> I don’t see how any of this supports GDP per capita as a QOL metric. My bad, I should have clarified. I was trying to make a point about teaching being a r

> I don’t see how any of this supports GDP per capita as a QOL metric. My bad, I should have clarified. I was trying to make a point about teaching being a relatively well paid job in (in this case) my home country of India and that thinking of COL or QOL in simple terms of scalar multiples is not all that helpful. That being said, your other point totally holds. GDP is 100%, a flimsy metric to gauge QOL. Also, India-US disparity may be closer to 7-8x, but in the Ethiopia-US case it appears to be closer to 60-70x. You correct, that 800$/year is a laughable income to live any kind of life, and no difference in GDPs or cost of products is going to make up for such a massive difference in wealth. This is a country living almost entirely in poverty, and earning a standard deviation for two more than the median would still leave one in crippling poverty.