[mola]

Qualify of life is pretty high there, right? Are there many poor people? Do median people have access to good education and healthcare?

They don't produce new billionaires via cutthroat competition, so?

Please let me live in that sort of "late soviet pessimism", safety, stability, work, leisure. Oh the horrors.

[killtimeatwork]

The gist of the article is that things are not bad, but have been in slow but steady decline for some time now. This brings a lot of discontentment, because people psychologically can care more about first derivative that the actual value of their quality of life - i.e. a poor guy who just got a job which pays median wage can be happier than a billionaire who just lost $100m.

[hntrader]

> first derivative

At the risk of being pedantic; people care about both the first and second derivative. After a while, people get dissatisfied if the second derivative is <= 0, because that implies that the rate is decreasing. People also care about relative differences with their peers.

[bawolff]

With the implication it wouldn't be that way if canada was more like the usa. But aren't americans constantly complaining about stagnant wages (for low and middle class) and generally shrinking middle class?

[killtimeatwork]

There are some people in the middle class who do very well, e.g. software engineers - while, according to the article, the only class of people which does well in Canada is the real estate owners.

[bawolff]

As a canadian software engineer who owns no real estate, i beg to differ. (Before anyone says ancedote != data, this article has no data only ancedotes)

[curation]

It is. The cultural difference between Canadians and Americans is we worry about that difference, are taught to in school. The economic difference is we have healthcare, so don't fear getting sick in the same register of horror.