[munk-a]

I disagree with this actually - the effective savings rate is generally lower in the US compared to a lot of countries with "robust workers rights" if you're working in the US you end up losing a lot of wealth to problems that are generally societally insured elsewhere in the world.

[s1artibartfast]

I would look into stats on social mobility by country.

Social mobility in the US is still pretty good last time I checked. Most European countries have have lower income income inequality, but less mobility. Eg, the difference between the bottom and top 25‰ is smaller, but your birth class is more predictive of your future income.

[TFYS]

Looks like most of Europe has better social mobility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

[s1artibartfast]

Unfortunately, no data on social mobility was used in the making of this ranking.

The authors picked several factors like which they assume lead to improved social mobility (like births/woman), score countries out of 100, then perform a simple numerical average them to form the mobility index. Look at page 205 of the report for the list. They don't validate that the factors are actually related in any way to mobility outcomes.

https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....

[TFYS]

Sure, it takes other things than income into consideration as well, but it's probably better that way if you really want to understand how easy it is to improve your life in each country. They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".

[s1artibartfast]

>Sure, it takes other things than income into consideration as well.

In fact, mean income feeds 0% into the index ranking. Intergenerational change in income feeds 0% into the index. Income inequality (fixed in time), feeds in 10% to the index.

> They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".

That is a reference to another study in the section explaining "why social mobility matters". It was NOT included in the Index ranking. That line data isn't sourced well, so it is hard to follow up on what exactly they are comparing and how.

[inter_netuser]

This could also be a question of culture. Somehow Americans just spend more on silliest things, it seems.

Anything can be sold in America.

[munk-a]

That's quite possible. Americans also lose a lot of money unnecessarily to utilities (the cellphone bills are ridiculous) and keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses like a starbucks a day. I think it's pretty hard to distinguish those costs as we can see similar or higher standards of living elsewhere - but I do think the out of pocket expenses hurt a lot (and they hurt even more when you stop drawing an income - retiring in the states is a huge gamble).

[inter_netuser]

Starbucks and fastfood, etc, I don't see it as keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses.

I feel in the US there is a lot of subconscious decision making that's essentially about buying more time with money, but in an actual monetary transaction as opposed to some implicit trade off. They seem to be chronically starved for time.