it would be cool if people writing these pieces had a background in dialectical materialism. maybe people don't buy into the belief but are coerced into working more hours to *checks notes* not die?
I think a lot of Americans don't realise just how much higher salaries are in the USA.
I guess the grass is always greener.
Americans are higher variance (wrt wealth) in general, which makes some of these comparisons quite difficult.
Sure, but that's hardly a panacea. There are better and worse analysis, but this stuff is genuinely not easy to do well. No simple statistic alone will do it if you are comparing quite different distributions.
The US is well below many European countries (and others) by median wealth, and well above the same ones by mean wealth; That doesn't paint a clear picture either.
The US ranks 6 in median household income and median per capital income. The ones above us are much smaller nations, and it's easier to for them be statistical outliers compared to a large nation like the US. California, which has a larger population than any nation that scores better than the US in median income, blows any of them outside the water no matter what wealth metric you use.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
That would put US at 3 by mean and 22 by median. Countries above it by median would include UK, Japan, etc. Of course most countries are smaller by population, but that's not like comparing to Luxembourg.
I think we are agreeing, each one of this sort of comparison give you different information, which makes it difficult. Especially considering that, to your point, looking at Cali or Miss. gives a lot of variance by itself.
The large houses and cars in particular have quite adverse social impacts. Low density living increases commute times, infrastructure cost, cost of housing, energy usage, and so forth. It's quite astonishing that the co2 emissions per capita in the US are almost three times as high as in the United Kingdom.
Cooling is opening the window; turning on a fan and sweating your nads off. But only for a few weeks a year.
The rest of the year the incessant drizzle and grey sky helps cool the building.
It's too bad, because you can have tremendous wow factor in a smaller but very smartly designed space.
But indeed the cheapest form of wow factor is to supersize the house. This is cheap in design expenditure (AKA less "thought" in the design), but not cheap in in the amount of materials used.
In these cases lower quality materials - i.e. non-structural paper-based sheathing, flimsy weather barrier materials, etc - are often used to compensate for the huge size.
Well, enough to afford the mortgage and down payment for $100,000 worth of house for starters.
The minimum down payment for most mortgages is 3.5%, which yields a mortgage payment of $635 at today’s rates, according to Zillow. This includes P&I, PMI, taxes, and insurance. So far so good.
The maximum recommended amount of your monthly take home your mortgage should be is 28%. If we follow this recommendation then our hypothetical family needs to bring home $2,267 after tax to guarantee that their mortgage is no more than 28% of their monthly budget.
$2,267 works out to $13.07 per hour for one person fully employed, or $6.53 for two people.
So yes, it’s technically possible at most minimum wages, but boy are those margins slim. I think the biggest issue here is that assuming that both members of the household can maintain perfect full time employment forever in an area where houses are that cheap is a really dangerous assumption to make.
Margins are slim for sure though. That point should not be overlooked. I am not trying to claim it is easy to live at the bottom.
It is not just that salaries are higher but overall quality of life is significantly better. In USA I can drive in any random direction for 400 miles and crash at a Motel 6 without having to worry about reservations. I can eat at Denny's at any time of the day and fill up gas in towns like Austin, NV with population 29. There are giant theme parks within 100 miles of driving distance in any city. USA is dotted with national parks and various state parks, fishing spots, hiking trails, hunting grounds. Every American school is basically a mini Olympic stadium with some space for classrooms. Most people including people below poverty line own cars, which means their quality of life is way better. You can explore different and remote places, spend more time with family and friends over the weekends and show your kids lot more stuff each weekend that what a London resident can not do for similar amount of money.
Also, I can totally see why people in UK may not want to make those extra bucks putting in more hours because often, it is not allowed because of tighter regulations. Tough labor laws discourage businesses from hiring new people so if you quit your job it is harder for you to find a new job. So people would rather stick to a dead end job working uninspired. that quit for better opportunities.
It is also incredibly common for Americans to simply quit their jobs and take a long break to explore whatever hell they want to explore. I arely saw that in UK.
The contract (we have employment contracts) may say 37.5 hours but it also says "and any other necessary to complete your work"
People also forget how good the standard of living can be for tradesmen charging $100-500/hr to reset a GFCI outlet or perform basic plumbing tasks in the US.
This mythical tradesman I describe often lives in a 1500+ sq-ft house and drives a pickup. He takes his kids dirt biking every weekend or goes fishing in his boat. The folks I met in the Google London office have none of these things. Most of them didn't even own a car and had a long public-trans commute home.
The bottom is really hard in the US, but the middle can be fairly good if you are working in the right areas of in-demand employment.
Minimum wage work in the US is brutal. The federal minimum wage is $7.25, amounting to $14,500 a year if you can manage to work a steady job. That leaves you very little money left over for traveling to those national parks.
Being a janitor is actually a step up from a lot of retail jobs, where your schedule is variable and it's hard to work the same 40 hours per week. It might even come with health care, another thing rare among minimum wage jobs. It's less likely to come with retirement savings, and at $14.5k per year you're not putting anything away. Certainly not if you also like to take vacations.
Being poor in the US sucks. Being janitor is not the worst job, but from context I think they meant it that way. I think few people would take janitor in the US over engineer in the UK, and practically nobody sane would take jobs in retail or food service if they had any other option. (Part of the reason they pay so badly is that those are the jobs occupied by people who have no other option.)
I'll agree with his comment
Living in a double wide in BFE and commuting 40min of scenic roads to vacuum the regional hospital isn't that bad (I've done it). The instantanteos QoL was arguably better than my first tech job after I got my degree (but the tech job had better long term QoL because of savings and future earning potential).
That said, I'm surprised that more people working min-wage jobs while living in the high cost of living major metro area don't go postal. It's a far, far, far worse quality of life.
>Being a janitor is actually a step up from a lot of retail jobs,
It's really a matter of personal preference. All minimum wage jobs that aren't a good fit for any person suck. When you find something that's a good fit it's just a job. I hate customers so janitor was a way better fit for me.
Being poor sucks everywhere but it sucks less in USA.
My claim is not that being janitor is some kind of gold standard or aspiration in USA. My point is that even such a very low skilled job is good enough to help you survive. You will probably suffer a lot but yet it is way way better than being completely jobless on streets.
Janitor is also not a job for life, it is mostly a stepping stone for something bigger and a lot A LOT of americans do this every single year. Something you will rarely see outside of USA.
Citing the federal minimum wage is kind of useless with the number of states and cities with their own laws.
The problem is when short-term sacrifice is simply short term sacrifice or will likely result in reduced expectations for the future.
Retiring later could be a sign of longer health ( although I doubt that's the reality in this statistic ).
It's a sign that you didn't manage to save enough in time. Soon retirement age will be over 70 pretty much everywhere in the west, nobody chose to work at that age for fun and giggles
This doesn't follow from [edit] the examples. It may be that most Americans don't believe the common story around hard work leading to success and opportunity, but do believe that if they don't work hard (or appear to, e.g. not take vacation) they will be punished; long hours etc. may just be table stakes in the US.
Doesn't mean less stress. 21 vs 15.1 trillion. nearly double the GDP per capita.
It is not just dumb hard work that was regarded as American virtue. In fact Americans are quick to embrace technology to reduce workload, Americans rarely suffer from the luddite attitudes which are pretty common elsewhere in the world. As an immigrant, I think American virtues is about working hard for what you want rather than expecting someone else to do it for you. That notion of hard work is what American society values a lot even today. It is not just dumb work.
I come from India where people think Farmers are hard workers because they work in hot sun where as Tech workers are lazy because they spend all their time in AC offices. I do not see such attitudes in USA at all.
> a recent study found that Americans work 25 percent more hours than Europeans
That also leads to significantly more per capita income for Americans and far better quality of life and not that this is voluntary. Unlike Europe where jobs are mostly "protected" by tighter labour laws, exiting a job is much harder and getting a new job is even harder. USA does not suffer from such problems. I know plenty of people who simply quit their jobs and spend their time doing nothing for few months before getting a new job. No study would put this as "vacation" but in reality has same effect as vacation.
> that U.S. workers tend to take fewer vacation days and retire later in life
This is voluntary too.
> simply working hard doesn’t actually lead to a better life.
This is purely arbitrary conclusion that does not follow automatically from studies that are at best anecdotally.
> I’d argue quite strongly that working more hours, taking less vacation, and retiring later is the definition of a worse life.
May be but this is very very subjective decision and we can not make such conclusions on behalf of other people.
Hey, i did that too, for 6 month last year, and i still have 7 weeks of paid vacation/year. And i did go sailing every afternoon last week (this week its harder as the tides are in my work hours).
I’d argue quite strongly that working more hours, taking less vacation, and retiring later is the definition of a worse life.