[wongarsu]

The US has the 8th highest GPD per capita in the world (PPP, place 7 if you use nominal numbers). About the same as Denmark, yet the US has nearly ten times as many prisoners per capita.

Clearly there are more differences between Denmark and the US. But I don't think that only countries wealthier than the US (the likes of Quatar, the UAE or Luxembourg) can afford to handle crime in a more humane way.

[w______roy]

And this illustrates why GDP is a terrible metric for measuring the kind of collective/civilizational wealth that they are talking about.