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What does it mean to be "successful, controlling for socioeconomic status"? Their success is defined by their peoples' socioeconomic status.
by karpierz 5y ago
What does it mean to be "successful, controlling for socioeconomic status"?
Their success is defined by their peoples' socioeconomic status.
- endisneigh 5y agoIf that's the case then the USA is superior to all but a few European democracies per capita and all of them nominally? Even Massachusetts would be superior than every European country per capita.
- gumby 5y agoI don’t understand: are you talking about PPP GDP per capita? I agree that the US optimizes for that, but it doesn’t translate into higher quality of life by metrics like life expectancy, literacy, leisure time, malnutrition, proportion of “precariat” etc.
- endisneigh 5y agoYes, hence my original question.
- karpierz 5y agoIf you define socioeconomic status narrowly (gender, race, age, net wealth), then I was wrong to say that the success of European countries is rooted in their socioeconomic status. I'm happy to take that point back, and focus on why I don't think controlling for socioeconomic status is the right analysis. However, even if the US shows better outcomes when controlling for socioeconomic status, the distribution of people within socioeconomic status is relevant. If the US has 1000 impoverished people and 10 middle class people, and Germany has 10 impoverished people and 1000 middle class people, the relevant comparison is the German middle class to the US impoverished class. In other words, you'd want to compare outcomes based on percentiles regardless of socioeconomic status.
- jandrese 5y agoMaybe it would be better to say "controlling for immigration policies"? But even then the US is going to come out behind because those countries don't have the legacies of slavery still weighing them down.
- gumby 5y agoGermany, US, France have about the same percentage of immigrants if you want to compare things like life expectancy on that basis.