second is the money not taxed. Which is a particularly frustrating mindset that I encounter on the internet.
In either case, we're not "squandering" money anywhere. You may disagree with the allocation of some resources but that doesn't mean its been squandered.
...haha what was I thinking never mind. Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Hah! I didn't say you couldn't have an opinion on it. Only that you can't know the world that "could have been".
> Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Squander is a word which means to waste. If a government project has a net economic (or public health) benefit then by definition the money was not squandered.
Just want to point out that this statement doesn't account for opportunity cost. if it could go to something of greater net benefit, the difference between the two could be considered squandered.
I imagine it'd be a lot more like the conflicts in the rest of Africa.
> It's not "unknowable";
Yes it is, unless you have a time machine.
> we just have to start voting...
Ah see, but we already do that. The US votes to keep a massive, mighty military.
Voting just isn't all it's cracked up to be!
> America is mighty but that doesn't translate into the life quality of its citizens at all.
Countries can vary in development and quality of life but your original statement is demonstrably false.
It would be helpful for you to explain how life in, say, Sweden is vastly better than life in Georgia. Before you cite poor uneducated Georgian hillbillies, keep in mind that Georgia is home to Georgia Tech, not to mention Atlanta, which was quite prosperous last time I checked. And if you're going to cite Sweden's "free" universities, you might as well go ahead and throw in a side-by-side comparison of Georgian/U.S. Federal and Swedish tax rates as well.
The US does have an awful lot of support for people, but our society is also hostile to poor people and we have awful workplace regulation for low quality jobs.
You've said nothing. Every country has economic strata. Pointing it out only in the case of the U.S. is specious.
The US is a rich country and the lack of resources for people at the bottom is more likely to be arbitrary than it is to be contributing to that wealth.
How many people are hustling two or more jobs to make ends meet in the US? How many of them afford day care? What happens if they break a leg and can't work for a month?
So, your argument is basically, "Yay, we're better than two theocratic monarchies whose prosperity is based solely on oil wealth and importing a bunch of virtual slaves from poor countries, maybe better than one technocratic dictatorship, better than a bunch of undeveloped third world countries, but worse than every other single Western democracy. Go us!"
I like how you casually discard the vast swath of data that doesn't agree with you.
It is not an accomplishment for the US to be doing better than a bunch of third world countries that are poor as shit because they were on the losing end of colonialism. It needs to be compared to the other comparably developed countries.
I never said it was an accomplishment, just that the U.S. is better than many countries. That was in response to a comment that was implying that the United States is somehow worse than the majority of countries period, not just developed Western nations.
You shifted the conversation by arbitrarily declaring that the U.S. should only be compared to a select group of developed countries, which is not the point that I was originally arguing against.
But let's go with that for a minute. I assume you're measuring stratification by the Gini coefficient, since you don't say. In that case, what you failed to mention is that the list of countries "less stratified" than the United States also includes Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among many other decidedly unpleasant places. Your implication that some other countries are necessarily "doing it right" compared to the United States because they have a lower Gini coefficient assumes that a lower Gini coefficient is always necessarily a good thing, which is obviously false when you consider all of the data. A lower Gini coefficient does not equal a higher quality of life.
The Scandinavian model relies on many incompatible tenets that could be mentioned, including but not limited to immigration. The Swedish system is already practically collapsing from its first major influx of immigrants ever.
If we want a country in which everyone is welcome, it can't be a country in which we offer a fantastic quality of life automatically through living there. I mean, not until we have some post-scarcity economy, at least.
Another issue is that maybe part of the States' success is related to having more income to yourself, to spend at your discretion after taxes, rather than it being spent for you by the government. It inspires a lot of immigration from people with big ideas, and that could easily change if the U.S. surpasses other countries in taxes.
I think there are models the U.S. should adopt from Scandinavia, however they're smaller in scope and address efficiency with tax money. One example is that all your income tax goes to the local government up until a certain point (~65,000 USD?), and it's redistributed at that level, rather than being siphoned through so many levels of bureaucracy like in the States. It's funny, while being the polar opposite of the U.S. and its conservative values, Sweden still manages a smaller federal government!
A lot of the differences between Sweden and the US comes down to things like whether health care should be a human right etc. Do you think people are less inclined to want "free" health care if they live in a community that's ethnically mixed? I don't buy it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
Australia still manages to have great quality of life (unless you are an Aboriginal). I'm not sure how they manage it, I haven't looked into it, but somehow they have.
Their housing market value as a share of GDP, is about 2.6x that of the US rate.
https://i.imgur.com/h0BOtzE.png
The other thing has been the rise of China and selling them a vast supply of commodities.
In 2002, Australia's GDP per capita was $20,000, while the US was $38,000. A dramatic gap. China's GDP explosion began in 2003 (their economy went from $1.4t in 2002 to $4.6t in 2008, and on upward from there). Australia's GDP soared right along with China's economy.
A very intriguing idea. I like it on the surface, but it falls down a little bit because local taxation is varied. Some cities have their own income taxes, while others don't. Some states have income taxes, while others don't. Some states|counties|cities have sales tax, while others don't. It's a hodge-podge.
The local jurisdictions use this as an incentive to draw in new businesses. The idea is for local control of taxation. But your proposal seems to give the locals more control over taxes than the top-down structure we have now. It's worth thinking about.
It's currently infeasible in the US due to how substantial our federal government is, but it's funny as it's a libertarian dream to minimize the government; Sweden's success is in fact doing so, but also keeping tax rates high in the process.
We are nowhere close to collapsing, first of all. I don't know if you've been back recently or if you get your information from social media only, but really things are fine.
Secondly this was hardly the first major influx of immigrants ever. We saw a major influx during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the 90s, lots of people came here after the US started wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 00s. And back in the 60s there was a huge amount of workforce immigration, so much so that Finnish people are still the largest non-Swedish group in the country.
Fun fact: the second largest group of people to come to Sweden in 2016 were repatriating swedes.
And obviously single examples are not representative of the whole, but they're far more useful than GP's blanket assertion which is based on nothing other than, I suspect, the fact that it's currently edgy/fashionable to whinge about all the "free" things Europeans get that Americans don't.
Impecable logic, technically not even wrong, but ... you are saying the wars didn't cause colataral damage to a significant degree because ... you cannot live without air conditioning?
GP was implying that Iraq would be nice if it weren't for American interventions. You appear to be making the same point, given your reference to collateral damage.
I'm saying that's highly unlikely considering that Iraq has always been quite poor compared to the U.S., even before any of these wars.
I see this whiny argument repeated over and over ad nauseam--"Iraq would be an oasis of civilization if only it weren't for those mean imperialist Americans coming in and breaking our toys". Utter nonsense. Iraq was a mess long before the Americans showed up.
But that's all beside the point anyway. This discussion is about relative GDPs of various countries and U.S. states, not an analysis of whose fault it is that the ones at the bottom are at the bottom.
Are you capable of staying on topic? Do you actually have an argument? Or are you just going to fling childish insults in lieu of one?
What-if historical arguments are always fluffy, but we have examples of similar sorts of states experiencing similar initial growth that weren't crushed by an empire's geopolitical interests. Where are they today?
Edit: In any case, the point I was going to make is that the reason why it is the way you observed is because the economies in Oklahoma and Iraq serve different purposes within the context of global capital, Iraq being a client state to the United States and primarily serving as a vehicle of resource extraction and exploitation, while in Oklahoma at least some of that economic activity is going towards the well-being of the people there.
Now, the upshot is that the relative wealth of normal schmoes in the United States and other nations of similar economic development shows the discrepancy that it does because of the same sort of forces in a less extreme way. Americans are more exploited per capita by the capitalist class than they are in, say, the EU. Other people in these threads have described how, e.g. deregulated healthcare is a manifestation of that exploitation.
But to be honest, after your reply I wanted to yank your chain :^)
Ah, the 1970's--the decade that ended with Iraq opportunistically invading Iran and promptly getting its ass kicked. If you want to make the case that America's imperialism is the reason for Iraq's troubles, that's probably not the example you want to go with.
Calling Iraq and Oklahoma similar closes that door, because those two are not similar at all per capita.
I choose to interpret GP's comment to mean what it actually says. You may choose to put words in GP's mouth so that their argument says what you wish it to say, but for me that's a waste of time. If they wish to clarify and restate their argument, they are welcome to do so. But then they will have to provide some evidence that per-capita GDP "goes farther" in other countries than in the U.S. So far nobody has done that.
Well, I do, and I hope this answers your question of why I replied to your post and not the the one above (which did not add much to the discussion to begin with).
If this is an outside looking in scenario, I'll just say that I'm amused and disappointed by international press coverage of the US whenever I travel abroad.
I also like this world map, scaled by population instead of land area. I think it would be interesting to edit it with major cities, and also use it as a base for other infographics.
http://www.buzzhunt.co.uk/wp-content/2014/01/World-map-sizes...
> The economy of alleged US nemesis Russia is less than 9% as large as the US economy and hasn’t grown consistently in years.
"The economy of alleged US nemesis Russia is less than 9% as large as the US economy and hasn’t grown consistently in years."
Outside from the major metro areas, Russia does not have a extensive - or expensive service economy, and it has very few exports. Between that, and the petro-ruble suffering from oil shocks/sanctions, its GDP is, unsurprisingly, quite low.
[1] Oil is, for example, 3% of Canada's GDP, but you wouldn't think it, given how hard the federal government is trying to prop it up, at the expense of other industries. Extracting it, like growing food, is an incredibly low-value industry.
If you live in a roach infested box in California you need to be putting dollars in the bank and have an exit plan to take those dollars to somewhere with a much lower COL someday, otherwise...you live in a roach infested box with a very high GDP!
Also you sound pretty bitter. I never saw a roach when I lived in Mountain View, though my apartment was pretty small.
At the time of my comment, very early in the submission, all of the other comments were drawing false conclusions about what is being presented. GDP comparisons tell you nothing about the lives of the people living in those two areas being compared. My original comment was meant to point that out to an audience that may not have spent much time studying economics.
If your goal was just to educate people about the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of living standard, the social commentary about California's high cost of living didn't help.
It doesn’t mean GDP per capita isn’t interesting either, but they’re different lenses used to view different things.
> "California has a labor force of 19.3 million compared to the labor force in the UK of 33.8 million (World Bank data here). Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output last year as California! ... Further, California as a separate country would have been the 5th largest economy in the world last year, ahead of the UK ($2.62 trillion), India ($2.61 trillion) and France ($2.58 trillion)."
Migration, or internal migration is probably a better term here.
It isn't just the migration either - it is the nature of what happens. The top cities/areas for several industries are here, and many secondary ones as well. Film production, software/web, lots of aerospace. It also helps that a fair bit basic needs are provided back to the state by itself (Central Valley farming).
A most undesirable state of affairs.
Would be interesting to know where the wealth comes from in Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. I don't know enough about them to comment.
Edit: some data here: https://www.ocregister.com/2018/01/31/california-migration-c...
"The top relocation motivation for 65 percent of households arriving by van said they came to California for jobs. Only 43 percent of those departing by moving van described the move was work-related.
The jobs rush means your new neighbors are likely wealthier than the people they replaced. United’s study showed 68 percent of arriving households make $100,000 or more annually; just 63 percent of those departing by moving van make above that threshold."
Wealth in Colorado, Minnesota, etc., comes from the same place as anywhere else. The U.S. is a rich country with lots of productive industries. Tech is actually a pretty small portion of that (5-6% of GDP, 3% of employment). E.g. Target is based in Minnesota, and has double the revenues of Facebook.
How much of the GDP is based on coastline, major ports, access to imports from China/Southeast Asia that get distributed to the rest of the US, US based companies located there with manufacturing based in China and even Mexico.
Geographically, it seems like it's in an ideal location to hold business HQ's with access to less expensive labor for imported goods.
Is there a study like this out there?
You compare that to the UK that doesn't have any clearly accessible inexpensive labor force option and it makes you wonder.
Despite this, it's one of the major agricultural producers in the world due to it's variety of climate zones and long growing seasons. I'm not sure of the current status, but agriculture used to be a larger industry for the state than tech and film combined.
One might think that its geographic location would be a problem, and cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic, but it's just so large and populated as a state, and it turns out that intra-Americas trade is far dominant to either oceanic competitor. Just selling its products and services to the U.S. alone brings it enormous economic activity. But it turns out that most of what it produces also has ample foreign markets as well (tech, film, food).
Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.
I also overstated the domain. I should have confined the claim to the country, not the world. And as others have pointed out, even at a national level, the claim is disputable.
Huh? Newport Beach? If you mean the Port of Los Angeles, which is next to Long Beach, but is actually in San Pedro, you're not even close. It's not even the busiest in America.
Measured by tonnage: Busiest port in the world is Ningbo-Zhoushan, China. Busiest American port is South Louisiana (#14 worldwide).[0]
Measured by containers: Busiest port in the world is Shanghai, China. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[1]
Measured by transshipments: Busiest port in the world is Singapore. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[2]
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_ports_by_cargo...
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_transshipment_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Agricult...
Federal land by state table (numbers vary between years and by counting method - Utah federal lands have increased significantly since 2004): https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state#Fede...
California map: https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/images/pdf/fed...
Look at it the other way, the UK can house & feed more people with the same economic output, therefore being more efficient at those tasks.
I have no idea which way it is, but spinning lower GDP per worker as more efficient doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, the GDP doesn't make any sense either. Busywork also increases the GDP.
During college in Utah I was sad each winter to regularly read stories in the newspaper about homeless people found frozen to death in parks.
After President Jimmy Carter closed the mental institutions in the 70s, the mentally ill people were just let out of the asylums without any plan or further support from the state.
Since then, homelessness has grown into a ubiquitous and rampant problem throughout the United States.
Especially true in sunny California, and doubly so in San Francisco. SF seems to have become the Homeless Capital of the world. A sad and embarrassing state of affairs for a "leading" first world country.
To be clear, the amount homelessness in California is not due to lack of improvement efforts. The City of San Francisco alone pours a quarter of a billion dollars annually into services for the homeless. Despite such efforts, more than half of the homeless in the city remain unsheltered.
"1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act to improve on Kennedy’s dream [JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care.].
1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...
As far as California, specifically the bay area: it's a hell of a mess. Beyond people living on the streets, there is a growing group of people living in RVs. I took these pics near my office in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tJKzrSZmaU8HW1NaA
Illegally parked, but not homeless
Also: at least in Mountain View and Palo Alto, these are not all necessarily illegally parked. They need to be moved every couple of days, but at the moment, the cities aren't pressing the issue.
An American that drives relatively few miles over their life changes their life expectancy to be one of the highest in the world. It is a high impact lifestyle choice that I made a decision to adopt many years ago in part for this very reason.
For instance, New Zealand has the highest number of homeless people per capita. But this is only because in New Zealand, you're basically counted as homeless if you don't have a rental contract or own a house. I was technically homeless for 18 months or so, despite having a roof over my head and being perfectly happy with my living situation, I certainly didn't consider myself homeless until I read an article telling me I was. I still didn't consider myself homeless after reading the article.
Unless we know how the numbers for the UK and California are calculated, there's no point in trying to compare the numbers. Where did you source your numbers from?
I did a bit of research, and while on the face value, the numbers are correct, they aren't really correct at all. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The official number of homeless in the UK is 307,000 [1]. This includes "sleeping rough, or accommodated in temporary housing, bed and breakfast rooms, or hostels". There are only about 4,800 rough sleepers in the UK [2].
In California, there are 113,000 homeless people (2017), of which 88,000 are unsheltered, i.e. sleeping rough. [3, page 25]. HUD defines homeless differently to the UK Govt too, living in a motel or a hotel (if not paid for by the government) is not considered homeless [4]. So there's a whole category of people counted as homeless in the UK, but not the USA.
There are massively more rough sleepers in California than in the UK, even counting for the fact that the UK is much colder than CA.
Anyway, my rather long winded point is that it's difficult to compare numbers between countries, because countries have different ways of counting things.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/08/one-in-every...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[3] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...
[4] https://www.nhchc.org/faq/official-definition-homelessness/
Of course, child poverty itself is no joke..
New Jersey is approximately the same area and population as Israel.
The joke in the anecdote is that the two regions' neighbors have similar attitudes about them.
Updated to 2017 figures and rounded (for the US figures):
https://i.imgur.com/u0FdDUt.png
Since the birth of the nation, Russia supported the US. It supported its revolution and supported the Union during the civil war. It even sold Alaska to the US. We brokered the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and about 3.3 million Russian Jews and Poles immigrated to the US by 1917. We then started down the path of trying to support the anti-communists, which of course backfired. We allied with the Soviets during WWII, but then we quickly started the cold war and formed NATO.
Since then, the Soviet Union basically wanted to control eastern (and possibly, eventually, all?) Europe, but it didn't work out, and the nations they had absorbed along the way eventually became independent again. So now their sphere of influence is smaller, but they still have a lot of nukes, and neither of us trust each other.
I would call us "frenemies", perhaps (a bit like China). But we really don't have some big grudge against each other. We're just two dicks who want to rule the world.
So, about starting the cold war.
USSR meddled in Poland's elections
USSR basically invaded Persia and tried to annex a part there.
USSR tried to force Turkey to gave up control over Bosphor Straits
USSR blockaded Berlin effectively putting people on verge of dying from hunger
... but somebody else started the cold war, absolutely out of the blue?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/africa-subsi...
Honestly, injustice is just too great to bear. All you ever discuss is things like 10% gender-gap in payouts for the people within your arbitrary borders, yet the horrible exploitation inflicted on us by yourself is never ever discussed.
Or, see: China's several trillion dollar trade surplus with the US over the last 20 years.
25% of Vietnam's entire economy is currently made up of US imports from their nation, and it's almost all trade deficit for the US. Their economy is being constructed by US capital and US consumers, enabling them to dramatically lift their standard of living, exactly as China has.
Then we get to the free technology transfer, which enabled countries like China to rapidly leap forward without having to invent much of anything new. They get to focus on implementing things that are already known to work. The US invented nearly all the modern tech infrastructure, the list is hilariously long, here's the short version:
Internet, transistor, router, microprocessor, computer graphics, fiber optics, ram, most operating system tech, Unix, computer networking, the mobile phone, the smart phone, the hard drive, SSDs, the LCD, the LED, the laser, tcp/ip, hypertext, C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Basic/etc., the digital camera, qwerty keyboard, cable modem, the spreadsheet, the relational database, the fax machine, the GPU, 3D graphics cards, ethernet, hypertext, the mouse, streaming media, email, GPS, ecommerce.
Then we can go further back in time to all the older industrial technology invented by the US and Western Europe, which developing nations have been able to free ride over the last 50+ years.
And that's before we get to vaccines, medtech, biotech, pharma, genetech, aerospace, vast free research & data, process knowledge, and on and on.
Oh the exploitation, make it stop.
Go USA!!! Thank you for being such an ubermensch and inventing all that stuff. We are obviously too stupid here to invent anything, I wonder why.
Japan and Germany had to rebuild themselves from complete obliteration. Eastern Europe had to rebuild itself from decades of Soviet occupation and forced impoverishment: Czech took their GDP per capita from $2,800 in 1991, to $22,000 by 2008. Lithuania took its GDP per capita from $2,100 in 1995 to $15,000 by 2008; Estonia went from $3,000 to $18,000 over the same time frame.
I guess you can either whine about the wealth and power of other nations, or you can turn yourself into a successful nation like all of those examples have done.
Germans, Czech, etc. were obviously so much smarter and hard-working than us - that's exactly the reason why they created a successful nation.
I have no words.
Few bubble influences there as well, with your willingness to defend a viewpoint with extreme bias without even any context of what the OP is talking about. It seems like you would go to any length to prove to yourself that you deserve to go to Harvard and spend your vacation money on NYC or wherever while the kids mine cobalt in Africa and middle-easterners get neglected by their "own" governments cuz selling oil to first-world is more lucrative than educating a nation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lol, imbecile.
I have done so much more ballsier stuff in less amount of time while being attacked by savages in all 4s.
You are a dumb pig with the intellectual capacity of a fucking earthworm.
I said, directly and indirectly, that developing nations benefit immensely more from developed nations than vice versa. It was similarly true for the US as well when it was a developing nation. It's factually true and very easily demonstrated: it's why the global median standard of living is at the highest it has ever been, famines are almost non-existent globally, the median life expectancy globally continues to expand, there is less extreme poverty today than at any other time in recorded history, global equality is at an all-time high and has continued to improve, food security is at an all-time high, infant mortality is at an all-time low, etc.
If you were right, none of that could be true, because all the wealthy & powerful nations would be busy oppressing all the poor nations, such that they could never climb the standard of living tiers.
Over five decades Vietnam suffered repeated occupation, genocide, famine, civil war, a brutal form of Communism, and overall had a large percentage of its population killed. Today they're on a booming express train toward a middle income economy. What excuse could you possibly present next to that? Countries like Vietnam (and China before it), or Czech, or Estonia, demonstrate very clearly what's possible and they deserve credit for their accomplishments.
I'm guessing the majority of that is the millions of people on GSA payroll sitting in office buildings all day. That and of course lawyers and lobbyists.