6 ms·

Look i get that USA has a lot of billionaires and the GDP per capita looks great for the USA but I want US citizens to please take a look at median wealth per a

Look i get that USA has a lot of billionaires and the GDP per capita looks great for the USA but I want US citizens to please take a look at median wealth per adult and see how far you have to scroll down to find the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... This is a great way to rule out outliers. My home country Australia has 3X the median wealth per adult of the USA. This is similar to the median wealth difference between the USA and China for reference. It shows to be honest having lived in both countries. Specifically it shows in the conditions that minimum wage earners in the USA face, eg. having to live off food stamps as is common for wallmart workers for example is just horrendous. eg. https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/report-amazon-walmart-workers-on-list-of-top-food-stamp-users/830854650/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/report-amazon-walmart-worke... Australians usually call out companies that make things in sweatshops where pay is below the poverty line. Specifically clothing in Asia. But i believe we should start doing this for US companies as well. Sure the US minimum wage is higher than say Bangladesh but since the cost of living in the US is higher too so it doesn't change the fact that things manufactured at minimum wage in the US are coming from companies that pay wages below the poverty line.

grandmczeb 6y ago
Wealth is very hard to accurately measure and is impacted a lot by demographics (e.g. age distribution). Consumption is a better measure of how people actually live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  I disagree simply because expenditures are completely different for more socialist countries. Eg. Total healthcare expenditure per capita is well below the USA in Australia. Less than half in fact. https://onthewards.org/the-inside-scoop-part-one-a-comparison-of-the-us-and-australian-healthcare-systems/ https://onthewards.org/the-inside-scoop-part-one-a-compariso... So that's $4500 a year more the average US citizen has in total expenditure that isn't some type of luxury good or indicator of a better life. It's just survival. I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
  - grandmczeb 6y ago
    If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher. > I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there. I don't think it's worth it to get into an argument about which country is "better", except to say a lot of indexes are designed to advocate for the creator's goals rather than as a useful comparison. E.g. your linked ranking uses "the share of women holding seats in national Houses of Assembly". Is that really a useful comparison point for quality of life?
    - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
      >If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher. Yes but the point is that's one example. I'm not going to got through the full list but i can't think of one USA government provided service that's better quality or requires less private intervention compared to social democracies like Australia and it shows up in so many intangible ways. eg. little things like the Australian government provided online tax filing. In the USA people need to pay to file taxes online (sure paper is free but ugh what a hassle). More private toll roads in the USA. Public housing is more common per capita in Australia. Australias national broadband network (i still can't get fibre here in the USA but i had it in regional Australia), etc. Again i'm not going to keep going except to say that i've lived in both nations and it's really obvious. In more socialist countries per capita spending can be seen as lower but the services are better despite no spending from consumers going to them. The spending comes from the government. You can't compare spending between the USA and Australia for this reason.
      - modeless 6y ago
        Online tax filing is free for everyone under the median income. Private toll roads may or may not be "more" common but they are certainly rare. Average internet speeds are twice Australia's. https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou...
      - 6y ago
- mdoms 6y ago
  Yikes. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is a VERY American perspective.
  - cynicalkane 6y ago
    Consumption is the income and wealth that you end up using. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is the standard economic perspective, since it describes how much of society's goods and services one ends up using. More simply, if you save then spend, wealth-based measures will rate you as better off than a person with higher income who just spends. That doesn't make sense.
    - mdoms 6y ago
      A wealth measure will give a higher rating to someone who spends on assets than someone who spends on Fortnite skins. What it doesn't do is arbitrarily favor someone who lives in a HCOL area or in a country (sorry, the country) that forces individuals to spend their own money on things like health care.
      - HPsquared 6y ago
        Someone living in a HCOL area who happens to have bought their house before the price inflation era, would have a high wealth figure but unable to do anything with said wealth. Australia has high house prices.
    - kennywinker 6y ago
      This is confusing. If you save, you have more wealth. If you have more wealth, you are more resilient to hardships (economic, health, etc.) - a population of people with large savings accounts and low debt seems obviously better than a population that makes a ton of money but lives close to the wire or carries large debts
      - jldugger 6y ago
        The problem though is that personal savings grows over time -- a nation full of young people with high incomes will eventually become a nation full of weathly old people, but if you were to compare the two nations, the yard stick matters. edit: if you want to cook up some evidence, look at a scatter plot of some indicator of age (national average age?) vs national average wealth. I suspect, given the countries at the top of the list, you'll end up with a pretty good r.
- markmark 6y ago
  We would need to see median consumption, rather than per capita, to compare to the wealth figures above. The US rates very highly in wealth per capita as well.
  - grandmczeb 6y ago
    The consumption distribution is a lot more flat than income or wealth (~5x difference in consumption for bottom quintile vs top quintile compared to ~20x in income). You can see consumption broken down by income here[1]. One thing I’d point out is that the bottom quintile in the US has a higher consumption than the Australian average, although the Wikipedia numbers don’t quite measure the same thing so it’s not perfectly comparable. Also note this uses 2018 dollars rather than 2011 dollars. [1] https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/combined/decile.pdf https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/combined/decile.pdf
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scatters 6y ago
Median wealth says absolutely nothing except how many homeowners you have and to what extent the housing market is out of control. The metric that actually reflects people's lives is consumption adjusted for purchasing power. Disposable income (again, adjusted for purchasing power) is useful as well.
MuffinFlavored 6y ago
> But i believe we should start doing this for US companies as well. We can "call out" whatever you want. People vote with their dollar. Target, Walmart, cheap resellers on AliExpress/Amazon are "winning" every day because the most important thing most consumers care about is rock bottom price. I don't think "calling out" will do much other than virtue signal.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available. That said, there are a ton of areas where we still have choice. In those cases, people do need to become more aware of the impact of their purchasing decisions - but in those cases I agree with you: making different decisions is the actual required action.
  - qeternity 6y ago
    > Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available. Aside from actual monopolies (utilities, etc) what is one example of having no choice? Whenever I hear this argument, it’s not that there’s no choice, it’s that there’s no cheap, convenient alternative...hence Walmart’s domination. It’s like people never stop to ask why Walmart is so successful: people would rather have abundant selection at low prices rather than support their local mom and pop shop.
    - Qub3d 6y ago
      Take a look into how Dollar General is actively displacing and destroying local grocery opportunities in small towns: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/when-the-closest-grocery-store-is-a-dollar-store https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/when-the-...
- ardy42 6y ago
bhupy 6y ago
On an article about wages (not wealth), did you consider looking at median income per adult? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
umvi 6y ago
Does that take into account cost of living? In America you can buy a gallon of milk for $1.50 at Walmart. In Australia (after some brief googling[0]) it's more like $4.50. Same with gas, video games, you name it, a lot of things seem to cost 2-4x more in Australia. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Australia https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...
- thomasahle 6y ago
  Yes, you probably want to look at the Purchasing Power Parity Median: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalized_disposable_household_income_(PPP)_$ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per... Or the household version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  Not quite that extreme. ~AUD$4 for the fnacy brand which is under USD$3. Less for the loss leader store brands. Looks like 10% difference in cost of living by official figures but regardless the median wealth being so much higher isn't due to a few percent difference in cost of living or a small difference in average age as some suggested. Australia is objectively doing better on the wealth gap leading to a higher median (but not a higher mean). You can look at USA wealth historically too and see the USAs decline in median wealth over the years (but again mean wealth is doing fine). It all comes down to the thing we all know and have heard a lot. The wealth gap in the USA is increasing a lot. The lowest paid workers are now well into the poverty zone. The arguments against minimum wage are similar to the arguments for Asian clothing sweatshops.
- k__ 6y ago
  Back in the days, when I saw Walmart fail in Germany, I had the impression the US isnt known for having cheap food.
- lotyrin 6y ago
  In America you can also decide whether to be able to afford to pay rent or whether you'd like to not live in agony because having teeth is a luxury.
fctorial 6y ago
> having to live off food stamps as is common for wallmart workers for example is just horrendous. Why is using food stamps horrendous?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I think the point is "The pay is so bad, you qualify for welfare while working."
- miffy900 6y ago
  I live in Aus also, and there are people here who work full-time and still need to avail themselves of local charities, for food boxes and such, but the relative size of that demographic seems to be smaller here compared to the US.
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  It's a clear indicator that the wage is below survival levels.

grandmczeb 6y ago

Wealth is very hard to accurately measure and is impacted a lot by demographics (e.g. age distribution). Consumption is a better measure of how people actually live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

AnotherGoodName 6y ago
I disagree simply because expenditures are completely different for more socialist countries. Eg. Total healthcare expenditure per capita is well below the USA in Australia. Less than half in fact. https://onthewards.org/the-inside-scoop-part-one-a-comparison-of-the-us-and-australian-healthcare-systems/ https://onthewards.org/the-inside-scoop-part-one-a-compariso... So that's $4500 a year more the average US citizen has in total expenditure that isn't some type of luxury good or indicator of a better life. It's just survival. I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
- grandmczeb 6y ago
  If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher. > I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there. I don't think it's worth it to get into an argument about which country is "better", except to say a lot of indexes are designed to advocate for the creator's goals rather than as a useful comparison. E.g. your linked ranking uses "the share of women holding seats in national Houses of Assembly". Is that really a useful comparison point for quality of life?
  - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
    >If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher. Yes but the point is that's one example. I'm not going to got through the full list but i can't think of one USA government provided service that's better quality or requires less private intervention compared to social democracies like Australia and it shows up in so many intangible ways. eg. little things like the Australian government provided online tax filing. In the USA people need to pay to file taxes online (sure paper is free but ugh what a hassle). More private toll roads in the USA. Public housing is more common per capita in Australia. Australias national broadband network (i still can't get fibre here in the USA but i had it in regional Australia), etc. Again i'm not going to keep going except to say that i've lived in both nations and it's really obvious. In more socialist countries per capita spending can be seen as lower but the services are better despite no spending from consumers going to them. The spending comes from the government. You can't compare spending between the USA and Australia for this reason.
    - modeless 6y ago
      Online tax filing is free for everyone under the median income. Private toll roads may or may not be "more" common but they are certainly rare. Average internet speeds are twice Australia's. https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou...
    - 6y ago
mdoms 6y ago
Yikes. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is a VERY American perspective.
- cynicalkane 6y ago
  Consumption is the income and wealth that you end up using. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is the standard economic perspective, since it describes how much of society's goods and services one ends up using. More simply, if you save then spend, wealth-based measures will rate you as better off than a person with higher income who just spends. That doesn't make sense.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    A wealth measure will give a higher rating to someone who spends on assets than someone who spends on Fortnite skins. What it doesn't do is arbitrarily favor someone who lives in a HCOL area or in a country (sorry, the country) that forces individuals to spend their own money on things like health care.
    - HPsquared 6y ago
      Someone living in a HCOL area who happens to have bought their house before the price inflation era, would have a high wealth figure but unable to do anything with said wealth. Australia has high house prices.
  - kennywinker 6y ago
    This is confusing. If you save, you have more wealth. If you have more wealth, you are more resilient to hardships (economic, health, etc.) - a population of people with large savings accounts and low debt seems obviously better than a population that makes a ton of money but lives close to the wire or carries large debts
    - jldugger 6y ago
      The problem though is that personal savings grows over time -- a nation full of young people with high incomes will eventually become a nation full of weathly old people, but if you were to compare the two nations, the yard stick matters. edit: if you want to cook up some evidence, look at a scatter plot of some indicator of age (national average age?) vs national average wealth. I suspect, given the countries at the top of the list, you'll end up with a pretty good r.
markmark 6y ago
We would need to see median consumption, rather than per capita, to compare to the wealth figures above. The US rates very highly in wealth per capita as well.
- grandmczeb 6y ago
  The consumption distribution is a lot more flat than income or wealth (~5x difference in consumption for bottom quintile vs top quintile compared to ~20x in income). You can see consumption broken down by income here[1]. One thing I’d point out is that the bottom quintile in the US has a higher consumption than the Australian average, although the Wikipedia numbers don’t quite measure the same thing so it’s not perfectly comparable. Also note this uses 2018 dollars rather than 2011 dollars. [1] https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/combined/decile.pdf https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/combined/decile.pdf

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

scatters 6y ago

Median wealth says absolutely nothing except how many homeowners you have and to what extent the housing market is out of control. The metric that actually reflects people's lives is consumption adjusted for purchasing power. Disposable income (again, adjusted for purchasing power) is useful as well.

MuffinFlavored 6y ago

> But i believe we should start doing this for US companies as well. We can "call out" whatever you want. People vote with their dollar. Target, Walmart, cheap resellers on AliExpress/Amazon are "winning" every day because the most important thing most consumers care about is rock bottom price. I don't think "calling out" will do much other than virtue signal.

kennywinker 6y ago
Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available. That said, there are a ton of areas where we still have choice. In those cases, people do need to become more aware of the impact of their purchasing decisions - but in those cases I agree with you: making different decisions is the actual required action.
- qeternity 6y ago
  > Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available. Aside from actual monopolies (utilities, etc) what is one example of having no choice? Whenever I hear this argument, it’s not that there’s no choice, it’s that there’s no cheap, convenient alternative...hence Walmart’s domination. It’s like people never stop to ask why Walmart is so successful: people would rather have abundant selection at low prices rather than support their local mom and pop shop.
  - Qub3d 6y ago
    Take a look into how Dollar General is actively displacing and destroying local grocery opportunities in small towns: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/when-the-closest-grocery-store-is-a-dollar-store https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/when-the-...
ardy42 6y ago

bhupy 6y ago

On an article about wages (not wealth), did you consider looking at median income per adult? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

umvi 6y ago

Does that take into account cost of living? In America you can buy a gallon of milk for $1.50 at Walmart. In Australia (after some brief googling[0]) it's more like $4.50. Same with gas, video games, you name it, a lot of things seem to cost 2-4x more in Australia. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Australia https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...

thomasahle 6y ago
Yes, you probably want to look at the Purchasing Power Parity Median: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalized_disposable_household_income_(PPP)_$ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per... Or the household version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
AnotherGoodName 6y ago
Not quite that extreme. ~AUD$4 for the fnacy brand which is under USD$3. Less for the loss leader store brands. Looks like 10% difference in cost of living by official figures but regardless the median wealth being so much higher isn't due to a few percent difference in cost of living or a small difference in average age as some suggested. Australia is objectively doing better on the wealth gap leading to a higher median (but not a higher mean). You can look at USA wealth historically too and see the USAs decline in median wealth over the years (but again mean wealth is doing fine). It all comes down to the thing we all know and have heard a lot. The wealth gap in the USA is increasing a lot. The lowest paid workers are now well into the poverty zone. The arguments against minimum wage are similar to the arguments for Asian clothing sweatshops.
k__ 6y ago
Back in the days, when I saw Walmart fail in Germany, I had the impression the US isnt known for having cheap food.
lotyrin 6y ago
In America you can also decide whether to be able to afford to pay rent or whether you'd like to not live in agony because having teeth is a luxury.

fctorial 6y ago

> having to live off food stamps as is common for wallmart workers for example is just horrendous. Why is using food stamps horrendous?

DoreenMichele 6y ago
I think the point is "The pay is so bad, you qualify for welfare while working."
miffy900 6y ago
I live in Aus also, and there are people here who work full-time and still need to avail themselves of local charities, for food boxes and such, but the relative size of that demographic seems to be smaller here compared to the US.
AnotherGoodName 6y ago
It's a clear indicator that the wage is below survival levels.