3 ms·

Meh. There's really not that much difference between most industrialized countries for those in the first standard deviation (aka. most people). It's kinda lik

by fleitz 12y ago

Meh. There's really not that much difference between most industrialized countries for those in the first standard deviation (aka. most people). It's kinda like the Olympics, if you're in the top 10 you're doing fine. If one is selecting a country to live in, it's likely better to optimize for your own situation rather than optimizing from a bunch of HDI/GDP/Freedom type reports. It's like a friend said of China, probably one of the most free places on earth because he could stay out drinking all night. For him it was more important that bars were open because he likes to drink than it was to be able to protest the government. For instance there is pretty much no way I'd ever live in Singapore; Singapore makes US drug policy look downright progressive.

_delirium 12y ago
I dunno, I'm from the U.S., and now live in Denmark, and it feels much nicer socioeconomically. They are both in the top 10, and the U.S. actually has a higher median income, but the subjective difference to me is huge. Not in the mean or median, but in the general feeling that there is far less poverty. Even bad parts of Copenhagen are nothing like the bad parts of Atlanta (same goes for other cities I've lived in, like Chicago and Los Angeles). You don't really have to watch yourself nearly as much. When I lived in Atlanta, you needed a lot of fairly specific knowledge about which areas of the city were safe, sometimes even which specific streets were okay to walk on at night. And the unsafe ones were unsafe in the "people get mugged here daily" sort of way, whereas the Copenhagen unsafe neighborhoods are more like "someone was mugged here 6 weeks ago and it's still in the news". Homeless people are much more rare; things like people living in trailer parks are also very rare. There is no safety problem biking 10km alone at 4am half-drunk; in fact it is not too uncommon to do so. And even poor people seem to have fairly normal lives, not that different from mine. They rent non-squalid apartments, send their kids to ok schools, have good medical care, etc. I'm not sure how to quantify that subjective feeling of the general level feeling wealthier, but one guess might be to look at Nth-percentile incomes for your choice of lower bound N. The U.S. has a higher median income than Denmark. But a bound that half the people fall below (N=50) doesn't give you strong guarantees. How do their 10th-percentile incomes compare? I.e. what is the lower bound that >90% of Americans meet, vs. the lower bound that >90% of Danes meet? IIRC, it's considerably higher in Denmark, which might explain why it subjectively feels wealthier to me—the income $x where you can assume "probably almost everyone makes at least $x" for some reasonable choice of "almost everyone" (80%, 90%, 95%, somewhere in that range) is higher.
- tormeh 12y ago
  People in the rest of the world don't get this, I think. They believe life has to be full of fear and desperation. It doesn't. I'm temporarily living in Berlin and it's a bit sad to watch all the homeless beggars around here.

by fleitz 12y ago

_delirium 12y ago

I dunno, I'm from the U.S., and now live in Denmark, and it feels much nicer socioeconomically. They are both in the top 10, and the U.S. actually has a higher median income, but the subjective difference to me is huge. Not in the mean or median, but in the general feeling that there is far less poverty. Even bad parts of Copenhagen are nothing like the bad parts of Atlanta (same goes for other cities I've lived in, like Chicago and Los Angeles). You don't really have to watch yourself nearly as much. When I lived in Atlanta, you needed a lot of fairly specific knowledge about which areas of the city were safe, sometimes even which specific streets were okay to walk on at night. And the unsafe ones were unsafe in the "people get mugged here daily" sort of way, whereas the Copenhagen unsafe neighborhoods are more like "someone was mugged here 6 weeks ago and it's still in the news". Homeless people are much more rare; things like people living in trailer parks are also very rare. There is no safety problem biking 10km alone at 4am half-drunk; in fact it is not too uncommon to do so. And even poor people seem to have fairly normal lives, not that different from mine. They rent non-squalid apartments, send their kids to ok schools, have good medical care, etc. I'm not sure how to quantify that subjective feeling of the general level feeling wealthier, but one guess might be to look at Nth-percentile incomes for your choice of lower bound N. The U.S. has a higher median income than Denmark. But a bound that half the people fall below (N=50) doesn't give you strong guarantees. How do their 10th-percentile incomes compare? I.e. what is the lower bound that >90% of Americans meet, vs. the lower bound that >90% of Danes meet? IIRC, it's considerably higher in Denmark, which might explain why it subjectively feels wealthier to me—the income $x where you can assume "probably almost everyone makes at least $x" for some reasonable choice of "almost everyone" (80%, 90%, 95%, somewhere in that range) is higher.

tormeh 12y ago
People in the rest of the world don't get this, I think. They believe life has to be full of fear and desperation. It doesn't. I'm temporarily living in Berlin and it's a bit sad to watch all the homeless beggars around here.