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I think the reason you see dumb takes like this is because it's harder to say "the USA, while a very rich country, has major issues with inequality and the provision of services for the poor, but overall generates a lot of wealth for it's people". Much easier to say dumb shit like "the USA is a poor country with rich people"

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Glad to see you mention home sizes -- the graphic here https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/median-home-size-in-us/ (since 1980) is pretty stunning. Americans need big enough spaces to eat their meat portions.

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Sep 18, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I prefer the conclusion of the earlier article that "life is just about equally as good in all developed countries". All developed countries have access to much the same technology and the same capacity to educate their workforce, so almost any difference is going to involve a trade-off. And getting away from aggregates, there's a fair bit of room for people to make those trade-offs at an individual/household level also>

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Sep 17, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Fantastic article as usual... and hilarious: "it’s unlikely to be skewed by a few rich people eating hundreds of times as much meat as the middle class"

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Thanks for this rebuttal. The conclusion that JBM drew was really silly, and I normally like the analysis the guy does. Poor societies with some very rich people look like Brazil, Russia, and South Africa. A few issues, though:

There's no question that the median American has much higher purchasing power than an the average resident of the EU or Japan and somewhat more than a Canadian or Australian. I'm wondering how quickly this falls off. If this is falling off at 10% of income, that's one thing, but if it's closer to 50%, that's really another question as to how people are living and as to how they vote or don't.

There's also the neglected poly-crisis of declining American health. US life expectancy has been declining for 8 years and is now in the OECD bush league along with Eastern Europe at 76. There are much poorer nations living about 8 years longer than that in Asia and Southern Europe. British Columbians live on average about 3 1/2 years longer than Washingtonians and Oregonians in the very bi-national cultural region of the PNW. In the past I think this was disproportionately caused by young deaths and that Americans age 65+ had pretty comparable life expectancies from that year on to other developed countries, but that may have changed during the pandemic. At any rate, we have massive excess mortality from homicide, suicide, drug overdoses, and traffic violence that other developed countries just don't.

Finally, there's the much more philosophical question of how much extra utility and happiness is being captured by the upper-middle and upper classes in the US vis-a-vis in other countries. I'm an urbanist like you who doesn't like accumulating goodies to put in houses or more and bigger cars but most Americans do. And they aren't irrational about it - everything about family formation in the US favors private wealth and asset accumulation from the dearth of good public space to the scarcity of good school districts to the cost of college. There's going to have to be a hard environmental and political reset to get to another outcome. I wish it were otherwise, but it is what it is. In suburban Seattle I envied hearing from Australian and Swedish exchange students how much less stressful high school life was like back home.

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Also if you ask people whether they'd live in the USA vs Slovenia, I'd bet over 80% would say the USA.

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I would certainly agree with Noah, that the US is best characterized as a very rich country with (a lot of) poor and almost poor people.

The poverty rate is higher than it should be for a wide variety of reason some which are not easily fixed. And obviously a lot of middle class people are only able to maintain their lifestyle through credit and debt. They are as the saying goes living pay check to pay check. One bout of bad luck away from

poverty because they couldn’t come up with $500 to handle an emergency. That’s not new.

One thing I would quibble with is an overly broad statement like “Given the choice of where to live, Americans choose” to live in the suburbs. People “choose” to live in houses they can afford. And the further out in the suburbs you go the more affordable it becomes. The “drive until you qualify.”

Also Americans own more cars because there are very few places in the entire country where you can get anywhere without one. It appears that Europeans have much greater access to mass transit than even Americans living in big cities.

A car is essential to employment and even being able to get to a store or school. So the choice is really no choice at all.

But given all that yes we are a rich country where most people have it pretty good.

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America might be set up in such a way that comparable levels of consumption are subjectively worse experiences. For example, everything healthcare related just costs a lot here, so consuming healthcare worth a lot of money doesn't mean you're getting much or good care. Let alone outcomes. This is a homeownership society: while living in a small apartment could theoretically be just as fine in the US as it is in Europe, in practice small apartments are also poor quality, located in bad neighborhoods, and treat their tenants like crap. This is a car dependent society: having a car per adult household member might be necessary just to achieve the same baseline level of mobility and access that a European household gets for free from their neighborhood, or for tens of Euros from their transit system.

The way the society and the public realm are set up are going influence pretty drastically what given level of personal consumption actually means from a practical day-to-day perspective, and from a psychological perspective.

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Thank you for taking the time to intelligently refute that deeply silly article

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I find this debate fascinating. Your data is persuasive. Are there things that it misses, and do those things matter when it comes to quality of life?

I’d love to see a comparative study - better yet a well-produced documentary - comparing and contrasting lives of people bang on the median income between countries. What does their house look like? What do they eat? Do they feel safe? Do they worry about debt? What sort of holidays do they go on?

If it doesn’t exist, it should.

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Great article, my simple metric when faced with those who criticise how bad things are (I'm in Australia, but it applies to many affluent countries) is "so, tell me, how many people are bashing down the door to get into other countries?" and "which countries would people prefer to migrate to if they had a choice?". Having said that, there's a lot more we should be doing to lift our own citizens and residents out of poverty.

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I’m an American traveling in Europe right now (UK, Italy, France) and am constantly being blown away by my ignorance of America’s wealth. In Europe... many bathrooms lack toilet seats (even at airports!), living spaces are significantly smaller, indoor spaces are rarely air conditioned (even at airports!), roads are smaller and less maintained, cars are older and tiny, I haven’t walked onto a plane using a jetbridge, shops are closed in the middle of the day, parking in urban areas is deeply limited... the list goes on. I worry that Americans have gotten into a wealth spiral in which we can’t escape -- we can’t easily solve our economic equity issues because we have developed an insatiable desire for comfort and extremely nice stuff... and we don’t even realize it.

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It is probably worth some time to examine what we mean by the "poverty level". The census bureau takes a family's income before taxes, adjusts for family size, and then compares it to a number that is 3 times the cost of food in 1963 (presumably adjusted for inflation)

If you walk around the flatlands of Oakland, you will see a lot of homeless people and many others who do not have much wealth or income. But you will not see the bodies of starvation victims in the street. Transfer payments and charity make up the difference for everyone who needs them.

The 2020 census of the homeless in America found just over half a million people living in those conditions. Double that number, and you still have less than a third of one percent of the US population. You will see more in Oakland, but that is from a combination of NIMBYism and migration. Everyone else has a roof over their heads.

So when we talk about people living in poverty, we are talking about people whose lives are constrained by their finances. Only a very few are truly threatened by their finances. Yet the public discussion always focuses on how many dollars different people have. That is absolutely the wrong discussion to have. If you want to make lives better, focus on educational opportunity, access to (supply of) health care, reducing all forms of violence, and addressing the issues that make people live outside of buildings. Each of these can be improved without ever changing what we calculate to be the poverty level.

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This is an important post that makes some important points, but is a bit selective in its deployment and interpretation of statistics.

Like Australia, the US has plenty of room for larger house sizes, while the average no doubt is pushed up by McMansions and ubiquitous suburban sprawl. Would be more revealing to know the relationship between the 10th and 20th percentile and that average.

Also the reproduction of bald summary OECD data on cross-national out-of-pocket health expenditure needs methodological and contextual explanation to be meaningful. NS is usually quite vigorous in his data digging and analysis, but seems to have added a few tables that support his case.

I am not an American citizen and do not know whether the low out of pocket health expenses figure reflects reality on the ground and/or it ignores the exclusion of those who don't access health care to avoid such expenditure that that they cannot afford.

Do working class Americans on or around the 18th percentile have employer or own-purchased health insurance that is affordable and adequate?

What about education expenditure?

Given limited public transport, car ownership must be a necessity for most, not a discretionary purchase, and a greater financial strain the further down the distribution you go.

The relative lack of security over the lifecycle compared to that partly provided by European welfare state systems, as well as longer hours, fewer holidays at work, should be considered in any comparative assessment.

And, so on.

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What's not taken into account here is status. It's human nature to want to keep up with the guy/gal ahead of you, and with greater inequality and a smaller (not poorer) middle class, that distance is also greater. This may contribute to our relatively low life satisfaction score and the perception of non-richness. It was loss of status (closely tied to income, of course) that correlated most closely to the "deaths of despair."

I'm not sure if the incomes statistics include debt (negative income,) but status competition is a big factor there, also.

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❝This inaccurate description of the U.S. — which comes from the headline of the article itself, and is repeated in the final sentence — is highly appealing to a lot of people.❞ This is probably even more the case in the UK where many of the educated class remain full of bitterness over Brexit and seek always a narrative that belittles and diminishes the UK. The FT is a leader in this - I even wonder if Burn-Murdoch 's editor might have added something.

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