My wife is currently on maternity leave with almost full pay. I am allowed by law to take paternity leave, and as is common my contract gives me several months with full pay. Even if you don't get paid by your work, you have the right to take up to a year off (in all for both of us) with government support.

Even if we both lost our jobs, our (government-subsidized) unemployment insurances are enough to mean we would be able to live more or less as we do now for the two years that the insurance covers, without finding jobs. With some adjustments to our living standard, we might just about be able to at least stay where we live now, even with just the lower benefit rates that we would be able to collect after the two years. We are, however, both in positions where finding new work is fairly simple.

Health care is free and not tied to our employment situation. If either of us become gravely ill, we can worry about the illness, not the cost of treatment. There is no such thing as a "medical bankruptcy" here, and we don't have GoFundMe.

We were paid a little to go to university. I still have some (government) student loads from that time because I was a bit of a fuck-up and didn't work while studying, but it's not so bad.

All in all, I live mostly free of fear and certainly free of want. You think I'd trade that for 18k per year? Would saving up all of it mean I could get even close to this? And how do the people who are below average fare?

Social mobility in the United States is better than most countries in the world but not particularly high compared to similar countries. More worrying is that it has been falling over time. This kind of social stratification eventually results in large swaths of the country and citizenry for whom life is not better and who do not have the same opportunities.

Having more money certainly helps -- it's hard for anyone to live a "better and richer and fuller" life if they cannot afford necessities. But past a certain point the correlation between a country's wealth and measures like happiness, life expectancy, social mobility, life satisfaction, etc seem to break down, especially in the US. Which to me indicates that we're probably not using our wealth efficiently.

https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_1_1_Family_size_and_compo...

The difference in household size isn't just kids.

The survey is being misinterpreted though. Its not that only 2% of Americans are satisfied, its that 2% of Americans offer vague positive vibes rather than a specific answer to what gives them meaning. I don't think I am stereotyping when I say Germany, Japan, and South Korea are more reserved culturally, so of course they're going to be more likely to say "yeah things are going fine overall".

https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

Americans watch an average of 600 hours of Netflix per year. They aren't short on time.

https://www.nexttv.com/news/analysis-americans-averaged-600-...

Ah. So that's why they're dissatisfied.

Mean income (the more useless measure) is about $54,000.

Median income (the meaningful, realistic number) is $34,000.

How many of these people $34k jobs do you think come with actual health, dental, and other benefits?

The middle income families are barely scraping by.