As someone who lives in America and is about to move to Copenhagen (with a significant reduction in salary as well as cost of living), this was an interesting read for me.
I agree with a lot of the criticisms in the comments regarding use of mean vs. median, not accounting for cost of living or US/EUR disparities, etc. There is also the question in my mind of the usefulness of a lot of our GDP (i.e. our healthcare system generates a lot of economic activity captured in GDP numbers while it spits out poor health outcomes, shorter lifespans, and crippling medical debt for citizens).
But the biggest issue for me is how to quantify the large scale human suffering and lack of dignity for the vast majority of people homeless, near homeless, living paycheck to paycheck, trying to get out from under massive educational or medical debt, threatened with random gun violence at schools and public venues, facing unregulated industrial pollution or dangerous work environments (compare auto industry jobs in U.S. south vs. Europe), etc. How do you quantify the feeling of putting your kid on a school bus and knowing there's a very small but nonzero chance that they will be the victim of a mass shooting with easily accessible assault weapons?
Many of these things are the byproduct of chasing GDP growth with zero thought to societal impacts. A discussion of America vs. Europe without accounting for those things is a good conversation starter but virtually useless for anything other than an intellectual exercise.
"How do you quantify the feeling of putting your kid on a school bus and knowing there's a very small but nonzero chance that they will be the victim of a mass shooting with easily accessible assault weapons?"
This is more a recitation of a talking point than a worthwhile critique. Your list of bad things is not good analysis. Knife crime, violent ethnic ghettos, bomb attacks, these are all facts of life in parts of the UK, Sweden, France, etc. The same goes for poverty and drug abuse. The facts don't support the contention that the US is a hellscape relative to Europe.
As a somewhat fortunate dual citizen of the US and the UK I find these explorations of divergences between US and Europe/UK curious.
While the GDP differences Yascha articulates are real, these numbers do not directly correlate to my experience of the differences in quality of life between the US and Europe/UK. My partner and I have lived in both the UK and US over the past 30 years and we have recently been moving back home to the UK. We are continually struck by the more at ease sensibility here on the south coast in the UK relative to the west coast of the US we have lived.
We can only guess reasons for this, but the sense of little gun ownership, much greater social care, much less homelessness, a deeper sense of history, a greater acceptance of differences, even the humility that comes from being a fallen empire may all contribute to an embodied sense of enjoying life in the UK.
Just two peoples anecdotal experience, but I do think there are some aspects of life that don't lend themselves easily to measurement..
There's a lot of cultural variation in friendliness around the US. In my experience, the west coast is the least friendly part of the US. Even NYC is friendlier.
Gonna have to disagree that anywhere northeastern is friendlier than California (PNW another story), but just shamefully concede to a tragic decline in outgoing, easy going , open attitudes California used to be known for.
You're exactly proving Yascha's point. Why dismiss the GDP divergence as a "good conversation starter but virtually useless"? Are you really saying that when you were deciding to move to Copenhagen, the significant reduction in salary did not merit any consideration at all? Would you still move if you were going to be making no salary at all? If you're able to acknowledge the existence of a tradeoff there, why do you have to deny that the GDP divergence is describing something real? The fact that GDP numbers don't account for your level of anxiety about school shootings doesn't make them just an intellectual exercise.
Most of your critiques are routed in negativity bias. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Greece have higher homelessness rates than the United States. The US has better air quality than Europe, and roughly similar pollution levels. The global food safety index ranks the US as first in food safety, and workplace safety between the two places are comparable. Less than 13% of Americans have student debt, and some European countries, like the UK, have higher student debt rates.
It is true that America is more violent than Europe, but crimes in America have been going down, while it has skyrocketed in countries like Sweden and Germany.
People have this “holier than thou” view of Europe and belief that America is all bad and the reality is the US does some things right, and Europe has problems too
People often confuse personal preference to objective metrics. You might not like the McMansion suburb and strip malls, but the reality is that the small towns in the middle of flyover states in the US are filthy rich and have every amenity imaginable at reasonable prices (when compared to incomes), which is simply not the case for many places worldwide, even if those places do have the allure of a cute cafe in the old town.
I've lived in Italy, Greece, Spain and Japan and now live in rural America, and what you say is true.
I'd also add that, here in flyover country we have outdoor cafes, micro-breweries and distilleries, artisan creameries and cheese factories, restaurants that bake their own bread, butcher shops selling locally sourced meats, including a variety of sausages. We have farmers' markets full of fresh, local produce. We have a county fair and rodeo with horse racing, an antique car show and 4H events. We have lovely and safe parks and recreational areas (thanks to lacking "our greatest strength").
Oh, and driving is like being in a car commercial -- scarcely any traffic. And anything we want in the world we can order on-line and have it delivered the next day, same as in the big cities and suburbs.
America is a big country. If you don't like where you are, you can move thousands of miles away and still be in the same country, speaking the same language, observing the same customs. People forget how unusual that is, especially compared to Europe, which is really rather small, and each country with its unique language and customs even smaller still.
Those are typically in agricultural states heavily subsidized by the government in the US. Dip a bit further to the south in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and your analysis crumbles.
Or try Youngstown, Ohio. Christ, try Cleveland. Used to be the biggest, richest city in Ohio. That mantle has been assumed by the blue island of Columbus, with its many white collar industries and the university.
Yes very much so - you look at Europe with small walkable cities, decent public transit etc and confuse that with prosperity - Noah Smith wrote an article about that Japan - looks prosperous but has a lot of poverty - or words to that effect
Don't confuse "prosperity" objective metrics with quality of life. Jesus, the US has a huge GINI coefficient, the public eductation system is in the gutter, healthcare for most is a travesty. Unappiness abounds Besides, except certain cities, it's tacky AF
Says an all American who's been almost everywhere in the world
As the article stated, the GINI coefficient is not that much higher than Germany and the UK, Americans generally rank pretty high on international tests (our worst performing group, black Americans, do better than most Europeans) and healthcare depends on the state. In California, being poor, healthcare has been a breeze (I have the public option!). Tacky is in the eye of the beholder, but given how no matter where I travel, people seem to be sporting American gear, it seems a lot of people like it
But objective metrics are useless if they don't track (average) personal preferences. Having a cute café within walking distance is an amenity just as much as having a clothes dryer.
Such a naive analysis. Yes, the US has greater capita GDP because the US has a greater percentage of “dirty” industries — oils and gas extraction and mining activities. US life expectancy is now about 5 years less than Europe as a whole. It’s an established fact that Europeans have more leisure time. And the US has a maternal mortality rate that is 2-1/2 times that of Europe. While more students are pushed through high school in the US, Europeans have a higher percentage of post secondary school education in both university degrees and vocational training. While Germany trains its workers to become more skilled, the US condemns its educational aspirants to crippling debt and training that often leads nowhere. As I said, such a naive analysis.
I think his point is that something has changed, and pretty quickly. European GDP per capita, even on a country-specific basis, has fallen way behind the US. It can't just be because Europeans demand more leisure. They always have done so.
Yascha: There is more to life than being rich and there are many ways in which living in Europe is better than living in the U.S., but the U.S. is undeniably richer than Europe.
You: What a naive analysis. Here's a bunch of stuff that is better about Europe!
There is something about this topic that is uniquely deranging. Even when you take incredible pains to explain that you are not saying the U.S. is better, only that it is richer, people break out "richer isn't better" like it's a thunderous dunk.
My theory is: back when Europeans were colonizing the world, they were motivated by a sense of supremacy over the people they colonized.
Once they lost their colonies (in part due to the US), they kept the sense of supremacy and redirected it from their colonies to the US.
This explains some interesting facts about Europeans: they call Americans dumb and then insist that we share our satellite internet and air defense technology with Ukraine, say Americans have no culture and then complain about our "cultural imperialism", etc.
It's hard to have a rational discussion about it because their brains have a tendency to short circuit when you point this stuff out. I've had many debates with Europeans who appear to have spent their entire lives poking fun an America's military spending and complaining about our supposed global imperialism. When I say that I agree and I want us to decrease defense spending and pull out of NATO, they tend to start sputtering. Supposedly the US gains great benefit from all of our support to NATO, yet Europeans are mysteriously unenthusiastic about taking those benefits for themselves.
In fact, religion drove much of the desire to conquer and colonize other parts of the world. Europe fought a completely senseless 30 year war over it. Hot on the heels of the missionaries were the industrialists and the mercantilists. Europeans have sneered at our military buildup as toy soldiering because, aside from the Civil War, we’ve never suffered devastation again and again only to do it again. We fight our wars and then return to the homeland that is still as developed and verdant as the day we left. War is not an abstraction for them. And Europe has absorbed the refugees of war and despotic rulers for centuries on end. War tends to make one cynical. War and it effects is engrained in the cultural fabric of Europe. That’s what makes them laugh at our hypocrisy. They’ve learned the futility of superiority.
It's not so much that the US oil/gas industry per se is a big money maker, but the knock-on effects of cheap North American fossil fuels (including a lot flowing in from Canada) for US industry more broadly. This is actually a major change from the late 20th century, when Americans and Europeans were both heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports and struggled with high market prices. Meanwhile, 21st century Europe has been on a diet in terms of energy consumption for a variety of reasons (not just related to fossil fuels, e.g. we could say the German "Atomausstieg" was a major strategic error) and now consumes less than half as much energy per capita as the USA. Now, obviously you can say Americans waste a lot of energy, but the other way around, it's proven quite hard for any country to achieve rapid growth in "GDP per tonne of oil equivalent".
Most American students don’t have “crippling debt” and some Europeans have higher student debt rates (the UK)
“Training that leads to no where” is weird considering that the average American worker is more productive than a German one.
And Americans routinely do well on international tests, with our worst performing group (black Americans) doing better than most Europeans.
The oil and gas sector make up 8% of US gdp, which is less than tech lol.
It’s your analysis that is flawed. You allow your grumpiness to cloud easily verifiable, objective facts because you’ve bought in so completely to the belief that “America bad”. The reality is America has its problems, but it does some things well. Almost as if your analysis is … naive
“The widely reported issue of racial disparities in U.S. maternal mortality persists, even with the lower overall rate. Black pregnant patients are still three times more likely to die than white patients, according to data in the study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on Wednesday.” That’s from the NPR report you linked.
That puts the maternal mortality rate of Black women at about 30 per 100,000, in line with poorer nations and even at 10.2 it’s high because as the report you link notes, “most maternal deaths are preventable.”
The reevaluation of the study also made some assumptions that data was in error and ignored data from some years when they felt the data was in flux.
“Approximately 43 million Americans hold a total of $1.8 trillion in student loan debt. This debt is held by a significant portion of the population, with roughly one in six adult Americans having federal student loan debt, according to a Congressional Research Service.”
You know that Germany is desperate for more skilled workers because it can't train enough, yeah? Not the case in the US where the tech industry is laying off every week despite growing.
Oh, my point was just a refutation of your claim that "While Germany trains its workers to become more skilled, the US condemns its educational aspirants to crippling debt and training that often leads nowhere."
The US isn't struggling to find skilled workers while Germany is.
The point makes no sense. Germany is struggling to find skilled worked not because the education system is failing, but because the pool of available workers is shrinking. You do know that tech workers are not the only workers in the labor force. The US is struggling to find skilled workers in other areas. Try to find an auto mechanic or a plumber. How many Americans are working in food service? For the richest country, the US has a work force that is poorly trained. That’s my point. And now AI and outsourcing are reducing the need tech workers.
So my point is that the US has *too* many tech workers while Germany doesn't have enough. That's why I get ads in the US that Germany would like American tech workers to immigrate. It has a lot of people that can put together a car, but I wouldn't really say that's a forward looking skill set like software development is.
Hmm... I haven't actually read about any tech firms laying off software devs or IT and replacing them with AI. Layoffs have mostly been a product of over-hiring during covid and high interest rates squeezing margins. It's also ushering in a sea change in what tech worker skills are the most sought after. Maybe it'll happen at some point though!
Nice article. The Economist has also published similar articles about divergence of the European and American economies.
I have no reason to doubt the numbers, but when I travel in Europe it just does not seem poorer than the United States. European cities are cleaner, the cars and taxis are nicer, and there is MUCH less visible poverty. I live in Seattle -- a city with median (not mean!) household income of >$120,000, but the visible poverty and homelessness is striking. A couple can drop $200 in a nice restaurant that has someone sleeping in filth just outside the door. I've never seen this in Europe. I'm also struck by the low cost of eating out in Europe. On a recent visit to Prague, the typical cost of a meal out was less than half what my family usually spends in Seattle (admittedly a very expensive city).
I definitely get the point that America is now much richer than Europe. Europe has produced no equivalents to companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Tesla, which have generated enormous wealth. So America must be doing something right economically. But as a society, Europe seems to run itself in a way that also has some advantages. It would be nice to figure out a way to have a vibrant, free economy that also promotes human dignity for all.
Seattle's problem isn't poverty, it's decades of mismanagement and single party rule, essentially legalizing petty crime and public disorder. That's not a GDP thing, it's a political choice.
Maybe, but it would be hard to be tourist in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco or LA and not see poverty. I've been a tourist in SF and LA, and the poverty was impossible to miss.
I'm originally from Europe. It truly depends on the city. Some hide their poverty very well, some don't. It seems like the US doesn't care as much about hiding it.
I'd go a step or two further in some places. Recall that for about six years, the 9th Circuit Court ruled cities under their jurisdiction were not allowed to hide poverty.
That’s mostly because you tourists parts. Visit southern Italy or a *banlieue* outside of Paris or a council flat in England, and what you’ll see would put most of Americas poor parts to shame
I dunno. Yascha is clearly trying to be honest but ... For one thing I see the word 'average' too often. Median would be better. If you take the wealth of Bezos and 100 people who own nothing and average that out, they are all millionaires. The poorest half of Americans are said to teeter on the brink of outright poverty if they aren't already there. In Europe there just isn't that sense of desperation.
It's interesting to witness the cognitive dissonance -- or maybe mere impatience that blocks careful reading -- that this article has inspired in comments. Some say, "But you're only looking at averages, not medians," even though the article discusses this at length and shows how medians are much higher in the U.S., adjusting for taxes and government transfers. Some say, "But you're not accounting for differences in cost of living," neglecting the fact that the median disposable income statistics cited are adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), and that the article discusses at length the superiority in material terms of typical American living conditions. Some say, "But you're not considering the plight of the poor," even though Mounk plainly considered it and agreed that the bottom-end American experience seems worse. Some say, "But some important things are better in Europe in ways not capture in stats," neglecting that Mounk acknowledges this point at well, professing to prefer living in Europe than in a typical American "suburb."
As a resident of an American suburb, I should take umbrage, but I don't. It's not a typical one. It's lovely and charming no end, but who can argue with fantasies of Paris and Italy?
It seems to me that many comments are missing the bigger picture. Regardless of whether or not Yascha got the details right, the overall trend is clear. Economic growth in Europe has been generally sclerotic since 2010. If that trend doesn't change, how will these states continue to pay for their social benefits and infrastructure as their populations continue to age? Unless something changes, costs are only going to rise and the tax base is only going to shrink. Without the economy growing, serious cuts will eventually have to be made.
You’re not wrong that Americans are much richer than Europeans, and that the gap has grown rapidly in the last two decades. But your “twice as rich” bit is misleading.
The figures you cite here show the US going from on par with Germany to about 50% ahead in twenty years. That’s a huge gap to open in so short a time, but it’s not double. The US might be twice as rich as Europe now on average, but there are a lot of poor countries in the EU, and they were poor twenty years ago, too; a large part of that gap is not recent.
You can talk about “double the wealth” and you can talk about “the last twenty years”, but when you put the two together, it’s extremely misleading. People are right to call you on it.
The “Americans are too dumb to realize how good they have it” guys are more of a threat to the Democratic Party now than the unhinged woke crowd. Prosperity and economic uncertainty can go hand in hand in a society where one trip to the hospital can cost you millions and the legal/political system is captured by moneyed interests who will bury you in legal fees before you can get justice. A 30% bump in median real income over 40 years means nothing if the wealthiest have seen a 3000% gain and now have the ability to buy elections and the courts.
"Flor's out-of-pocket costs after insurance are still $6,000, but he may not have to pay it because the stimulus package approved by Congress"
Liberals are inundated with catastrophizing rhetoric. Many internalize it without considering what is true, and what the larger context is. Racism and hate are pervasive, you can't get healthcare, it's impossible to go to college without massive debt, there are no good jobs...
Progressive are caught up in the belief that everything is out of their control and miserable.
And some of these big companies capitalized on the pandemic to buy up huge swaths of residential real estate. Pricing many “median “homeowners out of the market.
"Let’s start with housing. Since home prices are very expensive in the United States, many American readers might imagine that Europeans can, despite their nominally lower incomes, afford to live in much nicer apartments. But the figures paint a different picture. The average home size . . "
If average home size is our metric, then a McMansion in Browndirt, Nevada is exponentially "much nicer" than a flat in the 7th arrondissement. But that is subjective, to say the least.
But there are many people, I am not one of them, who find life in a desert environment to be very attractive and who would find life in a big city to be stifling.
Certainly, but 1) that's subjective and 2) most people seem to prefer living in a big city than in a desert environment - that's the reason why it's a big city in the first place.
Yes, desert environments are for people who fondly call themselves "desert rats". However, big cities grew to be big cities because cities are where the jobs were. This was especially true during the latter portion of the industrial revolution when farm work declined and factory work increased. Things have changed. Factories are moving to more rural areas like Spartanburg, SC, (only part of the reason is lower wages and lower costs of living) and more white collar work can be done remotely.
Living space is a function of space. The US has more building space and with the proliferation of automobiles and the suburbs, the US built out, not up. Comparing housing on this metric alone makes Japan the worst economy in the world.
Very true. My brother and his kids live in the middle-class 15th, across the river, and it too has gotten expensive and very crowded. On the other hand, terrific small shops—cheese, bread, meat, vegetables—are within walking distance. And daily or every other day walking is good for you. Not many obese people.
Only a tiny proportion of French people live in an apartment in the 7th arrondissement. But large houses in exurbs (McMansions) are quite representative of how vast numbers of Americans live.
No mention of the USD/EUR rate. The dollar has been unusually strong in recent years, and that necessarily skews numbers - quite significantly in fact.
Also, using restaurants and take-out to measure standard of living as regards food will strike Europeans as, well, missing the point
As a person who gets to enjoy life both in Europe (Norway) and the US (the semi-rural Hudson Valley in NY) I too see advantages and disadvantages in both locales. Taxes are much higher in Norway, for example, but the civic culture there is far more amenable to a stress-free life than here in the US. Road rage in Norway, for example, is virtually nonexistent, as is littler. Though the people can have a decidedly stoic demeanor, they are seldom if ever publicly crass, rude, or confrontational.
Which leads me to the issue of Under the Tuscan Sun vs Under the Texan Gun. In Norway I live without fear that, should a person actually lose his temper, he will be armed. Despite what many gun owners claim, that actually leads to a much more courteous society. Or so has been my experience.
It makes such a difference when I travel abroad. The threat of guns is constantly on one’s mind whether it’s a guy getting out of his car to head your way, a loud knock at the door, or just walking through parts of the city. It also lets so many people get away with acting like a-holes, since no one wants to risk it telling them to stop.
In the UK, Japan, Germany, etc, it’s nothing like that.
God this thread is filled with media brainwashed pansies. I’ve lived around more gun abundance and dangerous people than you have , kids at my school slept in bath tubs to avoid drive by shootings in the 90s, yet I have relatively little fear of guns and own many.
I agree European gun laws are vastly more sensible than America's. But that's an argument about, uh, gun laws. Not about the wealth disparity between the United States and Europe.
This is an interesting article but I would say the analysis probably misrepresents what Europeans usually mean when they describe America as having greater inequality. In doing so, I would wager most people are talking not about inequalities in income, but in accumulated wealth. I would also add the standard gini index has various problems that are not addressed in this article, and which will probably skew the results for the US.
When you look specifically at the WEALTH gini index, the US has a gini coefficient of 0.85, which is extremely high indeed! On this measure, the US is 25th in the world. That may not sound too bad, but keep in mind that almost all other countries in the top 100 are developing nations, kleptocracies and petrostates. To demonstrate the point, other nations in the top 25 include Brunei (number 1 with a score of 0.897), South Africa (number 5), the UAE (number 9), Russia (number 14), Saudi Arabia (number 19), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (coming in just ahead of the US at number 24!)
Among the top 50, the only other developed European country is Sweden (at number 12). Looking further down the list, you will find Ireland at 69 (nice) and Norway at number 80. Every other developed European country is far down the list.
In other words, I think it is actually very reasonable to describe the US as being far more unequal than almost all other developed nations.
Thanks for posting this comment. I was completely frustrated reading both the article and many of these comments because they fundamentally missed the key problem in the USA: the mind-boggling transfer of wealth over the last 40 years from the majority to a tiny, increasingly rich and powerful, minority. You can see the effects of this unwarranted largesse in the chronic decay of American civic life and public infrastructure.
While true, the article took great pains to point that the *median* American, even after taxes and transfers, are still richer than the median European. Hell, the worst performing group in America, black Americans, is significantly more wealthy. Did you read the article?
I think you've misunderstood my comment. I am specifically disagreeing with Yascha's contention that America is only slightly more unequal than Europe.
He states: "America is indeed somewhat more unequal than Europe. But the difference is not nearly as stark as some people on both sides of the Atlantic seem to assume. Indeed, America’s GINI coefficient, at 0.39, is only modestly higher than that of Britain, at 0.36..."
I am arguing that only works if you look specifically at income. If you look at capital (which I think most would agree is a better measure of "wealth"), then the opposite conclusion seems more sensible, namely that America is significantly more unequal than most of Europe.
I appreciate this post on many levels. As a Europhile, who had the great pleasure of spending three months in (mostly) France a couple years ago, I absolutely recognize the description of Europe as a place where the median person is not as economically well-off as many might suspect. That being said, one of my criticisms of analyses such as this, aside from those raised (to my mind, at least, appropriately and well) in the article, is the idea that median income somehow translates into “better life”. I was recently having a conversation where I explained to someone that after recently moving to California from the East Coast, I was forced by life logistics to buy a car. On someone’s metric, this is going to show up as “you could afford a car!” But in my life metric, I would be much better off living back in a town where public transportation was well-developed enough that I didn’t need one. In nearly three months in France, I rented a car for 10 days. And I otherwise got around much of the country, and several others, able to explore all sorts of areas without a car. I consider that much better off. I also live in a town where I search, every day, for the kind of community and human connection I found on a regular basis in the cafes and markets of France, even as a foreigner. I speak basic French, which certainly helps, but my word, seeing all sorts of people doing their shopping while obviously “catching up” with friends and neighbors at the same time . . . Can you imagine that even in the local (and I think, fabulous) Trader Joe’s here? At Whole Foods? At Safeway? Of course, impersonal shopping centers also very much exist and are very much used in Europe, but routine food shopping is, I would venture, still in large part a different cultural and human experience. And, finally, as a physician (with background in economics and politics, hence I’m here) who has recently lived in a top-10 US metropolitan area where 40% (forty! percent) of children live below the federal poverty limit, and adults struggle routinely to access care, even if they have Medicare, or Medicaid, or both (don’t look now, but that’s another piece). . . The health system may not be as fancy, the treatments may not be as technologically advanced everywhere, and . . . The life expectancy differences are real, and the strength of the basic health-supporting infrastructures of the societies are absolutely divergent . . . I wonder if part of the frustration people feel with definitions such as GDP-per-capita or median-income (even if the latter is absolutely more refined, and therefore, in my opinion, more appropriate), are what these measurements don’t capture . . . These are still relatively blunt instruments for assessing well-being. I am not trying to “win” some competition for “worse off than Europe” here, I am only trying to explain some of my own discomfort with this kind of analysis . . . Thank you for the thought-provoking piece.
I really try to keep it civil but what the hell Are you talking about? It is well documented that France is a far more closed culture than American culture.
There isn’t really a concept of the public square or the New Haven Green the way we might have in America’s founding. I’m glad you were on vacation for three months, but Jesus Christ you know nothing about this country.
Au moins on est civile, donc . . . . I think you have aptly demonstrated a certain flavor of Francophone restrictive and remonstrative thinking here . . . (Not for nothing, but if you imagine we have an unassailably « open « culture in the US, I have some recently-detained and deported friends you might want to talk to . . . not to mention a few university administrators . . . Not to mention several teenage patients without the means to travel to a jurisdiction where they might terminate an unwanted pregnancy) . . . My intention here was not to debate cultural supremacy or win or lose an argument about who has it « best », it was simply to broaden the idea of what constitutes « well off », and how that is measured and discussed . . . Paris is a hard place actually to live, no doubt and no shade . . . I’m sorry you are so unhappy there . . .
You chose to make a personal attack and deliberately miss the point.
France is not an open culture. They tend to make friends in elementary school and keep them for life and they are very slow to let in new friends and newcomers in general.
They have a strict distinction between the public and the private sphere that is very different than what one might find in Canada or the United States.
There are also firm cadres in which one is expected to behave.
This is well documented in books like The Culture Map, The Bonjour Effect, and 60 Million Frenchmen Cant Be Wrong.
As you alluded to, it’s not about whether something is right or wrong, but to say that France is an open culture is incorrect.
As an aside, if you feel that it is the platonic ideal of all progressive and liberal values, you should look at an electoral map that shows the popularity of the right wing party.
As someone who lives in America and is about to move to Copenhagen (with a significant reduction in salary as well as cost of living), this was an interesting read for me.
I agree with a lot of the criticisms in the comments regarding use of mean vs. median, not accounting for cost of living or US/EUR disparities, etc. There is also the question in my mind of the usefulness of a lot of our GDP (i.e. our healthcare system generates a lot of economic activity captured in GDP numbers while it spits out poor health outcomes, shorter lifespans, and crippling medical debt for citizens).
But the biggest issue for me is how to quantify the large scale human suffering and lack of dignity for the vast majority of people homeless, near homeless, living paycheck to paycheck, trying to get out from under massive educational or medical debt, threatened with random gun violence at schools and public venues, facing unregulated industrial pollution or dangerous work environments (compare auto industry jobs in U.S. south vs. Europe), etc. How do you quantify the feeling of putting your kid on a school bus and knowing there's a very small but nonzero chance that they will be the victim of a mass shooting with easily accessible assault weapons?
Many of these things are the byproduct of chasing GDP growth with zero thought to societal impacts. A discussion of America vs. Europe without accounting for those things is a good conversation starter but virtually useless for anything other than an intellectual exercise.
"How do you quantify the feeling of putting your kid on a school bus and knowing there's a very small but nonzero chance that they will be the victim of a mass shooting with easily accessible assault weapons?"
This is more a recitation of a talking point than a worthwhile critique. Your list of bad things is not good analysis. Knife crime, violent ethnic ghettos, bomb attacks, these are all facts of life in parts of the UK, Sweden, France, etc. The same goes for poverty and drug abuse. The facts don't support the contention that the US is a hellscape relative to Europe.
As a somewhat fortunate dual citizen of the US and the UK I find these explorations of divergences between US and Europe/UK curious.
While the GDP differences Yascha articulates are real, these numbers do not directly correlate to my experience of the differences in quality of life between the US and Europe/UK. My partner and I have lived in both the UK and US over the past 30 years and we have recently been moving back home to the UK. We are continually struck by the more at ease sensibility here on the south coast in the UK relative to the west coast of the US we have lived.
We can only guess reasons for this, but the sense of little gun ownership, much greater social care, much less homelessness, a deeper sense of history, a greater acceptance of differences, even the humility that comes from being a fallen empire may all contribute to an embodied sense of enjoying life in the UK.
Just two peoples anecdotal experience, but I do think there are some aspects of life that don't lend themselves easily to measurement..
There's a lot of cultural variation in friendliness around the US. In my experience, the west coast is the least friendly part of the US. Even NYC is friendlier.
Gonna have to disagree that anywhere northeastern is friendlier than California (PNW another story), but just shamefully concede to a tragic decline in outgoing, easy going , open attitudes California used to be known for.
💯
Assault weapons today, assault weapons tomorrow, assault weapons forever 🇺🇸 no compromise no matter what the cost 🇺🇸
If you want the social cohesion necessary to end spree shootings, end progressive culture .
You're exactly proving Yascha's point. Why dismiss the GDP divergence as a "good conversation starter but virtually useless"? Are you really saying that when you were deciding to move to Copenhagen, the significant reduction in salary did not merit any consideration at all? Would you still move if you were going to be making no salary at all? If you're able to acknowledge the existence of a tradeoff there, why do you have to deny that the GDP divergence is describing something real? The fact that GDP numbers don't account for your level of anxiety about school shootings doesn't make them just an intellectual exercise.
Most of your critiques are routed in negativity bias. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Greece have higher homelessness rates than the United States. The US has better air quality than Europe, and roughly similar pollution levels. The global food safety index ranks the US as first in food safety, and workplace safety between the two places are comparable. Less than 13% of Americans have student debt, and some European countries, like the UK, have higher student debt rates.
It is true that America is more violent than Europe, but crimes in America have been going down, while it has skyrocketed in countries like Sweden and Germany.
People have this “holier than thou” view of Europe and belief that America is all bad and the reality is the US does some things right, and Europe has problems too
Unregulated industrial pollution? This is not the USA I live in, which is massively regulated.
This is fantasy, but I am glad people exaggerate the negatives to deter more newcomers
Thank you!
People often confuse personal preference to objective metrics. You might not like the McMansion suburb and strip malls, but the reality is that the small towns in the middle of flyover states in the US are filthy rich and have every amenity imaginable at reasonable prices (when compared to incomes), which is simply not the case for many places worldwide, even if those places do have the allure of a cute cafe in the old town.
I've lived in Italy, Greece, Spain and Japan and now live in rural America, and what you say is true.
I'd also add that, here in flyover country we have outdoor cafes, micro-breweries and distilleries, artisan creameries and cheese factories, restaurants that bake their own bread, butcher shops selling locally sourced meats, including a variety of sausages. We have farmers' markets full of fresh, local produce. We have a county fair and rodeo with horse racing, an antique car show and 4H events. We have lovely and safe parks and recreational areas (thanks to lacking "our greatest strength").
Oh, and driving is like being in a car commercial -- scarcely any traffic. And anything we want in the world we can order on-line and have it delivered the next day, same as in the big cities and suburbs.
America is a big country. If you don't like where you are, you can move thousands of miles away and still be in the same country, speaking the same language, observing the same customs. People forget how unusual that is, especially compared to Europe, which is really rather small, and each country with its unique language and customs even smaller still.
That's the deal breaker for me. You have to drive everywhere. I don't care how luxurious it is.
There are plenty of cities where that’s not true! I’ve never had a license and have lived in the US most of my life
That's why Europe is more appealing......
Those are typically in agricultural states heavily subsidized by the government in the US. Dip a bit further to the south in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and your analysis crumbles.
You may not want to lean too hard on 'heavily subsidized'. "People living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
Or try Youngstown, Ohio. Christ, try Cleveland. Used to be the biggest, richest city in Ohio. That mantle has been assumed by the blue island of Columbus, with its many white collar industries and the university.
Yes very much so - you look at Europe with small walkable cities, decent public transit etc and confuse that with prosperity - Noah Smith wrote an article about that Japan - looks prosperous but has a lot of poverty - or words to that effect
Don't confuse "prosperity" objective metrics with quality of life. Jesus, the US has a huge GINI coefficient, the public eductation system is in the gutter, healthcare for most is a travesty. Unappiness abounds Besides, except certain cities, it's tacky AF
Says an all American who's been almost everywhere in the world
Not to mention the obesity and children with blank faces due to over medication.
As the article stated, the GINI coefficient is not that much higher than Germany and the UK, Americans generally rank pretty high on international tests (our worst performing group, black Americans, do better than most Europeans) and healthcare depends on the state. In California, being poor, healthcare has been a breeze (I have the public option!). Tacky is in the eye of the beholder, but given how no matter where I travel, people seem to be sporting American gear, it seems a lot of people like it
"Filthy rich" relative to other small rural West Virginia counties?
Unlimited access to cheap chinese made goods in the middle of nowhere is not the best lived life.
But objective metrics are useless if they don't track (average) personal preferences. Having a cute café within walking distance is an amenity just as much as having a clothes dryer.
But the article says people rarely eat out.
Yes, but there is a lot more locally “prepared” food that you can get in stores and in markets, like certain salads, quiches, paellas etc.
Such a naive analysis. Yes, the US has greater capita GDP because the US has a greater percentage of “dirty” industries — oils and gas extraction and mining activities. US life expectancy is now about 5 years less than Europe as a whole. It’s an established fact that Europeans have more leisure time. And the US has a maternal mortality rate that is 2-1/2 times that of Europe. While more students are pushed through high school in the US, Europeans have a higher percentage of post secondary school education in both university degrees and vocational training. While Germany trains its workers to become more skilled, the US condemns its educational aspirants to crippling debt and training that often leads nowhere. As I said, such a naive analysis.
I think his point is that something has changed, and pretty quickly. European GDP per capita, even on a country-specific basis, has fallen way behind the US. It can't just be because Europeans demand more leisure. They always have done so.
Yascha: There is more to life than being rich and there are many ways in which living in Europe is better than living in the U.S., but the U.S. is undeniably richer than Europe.
You: What a naive analysis. Here's a bunch of stuff that is better about Europe!
There is something about this topic that is uniquely deranging. Even when you take incredible pains to explain that you are not saying the U.S. is better, only that it is richer, people break out "richer isn't better" like it's a thunderous dunk.
No. Me: The source of America’s richness is also the source of its cultural and social poverty.
My theory is: back when Europeans were colonizing the world, they were motivated by a sense of supremacy over the people they colonized.
Once they lost their colonies (in part due to the US), they kept the sense of supremacy and redirected it from their colonies to the US.
This explains some interesting facts about Europeans: they call Americans dumb and then insist that we share our satellite internet and air defense technology with Ukraine, say Americans have no culture and then complain about our "cultural imperialism", etc.
It's hard to have a rational discussion about it because their brains have a tendency to short circuit when you point this stuff out. I've had many debates with Europeans who appear to have spent their entire lives poking fun an America's military spending and complaining about our supposed global imperialism. When I say that I agree and I want us to decrease defense spending and pull out of NATO, they tend to start sputtering. Supposedly the US gains great benefit from all of our support to NATO, yet Europeans are mysteriously unenthusiastic about taking those benefits for themselves.
In fact, religion drove much of the desire to conquer and colonize other parts of the world. Europe fought a completely senseless 30 year war over it. Hot on the heels of the missionaries were the industrialists and the mercantilists. Europeans have sneered at our military buildup as toy soldiering because, aside from the Civil War, we’ve never suffered devastation again and again only to do it again. We fight our wars and then return to the homeland that is still as developed and verdant as the day we left. War is not an abstraction for them. And Europe has absorbed the refugees of war and despotic rulers for centuries on end. War tends to make one cynical. War and it effects is engrained in the cultural fabric of Europe. That’s what makes them laugh at our hypocrisy. They’ve learned the futility of superiority.
To some extent it’s de gustibus and TV show indoctrination. Americans now count wealth eg by the number of huge bathrooms.
It's not so much that the US oil/gas industry per se is a big money maker, but the knock-on effects of cheap North American fossil fuels (including a lot flowing in from Canada) for US industry more broadly. This is actually a major change from the late 20th century, when Americans and Europeans were both heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports and struggled with high market prices. Meanwhile, 21st century Europe has been on a diet in terms of energy consumption for a variety of reasons (not just related to fossil fuels, e.g. we could say the German "Atomausstieg" was a major strategic error) and now consumes less than half as much energy per capita as the USA. Now, obviously you can say Americans waste a lot of energy, but the other way around, it's proven quite hard for any country to achieve rapid growth in "GDP per tonne of oil equivalent".
Quality of life aside - doesn't the divergence in GDP still mean a divergence in economic power?
Sure, that may not mean much to the average European or the average American today, but it might manifest into other things soon.
The maternal mortality rate is based off of false stats from 20 years ago and the reality is the US is about the same as France.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/13/1238269753/maternal-mortality-overestimate-deaths-births-health-disparities
Most American students don’t have “crippling debt” and some Europeans have higher student debt rates (the UK)
“Training that leads to no where” is weird considering that the average American worker is more productive than a German one.
And Americans routinely do well on international tests, with our worst performing group (black Americans) doing better than most Europeans.
The oil and gas sector make up 8% of US gdp, which is less than tech lol.
It’s your analysis that is flawed. You allow your grumpiness to cloud easily verifiable, objective facts because you’ve bought in so completely to the belief that “America bad”. The reality is America has its problems, but it does some things well. Almost as if your analysis is … naive
It is your analysis that is flawed
“The widely reported issue of racial disparities in U.S. maternal mortality persists, even with the lower overall rate. Black pregnant patients are still three times more likely to die than white patients, according to data in the study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on Wednesday.” That’s from the NPR report you linked.
That puts the maternal mortality rate of Black women at about 30 per 100,000, in line with poorer nations and even at 10.2 it’s high because as the report you link notes, “most maternal deaths are preventable.”
The reevaluation of the study also made some assumptions that data was in error and ignored data from some years when they felt the data was in flux.
“Approximately 43 million Americans hold a total of $1.8 trillion in student loan debt. This debt is held by a significant portion of the population, with roughly one in six adult Americans having federal student loan debt, according to a Congressional Research Service.”
African Americans score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. The gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood, according to Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-score-gap-why-it-persists-and-what-can-be-done/
No, not “America Bad,” just not all good.
BTW/ would like to see the sources you cite.
You know that Germany is desperate for more skilled workers because it can't train enough, yeah? Not the case in the US where the tech industry is laying off every week despite growing.
https://www.dw.com/en/opportunity-card-a-boon-for-germanys-labor-market/a-69267503
Germany has an aging population. The US tech industry is relying more on AI and outsourcing to India. Not sure what your point is.
Oh, my point was just a refutation of your claim that "While Germany trains its workers to become more skilled, the US condemns its educational aspirants to crippling debt and training that often leads nowhere."
The US isn't struggling to find skilled workers while Germany is.
The point makes no sense. Germany is struggling to find skilled worked not because the education system is failing, but because the pool of available workers is shrinking. You do know that tech workers are not the only workers in the labor force. The US is struggling to find skilled workers in other areas. Try to find an auto mechanic or a plumber. How many Americans are working in food service? For the richest country, the US has a work force that is poorly trained. That’s my point. And now AI and outsourcing are reducing the need tech workers.
So my point is that the US has *too* many tech workers while Germany doesn't have enough. That's why I get ads in the US that Germany would like American tech workers to immigrate. It has a lot of people that can put together a car, but I wouldn't really say that's a forward looking skill set like software development is.
Hmm... I haven't actually read about any tech firms laying off software devs or IT and replacing them with AI. Layoffs have mostly been a product of over-hiring during covid and high interest rates squeezing margins. It's also ushering in a sea change in what tech worker skills are the most sought after. Maybe it'll happen at some point though!
Correct - read this:
https://www.imk-boeckler.de/de/faust-detail.htm?sync_id=HBS-008792
Nice article. The Economist has also published similar articles about divergence of the European and American economies.
I have no reason to doubt the numbers, but when I travel in Europe it just does not seem poorer than the United States. European cities are cleaner, the cars and taxis are nicer, and there is MUCH less visible poverty. I live in Seattle -- a city with median (not mean!) household income of >$120,000, but the visible poverty and homelessness is striking. A couple can drop $200 in a nice restaurant that has someone sleeping in filth just outside the door. I've never seen this in Europe. I'm also struck by the low cost of eating out in Europe. On a recent visit to Prague, the typical cost of a meal out was less than half what my family usually spends in Seattle (admittedly a very expensive city).
I definitely get the point that America is now much richer than Europe. Europe has produced no equivalents to companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Tesla, which have generated enormous wealth. So America must be doing something right economically. But as a society, Europe seems to run itself in a way that also has some advantages. It would be nice to figure out a way to have a vibrant, free economy that also promotes human dignity for all.
Seattle's problem isn't poverty, it's decades of mismanagement and single party rule, essentially legalizing petty crime and public disorder. That's not a GDP thing, it's a political choice.
Poverty is rarely seen by tourists, tbh.
I doubt tourists visit 18th-19th-20th arrondisments. Or St. Denis (except for tbe church), where you get poverty and crime, plus Islamist fanaticism.
Maybe, but it would be hard to be tourist in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco or LA and not see poverty. I've been a tourist in SF and LA, and the poverty was impossible to miss.
I'm originally from Europe. It truly depends on the city. Some hide their poverty very well, some don't. It seems like the US doesn't care as much about hiding it.
I'd go a step or two further in some places. Recall that for about six years, the 9th Circuit Court ruled cities under their jurisdiction were not allowed to hide poverty.
Fair point.
There are bums splayed out on every other block in NYC these days.
Be careful, Unset, or you’re gonna get accused of bumophobia!
These days? Have you ever googled “the Bowery”
Do you realize the Bowery is one street not every other street?
Native New Yorkers also metonymically refer to it as an area.
As a native NYer and 50 year resident I am well aware of that. Far more true 80 years ago than today. My point, however, stands.
When you travel you go to tourist areas.
That’s mostly because you tourists parts. Visit southern Italy or a *banlieue* outside of Paris or a council flat in England, and what you’ll see would put most of Americas poor parts to shame
I dunno. Yascha is clearly trying to be honest but ... For one thing I see the word 'average' too often. Median would be better. If you take the wealth of Bezos and 100 people who own nothing and average that out, they are all millionaires. The poorest half of Americans are said to teeter on the brink of outright poverty if they aren't already there. In Europe there just isn't that sense of desperation.
The entire thrust of the piece is on the median not the average. I refuse to believe half these comments read the text of this article
He spends like half the article talking about the median lol
Median occurs 11 times, average 14 times. As I said, I'd prefer more median and less average.
It's interesting to witness the cognitive dissonance -- or maybe mere impatience that blocks careful reading -- that this article has inspired in comments. Some say, "But you're only looking at averages, not medians," even though the article discusses this at length and shows how medians are much higher in the U.S., adjusting for taxes and government transfers. Some say, "But you're not accounting for differences in cost of living," neglecting the fact that the median disposable income statistics cited are adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), and that the article discusses at length the superiority in material terms of typical American living conditions. Some say, "But you're not considering the plight of the poor," even though Mounk plainly considered it and agreed that the bottom-end American experience seems worse. Some say, "But some important things are better in Europe in ways not capture in stats," neglecting that Mounk acknowledges this point at well, professing to prefer living in Europe than in a typical American "suburb."
As a resident of an American suburb, I should take umbrage, but I don't. It's not a typical one. It's lovely and charming no end, but who can argue with fantasies of Paris and Italy?
The Parisians I know think the American suburbs look fantastic. Like, they think our big houses with A/C are nice. They are right.
The commenters on this thread want an American salary and life with Paris as the background. They don't want to be European and all that entails.
It seems to me that many comments are missing the bigger picture. Regardless of whether or not Yascha got the details right, the overall trend is clear. Economic growth in Europe has been generally sclerotic since 2010. If that trend doesn't change, how will these states continue to pay for their social benefits and infrastructure as their populations continue to age? Unless something changes, costs are only going to rise and the tax base is only going to shrink. Without the economy growing, serious cuts will eventually have to be made.
You’re not wrong that Americans are much richer than Europeans, and that the gap has grown rapidly in the last two decades. But your “twice as rich” bit is misleading.
The figures you cite here show the US going from on par with Germany to about 50% ahead in twenty years. That’s a huge gap to open in so short a time, but it’s not double. The US might be twice as rich as Europe now on average, but there are a lot of poor countries in the EU, and they were poor twenty years ago, too; a large part of that gap is not recent.
You can talk about “double the wealth” and you can talk about “the last twenty years”, but when you put the two together, it’s extremely misleading. People are right to call you on it.
The “Americans are too dumb to realize how good they have it” guys are more of a threat to the Democratic Party now than the unhinged woke crowd. Prosperity and economic uncertainty can go hand in hand in a society where one trip to the hospital can cost you millions and the legal/political system is captured by moneyed interests who will bury you in legal fees before you can get justice. A 30% bump in median real income over 40 years means nothing if the wealthiest have seen a 3000% gain and now have the ability to buy elections and the courts.
You:
"one trip to the hospital can cost you millions"
The article you reference:
"Flor's out-of-pocket costs after insurance are still $6,000, but he may not have to pay it because the stimulus package approved by Congress"
Liberals are inundated with catastrophizing rhetoric. Many internalize it without considering what is true, and what the larger context is. Racism and hate are pervasive, you can't get healthcare, it's impossible to go to college without massive debt, there are no good jobs...
Progressive are caught up in the belief that everything is out of their control and miserable.
Who was charged millions for a trip to the hospital?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/coronavirus-hospital-bill-healthcare-america
https://www.today.com/today/amp/tdna184348
Third paragraph
And some of these big companies capitalized on the pandemic to buy up huge swaths of residential real estate. Pricing many “median “homeowners out of the market.
I don't find this very persuasive
"Let’s start with housing. Since home prices are very expensive in the United States, many American readers might imagine that Europeans can, despite their nominally lower incomes, afford to live in much nicer apartments. But the figures paint a different picture. The average home size . . "
If average home size is our metric, then a McMansion in Browndirt, Nevada is exponentially "much nicer" than a flat in the 7th arrondissement. But that is subjective, to say the least.
But there are many people, I am not one of them, who find life in a desert environment to be very attractive and who would find life in a big city to be stifling.
Of course, but as I said, it is subjective at best whether that is "much nicer."
Certainly, but 1) that's subjective and 2) most people seem to prefer living in a big city than in a desert environment - that's the reason why it's a big city in the first place.
Yes, desert environments are for people who fondly call themselves "desert rats". However, big cities grew to be big cities because cities are where the jobs were. This was especially true during the latter portion of the industrial revolution when farm work declined and factory work increased. Things have changed. Factories are moving to more rural areas like Spartanburg, SC, (only part of the reason is lower wages and lower costs of living) and more white collar work can be done remotely.
Living space is a function of space. The US has more building space and with the proliferation of automobiles and the suburbs, the US built out, not up. Comparing housing on this metric alone makes Japan the worst economy in the world.
A flat in the 7th arrondissement would be almost unobtainium, it is the richest part of Paris with the 16th.
Very true. My brother and his kids live in the middle-class 15th, across the river, and it too has gotten expensive and very crowded. On the other hand, terrific small shops—cheese, bread, meat, vegetables—are within walking distance. And daily or every other day walking is good for you. Not many obese people.
Don't forget the bigger refrigerators which apparently counts for something - I'm not sure what.
Only a tiny proportion of French people live in an apartment in the 7th arrondissement. But large houses in exurbs (McMansions) are quite representative of how vast numbers of Americans live.
That has no bearing on the point I was making, which is that home size is not an objective measure of "much nicer."
No mention of the USD/EUR rate. The dollar has been unusually strong in recent years, and that necessarily skews numbers - quite significantly in fact.
Also, using restaurants and take-out to measure standard of living as regards food will strike Europeans as, well, missing the point
And the US data is based on reported behavior by consumers not actual economic data.
More holes than a Swiss cheese.
As a person who gets to enjoy life both in Europe (Norway) and the US (the semi-rural Hudson Valley in NY) I too see advantages and disadvantages in both locales. Taxes are much higher in Norway, for example, but the civic culture there is far more amenable to a stress-free life than here in the US. Road rage in Norway, for example, is virtually nonexistent, as is littler. Though the people can have a decidedly stoic demeanor, they are seldom if ever publicly crass, rude, or confrontational.
Which leads me to the issue of Under the Tuscan Sun vs Under the Texan Gun. In Norway I live without fear that, should a person actually lose his temper, he will be armed. Despite what many gun owners claim, that actually leads to a much more courteous society. Or so has been my experience.
It makes such a difference when I travel abroad. The threat of guns is constantly on one’s mind whether it’s a guy getting out of his car to head your way, a loud knock at the door, or just walking through parts of the city. It also lets so many people get away with acting like a-holes, since no one wants to risk it telling them to stop.
In the UK, Japan, Germany, etc, it’s nothing like that.
God this thread is filled with media brainwashed pansies. I’ve lived around more gun abundance and dangerous people than you have , kids at my school slept in bath tubs to avoid drive by shootings in the 90s, yet I have relatively little fear of guns and own many.
Brainwashed pansies? There was a murder two blocks from my house you POS.
I agree European gun laws are vastly more sensible than America's. But that's an argument about, uh, gun laws. Not about the wealth disparity between the United States and Europe.
This is an interesting article but I would say the analysis probably misrepresents what Europeans usually mean when they describe America as having greater inequality. In doing so, I would wager most people are talking not about inequalities in income, but in accumulated wealth. I would also add the standard gini index has various problems that are not addressed in this article, and which will probably skew the results for the US.
When you look specifically at the WEALTH gini index, the US has a gini coefficient of 0.85, which is extremely high indeed! On this measure, the US is 25th in the world. That may not sound too bad, but keep in mind that almost all other countries in the top 100 are developing nations, kleptocracies and petrostates. To demonstrate the point, other nations in the top 25 include Brunei (number 1 with a score of 0.897), South Africa (number 5), the UAE (number 9), Russia (number 14), Saudi Arabia (number 19), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (coming in just ahead of the US at number 24!)
Among the top 50, the only other developed European country is Sweden (at number 12). Looking further down the list, you will find Ireland at 69 (nice) and Norway at number 80. Every other developed European country is far down the list.
In other words, I think it is actually very reasonable to describe the US as being far more unequal than almost all other developed nations.
Thanks for posting this comment. I was completely frustrated reading both the article and many of these comments because they fundamentally missed the key problem in the USA: the mind-boggling transfer of wealth over the last 40 years from the majority to a tiny, increasingly rich and powerful, minority. You can see the effects of this unwarranted largesse in the chronic decay of American civic life and public infrastructure.
While true, the article took great pains to point that the *median* American, even after taxes and transfers, are still richer than the median European. Hell, the worst performing group in America, black Americans, is significantly more wealthy. Did you read the article?
I think you've misunderstood my comment. I am specifically disagreeing with Yascha's contention that America is only slightly more unequal than Europe.
He states: "America is indeed somewhat more unequal than Europe. But the difference is not nearly as stark as some people on both sides of the Atlantic seem to assume. Indeed, America’s GINI coefficient, at 0.39, is only modestly higher than that of Britain, at 0.36..."
I am arguing that only works if you look specifically at income. If you look at capital (which I think most would agree is a better measure of "wealth"), then the opposite conclusion seems more sensible, namely that America is significantly more unequal than most of Europe.
I was surprised this assessment did not include a comparison of Cost of Living stats which indicate the US is 30% more expensive than Europe.
The PPP stat is supposed to take cost of living into account.
Brilliant writeup. Americans have indeed seemed to have lost the grasp on reality in terms of how well we still have it.
I appreciate this post on many levels. As a Europhile, who had the great pleasure of spending three months in (mostly) France a couple years ago, I absolutely recognize the description of Europe as a place where the median person is not as economically well-off as many might suspect. That being said, one of my criticisms of analyses such as this, aside from those raised (to my mind, at least, appropriately and well) in the article, is the idea that median income somehow translates into “better life”. I was recently having a conversation where I explained to someone that after recently moving to California from the East Coast, I was forced by life logistics to buy a car. On someone’s metric, this is going to show up as “you could afford a car!” But in my life metric, I would be much better off living back in a town where public transportation was well-developed enough that I didn’t need one. In nearly three months in France, I rented a car for 10 days. And I otherwise got around much of the country, and several others, able to explore all sorts of areas without a car. I consider that much better off. I also live in a town where I search, every day, for the kind of community and human connection I found on a regular basis in the cafes and markets of France, even as a foreigner. I speak basic French, which certainly helps, but my word, seeing all sorts of people doing their shopping while obviously “catching up” with friends and neighbors at the same time . . . Can you imagine that even in the local (and I think, fabulous) Trader Joe’s here? At Whole Foods? At Safeway? Of course, impersonal shopping centers also very much exist and are very much used in Europe, but routine food shopping is, I would venture, still in large part a different cultural and human experience. And, finally, as a physician (with background in economics and politics, hence I’m here) who has recently lived in a top-10 US metropolitan area where 40% (forty! percent) of children live below the federal poverty limit, and adults struggle routinely to access care, even if they have Medicare, or Medicaid, or both (don’t look now, but that’s another piece). . . The health system may not be as fancy, the treatments may not be as technologically advanced everywhere, and . . . The life expectancy differences are real, and the strength of the basic health-supporting infrastructures of the societies are absolutely divergent . . . I wonder if part of the frustration people feel with definitions such as GDP-per-capita or median-income (even if the latter is absolutely more refined, and therefore, in my opinion, more appropriate), are what these measurements don’t capture . . . These are still relatively blunt instruments for assessing well-being. I am not trying to “win” some competition for “worse off than Europe” here, I am only trying to explain some of my own discomfort with this kind of analysis . . . Thank you for the thought-provoking piece.
I really try to keep it civil but what the hell Are you talking about? It is well documented that France is a far more closed culture than American culture.
There isn’t really a concept of the public square or the New Haven Green the way we might have in America’s founding. I’m glad you were on vacation for three months, but Jesus Christ you know nothing about this country.
Au moins on est civile, donc . . . . I think you have aptly demonstrated a certain flavor of Francophone restrictive and remonstrative thinking here . . . (Not for nothing, but if you imagine we have an unassailably « open « culture in the US, I have some recently-detained and deported friends you might want to talk to . . . not to mention a few university administrators . . . Not to mention several teenage patients without the means to travel to a jurisdiction where they might terminate an unwanted pregnancy) . . . My intention here was not to debate cultural supremacy or win or lose an argument about who has it « best », it was simply to broaden the idea of what constitutes « well off », and how that is measured and discussed . . . Paris is a hard place actually to live, no doubt and no shade . . . I’m sorry you are so unhappy there . . .
You chose to make a personal attack and deliberately miss the point.
France is not an open culture. They tend to make friends in elementary school and keep them for life and they are very slow to let in new friends and newcomers in general.
They have a strict distinction between the public and the private sphere that is very different than what one might find in Canada or the United States.
There are also firm cadres in which one is expected to behave.
This is well documented in books like The Culture Map, The Bonjour Effect, and 60 Million Frenchmen Cant Be Wrong.
As you alluded to, it’s not about whether something is right or wrong, but to say that France is an open culture is incorrect.
As an aside, if you feel that it is the platonic ideal of all progressive and liberal values, you should look at an electoral map that shows the popularity of the right wing party.