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You're looking at GDP when comparing Missouri to European nations. Bulgaria has higher life expectancy than half this country.

echelon 10 days ago

It's unfair to compare the US, which is incredibly and wildly diverse in race and culture, against monocultural Europe.

I grew up in the South. You'll have to kill these people to take away their sweet tea and fried chicken. And that's just one dimension.

In fact, America's wealth (and our fairly generous welfare programs, despite what Europeans might think) actually enables the massive obesity rates we have, which is one of the main reasons we have lower life expectancies. If Europeans were richer they'd likely be eating themselves to death more like we do (though cultural and other factors play a role too).

You don't think Europeans can afford to eat the cheap crap that makes one fat? Healthy food is expensive, garbage food is cheap. Obesity is a poverty problem in the whole western world.

No it must be that Europeans can't afford corn fed omega-6 beef, corn syrup water and baked extruded corn mush coated in MSG so they have to get by eating real bread, tomatoes and ham.

The OP is about wealth, not life expectancy.

The standard of life you get is one you can afford. GDP PPI does a better job of capturing this than GDP, but better yet look at how long people live. The best raw GDP is gotten when you drive your working class until they collapse and die and thus is a shitty metric for measuring quality of life unless that means the ability to acquire globally manufactured trinkets to you.

Americans have homes roughly twice as big as European homes, and a far higher percentage of Americans are homeowners than Europeans. Home ownership rates are within a few percent of each other too.

Part of the reason we're fat as fuck is that giant parcels of land make driving everywhere mandatory.

Better then living in a crowded city where they let rabid hobos attack you on the bus with effectively no consequences.

I guess this is the difference between people existing for the betterment of the economy vs the economy existing for the betterment of people.

And which do you think is which? Whatever the "intent" of either the US or EU economies, the US has produced far greater wealth and material prosperity for its citizens than Europe has for its citizens.

Material prosperity. Euros don't have the newest iPhones, 3 row SUVs or a gas dryer that gets your load of laundry crispy in 30 minutes flat. They have third spaces, public transit that actually covers cities/intra-city transport and in southern countries actual food (for now).

And infant mortality rates 2/3 of the USA.

tossandthrow 10 days ago

If you move health care out of the US economy (as it largely is in the EU), you are at quite similar gdp.

Nope, even adjusting for health care costs the average American is still roughly 20-40% richer than the average European. This may come as a shock to you, but roughly 20% of Americans are on Medicaid, our state-sponsored healthcare insurance. America does actually provide healthcare for its poorest citizens.

tossandthrow 9 days ago

Source?

When I run the calculations and take vacation, health, education for the median person they are close to similar.

But these calculations does not take into consideration: less noisy cities, walkable neighborhoods, longer life expectancy, higher quality food, better workers protections, education, etc.

An honest study would need to include the value of the commons.

> roughly 20-40% richer

This is likely wrong. Americans have better purchasing power, but are not necessarily richer.

MaxHoppersGhost 10 days ago

I wish we’d focus more on living standards than wealth as I think that’s what really matters. “How can we lift up the people with low living standards in the US?” should be the question rather than “How can we keep people from becoming ultra rich?” which I think is what happened in Europe. The only reason wealth should be checked is because of undue influence on politics/power. Otherwise I don’t care if there are 1,000 trillionaires as long as as many Americans as possible have a good quality of life. I think for many the obsession with redistributing wealth comes from a deep seated jealousy.

Regarding your last sentence about the jealousy, I have been thinking about this quite a bit for myself, if it is actually jealousy. And I have come to the following realisation:

I would like 20$ million. It would let me live the life I want (with extra), and take care of the people I love. I would be able to spend my time doing only things I like. I am envious of people having this kind of wealth. I don't really want more, and I am not more envious of someone having 100 of millions of dollars. This you must just belive me on, but I truly don't see what I would do with more than 20$ million.

But they, the ones with hundreds of millions, are the ones I want to tax. Because I am afraid of them, afraid of the power that comes with the wealth. And if it was envy I would have wanted to tax everyone I envied, also the ones with 10-20$ million. But I am fine with them having their wealth, cause they don't scare me.

enoint 10 days ago

Maybe envy, as a sin, was easy to see in premodern times; as the number of children, rather than tax bracket.

So, money is likes votes into the economy, and it decides what the economy produces. When a rich man decides that a house should be built for his two dogs, and that another human should spend their time taking care of those dogs, he can use his money to influence the economy to produce as he wants. The labour does not pop into existence from the void, similar with the materials for the house. It is a redirection of the economy to produce what he wants.

Money is not like mana, it does not conjure things into existence, it moves (through the invisible hand) the economy to produce what the owner desires.

Now, this does absolutely not mean that the economy is zero sum (over time). There are of course something the economy can do which will be productive and produce more goods, and there can be bad decisions. Wealth can absolutely be created by actually value creation, but also by a lot of parasitic processes(and inheritance). And the owner of money gets to controll what the economy does, you don't (barely).

A large concentration of wealth will mean that the economy at large will to a larger degree be used to produce what really rich people wants, instead of producing things the middle class wants.

enoint 10 days ago

I wonder how many people think about the options we can offer to our children. Will my future grandchildren have access to gene therapy? Or has generational wealth already closed the door for the upper-middle class? Maybe that’s jealousy or envy.

actionfromafar 10 days ago

The poorest US states are wealthier through redistribution of wealth to them from other states.

Mississippians average $43,000 of disposable income. Net federal money to Mississippi is roughly $9,000 per capita. Even if we assume that 100% of that $9,000 is welfare payments to the poorest, that still puts Mississippi roughly equal to Germany in terms of disposable income.

And still Mississipi has a child mortality rate og 9.65 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to Germanys 3.4. Life expectancy is 72.6 vs 81.7 (!!)

Looking at income per person really misses some important factors of a societies real riches.

Mississippi has a very high obesity rate (enabled by our wealth and our fairly generous welfare programs, actually). Mississippi also has a far higher percentage of black residents than the median US state, and blacks generally have higher rates of obesity and lower life expectancy due to lifestyle choices, higher rates of participation in gang violence (which leads to a higher murder rate), and various other cultural and environmental factors.

A Mississippian is free to eat themselves to death (enabled by Americans' wealth) in a way that Europeans simply can't.

As mentioned before, your view that Europeans can't afford to eat the cheap shit that makes you fat, is just straight up absurd. Across western countries (including the USA) obesity is a poverty problem. It's often called the "poverty obesity paradox". There is no lack of information about it online if you care about knowing, and American obesity is not the flex you seem to think it is.

White people in Mississipi had a infant mortality rate close to the national average at 5.8. Which still means it's 50% more likely that a birth result in the infants death the the USA than in Europe. The fact that black people in Mississipi has a infant mortality rate of 16 should really shock you, and indicates that something is seriously wrong somewhere.