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Right, and if the United States merged with a cross section of less developed countries our GDP per capita would look smaller, too.
by standardUser 7y ago
Right, and if the United States merged with a cross section of less developed countries our GDP per capita would look smaller, too.
- leetcrew 7y agobut it didn't, and this is moving the goalposts. the original claim was correct.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe original claim was also a bad and misleading comparison. It doesn't make sense to compare a single country to an entire continent of 44 different countries, which are quite different from each other in a large variety of salient ways.
- leetcrew 7y agowhy not? the US is a large country (with more land area than the "entire continent" it's being compared against) with fifty states that are also quite different from each other. the US states are less autonomous than EU, but the country is large and diverse enough that it makes more sense to compare it to the entire EU than a very wealthy subset of US state-sized countries.
- oecdnerd 7y agoIt doesn't make sense to compare the EU to a federation with more than double its land area, composed of 50 different states, which are quite different from each other in a large variety of salient ways.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- samatman 7y agoIt assuredly does to citizens of the United States. The hint is in the name.
- oecdnerd 7y agoIf you drop Mississippi, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Alabama from the US numbers, then the US GDP per capita number would look bigger. Anyone can get different numbers by cherry-picking higher performers and dropping lower performers, but OP wrote "Europe" not "this list of rich countries in Europe".
- standardUser 7y agoIt's not cherry picking. One of these entities is a nation and the other is not. It's a bad comparison.
- ummonk 7y agoThe US isn't homogenous either. DC, Massachusetts, New York, California, Alaska, and Washington have much higher GDPs per capita than other states / provinces.
- standardUser 7y agoThe US is a nation state, the European Union is not. Comparing the two should only be done with a truckload of caveats to begin with. If anything, compare the Eurozone to the US.
- ummonk 7y agoWith visa-free travel, common regulations, etc., the European Union is certainly starting to approach the United States (notice the plural in "States"?) in developing a similar federal structure.
- gknoy 7y agoBrexit shows that there's still a major difference: member states can elect to leave. Economic penalties etc follow, and political fallout, but here in the US we fought a major war to demonstrate that states are _not_ allowed to secede from the union. (As much as many blue states might wish they could ...)
- VWWHFSfQ 7y agoThere are only two states in USA that could secede and not feel crippling economic impact. Texas and California. One Blue, one Red
- oecdnerd 7y agoUsing the OECD numbers[1]: (USGDPPC - EurozoneGDPPC) / AVERAGE(USGDPPC, EurozoneGDPPC) = 0.283 Roughly speaking, you could write this as "The GDP per capita of the Eurozone is 28.3% lower than the US". [1] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV
- aidenn0 7y agoI think the merged-with-less-developed countries is a red-herring. Run the calculation against the Eurozone and it doesn't change much. There's no single apples-to-apples measurement we can make; the US has more natural resources than the EU, suffered far less harm from all the major conflicts up through WW2, &c. I don't know whether or not liberalizing the economy of the EU would raise per-capita GDP or not, but the post I was replying to was claiming that a very specific and easy-to-check fact was wrong, so I checked it.
- icelancer 7y agoYeah, we call it "the South" here in the United States.