Exactly. PPP is calculated in such a way that makes such gigantic jokes like this possible. You simply have to travel to see how funny it is. Has that person been to Mississippi, and has he been to Switzerland or Norway? I mean, come on.
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I was waiting for someone to debunk this, but I have to ask --- everyone in Jackson has a Wal-Mart within a 5 minute drive, and the average home purchase price is $129,000. It isn't possible that people in Jackson have approximately the same standard of living as Germans, at a much lower price?
Let's not blithely discount the judgment of all the people who pay twice as much for the same house elsewhere.
There's a reason that people pay 3-4x as much to live in Manhattan, but it isn't to get better houses. Just 43% of Germans own at all. Renting can be better than owning, especially in major metro areas, but owning comes with benefits too --- like being able to customize.
Yes, there are many factors to consider. For instance, the average European probably enjoys much better weather than the average Mississippian.
Of all the European countries I've been to, Germany is the country that most reminded me of the US in terms of road patterns and layout, car orientation, big marts / malls with a lot of choice - far more choice than the average UK supermarket, in which it's unusual to see more than about 4 choices for any given commodity.
For context, I'm Irish and currently living in the UK, working for a US company and regularly visit the Santa Cruz area; I've been in Paris, Barcelona, Seville, Lisbon, Sicily, much of Italy, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia, Athens, Lausanne, etc. I know my German girlfriend and her friends disagree with my perception - they see UK & Ireland as being quite different from the continent.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "standard of living".
I can give you a triple gold plated guarantee, though, that the Germans would not consider living in Jackson in your $129k house next to Wal-Mart a "high standard of living".
So, in summary, no, it's not possible. You should travel a bit. The whole idea is a complete joke. I mean seriously, would you rather live in Berlin or Jackson? Seriously? Berlin has a 24hr tram every 15 minutes, go whereever you like for like a euro. Some of the best nightclubs in Europe (America has 0 good nightclubs). What was that about cheap jars of pickles at Wal-Mart?
I guess that depends on what you mean by "standard of living".
Exactly! I, for example, wouldn't want to live in Germany as you describe it. I could care less about trams and nightclubs -- my idea of a great night out is lying in the grass in the dark with my wife, sharing a bottle of wine while listening to the howl of coyotes in the distance. But I prefer to live in a rural area; someone with more urban sensibilities would probably think I'm nuts!!
I've traveled a lot, including to Germany. My wife lived in Zurich. Please don't assume I'm being parochial.
You and I are not the right control group for this experiment. I'm not going to move to Jackson because my favorite bands will never play there, and because I like high-end and ethnic restaurants. But a 44-year-old schoolteacher might not care about those things. The decision between Jackson and Chicago might not be cut-and-dry for him.
(Also, have you been to Jackson? I have. It's not squalid. It's not hickish. It's just a small city. It has several large colleges, and is the headquarters for a couple large companies.)
Oh, I didn't mean that. I just meant that "how much stuff you can buy" is perhaps not the only possible measurement of quality of life. And I've long thought PPP to be almost irrelevant in developed countries. Every single thing I buy I buy on quality, not price or quantity. PPP utterly fails to account for that. It's useless.
Anyway. Cool, I like Zurich. Hm, this thread is making me remember all these cities and influencing my holiday plans!
update: you edited your post. I have never been to Jackson, nor any American city aside from NYC and the California sprawl (LA/SF/SD). Yes, your 44-yr-old schoolteacher might enjoy a happy, quiet life there. I am sure it is a fine city, but I have zero interest in ever visiting it. Again, you are right - we are not the right control group here.
Not sure I totally buy this argument. Housing, food, and transportation are three things that vary wildly in price around the world, and which you can't buy strictly on quality. For instance, whatever else you might want to say about Jackson, you can get a better house there than you can get in NYC metro.
(edits: look me up if you ever make it to Chicago, which is a cooler place to visit than LA, and also note that SF is not in the same sprawl as LA and SD. =P)
But people don't just buy houses, they buy lifestyles and locations in which they live. The actual physical house might be better but who cares?
Your average NYC dweller probably wouldn't even live in Jackson if the rent was totally free. The physical quality of the house's construction, etc, is almost totally irrelevant.
Your arguments are tending to sound more emotional than rational. NYC has a huge underclass, perhaps most of which would happily take a house in Jackson if they could get a secure job there and move without totally disrupting their lives. NYC is, for instance, a really bad place to raise a family on the national median income, or to start a company on same.
The point made upthread was that no German would consider a life in Jackson equivalent to the life they could have in Germany. That's true, but it's probably mostly true because most people in Jackson don't speak German or eat the same food. And the converse is also true; someone from Jackson would probably find Berlin cramped and invasive. That's why you have to control for cultural stuff.
(This post is now getting lots of debunking comments that I think are more sound than "it's ridiculous to even compare the two because Germans would scoff at Jackson").
What could an American nightclub copy from Europe to give our continent its first 'good' nightclub?
But but but a coffee and cake at a Swiss Starbucks will cost you so much more! At least that's the way it was when I was last in Lausanne, but the views and free wifi (city-wide IIRC, judging by the SSID) made up for it.
Lausanne!? That's practically in France!
edit: well it is!