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> America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
International comparisons are tricky, and you should always check the data definitions carefully.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Salary alone is meaningless if you don't factor in purchase-power-parity and other quality of living aspects. E.g. a lot of people are happy to move to Denmark, and accept a paycut because they are leading with their social facilities and family support. Salary alone will not conjure good infrastructure
> paying people
If you are not in the US, there can be a lot of surprises in these comparisons.
You might see that you make $X in tech and in Silicon Valley someone makes $3X for same job and that sounds awesome on paper.
But how much is health care coverage, both insurance and out of pocket after insurance? In SV I pay over $20K in insurance and the additional out of pocket depends on what happens but can be $10K-$20K. But if you have some catastrophic health problem, can be in the millions of dollars. Compare this with health expenses outside of the US.
How much is daycare, school and university for the kids? The costs in the US are mind-blowing, vs. either free or cheap in other countries. Here in SV I pay ~$45K/year just for high school, university will probably be a lot more.
Home insurance? If you can even get it, will be outrageous. Car insurance, think 4K-10K year depending on details.
And so on.
Don't compare gross salary, compare net leftover salary after ALL required expenses.
> Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
These charts are seriously out of date though. Five years in the current economic climate? Might as well be ancient history.
As somebody living outside the US, I would find moving to the states highly undesirable even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
I’m not in the US, but laughed when I saw that my bike is ‘known to cause cancer or birth defects/reproductive harm.’
When everything is dangerous, nothing is dangerous.
I live in the US. I disagree about the hostility towards non-citizens. If you are talking about ICE, it's more about racism. They are not gunning down Brits, Germans or Australians.
Agree about the rest. Can I come live in your country? :)
yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
If you look at the immigration numbers across the board, apparently most people disagree :) just purely by numbers other than vibes or rare scary scenarios, the living standards in the US make most other OECD countries look poor. Not even speaking of the fact that immigrants can always go back so it's even better for them. I hiked with a guy who lived between US and Canada because he liked US better but needed expensive surgeries (that were also optional, kinda) so he did the minimum in Canada to qualify. Or worked with a European who outright said after making money it would be a good idea for him to go back and (ab)use the welfare state. Americans can't do that!
It very much depends on life situation. For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
It really is astounding how bad national brands are. Everything loaded with sugar and salt. Lowest quality ingredients in everything, and I do mean everything.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ $22 for a package of toilet paper that has 1/3 less paper than before.
Prices are out of sight. 3 years ago, 1lb of real deli roast beef was $7. Now $20. Costs almost $30 to make a pot of stew. Used to cost $10.
I could write for hours on this subject. The garbage produced is that prolific.
Yeah the USA has only given lip service for everything it claims to be. Especially in the last 18 months it’s been working overtime to make it even worse.
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Not to mention school shooting drills. Teaching kids how to behave when someone tries to shoot up your school, because it happens more than once a decade... And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
> even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world[0], and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?tab=line&coun...
I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
> American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
I do wonder how real the base number - the GDP - is. The wealthy have been accumulating wealth rapidly but it’s all on paper and the entire thing is underpinned by assumptions of USD reserve currency status.
"We set the bar at half of what a typical American household earns. "
Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Yes you want to raise the floor, but the US is doing a famously bad job at that.
I generally agree that if it was true that the inequality would lead to consistent floor raising it would be fine, but it doesn't.
Wealth inequality itself causes a great number of ills in this country. We should absolutely aim to lower this gap as a goal in itself.
Hmmm, this index scores US at 80% and Mexico at 86%.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
This is a weird number.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
US ownership in capital markets by wealth level:
Wealthiest 1% of earners - 50.1%
Top 90-99% of earners - 37.3%
Top 50-89% of earners - 11.7%
Bottom 50% of earners - 1.1%
Source: Federal Reserve/Reuters
> We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population.
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
it's not that either. it's the total value of all transactions.
if you paint a masterpiece worth millions and keep it in your closet it has negligible impact on GDP. only once it is sold does it have an effect.
That text is linked to a graph where the X axis is years.
Also a great number of those services are valueless bullshit. It's much closer to the sum of all transactions.
It's hard to understand that more and more countries are becoming better than the USA.
You can live in a "developing" country and feel safer and better.
>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
Check out https://arindube.substack.com/p/a-minimum-wage-natural-exper..., very good post comparing states with minimum wage and without, that seem to go against this often repeated argument.
On other hand if you can not afford to pay your employees wages they can survive on you do not deserve to be in business. You should go out and any resources you use should instead be used in way that can reasonably sustain workers.
> You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage [...]
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
But if they made the minimum wage $1m/year then we would all be rich! /s
This is yet another article that doesn't understand what wealth is. There is almost no point talking about these numbers, because they mislead more than they inform.
Agreed - it also doesn't understand rights. A right to someone's labor is slavery. It's great to have robust social programs. However, they aren't a right - they are benefits. Changing the definition of rights is a trick to idea smuggle politics.
I would expect fortune to be able to understand basic economics, but I guess not. I can't verify because it is a paywalled article, but if this article isn't about oligopolies abusing labor market power, then it is intensely wrong headed. Paying workers less is a good thing to a point, it means less dead weight loss to the economy from labor abusing market power (which is basically the worst thing you can do in economics). If it's about abuse of monopsony power in the labour market by oligopolies then I apologize, that's the one case where paying people less is bad, but it's also kind of rare these days.
I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
But who are you to decide whether suburban Americans are living the right kind of life? Surely if they wanted to they could move to an apartment in a dense inner-city area. It would be cheaper than living in a large house in the suburbs and save them from spending more on heating, maintenance and cars. It would save them time as well, because they could be located close to their office. Despite all these downsides they still prefer to buy large suburban houses, drive everywhere, not know their neighbours and so on. Perhaps they just like it that way.
Police officers are screened in a way that intentionally prevents people with exceptionally low IQs from entering the field.
I love suburbia.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
We are in the bad place.
As an (in)famous philosopher said recently, if you workers are not bone-skinny it means you are doing Capitalism wrong and are paying them too much.
Maybe pay them with GLP-1 drugs if that's your goal.
As if workers got paid by "what $wealth allows".
As if there was a "right to dignified work" (what is "dignified"?).
As if there was a "right to fair income" (whats "fair"?).
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
After all of that, you still seem to be familiar with the concept of "fairness". And yet you feel you shouldn't try anything because you don't have the perfect universal answer... are you sure you're posting on the correct forum?
That's why they let in massive number of immigrants from poor countries.