As somebody living outside the US, I would find moving to the states highly undesirable even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
It really is astounding how bad national brands are. Everything loaded with sugar and salt. Lowest quality ingredients in everything, and I do mean everything.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
If you look at the immigration numbers across the board, apparently most people disagree :) just purely by numbers other than vibes or rare scary scenarios, the living standards in the US make most other OECD countries look poor. Not even speaking of the fact that immigrants can always go back so it's even better for them. I hiked with a guy who lived between US and Canada because he liked US better but needed expensive surgeries (that were also optional, kinda) so he did the minimum in Canada to qualify. Or worked with a European who outright said after making money it would be a good idea for him to go back and (ab)use the welfare state. Americans can't do that!
> We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population.
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
I do wonder how real the base number - the GDP - is. The wealthy have been accumulating wealth rapidly but it’s all on paper and the entire thing is underpinned by assumptions of USD reserve currency status.
As if workers got paid by "what $wealth allows".
As if there was a "right to dignified work" (what is "dignified"?).
As if there was a "right to fair income" (whats "fair"?).
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
> America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
If you are not in the US, there can be a lot of surprises in these comparisons.
You might see that you make $X in tech and in Silicon Valley someone makes $3X for same job and that sounds awesome on paper.
But how much is health care coverage, both insurance and out of pocket after insurance? In SV I pay over $20K in insurance and the additional out of pocket depends on what happens but can be $10K-$20K. But if you have some catastrophic health problem, can be in the millions of dollars. Compare this with health expenses outside of the US.
How much is daycare, school and university for the kids? The costs in the US are mind-blowing, vs. either free or cheap in other countries. Here in SV I pay ~$45K/year just for high school, university will probably be a lot more.
Home insurance? If you can even get it, will be outrageous. Car insurance, think 4K-10K year depending on details.
And so on.
Don't compare gross salary, compare net leftover salary after ALL required expenses.
This is yet another article that doesn't understand what wealth is. There is almost no point talking about these numbers, because they mislead more than they inform.
I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
It is the job given to low status men who cannot qualify for other jobs. Every society deals with its low status men in some form or another — in many US regions it is becoming a cop, in Russia it is being sent to war, historically it was being sent to the mines.
No? It's significantly harder to become a police officer than a truck driver or a skilled tradesperson, and, in particular, in most departments there's an actual higher ed requirement.
Is that really true? It's not super high status, for sure, but many police departments in the US require every officer to have a bachelors degree. And the pay is higher than average.
But who are you to decide whether suburban Americans are living the right kind of life? Surely if they wanted to they could move to an apartment in a dense inner-city area. It would be cheaper than living in a large house in the suburbs and save them from spending more on heating, maintenance and cars. It would save them time as well, because they could be located close to their office. Despite all these downsides they still prefer to buy large suburban houses, drive everywhere, not know their neighbours and so on. Perhaps they just like it that way.
I would expect fortune to be able to understand basic economics, but I guess not. I can't verify because it is a paywalled article, but if this article isn't about oligopolies abusing labor market power, then it is intensely wrong headed. Paying workers less is a good thing to a point, it means less dead weight loss to the economy from labor abusing market power (which is basically the worst thing you can do in economics). If it's about abuse of monopsony power in the labour market by oligopolies then I apologize, that's the one case where paying people less is bad, but it's also kind of rare these days.
It's hard to understand that more and more countries are becoming better than the USA.
You can live in a "developing" country and feel safer and better.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 62.0 ms ] threadTo me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ $22 for a package of toilet paper that has 1/3 less paper than before.
Prices are out of sight. 3 years ago, 1lb of real deli roast beef was $7. Now $20. Costs almost $30 to make a pot of stew. Used to cost $10.
I could write for hours on this subject. The garbage produced is that prolific.
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
If you are not in the US, there can be a lot of surprises in these comparisons.
You might see that you make $X in tech and in Silicon Valley someone makes $3X for same job and that sounds awesome on paper.
But how much is health care coverage, both insurance and out of pocket after insurance? In SV I pay over $20K in insurance and the additional out of pocket depends on what happens but can be $10K-$20K. But if you have some catastrophic health problem, can be in the millions of dollars. Compare this with health expenses outside of the US.
How much is daycare, school and university for the kids? The costs in the US are mind-blowing, vs. either free or cheap in other countries. Here in SV I pay ~$45K/year just for high school, university will probably be a lot more.
Home insurance? If you can even get it, will be outrageous. Car insurance, think 4K-10K year depending on details.
And so on.
Don't compare gross salary, compare net leftover salary after ALL required expenses.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
Wealthiest 1% of earners - 50.1%
Top 90-99% of earners - 37.3%
Top 50-89% of earners - 11.7%
Bottom 50% of earners - 1.1%
Source: Federal Reserve/Reuters