2 ms·

You'd be better off talking about household-adjusted median disposable income at PPP levels. It still makes your point, not as dramatically but more solidly. Th

You'd be better off talking about household-adjusted median disposable income at PPP levels. It still makes your point, not as dramatically but more solidly. There's a table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalen... There's another chart here, from OECD with similar distribution and levels: https://mises.org/blog/when-it-comes-household-income-sweden-and-germany-rank-kentucky https://mises.org/blog/when-it-comes-household-income-sweden... (You need to adjust for different levels of required expenditures (different things are subsidised in different countries), different cost levels for local goods and services, different worker participation rates (e.g. dual income vs single income), etc.)

adventured 9y ago
Perhaps. The foundation of the parent's claim, rested on the French middle class seeing stronger wage growth than the US. That claim is very painfully false, as French wage growth is typically far lower than the US wage growth across the board. In fact French wage growth has been extremely poor for the last two decades, which shoots a massive hole in the premise about their labor code somehow being beneficial to that middle class (persistently high unemployment + very low wage growth). How long can French wage growth continue at 0.5%, while the US continues at 2.5%, before the gap gets extreme? I think it's probably aleady nearing that point, as it pertains to developed nations standards. And that obviously isn't to say the US is the best in the world at any of this, it's simply that the French economy has performed so miserably in general. They've basically been failing to keep pace with global economic growth for three decades, watching their macro, per capita & household rankings slide persistently.

adventured 9y ago

Perhaps. The foundation of the parent's claim, rested on the French middle class seeing stronger wage growth than the US. That claim is very painfully false, as French wage growth is typically far lower than the US wage growth across the board. In fact French wage growth has been extremely poor for the last two decades, which shoots a massive hole in the premise about their labor code somehow being beneficial to that middle class (persistently high unemployment + very low wage growth). How long can French wage growth continue at 0.5%, while the US continues at 2.5%, before the gap gets extreme? I think it's probably aleady nearing that point, as it pertains to developed nations standards. And that obviously isn't to say the US is the best in the world at any of this, it's simply that the French economy has performed so miserably in general. They've basically been failing to keep pace with global economic growth for three decades, watching their macro, per capita & household rankings slide persistently.