Wealth inequality is much worse in the US than Europe, so relatively speaking, "poor" in EU is still much better than "poor" in the US.
This obviously doesn't mean that any wealth inequality dominates any absolute level (quick: everyone gets nothing!), and getting the balance right is tricky.
But looking at the world happiness index, it is obvious that European countries are doing a pretty good job.
https://dmerharyana.org/world-happiness-index/
1 Finland 7.842 7.809 5,554,960
2 Denmark 7.62 7.646 5,834,950
3 Switzerland 7.571 7.56 8,773,637
4 Iceland 7.554 7.504 345,393
5 Netherlands 7.464 7.449 17,211,447
6 Norway 7.392 7.488 5,511,370
7 Sweden 7.363 7.353 10,218,971
8 Luxembourg 7.324 7.238 642,371
9 New Zealand 7.277 7.3 4,898,203
10 Austria 7.268 7.294 9,066,710
11 Australia 7.183 7.223 26,068,792
12 Israel 7.157 7.129 8,922,892
13 Germany 7.155 7.076 83,883,596
14 Canada 7.103 7.232 38,388,419
15 Ireland 7.085 7.129 5,020,199
16 Costa Rica 7.069 7.121 5,182,354
17 United Kingdom 7.064 7.165 68,497,907
18 Czech Republic 6.965 6.911 10,736,784
19 United States 6.951 6.94 334,805,269
20 Belgium 6.834 6.864 11,668,278
21 France 6.69 6.664 65,584,518Meanwhile, in the real world, we find that that’s not how happiness works at all. People want more than they used to have or they want more than the people around them. If they don’t, they aren’t happy.
You can blame capitalism all you like, but this is a fundamental tenet of brain chemistry. No matter how well off we are, our dopamine level adjusts to that.
This isn’t good or bad. It’s just the way humans are.
Generally I find this rhetoric is popular when people are making decisions for other people rather than those people articulating their desires.
For example, I voted with my feet. I used to live in the US, but I moved (back) to Germany, because despite the fact that I could make tons more in the Bay Area, my standard of living is much higher here.
A friend of mine is a Norwegian in the US. He told me all the ambitious people in Norway scheme to come to the US to make their fortune then retire back in Norway. Seems to be a very common pattern in Europe - make your money someplace without the excessive taxes and regulations, then travel back for the social safety net. Somehow they see this as moral and just which is quite perplexing.
This is literally the system the US built since WWII and what globalization is all about after the Iron Curtain fell.
Of course, the US being at the center of all this trade as the military guardian of naval trade routes and financier of specialized production capabilities all across the globe.
It was and still is a smart as hell play.
But that's exactly why anyone hitting on any one part of that web of trade as being irrelevant is so... unimaginative: The fact is that it's NOT a zero sum game, but a system where everyone benefits if trade happens.
There are some EU companies that can produce tech in some domains without much or any competition in the US (or think of semiconductors of Taiwan) and the same is true for companies in the US.
This is literally Econ 101.
Even more so, given the societal unrest seen in the USA. Just baffling.
To be fair, the social unrest of the US fueled by social media & advertising is now exporting itself to other countries - starting with the English-speaking ones (since the content can be reused as-is) but it's just a matter of time before it consumes other countries too.
German and swedish machining/mechanical engineering industry is essentially powerong the world's manufacturing. The biotech companies that gave us RNA vaccines are based in Europe. Where Europe is lagging is large supernational social media, software companies (although Spotify is Swedish). Hardly a museum. Also in comparison to the US or China the European market is quite open (the whole US defence is essentially a large government subsidy scheme).
I find it interesting that free market maximalists are always pointing to FANG companies as examples how the US unregulated market is so much better. The irony is that these companies are so big that they are largely outside free market pressures and competition and I would argue are a good example how the US dropped the ball on regulating industry to keep competition alive.
I doubt that anyone from the EU would like to migrate to the USA to do blue collar work.
Obviously this is not the end alm be all of how good life is, but there are numerous studies indicating the average of goods and services provided to the poorest 20% in the US is higher than the amount of goods and services provided to the median EU citizen.
- Europe: 21.7% (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)
- US: 11.6% (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo...)
So a very very generous adjustment would put them at roughly similar poverty rates?
So I would assume poverty rates are roughly similar, indeed.
Post-transfer median income is higher in the US than in Europe.
Here's one analysis, but there are others. I would prefer a less conservative source.
That said, it is of course possible I overstated my case - the provenance of sources I am finding is not as strong as I would have expected.
[1] https://mises.org/wire/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...
Note: I appreciate your calm responses and engagement of the arguments. I concede that I should have included some refutation or concession based on the merits of the article themselves in my original reply.
Edit: to add another source refuting the Mises thesis, stating that income inequality is highest in the US among G-7 countries (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Institute
Even if they got the numbers right, which I doubt, they completely miss that US income has to pay for a lot more than in most of Europe, healthcare and education just as the most prominent examples, also lack of public transit etc.
And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.
> And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.
mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but that is intense material deprivation relative to latter 20th century US.
Take a tour of rural Alabama or Appalachia today and you will see plenty of extreme poverty like that. We have a whole industry of NGOs and bin manufacturers [1] just to supply them with used clothes and shoes, massive subsidies to provide them with internet and electricity, and so on.
Once you get out of the big cities, especially in "fly over" states, the poverty in the US can be downright staggering.
[1] https://d2jald4mo73t7v.cloudfront.net/banners/_1200x630_crop...
They claim to account for them. Whether they actually did so in any way that makes sense is not documented. Given the credibility of the source... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, their claim is "social benefits paid to households". That wording strongly suggests that they only took into account those social benefits that result in a payment, of money, from the government to the households, such as social security payments or unemployment benefits.
Which would miss the vast majority of benefits, including all the ones I mentioned, because those benefits don't work that way.
Besides the questionable practice of lumping all of European countries into a single "Europe" block for debates like this, a single metric like wealth inequality, for instance, isn't useful to compare how countries or regimes are faring.
For instance, by that metric, the following countries are better than Sweden: Belarus, Moldova, UAE, Algeria, Iraq. And places like Myanmar and Poland are better than Austria.
source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in...
That's a great analogy.
I think you're giving "the media" too much credit here, it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them. I think in general that's the basis for all the laws we have - a bunch of people thought there should be a law against something and made it.
The only alternative to this is someone doing top-down laws based on what they personally think is right or wrong, and I'd argue that's much more what was happening in Christian-ruled Europe. The church was making laws - they weren't coming from a democratic government.
> it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them.
I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge. This is clearly a small group of "elite people in the know" (which in this case I consider myself and yourself a part of) deciding this.
“Do you want us to use [extensive list of all of the kinds of information we have meticulously gathered about you] to show you more relevant ads? Yes/no”
I have a personal belief on what most people will answer to that question. You may disagree. But it doesn’t really matter - the key is that people will be given the chance to make an informed decision.
I do pay for Youtube premium, because without that, the amount of ads really annoys me. I usually buy ad-free versions of freemium Android apps. There must be some value to pay for; making the free version annoying subtracts enough value that paying for the uncrippled version becomes a reasonable choice. (I usually buy paid versions of open-source apps to keep them open-source; that's also a value.)
Also, a lot of people are very much not well off. They often don't have that extra $5; I remember being in that state myself as a student. So they will put up with free shit, even if it has a noticeable shit component :(
Ads shown in Gmail are not based on the contents of the emails, rather on other characteristics inferred from the associated Google account [0]. It's a bit of a "splitting hairs" thing, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.
I'm not familiar with Hulu.
> How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free!
Those search engines are not as good as Google. All things being equal, I posit that people would prefer products that respect their privacy.
> You don’t have to guess.
Again, that's beside the point. The point is that people should be given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether a company is allowed to process their personal data for the purpose of showing "more relevant" advertisements, and that is a Good Thing.
When Apple forced apps to implement App Tracking Transparency which asks a neutral, OS-provided question to the user, only 4% opted in.
Furthermore, people generally don't care about privacy because they don't understand the ramifications of that decision (which is exactly why the GDPR was enacted instead of letting consumers and "the market" decide), but they do freak out when the tracking ends up backfiring on them.
Every single time I point that out, I get told to show proof of such "ramifications". They just don't think they'll be impacted by this tracking, which is ridiculous. Even more strange is the position of "I have nothing to hide." - privacy != secrecy.
And if your implied suggestion was that the business model of company X (and whatever benefit they may provide through this model) is a more important vote than the basic value of privacy, or that the issue of cost was not brought to the table enough times for people to understand the trade-offs, then I guess my understanding of how democracy works is different than yours.
Europe already endured centuries of this when the majority Christian ethos was that usury & banking were an evil to be banned. This, among other things of course, helped sentence millions of people to poor and deprived lives for centuries.