Why Don't Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are?

Re:Why Don't Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are? by RestlessMind on Thursday April 04, 2019 @02:20PM (#19575463)

It is pointless to compare richest subset of Europe to the entire US. If you want to do a fair comparison, compare entire Europe to the entire US. Then we see that Europe is not that much better and so called "awesome European welfare" is not reflecting into key metrics. Just to pick two examples, if Europe provides vastly better healthcare and education for free/cheap to its citizens, why is life expectancy or unemployment rate comparable to the US?

Life expectancy: ranges between 71.5-89.4 years across European countries [1], 73.4-81.3 across US states [2]

Unemployment rate: ranges between 1-31.4% between European countries [3], 2.1-18% across US states/territories [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

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Re:Why Don't Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are? by amf12 on Friday April 05, 2019 @07:57AM (#19581626)

> It is pointless to compare richest subset of Europe to the entire US. If you want to do a fair comparison, compare entire Europe to the entire US.

I don't think that's really a fair comparison. Every city from NYC to a small town in Midwest get the same benefits of being one of the richest countries in the world. American federal policies affect everyone in America, rich or poor, in big cities or small towns. Comparing with every European country is disingenuous because that group also consists of Ukraine, Serbia etc. I would way a fair comparison will be with European countries with similar economic indicators as the USA. If you do that, you will notice that metrics are indeed better in those countries.

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