9 ms·

Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

109 points by eoinmurray92 7y ago

pwinnski 7y ago
I'm not sure how they're setting the points, exactly, but the US is certainly an outlier.
marcoperaza 7y ago
This is very deceptive. Under this methodology, people too poor to be called “middle class” in the US would be called middle class or higher in the other countries. Note how much higher the median income in the US is than in any other very large country (UK, Germany, France). There is no doubt the US is more unequal, but absolute wealth for the vast majority is higher.
- ixtli 7y ago
  Fair point but I think you can make the same claim if you only compare to countries of equivalent "first world" status. EDIT: It is still a potentially deceptive visualization though.
  - marcoperaza 7y ago
    What I said holds true when comparing to all of the major European powers too. The only countries that exceed or even come close to US per capita are small, homogenous countries with niche economic specialties or resource wealth.
- ucaetano 7y ago
  You can address that by using Gini index x median income. The result is the same: the US continues to be an outlier with significantly higher inequality than most developed countries.
- friday99 7y ago
  The graph isn't about absolute levels, but income distribution. The point I think they are trying to make is that higher total income countries tend to have a more equal income distribution. The US doesn't fit that trend, though also some of the lower total income countries such as the Czech Republic have more equal distribution as well.
  - marcoperaza 7y ago
    It’s incredibly deceptive because not only is almost everyone in the US wealthier than their counterparts in the distribution in Europe, but they have much higher purchasing power due to much lower prices.
    - dblotsky 7y ago
      But they might also spend more of that money on things that are free in Europe.
      - acchow 7y ago
        There should be data available for distributions of income including government transfers. But I would expect that the median for US would still be faring much better than the median for France.
        dblotsky 7y ago
        Based on what data would you expect that?
    - ModernMech 7y ago
      Do we though? I spend most of my income on rent, healthcare, and student loans. I don't buy much because at the end of the day there's not much left over.
    - cpmsmith 7y ago
      That's what the X axis is for.
- dblotsky 7y ago
  It’s unfair for many other reasons as well. In the US more of that income might go to services that are cheaper in other countries (e.g. healthcare, education). So, what looks like a higher number (even adjusted for PPP) might still be lower in practice.
- willyt 7y ago
  It’s hard to make a comparison because it’s purchasing power that counts not dollar income. It’s much cheaper to eat better quality food from Waitrose in London than from Wholefoods in New York. I felt that food shopping in New York State in general was about 3 times more expensive than in the UK. But British people pay more per m² in rent because our houses are smaller than US and EU averages. In fact many new builds built in Britain would be illegal in a lot of EU countries because they are too small. So it’s more complicated than dollars.
ixtli 7y ago
My intuition about this as someone who grew up in America and has traveled internationally quite a bit is that nowhere else on earth are the middle classes so convinced that one day they will be "millionaires" than here. This causes them to act against their own best interests. (This was observed by Engels long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness )
- pathseeker 7y ago
  >This causes them to act against their own best interests. That doesn't follow. You can act completely selfishly by not voting for unsustainable policies that appear to benefit you in the near term but would harm you in the long term.
- marcoperaza 7y ago
  Would you rather be richer and have more buying power in absolute terms, or just make sure the fellow next door doesn’t have more than you? This graph is misleading. It talks about middle class as a percent of national median income, which means large numbers of people counted as lower-class in the US would be counted as middle-class if they lived in Europe and made the same income.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    I'd most like to have an existence where I don't worry about being bankrupted by a medical emergency or surviving on cat food once I retire[0]. [0] The cheap cat food, I mean, not the $10/meal cat food that rich Americans buy their pets.
    - tristor 7y ago
      Presumably since you're posting on this site you have a marketable skillset in a high demand field, which means you can enjoy a lucrative career and through making good decisions have significant retirement savings so you can afford to eat normally. Maybe you meant that you want that existence for others, in which case, you might have a point, but I think a lot of the people who have your worries in the tech industry only have them because they live in stupidly high cost-of-living areas like SV.
ucaetano 7y ago
Another way to look at it is median income x Gini index. Essentially, higher-income countries tend to have lower inequality, but the US is an exception, with significantly higher inequality than other developed countries.
crushcrashcrush 7y ago
I have a real, honest to goodness question. I live in the Bay Area. I make $200,000 a year. I just had a mini-exit where I netted about $300K after taxes. I still rent for $2700/month. I don't want to buy an overpriced home in the bay in the suburbs (I wish we had for-sale condos like Toronto everywhere... still don't know why) I do well. I'm 32. I'm on an upwards path. But I don't feel upper class. I feel middle class. Maybe upper-middle. But I don't feel like I'm killing it. Should I?
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I make a lot less than that and my rent is more than that now... I’m also 10 years younger.
  - mfoy_ 7y ago
    How exactly does a 22-year-old have a $3k+ rent?
    - ixtli 7y ago
      I mean if you graduate college, get a finance job and live and work in lower manhattan i could see this happening. Might not be a very good idea but its still certainly possible.
    - RobAtticus 7y ago
      There are plenty of 1-bedrooms in high-cost of living areas like NYC, so one way is for the 22-year-old to rent one of them? Now it may not be financially advisable, but if he's making 120k that would be both "a lot less" than 200k and possible to rent a 3k apt, since landlords usually want 40x rent as income.
      - akhilcacharya 7y ago
        Studio :/
    - Simon_says 7y ago
blissofbeing 7y ago
Is there a full dataset somewhere? I would like to see where NZ is on this.
drocer88 7y ago
Top 20 congressional districts by income are Democratic. Proof : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party-controls-wealthiest-184200649.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party-controls-w... When the alternative is an "opposition" party that is suffering from "affluenza" , it's unlikely real fixes will happen anytime soon.
- ixtli 7y ago
  This is a bit misleading. It doesn't mean that the rich are predominantly rich (though this could be the case): that map is also basically a population density map which is, according to what i've seen, the only clear predictor of whether or not a county is likely to be "blue."
- padobson 7y ago
  Four of those 10 districts are suburbs of DC. They're voting for bigger government because they're getting rich from it.
wnevets 7y ago
That's ok, everybody in the lower class are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
cperciva 7y ago
I'd be interested to see how this graph looks if the USA were replaced by data points for each of the states. The USA is unusually big as countries go, and that will tend to increase the dispersion. (Or conversely: Replace all the European countries with a single EU data point -- you'll probably see an even smaller "middle class" for the EU than for the USA.)
- somethoughts 7y ago
  Here it is from a GDP perspective: http://www.aei.org/publication/putting-americas-enormous-19-4t-economy-into-perspective-by-comparing-us-state-gdps-to-entire-countries/ http://www.aei.org/publication/putting-americas-enormous-19-...
yardie 7y ago
In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact the government doesn't work at all. Yes, the DMV sucks, but guess what, that is the level of service voters decided they wanted and that is what the DMV can deliver based on it's funding; 1-2 hour wait times with 2 or 3 agents at the counter.
- ixtli 7y ago
  Don't even get me started. I did a year and a half of university in Tokyo and I used and paid for the health care system there a few times. Cavities filled for 20 dollars at high end central Tokyo offices. Skin doctors for zero dollars and prescribed creams for 800 yen. I knew a brain surgeon there who told me that the max price you could pay for his services was equivalent to 700 dollars. He didn't even bother going to conferences in America, and this was 10 years ago. Oh, and people love to talk about wait and access to doctors: not only did none of my experiences have a wait they didn't even have a schedule. I simply walked in to an office and was seen immediately, and the Tokyo metro area has 35 million people living in it.
  - umvi 7y ago
    I don't have anything to prove it but I swear countries like Japan and Germany are very good at this sort of thing because the people have a culture of strict obedience to authority be it the government or whatever. They love having and following well defined rules and are nonplussed (in the original sense of the word) when people break the rules. People in USA have the opposite attitude towards authority and rules. Go someplace in Europe that doesn't have this culture and it breaks down. Italy's healthcare is a circus. When I was in Italy not even that long ago a doctor came in to see me with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
    - whatever_dude 7y ago
CompelTechnic 7y ago
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/under-pressure-the-squeezed-middle-class_689afed1-en#page21 https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... The graph cites the report linked above. Middle income is defined as household income between 75% and 200% of median on page 19 of the report.
somethoughts 7y ago
Interestingly it seems from this articles figures that the actual disposable income of the middle class and lower class of the US is much higher than in Europe [1]. "The United States’ smaller middle income group still earns more than almost all its Western European counterparts. The average disposable income among middle income Americans in 2010 was $60,884, placing it comfortably ahead of Norway, which averaged $56,960. The one exception to Western Europe’s income trends was Luxembourg." [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle-class/524193/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle...
- standardUser 7y ago
  One would hope so, given the astronomical cost of healthcare and the near-universal requirement that every household own and maintain at least one car in order to work and attend school.
  - dmix 7y ago
    What is the average healthcare costs for an American? Aren't the majority of people in the US covered by Medicare or their employers plans? I'm from Canada so I'm curious what the yearly costs would be like. I typically lean libertarian on most areas of gov-run organizations but, much like prisons, public health insurance makes far more sense to be completely centralized vs the US random centralization and countless layers of legislation over their pretend private market. They are wasting money: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Health_care_cost_rise.svg/800px-Health_care_cost_rise.svg.png?1556055036730 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/He...
    - standardUser 7y ago
      Having employer-provided health insurance in the United States does not mean it does not cost the employee as well. Many companies require the employee pay part of the premiums, especially for families, and there are many, many out-of-pocket costs that people must pay even when they have insurance. In the US, there were about 1.4 million bankruptcies every year before Obamacare. There are around 700,000 per year now. But the majority of those are still widely considered to be related to medical costs (though exact statistics don't exist). That should give an idea of the burden most Americans face in terms of healthcare costs. More anecdotally, my own costs this year - as a single adult having employer-provided health insurance - is already about $800 out-of-pocket for a few office visits and tests.
Isamu 7y ago
The middle income group in the US has shrunk to around 48% of population. The lower income group has grown a bit and this is the real problem. This group is defined as below 75% of median. The upper income group has also grown significantly. This is defined as above 200% of median. While we complain (rightly) about the share going to the upper few percent, the percentage of population that is upper income in the US may be significant compared to other "rich" countries. But we aren't given that graph for comparison.
- return1 7y ago
  That is the case https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
  - padobson 7y ago
    Wow. According to that first chart, the middle class has shrunk 10% since 1971, with the upper class getting 5% larger and the lower class getting 5% larger.
    - rukittenme 7y ago
      Consider the number of retirees on fixed incomes in 1971 versus 2016. The US is getting wealthier and older.
Farradfahren 7y ago
What i never understood is- all those taxes you dont pay- they come back, often amplified? You dont pay for social services, and instead have to pay horrendous sums for private security, gated communities and private police who keeps the campus of your workplace safe. You dont pay for flat health care, and are milked to the bone with every accident. It looks so utterly self defeating from a distance. Why would somebody who wants to pay so little, pay so much for the same thing? Its really bizarr.
willvarfar 7y ago
This reminds me of a TEDx talk titled "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Spoiler: Scandinavia, which happens to be top-right in this chart too. That talk has been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542391
dragonwriter 7y ago
I don't really like calling 75% to 200% of median income “middle class”, both because it's not really capturing an economic class distinction and because proportional symmetry suggests 50%-200% or 75%-133% would be properly centered middle income segments. But that doesn't change that it's interesting how much the US is an outlier in terms of the aggregate performance vs. distribution measure used.
- ranie93 7y ago
  Could you expand a bit on how its not really capturing economic class distinction ?
hartator 7y ago
This is misleading. Every countries in Europe would have a smaller middle class if you take the $32-33k median US income.
- dlp211 7y ago
  If you mean the whole world, then yes that is (mostly) true, but it is true for every high income nation, and therefore not really informative. If you mean against other high income nation's, then it is only true in the most superficial sense, as once you include all benefits available to people, and social and economic mobility, the US quickly falls down the charts.
  - hartator 7y ago
    > If you mean the whole world, then yes that is (mostly) true, but it is true for every high income nation, and therefore not really informative. Just against Europe (France, Germany, and UK). If everyone is poorer, I don't see the win. Remember Europe used to have a higher GPD per capita than the US not so long ago.
gok 7y ago
The actual OECD report is a good read: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/689afed1-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/689afed1-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/689afed1-en/index.html?i... The more complete quote is: > There are two striking exceptions to the positive relationship between absolute median income and the size of the middle-income class: > The United States. Although it boasts the fourth-largest median income, it has only the 31st-largest middle-income class of all OECD countries. Related statistics are that its population has the third-largest share of people in poverty and the fourth-largest in the upper-income class. > The Central European countries of the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland and Slovenia. In these countries, the shares of the population in the middle-income class exceed what might be expected from their median income levels.
m0zg 7y ago
Middle class is a meaningless term even within the US, let alone in comparison to other countries. What is "middle class"? Nowadays it seems that if you can afford to buy a house and reliably put food on the table, and have a couple of kids, while putting any money away for retirement you're considered "upper" middle class at least. To me that's just a baseline requirement for not being poor.
WalterBright 7y ago
Yet the chart shows that the US middle class is much wealthier than the middle class of other countries.
- ranie93 7y ago
  And also smaller, that can't be forgotten. Reading this through the lens of income inequality; I don't think having a smaller, yet richer middle class, is necessarily something to be proud of.
  - pathseeker 7y ago
    Eliminating people at the higher income brackets until the average has lowered enough that you have a large middle class isn't something to be proud of either.
    - ranie93 7y ago
      Is it? In the scenario you say we shouldn't be necessarily proud of more people would be economically well-off (e.g. less people choosing between food and rent). Are you sure that wouldn't be something to be proud of?
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        The graph has nothing to say about the relative prevalence of people choosing between food and rent.
        ranie93 7y ago
        I have not read the report entirely so I can't say if it does, but I don't know for a fact either which is why I left it as a parenthetical. I am fine with my comment being interpreted without the parenthetical.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    According to how the graph was constructed, you can't actually infer that the middle class in the US is smaller, because it defines the middle class as wealthier to begin with.
diogenescynic 7y ago
Healthcare, college, and childcare are all exceptionally expensive in America. Those are the fundamentals to having a middle-class life. You're better off as a middle class person in Western Europe than an upper-middle class person in the US. We have virtually no safety nets either. At least Europeans have a better sense of community and family and a welfare state to offer a safety net. I think being an average American is definitely more stressful than being your average Western European. I blame republicans like Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bush Sr. and Jr., Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan for the hollowing out of the middle class and giving trillions in tax cuts to billionaires. Vote Bernie if you want this to change and vote for Medicare for all.
rayiner 7y ago
It's worth reading the underlying OECD report: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/under-pressure-the-squeezed-middle-class_689afed1-en https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... Two points based on the charts on page 44, 46. 1) Looking at just "middle income" people exaggerates the situation in the U.S. because part of the reason the U.S. has a smaller middle class is because it has a bigger upper class. About 15% of the U.S. is "upper income" versus 5% in countries like Denmark, Norway, or France. At the other end, about 35% of the U.S. is "lower income" or below. That's on the high side, but Sweden, Ireland, and the U.K. are not that far off, at about 30%. Even Norway and Denmark are in the 25-26% range. The more concerning thing (and the OECD report focuses on that) is that almost 20% of the U.S. is poor (below 50% of median income) versus say 10% in Sweden (or 5% in Denmark). 2) Being "middle income" means different things in different countries. The lower threshold for the U.S. is $23,416 PPP-adjusted 2010 dollars per year. That's right around the median income for Germany. Put differently, someone who is right at the boundary between "middle income" and "lower income" in the U.S. is right at the median income in Germany. Many of the people in the U.S. classified as "low income" in the U.S. would still qualify as "middle income" in Germany.
- noja 7y ago
  > are not that far off Don't ignore the safety net.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  That's definitely interesting, though I think your comparison isn't entirely fair either. You will live a much better life in Sweden, Ireland or the UK as a "middle income" and especially as "lower income" or "poor" person. Those people, for instance, don't have to fear going broke if they break their leg one day.
- runako 7y ago
  You obviously know this, but for those who are not familiar with America, regarding #2 above, the experience in the US is vastly different from other rich countries. > The lower threshold for the U.S. is $23,416 PPP-adjusted 2010 dollars per year. A person that makes this in the US usually will not receive health insurance at work. Depending on the specifics of the person's demographics/state/income, a worker at the boundary between "middle income" and "lower income" may not be eligible for ACA subsidies and may not make enough to pay premiums. The middle/lower part of the income range is where a lot of the uninsured live. Jobs that pay near this boundary also tend not to come with real health insurance. So the frequent debate about repealing the ACA means that even if they are insured today, these folks do not have any healthcare security as the nation actively debates repealing their lifeline. (IIRC the Supreme Court will decide this summer whether millions of people lose their insurance this year. It's not a sure thing either way.) My personal take is that not until you're fairly rich (upper middle class) can you attain roughly the level of healthcare security that comes with residency in other rich countries. And even that requires you to stay employed, so it's still a lesser quality of security. Similar factors apply to the rest of the safety net. The US might be the worst rich country to live in if you're low-income/modest income.
eoinmurray92 7y ago
Also interesting is looking at GDP per capita vs equality (GINI coefficient) I've posted the graph here: https://kyso.io/eoin/gdp-per-capita-vs-gini https://kyso.io/eoin/gdp-per-capita-vs-gini And a discussion link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732909
rukittenme 7y ago
Note: caps are for emphasis not yelling. Household income is a stupid metric. In America, the top 20% of households contains TWICE as many PEOPLE as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains FOUR times as many income earners as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains THREE times as many children and HALF as many retirees as the bottom 20% of households. So when someone says America has too many "poor" households. Consider that those poor households EXIST because they are WEALTHY enough to afford it! Consider Italy. More households in the middle income share than America. Is that because Italy is an economic paradise? Or because of a strong, centralized bureaucracy capable of administering income distribution schemes? Maybe. But it could be the case that the old and young can not afford to establish their own households. So they continue to live with the working members of their family and enjoy the "benefit" of being a middle class household. I don't mean to imply that America is perfect and that Italy is not. I only want to say that this chart is an awful way to represent data and is, in my opinion, intentionally misleading.

109 points by eoinmurray92 7y ago

I'm not sure how they're setting the points, exactly, but the US is certainly an outlier.

This is very deceptive. Under this methodology, people too poor to be called “middle class” in the US would be called middle class or higher in the other countries. Note how much higher the median income in the US is than in any other very large country (UK, Germany, France). There is no doubt the US is more unequal, but absolute wealth for the vast majority is higher.

ixtli 7y ago
Fair point but I think you can make the same claim if you only compare to countries of equivalent "first world" status. EDIT: It is still a potentially deceptive visualization though.
- marcoperaza 7y ago
  What I said holds true when comparing to all of the major European powers too. The only countries that exceed or even come close to US per capita are small, homogenous countries with niche economic specialties or resource wealth.
ucaetano 7y ago
You can address that by using Gini index x median income. The result is the same: the US continues to be an outlier with significantly higher inequality than most developed countries.
friday99 7y ago
The graph isn't about absolute levels, but income distribution. The point I think they are trying to make is that higher total income countries tend to have a more equal income distribution. The US doesn't fit that trend, though also some of the lower total income countries such as the Czech Republic have more equal distribution as well.
- marcoperaza 7y ago
  It’s incredibly deceptive because not only is almost everyone in the US wealthier than their counterparts in the distribution in Europe, but they have much higher purchasing power due to much lower prices.
  - dblotsky 7y ago
    But they might also spend more of that money on things that are free in Europe.
    - acchow 7y ago
      There should be data available for distributions of income including government transfers. But I would expect that the median for US would still be faring much better than the median for France.
      - dblotsky 7y ago
        Based on what data would you expect that?
  - ModernMech 7y ago
    Do we though? I spend most of my income on rent, healthcare, and student loans. I don't buy much because at the end of the day there's not much left over.
  - cpmsmith 7y ago
    That's what the X axis is for.
dblotsky 7y ago
It’s unfair for many other reasons as well. In the US more of that income might go to services that are cheaper in other countries (e.g. healthcare, education). So, what looks like a higher number (even adjusted for PPP) might still be lower in practice.
willyt 7y ago
It’s hard to make a comparison because it’s purchasing power that counts not dollar income. It’s much cheaper to eat better quality food from Waitrose in London than from Wholefoods in New York. I felt that food shopping in New York State in general was about 3 times more expensive than in the UK. But British people pay more per m² in rent because our houses are smaller than US and EU averages. In fact many new builds built in Britain would be illegal in a lot of EU countries because they are too small. So it’s more complicated than dollars.

ixtli 7y ago

My intuition about this as someone who grew up in America and has traveled internationally quite a bit is that nowhere else on earth are the middle classes so convinced that one day they will be "millionaires" than here. This causes them to act against their own best interests. (This was observed by Engels long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness )

pathseeker 7y ago
>This causes them to act against their own best interests. That doesn't follow. You can act completely selfishly by not voting for unsustainable policies that appear to benefit you in the near term but would harm you in the long term.
marcoperaza 7y ago
Would you rather be richer and have more buying power in absolute terms, or just make sure the fellow next door doesn’t have more than you? This graph is misleading. It talks about middle class as a percent of national median income, which means large numbers of people counted as lower-class in the US would be counted as middle-class if they lived in Europe and made the same income.
- scarmig 7y ago
  I'd most like to have an existence where I don't worry about being bankrupted by a medical emergency or surviving on cat food once I retire[0]. [0] The cheap cat food, I mean, not the $10/meal cat food that rich Americans buy their pets.
  - tristor 7y ago
    Presumably since you're posting on this site you have a marketable skillset in a high demand field, which means you can enjoy a lucrative career and through making good decisions have significant retirement savings so you can afford to eat normally. Maybe you meant that you want that existence for others, in which case, you might have a point, but I think a lot of the people who have your worries in the tech industry only have them because they live in stupidly high cost-of-living areas like SV.

ucaetano 7y ago

Another way to look at it is median income x Gini index. Essentially, higher-income countries tend to have lower inequality, but the US is an exception, with significantly higher inequality than other developed countries.

crushcrashcrush 7y ago

I have a real, honest to goodness question. I live in the Bay Area. I make $200,000 a year. I just had a mini-exit where I netted about $300K after taxes. I still rent for $2700/month. I don't want to buy an overpriced home in the bay in the suburbs (I wish we had for-sale condos like Toronto everywhere... still don't know why) I do well. I'm 32. I'm on an upwards path. But I don't feel upper class. I feel middle class. Maybe upper-middle. But I don't feel like I'm killing it. Should I?

akhilcacharya 7y ago
I make a lot less than that and my rent is more than that now... I’m also 10 years younger.
- mfoy_ 7y ago
  How exactly does a 22-year-old have a $3k+ rent?
  - ixtli 7y ago
    I mean if you graduate college, get a finance job and live and work in lower manhattan i could see this happening. Might not be a very good idea but its still certainly possible.
  - RobAtticus 7y ago
    There are plenty of 1-bedrooms in high-cost of living areas like NYC, so one way is for the 22-year-old to rent one of them? Now it may not be financially advisable, but if he's making 120k that would be both "a lot less" than 200k and possible to rent a 3k apt, since landlords usually want 40x rent as income.
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
      Studio :/
  - Simon_says 7y ago

blissofbeing 7y ago

Is there a full dataset somewhere? I would like to see where NZ is on this.

drocer88 7y ago

Top 20 congressional districts by income are Democratic. Proof : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party-controls-wealthiest-184200649.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party-controls-w... When the alternative is an "opposition" party that is suffering from "affluenza" , it's unlikely real fixes will happen anytime soon.

ixtli 7y ago
This is a bit misleading. It doesn't mean that the rich are predominantly rich (though this could be the case): that map is also basically a population density map which is, according to what i've seen, the only clear predictor of whether or not a county is likely to be "blue."
padobson 7y ago
Four of those 10 districts are suburbs of DC. They're voting for bigger government because they're getting rich from it.

wnevets 7y ago

That's ok, everybody in the lower class are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

cperciva 7y ago

I'd be interested to see how this graph looks if the USA were replaced by data points for each of the states. The USA is unusually big as countries go, and that will tend to increase the dispersion. (Or conversely: Replace all the European countries with a single EU data point -- you'll probably see an even smaller "middle class" for the EU than for the USA.)

somethoughts 7y ago
Here it is from a GDP perspective: http://www.aei.org/publication/putting-americas-enormous-19-4t-economy-into-perspective-by-comparing-us-state-gdps-to-entire-countries/ http://www.aei.org/publication/putting-americas-enormous-19-...

yardie 7y ago

In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact the government doesn't work at all. Yes, the DMV sucks, but guess what, that is the level of service voters decided they wanted and that is what the DMV can deliver based on it's funding; 1-2 hour wait times with 2 or 3 agents at the counter.

ixtli 7y ago
Don't even get me started. I did a year and a half of university in Tokyo and I used and paid for the health care system there a few times. Cavities filled for 20 dollars at high end central Tokyo offices. Skin doctors for zero dollars and prescribed creams for 800 yen. I knew a brain surgeon there who told me that the max price you could pay for his services was equivalent to 700 dollars. He didn't even bother going to conferences in America, and this was 10 years ago. Oh, and people love to talk about wait and access to doctors: not only did none of my experiences have a wait they didn't even have a schedule. I simply walked in to an office and was seen immediately, and the Tokyo metro area has 35 million people living in it.
- umvi 7y ago
  I don't have anything to prove it but I swear countries like Japan and Germany are very good at this sort of thing because the people have a culture of strict obedience to authority be it the government or whatever. They love having and following well defined rules and are nonplussed (in the original sense of the word) when people break the rules. People in USA have the opposite attitude towards authority and rules. Go someplace in Europe that doesn't have this culture and it breaks down. Italy's healthcare is a circus. When I was in Italy not even that long ago a doctor came in to see me with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
  - whatever_dude 7y ago

CompelTechnic 7y ago

https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/under-pressure-the-squeezed-middle-class_689afed1-en#page21 https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... The graph cites the report linked above. Middle income is defined as household income between 75% and 200% of median on page 19 of the report.

somethoughts 7y ago

Interestingly it seems from this articles figures that the actual disposable income of the middle class and lower class of the US is much higher than in Europe [1]. "The United States’ smaller middle income group still earns more than almost all its Western European counterparts. The average disposable income among middle income Americans in 2010 was $60,884, placing it comfortably ahead of Norway, which averaged $56,960. The one exception to Western Europe’s income trends was Luxembourg." [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle-class/524193/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle...

standardUser 7y ago
One would hope so, given the astronomical cost of healthcare and the near-universal requirement that every household own and maintain at least one car in order to work and attend school.
- dmix 7y ago
  What is the average healthcare costs for an American? Aren't the majority of people in the US covered by Medicare or their employers plans? I'm from Canada so I'm curious what the yearly costs would be like. I typically lean libertarian on most areas of gov-run organizations but, much like prisons, public health insurance makes far more sense to be completely centralized vs the US random centralization and countless layers of legislation over their pretend private market. They are wasting money: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Health_care_cost_rise.svg/800px-Health_care_cost_rise.svg.png?1556055036730 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/He...
  - standardUser 7y ago
    Having employer-provided health insurance in the United States does not mean it does not cost the employee as well. Many companies require the employee pay part of the premiums, especially for families, and there are many, many out-of-pocket costs that people must pay even when they have insurance. In the US, there were about 1.4 million bankruptcies every year before Obamacare. There are around 700,000 per year now. But the majority of those are still widely considered to be related to medical costs (though exact statistics don't exist). That should give an idea of the burden most Americans face in terms of healthcare costs. More anecdotally, my own costs this year - as a single adult having employer-provided health insurance - is already about $800 out-of-pocket for a few office visits and tests.

Isamu 7y ago

The middle income group in the US has shrunk to around 48% of population. The lower income group has grown a bit and this is the real problem. This group is defined as below 75% of median. The upper income group has also grown significantly. This is defined as above 200% of median. While we complain (rightly) about the share going to the upper few percent, the percentage of population that is upper income in the US may be significant compared to other "rich" countries. But we aren't given that graph for comparison.

return1 7y ago
That is the case https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
- padobson 7y ago
  Wow. According to that first chart, the middle class has shrunk 10% since 1971, with the upper class getting 5% larger and the lower class getting 5% larger.
  - rukittenme 7y ago
    Consider the number of retirees on fixed incomes in 1971 versus 2016. The US is getting wealthier and older.

Farradfahren 7y ago

What i never understood is- all those taxes you dont pay- they come back, often amplified? You dont pay for social services, and instead have to pay horrendous sums for private security, gated communities and private police who keeps the campus of your workplace safe. You dont pay for flat health care, and are milked to the bone with every accident. It looks so utterly self defeating from a distance. Why would somebody who wants to pay so little, pay so much for the same thing? Its really bizarr.

willvarfar 7y ago

This reminds me of a TEDx talk titled "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Spoiler: Scandinavia, which happens to be top-right in this chart too. That talk has been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542391

dragonwriter 7y ago

I don't really like calling 75% to 200% of median income “middle class”, both because it's not really capturing an economic class distinction and because proportional symmetry suggests 50%-200% or 75%-133% would be properly centered middle income segments. But that doesn't change that it's interesting how much the US is an outlier in terms of the aggregate performance vs. distribution measure used.

ranie93 7y ago
Could you expand a bit on how its not really capturing economic class distinction ?

hartator 7y ago

This is misleading. Every countries in Europe would have a smaller middle class if you take the $32-33k median US income.

dlp211 7y ago
If you mean the whole world, then yes that is (mostly) true, but it is true for every high income nation, and therefore not really informative. If you mean against other high income nation's, then it is only true in the most superficial sense, as once you include all benefits available to people, and social and economic mobility, the US quickly falls down the charts.
- hartator 7y ago
  > If you mean the whole world, then yes that is (mostly) true, but it is true for every high income nation, and therefore not really informative. Just against Europe (France, Germany, and UK). If everyone is poorer, I don't see the win. Remember Europe used to have a higher GPD per capita than the US not so long ago.

gok 7y ago

The actual OECD report is a good read: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/689afed1-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/689afed1-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/689afed1-en/index.html?i... The more complete quote is: > There are two striking exceptions to the positive relationship between absolute median income and the size of the middle-income class: > The United States. Although it boasts the fourth-largest median income, it has only the 31st-largest middle-income class of all OECD countries. Related statistics are that its population has the third-largest share of people in poverty and the fourth-largest in the upper-income class. > The Central European countries of the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland and Slovenia. In these countries, the shares of the population in the middle-income class exceed what might be expected from their median income levels.

m0zg 7y ago

Middle class is a meaningless term even within the US, let alone in comparison to other countries. What is "middle class"? Nowadays it seems that if you can afford to buy a house and reliably put food on the table, and have a couple of kids, while putting any money away for retirement you're considered "upper" middle class at least. To me that's just a baseline requirement for not being poor.

WalterBright 7y ago

Yet the chart shows that the US middle class is much wealthier than the middle class of other countries.

ranie93 7y ago
And also smaller, that can't be forgotten. Reading this through the lens of income inequality; I don't think having a smaller, yet richer middle class, is necessarily something to be proud of.
- pathseeker 7y ago
  Eliminating people at the higher income brackets until the average has lowered enough that you have a large middle class isn't something to be proud of either.
  - ranie93 7y ago
    Is it? In the scenario you say we shouldn't be necessarily proud of more people would be economically well-off (e.g. less people choosing between food and rent). Are you sure that wouldn't be something to be proud of?
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      The graph has nothing to say about the relative prevalence of people choosing between food and rent.
      - ranie93 7y ago
        I have not read the report entirely so I can't say if it does, but I don't know for a fact either which is why I left it as a parenthetical. I am fine with my comment being interpreted without the parenthetical.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  According to how the graph was constructed, you can't actually infer that the middle class in the US is smaller, because it defines the middle class as wealthier to begin with.

diogenescynic 7y ago

Healthcare, college, and childcare are all exceptionally expensive in America. Those are the fundamentals to having a middle-class life. You're better off as a middle class person in Western Europe than an upper-middle class person in the US. We have virtually no safety nets either. At least Europeans have a better sense of community and family and a welfare state to offer a safety net. I think being an average American is definitely more stressful than being your average Western European. I blame republicans like Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bush Sr. and Jr., Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan for the hollowing out of the middle class and giving trillions in tax cuts to billionaires. Vote Bernie if you want this to change and vote for Medicare for all.

rayiner 7y ago

It's worth reading the underlying OECD report: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/under-pressure-the-squeezed-middle-class_689afed1-en https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... Two points based on the charts on page 44, 46. 1) Looking at just "middle income" people exaggerates the situation in the U.S. because part of the reason the U.S. has a smaller middle class is because it has a bigger upper class. About 15% of the U.S. is "upper income" versus 5% in countries like Denmark, Norway, or France. At the other end, about 35% of the U.S. is "lower income" or below. That's on the high side, but Sweden, Ireland, and the U.K. are not that far off, at about 30%. Even Norway and Denmark are in the 25-26% range. The more concerning thing (and the OECD report focuses on that) is that almost 20% of the U.S. is poor (below 50% of median income) versus say 10% in Sweden (or 5% in Denmark). 2) Being "middle income" means different things in different countries. The lower threshold for the U.S. is $23,416 PPP-adjusted 2010 dollars per year. That's right around the median income for Germany. Put differently, someone who is right at the boundary between "middle income" and "lower income" in the U.S. is right at the median income in Germany. Many of the people in the U.S. classified as "low income" in the U.S. would still qualify as "middle income" in Germany.

noja 7y ago
> are not that far off Don't ignore the safety net.
arcticbull 7y ago
That's definitely interesting, though I think your comparison isn't entirely fair either. You will live a much better life in Sweden, Ireland or the UK as a "middle income" and especially as "lower income" or "poor" person. Those people, for instance, don't have to fear going broke if they break their leg one day.
runako 7y ago
You obviously know this, but for those who are not familiar with America, regarding #2 above, the experience in the US is vastly different from other rich countries. > The lower threshold for the U.S. is $23,416 PPP-adjusted 2010 dollars per year. A person that makes this in the US usually will not receive health insurance at work. Depending on the specifics of the person's demographics/state/income, a worker at the boundary between "middle income" and "lower income" may not be eligible for ACA subsidies and may not make enough to pay premiums. The middle/lower part of the income range is where a lot of the uninsured live. Jobs that pay near this boundary also tend not to come with real health insurance. So the frequent debate about repealing the ACA means that even if they are insured today, these folks do not have any healthcare security as the nation actively debates repealing their lifeline. (IIRC the Supreme Court will decide this summer whether millions of people lose their insurance this year. It's not a sure thing either way.) My personal take is that not until you're fairly rich (upper middle class) can you attain roughly the level of healthcare security that comes with residency in other rich countries. And even that requires you to stay employed, so it's still a lesser quality of security. Similar factors apply to the rest of the safety net. The US might be the worst rich country to live in if you're low-income/modest income.

eoinmurray92 7y ago

Also interesting is looking at GDP per capita vs equality (GINI coefficient) I've posted the graph here: https://kyso.io/eoin/gdp-per-capita-vs-gini https://kyso.io/eoin/gdp-per-capita-vs-gini And a discussion link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732909

rukittenme 7y ago

Note: caps are for emphasis not yelling. Household income is a stupid metric. In America, the top 20% of households contains TWICE as many PEOPLE as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains FOUR times as many income earners as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains THREE times as many children and HALF as many retirees as the bottom 20% of households. So when someone says America has too many "poor" households. Consider that those poor households EXIST because they are WEALTHY enough to afford it! Consider Italy. More households in the middle income share than America. Is that because Italy is an economic paradise? Or because of a strong, centralized bureaucracy capable of administering income distribution schemes? Maybe. But it could be the case that the old and young can not afford to establish their own households. So they continue to live with the working members of their family and enjoy the "benefit" of being a middle class household. I don't mean to imply that America is perfect and that Italy is not. I only want to say that this chart is an awful way to represent data and is, in my opinion, intentionally misleading.