Re:The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than M...
by DoreenMichele on Monday August 26, 2019 @03:40PM
(#20802969)
It's extremely hard to compare apples to oranges like this.
I'm an American former military wife and Americans have trouble figuring out how to compare the value of a military compensation package to a civilian one because the two are structured so differently. It's so bad, people in the military sometimes think that they would be better off leaving the military for a better paid job, but those who actually do that tend to report money is tighter and quality of life worse as a civilian. You don't get much cash pay in the military, but flashing your ID gets you access to a ton of stuff for "free" that all costs money if you leave the military system and try to access similar services.
So that's within the same country with the same currency, same federal tax system, etc. Trying to compare across countries is far harder.
Decades ago, I saw a study (now completely out of date) that asked questions like "how many meals per day do you get?" It found that less than 1/2% of Americans were poor by the expectations of India.
Many materially poor nations have more stay-at-home moms, stronger social fabric and family ties and other things of value that enhance quality of life and are generally overlooked in studies of this sort.
In some sense, I don't care how America compares to other countries. I just know we do a poor job of taking care of our people in certain metrics. We need to stop quibbling about whether or not it's worse than a third world country and focus on resolving some of these issues.
We need to fix our busted housing supply system that cranks out oversized homes that are a mismatch for our current demographic and creates nothing but a thing I call "suburban hell." We need to fix our healthcare issues.
We no doubt could stand to work on other things, but those two are so bad they are chronically in the headlines.
I'm an American former military wife and Americans have trouble figuring out how to compare the value of a military compensation package to a civilian one because the two are structured so differently. It's so bad, people in the military sometimes think that they would be better off leaving the military for a better paid job, but those who actually do that tend to report money is tighter and quality of life worse as a civilian. You don't get much cash pay in the military, but flashing your ID gets you access to a ton of stuff for "free" that all costs money if you leave the military system and try to access similar services.
So that's within the same country with the same currency, same federal tax system, etc. Trying to compare across countries is far harder.
Decades ago, I saw a study (now completely out of date) that asked questions like "how many meals per day do you get?" It found that less than 1/2% of Americans were poor by the expectations of India.
Many materially poor nations have more stay-at-home moms, stronger social fabric and family ties and other things of value that enhance quality of life and are generally overlooked in studies of this sort.
In some sense, I don't care how America compares to other countries. I just know we do a poor job of taking care of our people in certain metrics. We need to stop quibbling about whether or not it's worse than a third world country and focus on resolving some of these issues.
We need to fix our busted housing supply system that cranks out oversized homes that are a mismatch for our current demographic and creates nothing but a thing I call "suburban hell." We need to fix our healthcare issues.
We no doubt could stand to work on other things, but those two are so bad they are chronically in the headlines.