To sum up, what matters to me, in what she described, were the consequences of the belief that one shouldn't be ashamed of having a life outside of work, and needing some time and peace of mind to actually enjoy it.

More money won't make me happier if I don't have holidays, week-ends, and some time during workdays to actually enjoy spending it, without being chronically on the verge of a burn-out. This is common sense in Europe, whereas it seems to be considered leftist heresy in the US.

Disclaimer: I am very leftish ( I was very right when I was young; if you will not work fuck off ) by circumstance : by design of what you and me do, there will be no jobs like there are now. And people cannot die in the streets so we need to change things. I spend all my waking ours trying to do that and loving it.

So now we have two pieces of anecdotal evidence, worth exactly twice as much as one (2*0)

That aside... there is always a choice. Don't ever think otherwise. You don't have to stay there. You don't have to drive a nice car. Always a choice. It's just a matter of tradeoffs.

I'm not single either. I have a great girlfriend I've lived with for over 10 years.

I don't have kids and only a few close friends, so you did hit that part correctly.

Anyway that wasn't the point, my point was that stating your particular preference doesn't really add much to the conversation.

There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to money, past a certain point it's not worth the time you gave up to get it.

Put it another way, when you reach retirement age, would you rather be a millionaire with health problems or a modestly rich person in great health?

There is something seriously wrong here. Many, many pleasures in life are as pleasurable, or more pleasurable, than productively working. For many people, productively working is actually not pleasurable.

I'd probably work Saturdays if I got paid by the hour, but at the same time, if I did and it was a decent income I'd probably opt to work less - and I don't even have a family.

And don't forget that most people don't have the luxury of an enjoyable job.

A decade later, my perspective has widened and my priorities have shifted. I still derive a lot of pleasure from work (even though I wouldn't describe it as "molding reality"), but I also realize that work is ultimately a means to an end, which is to spend time with my friends and loved ones and/or develop my hobbies.

I do like working. And this is a traditional characteristic of Americans. With all the America bashing that goes on (some admittedly deserved) this is a thing I'm particularly proud of about my country. I'm proud of what we have invented, what we have achieved in very short period of time. I'd like to be part of that tradition.

Your trolling accusation is entirely unfounded.

I did take a moment to read the complaints in your profile and have some kind of idea that you might be susceptible to feeling abuse from public forums and have very rigid ideas of how people should behave in them. I encourage a bit more flexibility in your thinking. Again, not trolling. That accusation is way off base (and in fact, a trolling behavior itself). You really should apologize.

If you say group X is different because it has more of quantity Y, then it means that you think non-Xers have less of quantity Y. You can't say a demographic is noted for a virtue, then say that this is not a comment on other people - because those other people are the baseline against which the measure is made.

> You really should apologize.

Really? Right after you accuse me a stretching, then immediately use my profile to say something I never suggested? My profile commentary is asking for accountability in the way the forum moderation works, not demanding that people behave a certain way. People are free to disagree all they want, but the way the forum manages disagreement sucks - how many times do we see people genuinely puzzled about why their comments get downmodded, and asking for explanations?

It's also a bit much to be accused of being susceptible to feeling abuse, then having an apology demanded over a passing internet disagreement. You want me to grow a thick skin, but don't have one yourself?

I looked back through your comment history. Mostly reasonable comments with a couple of sort of unfounded accusations of trolling. I did see one comment where you talked about Japanese being hard workers and industrious. Would you consider that calling everyone lazy?

It doesn't matter. I gave my opinion. You are free to consider it trolling if you chose. I like working mostly. I'm proud of my culture. You seem like a generally decent guy. I'm dropping it.

We're being downvoted because we were in something of a flamewar, and people are trying to discourage that with downvotes. If there were mandatory reasons and attributions required for modding, you wouldn't have to second-guess what was going on. I also know it's not you downvoting because you can't downvote a direct reply to your own comment.

Anyway, yes, time to move on.

Work. Bees don't do it.

I think you've bought into little more than propaganda. Americans take off weekends. And how do you judge 330 million people when it comes to burn-out, given the vast differences among them all?

I have yet to see a software company in the US with the amount of time off as European companies despite the fact that most of the people I know in the US would trade salary for time off.

It's simply a race to the bottom; with no incentive for employers to reduce the number of working hours (because there are no laws for it, because white collar employees are exempt from overtime, because Americans stupidly believe that they can't achieve work improvements through collective bargaining), it is obvious that they will attempt to squeeze as much work out of employees up to, but not beyond, the point of futility.

So the millions of poor people having to work two or three shitty jobs just to make ends meet chose to do so and want to live like that? Bullshit. Go watch some documentaries about the subject.

It really depends.

I know several companies offering 6 weeks of paid leave, plus holidays, in my area.

On the other hand, that's certainly not the norm. There are many people working jobs which provide no paid holidays or vacation.

At my previous job it was expected that you'd work overtime and weekends if anything remotely important was going on (and not get flex time or anything like that to make up for it) for no extra pay. At my current job there is no such expectation at all and nobody does it. Critical events wait until Monday.

My perception is things are especially bad in startup culture/the valley, but that's not necessarily representative of the US.

I think the real difference between the US and European Country X is the lack of any universal minimum standards in the US. There is the federal minimum wage and the FMLA, and that's about it. There is no federal requirement for paid leave or maternity benefits. But there are plenty of jobs with paid leave and maternity benefits (other than FMLA unpaid leave). So in reality, the work/life balance in America differs dramatically by locale, industry, and company.

Yeah, so on average, the parent's point is correct: on average, the standard of living and work-life balance in the US are abysmal compared to those in most Northern European nations.

I think it's important that everyone keeps defending the liberties and rights that we (in Europe) have right now - and that the people in the US that just accept their shitty working environments because it's considered normal fight it, and demand what I think is getting basic human rights like caring for your newborn without losing your job or getting into financial trouble over it.

I would love to see how it affected Cadillac's sales.

You have to be kidding me. The average standard of living in the US is not the fourth best in the world. The US only got universal heathcare this century, it has a ludicrous work-life balance, the minimum wage in some states is very low (and sometimes includes tipping!), the infant mortality rate is lower than some third world countries, and maternity and paternity leave almost doesn't exist.

OECD better life index:

http://i.imgur.com/ekhWXeG.png

Maternity leave is common in America. You are free to choose your job based on the benefits you desire, including vacation time and maternity leave.

Switzerland and Germany to name two, are famous for not having fully socialized healthcare systems, instead they blend private and public. Poor Americans have had universal healthcare for a lot longer than just this century, via Medicaid. US healthcare has only become particularly expensive in the last 15 years as costs have soared, prior to that the US had a very affordable, mostly private healthcare system.

The infant mortality rate in some third world countries is far more likely to be fraudulent, including in places like Cuba where they force abortions to artificially prop up their infant mortality rates.

The minimum wage in the US is set federally, and all states must at least meet that line. It's also likely to jump by ~50% nationally in the next few years, as major cities move to $11-$15 minimum wages. Italy for example has no minimum wage, and Germany just finally got one. Only 1% of American labor earns minimum wage. The median income of the bottom 25% of workers in America earn as much as the median income in all of Italy.

Vacation time is also the lowest (2 weeks) compared to Europe which on average has 4 weeks of vacation time.

Where did you get your information about healthcare from? Very affordable healthcare in America? Seriously, what are you smoking?

The two big price jumps were in 1990-2000, and then 2000-now. The last one is what finally broke the private system in the US in terms of affordability.

It's easy to look up the facts and demonstrate where the costs began to soar:

http://i.imgur.com/OXg7Nx7.png

http://i.imgur.com/R6MbaD9.png

Healthcare costs per capita have gone up four fold since 1990 roughly. Real household income in the US was about $47,000 in 1990. Today it's around $58,000 or so. That means people in 1990, with just around 20% less income, were spending 75% less on healthcare. Yes, it was affordable back then.

You can easily prove this another way: look up medical caused bankruptcies, and look at how they surge from the 1990s forward.

As far as I know, no law requires employers to give their workers paid vacation days in the US. Although the most common vacation time is 2 weeks, there are some jobs with no paid vacation time at all. Also, from what I've heard, what the article mentions about people feeling guilty for taking vacation time is very real in American's work culture.

Here in the Netherlands, in contrast, the minimum paid vacation time by law is four times the number of working days in a week. For full time that's 20 days. Typically, companies provide a bit more than that.

The EU mandates a minimum of 4 weeks, so 4 weeks could hardly be the average.

Normally none, as I said 4 weeks is the minimum mandated by the EU. The only way an EU country would have less is if it recently integrated the union and has yet to transcribe 2003/88/EC ("Working Time Directive") into local law.

As for vacation, I'm feeling it... I've spent most of my career doing contract/hourly work, and for several years the only time I really had off was both unpaid and between jobs with half the time spent interviewing. The past three years I've forced myself to take a couple weeks off over the year, and it's a world of difference... Still unpaid, but worth it.

If I come across a company that gives me the freedom as an employee that I've had as a contractor, I'd be happy to be there. I've done far better in positions where I'm able to get work done, instead of minutia and meetings all the time. Where quality of output is worth more than the number of Jira tickets closed. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the majority of my work experience.

Who knows how things will work out in the end... at least it's not like the first .com bust.

For the top X percent maybe; the US also has a poverty rate of over 16% [1], over half a million homeless [2], food stamps programs to support the poor, etc.

> You are free to choose your job based on the benefits you desire, including vacation time and maternity leave.

Do tell that to the big employers like McD's & co (who are now replacing their employees with order computers after they asked/demanded a minimum wage), Wal-mart, Amazon, etc. There's far too many people who do not have the luxury of choice - and even if they did, they can't get the education they'd need to get hired anywhere unless they have rich parents or happened to be eligible for a grant from somewhere.

And as long as people that don't tip in restaurants and such get mistreated or scoffed upon, don't even start about minimum wages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

There are at least a dozen countries I'd rather live than in the US when it comes to well being. And that's not bad by the way, for a country of over 300 million, to rank top 5 or top 10 in an very broad and averaged parameter (like standard of living) is very hard to do. There's a ton of stuff the US gets wrong, but for a country of its size and age, it's a very successful experiment in politics that does extremely well, all things considered. But that doesn't mean it's among the top 10 in standard of living, which its not.

One of the key issues with a lot of these indices is that they have tons of factors that are based on nominal income. So the OECD better life index for example, has about 10 factors, one of them is how much you earn from a job, the other is wealth and household income, another is spending on housing and real estate prices.

But what it fails to mention is that in Germany, university is free. In the Netherlands, I pay about $2k per year and I get an equal stipend from the government for free (as long as I finish, if I don't it becomes a 1% interest rate loan). In France it's a few hundred bucks per year. Similar stories for all of scandinavia etc etc, only the UK is an outlier in this regard. And if you look at the rankings, probably half of Dutch universities are in the top 100 worldwide, the average US student pays orders of magnitude more and doesn't go to even remotely a world class educational institution.

In other words, would I prefer to be an average American and rack up $30k in debt and go to an unknown local university? Or go to a world class uni in the Netherlands for free? The answer is clear.

Which is why purely droning on about income levels is ignorant. Just to make this clear, would you be willing to reduce your income by 50%, if your expenses would drop by 90%? Obviously. Yet you only look at income, and don't look at expenses. I mentioned education but it's really broad. I live in a lovely apartment by the park with my gf for a few hundred bucks in Amsterdam. My net healthcare payments are a few hundred bucks a year for full coverage. Do I really care I could make a few grand more somewhere else? Nope.

You mentioned maternity leave, one of the issues within work life balance that was covered in this thread before... according to your OECD index the US doesn't even make the top 25 in work life balance, they're in place 29. Out of a possible 36, by the way. It's poor. So you have all these financial indicators that say 'we make this much money and it's the most', yet very little about 'things like healthcare is twice as expensive, education makes you a debt slave instead of being free or near free in many other OECD countries', and then to make all that money to pay for much more expensive stuff, you sacrifice work life balance and come in at an appalling figure.

Time devoted to leisure and free time? Oh place 32 out of 36. Must be amazing. You also work some of the longest hours of all the countries in the study. The only reason the final score isn't as bad is because gender equality was better than average. (which was quite suspect given the Netherlands, quite often respected for being a frontrunner country when it comes to equality in many forms, including gender, came in last by a wide margin. Why? Because Dutch mothers tend to work part-time out of choice, considering they're better educated than men and have financial independence without having to work overtime. And the positive effects of that shows. Yet it's regarded as the worst country of all of them.)

In short, I'm not terribly impressed with the OECD index, but I think that's clear to anyone who sees Poland's bottom and top 10% rank better than say the bottom and top of France or Japan, with all due respect to Poland.

Again, for a country of 300 million I can't think of a more successful country or region than the US, an absolutely great feat for a country and one of the reasons I do admire the US, but it doesn't mean that compared to smaller countries it ranks in the top 10, often not even the top 20 depending on the metric. That's not to bash the US as it's not a fair comparison, but if you do want to make the comparison and list countries of 1 billion and 1 million in the same list, then you'll naturally end up with a lot of the small countries that are outliers at the top.

My wife is from a very comfortable middle class Polish family and went to one of the best universities in Poland. In her summer holiday before starting university she worked in a factory in the UK for minimum wage assembling car headlights. She did this because the pound-złoty exchange rate made this work more financially rewarding than anything she could have done in Poland.

I have more examples of Poles who are working in the UK right now, simply because of the exchange rate.

I've met many UK-based Poles and not one has preferred life in the UK to life in Poland.

If anything, the exchange rate allows someone in the Polish bottom 10% to climb out of that 10% much more easily than a bottom 10% Frenchman could: Go to western Europe and work for the minimum wage for ten years. Upon their return they'll have more than enough for a nice house.

While salary in Italy, France and Germany may not be as high as in Switzerland, they all have longer maternity leave, bigger number of vacation, better public transportation and better benefits than in the USA

I guess we should all travel to get perspective on our local environments and see what's possible with different organizations and beliefs.

In some countries you might even get worker's rights like workers councils, unions on the board, ... If you work for example for Volkswagen, every factory in the world will have strong unions, only the US factory won't.

Nowadays though people can get fired if they join a union, which is why shit companies like McD's and Wal-mart get to continue to exploit their employees. I mean "associates".

It's not about whether it's possible to reproduce Switzerland's standard of living in America. It's about asking some difficult questions about the fundamental aspects of American work culture and how they can be changed for the better.

For example, why isn't there mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave in America? Why does the culture essentially force people to choose between careers and family?

It's funny because you show inappropriate content on TV and everyone goes "think of the children!" and loses their minds, but no one bats an eye when mommy and daddy has to work 60+ hours a week each and has no time to spend with their kid.

Are business interests too strong? Is everyone afraid to be labelled "socialist" and thereby disqualified if suggesting something worker-friendly?

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/

Thanks for linking that, Roger Moore may be controversial, but he does a good job of pointing out why the reality of the US just doesn't match up to its propaganda.

Thanks for comparing us to North Korea. I appreciate it. Also, the reason people stay in North Korea is because they will kill you if you try to escape, and will kill your remaining family if you succeed.

I will also let you know when I meet the first American who thinks our healthcare system works.

I really do hope you continue on your path of caricaturing others in order to make yourself feel better.

I really do love switzerland, but a proper comparison would be to say, Marin County or Boulder or La Jolla.

I think our pockets of "switzerland" stand up pretty well in comparison.

There's also crap, though; all three are only awesome if you're toward the top of the earning spectrum. And even then the vacation allocations (and the guilt tripping related to using vacation) are pathetic, pretty universally in the US (with a few notable exceptions, but even those rarely give you a MONTH OFF every year and expect you to TAKE IT).

Until we have free health care and more standard vacation time and less expected overtime, there will be no Switzerland in the US.

Only privileged rich people living in enclaves have their own Switzerland experience. For all intents and purposes I'm one of those at this point, for what it's worth. I can take my extended vacations now (between contracts), and a few people I know will take an unpaid month away from work every few years. If I work overtime, it's for a high hourly rate for every hour I spend (depending on project type and client, between $150-$250/hour).

But the majority of people, even here in Boulder, still have a max 2 weeks of vacation a year, unpaid mandatory overtime, and pretty pathetic salaries to boot (considering the cost of living). Hardly paradise. Certainly not Switzerland, for them.

Most of the US has a low cost of living compared to eg Switzerland. In most of eg Texas - most of the US actually - you can live well on $50,000 to $60,000 per year.

You're aware I'm guessing of the economic metrics of the top 50% in the US? It seems obvious to me that in fact you do not have to be mega rich to live well. The top 80 million Americans in the labor force would likely qualify as having at least as good of a life as the median Swiss standard of living.

You won't get >4 weeks paid vacation in "most of eg Texas", or actually affordable healthcare, or paid maternity leave (let alone multiple month worth) and post-leave work-hour arrangements, or a "sacred lunchtime", or the ability to work flexible hours without being looked at like a loser (unless you're self-employed maybe), or 80% salary unemployment, or the ability to live without owning a car.

A privileged few may get those. Not "most of eg Texas", not by a very, very long shot.

Beyond that the differentiators are working hours/flexibility and healthcare. A household in Texas might have quite a good life in many respects with an income of 60k/year, but do they get 6 weeks off, flexible working hours (useful if you have kids), and paid maternity/paternity leave that lasts more than a few weeks? In the US if you want/need that extra time away from work you might need to take time of work or go part time, causing a drop in income and perhaps company sponsored healthcare, but in many European these things are available by default to fulltime employees.

While many problems of the US are of its own creation due to either ideology or wealth dominating politics (healthcare & education spring to mind), it is quite unfair to compare what the Swiss government provides with the US.

The idea that Switzerland is propped up by tax evasion simply isn't true. The UK thought it was true and actually wrote proceeds from better Swiss cooperation over banking records into their budget .... then discovered there was a huge shortfall, because there was much less evasion done that way than they had imagined.

Regarding (1), it is possible that living in a tax shelter gives residents without a fortune more opportunities to make money than living in a country like Germany or the US does, but I lean towards the possibility that per-capita GDP is simply inaccurate or flawed as measure of the economic prospects of the residents who don't have fortunes.

Also, Singapore's per-capita GDP is very high compared to the personal income of its human residents (I have read) and I figure that was because a large fraction of Singapore's businesses are owned by non-Singaporeans (which has been the case, BTW, since Singapore's founding by British trading interests).

Much of the money being "protected from corrupt government" was obtained through corrupt activity.

It's unfortunate that most of their Jewish customers were killed by the Nazis. They also accepted deposits from the Nazis, but I can understand their attitude of not taking sides. In the end you want a neutral party like that, no matter what side you're on.

The roots of their respective prosperity and poverty come from the long-term effects of their respective ideologies. The US choses to let corporations evade taxes, and the US choses to project military might to pursue private corporate aims.

Just because a behaviour and culture is endemic and has occurred for generations now, that doesn't make it written in stone.

Other countries start from ruins and rubble periodically. Switzerland grows its prosperity incrementally, without catastrophes.

Twice the Germans started the process of putting together a Swiss invasion and gave up early because they realized they would have lost.

If you're judging by average income. The wealth distribution is so off in the US that you'll find several dozens of countries where people in the low middle class are much better off.

Switzerland 2,335,059 immigrants, 28.9% of population

United States 45,785,090 immigrants, 14.3% of population

Actually, more than the working conditions, the Americans didn't want to go back because of the guns.

For example, in dollar terms Sweden's economy hasn't expanded since about 2007.

They have a ~7.8% unemployment rate.

They have about twice the household debt to income ratio of American households, and have a present debt crisis among those households:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/09/sweden-economy-idU...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/sweden-s-d...

The household debt is exclusively housing, simply because interest rates have been low for many years and mortgages in Sweden were traditionally not 30 years but rather 100 or infinite (interest rate only), and interest is deductible making it even cheaper to borrow. We also didn't see the bubble burst after the 2008 crisis, unlike many other countries, so many predict a bursting bubble now. That said, the mortgage market has tightened swiftly now, down payments have gone from 0% to 15-25, mortgages are repaid 1-2% per year etc, so the market is at least better prepared for a dip now than it would have been in 2008.

Anything else is a minority industry that can barely keep going because the oil export is driving the exchange rate through the roof.

This to the point that the government is fearful of doing anything major or else the exchange rate will really go out of whack.

Here is the thing, public buildings are disintegrating around us while the continued line out of the politicians is that we need to save "for future generations".

If you want to care for future generations you build, and you maintain what you build. But no, we must "save it for the future".

Damn it, we have basically turned Poland into a factory for "Norwegian" products. If you glance at a "Norwegian" chocolate bar these days it is likely to read "made in Poland".

Sure, but the standard on living on most of the things she mentions is better than the US in lots of others European countries, even if they're not as high as Switzerland...

>All these great states are tiny (8M people) outliers. There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than alive in Switzerland

That's beside the point, since that "work-life balance" is enjoyed by the overwhelming majority in Switzerland -- whereas that's not true for ANY city of comparable size in the US.

But I do think the article is right in pointing out a lack of options in the U.S. if you want to live a lifestyle that doesn't center around work. I love writing software but 40 hours a week + 5 hours of commute + 6 hours of software practice + recovery time seems to me to not leave enough time for enjoying the parts of life that don't involve compiling.

> But I do think the article is right in pointing out a lack of options in the U.S. if you want to live a lifestyle that doesn't center around work.

This is the "option" of being both a very small and very rich state, which is simply not feasible.

To put this into perspective, Norway is just over half the population of New York City. If New York City had half a million dollars of oil reserves per citizen (as you point out) and started to mint its own currency, and established immigration and trade barriers[0], yes, we would see a massive quality-of-life improvement compared to the status quo.

But that's simply not an option, because (a) we can't produce massive oil riches out of thin air, and (b) NYC is not a sovereign state.

[0] Norway is not part of the EU, but even if it were, EU member states are able to restrict trade and immigration within themselves to a far greater degree than a city or even state in the US can.

Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration. Sure it's a small and "rich" country, but the cultural things like good work/life balance applies anyway.

Edit: as was pointed out to me in another comment: this is using a loose definition of "life" which includes 23 hour nights at freezing temperatures. Not for everyone.

It absolutely does make a difference to have the world's largest sovereign wealth fund[0], as well as the economic status that allows you to leave it untouched. Simply having guaranteed future access to that kind of wealth changes your political and economic options today.

> Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration

Sweden is also comparably small (same size as NYC proper), and much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states. Sweden refuses to publish data on ethnic backgrounds[0], but by all accounts it is overwhelmingly white[1]. Of the top ten countries of origin for Swedish immigrants, 6 are predominantly-white European countries, and the rest are countries with majority Muslim population[2]. Muslim immigrants in Sweden have on average a dramatically lower quality-of-life than the general Swedish population and compared to what is being discussed here. On top of that, they face incredible racism and xenophobia.

So if anything, this supports the point that allowing free migration (as all US cities do) brings average quality-of-life down, not up. (Or to put it another way, it's very easy to maintain a high quality-of-life when you have the freedom to exercise strict control over your borders).

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24049876

[1] Manhattan, by contrast, was majority non-white for most of the 20th century, and only just surpassed 50% white in ~2011.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden#Populat...

It probably makes a political difference yes, but I mean that if you woke a swede in norway, they wouldn't really notice apart from that everyone sounded funny.

> much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states.

The biggest recently is Syria, followed by Eritrea (2014).

I'm not saying that immigration is a net positive economically in Sweden (this is a hot topic, which isn't PC to talk about btw), short term at least that is very hard to believe, especially for refugees. Long term you get a different set of factors though when you weigh in demographics etc, the opinion on immigration is somewhat positive here though.

Going slightly OT here but I'm pretty sure that racism/xenophobia against muslims in Sweden is no worse than elsewhere. I'm not saying things are peachy, but incredible seems like an overstatement in this case.

If anything, I'm surprised how tolerant this society is.

You must be confusing it with something else. Sweden is slightly bigger than California (450295 vs 423970 km2).

That is when we exert our five+ weeks of vacation and travel to a warmer place...

Track the price of oil against Norway's extreme GDP per capita growth from 2000 to 2008 ($37k per capita to $95k per capita), a time in which the price of oil went up ~10 fold. It's plainly obvious that Norway's economy is highly dependent on the performance of oil. Their wealth boom the prior 15 years came almost exclusively from the big oil run. Until the year 2000, they did not stand out as especially wealthy compared to other top tier nations. Their GDP per capita was almost identical to the US throughout the 1990s.

Each norwegian citizen is like Warren Buffett, they sit on a shitload of money but you can't tell.

Not so much disagreeing as pointing out that condensing something as complex as living standards into a league table is a somewhat absurd reduction.

In Switzerland or anywhere else in Europe (excluding the east) you enjoy all the benefits mentioned in the article no matter what income or job you happen to have.

It would be more meaningful to boil it down to a different ratio. Even per-capita would represent the differences better.

How is this even remotely relevant to the discussion?

Thats a little bit disingenuous comparing absolute numbers of countries with very different sizes.

I do agree that they're outliers though - seems very difficult to duplicate.

Why? Countries seem to scale pretty well. A social structure that works well in one city can work well in 200 cities.

Granted mega cities add a level of complexity, but on a very broad level I don't see why people here thing you can't scale a system employed by a 8m country to say 80m. Its just more of the same.

Imagine you had 1 team of 10 people working on ABC, or 100 groups of 10 people, working on ABC, yet having to cooperate between groups. It's really hard, it creates all kinds of friction, you need all kinds of overhead human capital to organise everything, everything moves slower, there's more resistance to change, and various of the smaller groups create their own working cultures and approaches, and squaring all of that into one cohesive vision is really tricky.

Then consider that companies are relatively dictatorial compared to the runnings of most OECD countries, where a CEO has more power to simply lay down a vision and expect everyone to get behind it, much more than a president or prime minister doing so.

I think that's mostly it. For a more academic approach look up diseconomies of scale, although I'm sure you're already familiar... It also applies to government. I do agree with you though, to a large extent I think we can scale, but there are limits and disadvantages at some point.

Beyond that I think to a large extent the differences can be numerically explained. It's not true that small countries do best across the board. Germany does better than Italy, Kenya does better than Malawi, China does better than Vietnam who does better than Cambodia etc... all larger countries that do better.

But imagine you have a list of 10 'large' countries, and 100 'small countries'. Obviously the large are less common, after all only two countries have more than 1 billion people, no other ones more than 500m, only 3 other countries have more than 200m, while more than 100 countries have less than 10 million people.

So imagine 10 large and 100 small countries, and they're randomly distributed. The chance of a small country in the top 10 is very large, as it is to be in the bottom 10, while for large countries the chance is really small to simply end up anywhere. Yet if you break up the US into 100 little regions of a few million people, like about 80 countries on the planet, similar to say Norway, Singapore, Finland (all 5m ish people), or Iceland (300k), you'd surely have many of those little regions hitting top 10 rankings for standard of living. Places like greater San Fransisco would probably do quite well.

In academic terms, this is known as the "economies of scale" And there is a reason why the mom and pop stores are always the underdog when Wall-Mart moves in. The economies of scale are bigger than the diseconomies of scale by degrees of magnitude. I mean, it would be nice to imagine that the nimble local stores are going to win out over the big chains, but theory says thats not going to happen, and in practice we observe that this does not happen.

The economies of scale are simply so much larger than the diseconomies that they steamroll them withotu noticing that they were ever there.

What is more is, we can observe how these things scale in countries from Iceland at 300 000 people, to Finland at 5 million to Germany at 80 million. There doesn't seem to be much evidence of diseconomies of scale over this span.

I dont really think we can assume they'd somehow spring into existence beyond the population of Germany.

Suppose you have a room full of 5 people building a bridge with legos. They're a small group and thus benefit from say the agility small teams provide. They finish their lego bridge in record time & live happily ever after.

If you need to provide lego bridges for 10 people though then you've got a choice: you can stick 10 people into the room and make them build a bridge twice as big, or you can have two rooms each building their own bridge in close proximity & benefiting from the speed of small teams.

Thats a simplification sure, but I feel societal structure (e.g. the mindset that makes canada's healthcare work) are to some extent imprinted in the people & thus apply regardless of the size of the border on some random map. If you stick another hospital on a map in Canada it'll work just as well.

As a side note, not convinced about the big company thing either. It can certainly be like that, but well managed its not inevitable. I work for one of the biggest companies out there & absolutely everything is split into ad-hoc ~7 man teams that have essentially absolute power over that project.

Bit fuzzy post/argument I know - apologies for that.

Median household income PPP adjusted in America is 30-40% better than France and Germany.

US PPP income is highly skewed because the US dollar is very strong, and a basket of consumer goods in the US is very cheap. Healthcare and education on the other hand are astronomical, and certain items seen elsewhere as 'luxuries' can be required in many parts of the US (one or two cars, for instance).

Anyhow, most quality of life surveys put the US at around 10th, which I think is pretty appropriate based on what I've seen (both statistically and anecdotally).

My main problem with quality of life indexes is they tend to overvalue income equality. It's true that income inequality is generally associated with poor countries but the USA is clearly an outlier. Favoring equality is a normative judgement.

For certain jobs. Many don't provide healthcare.

> Things like free tuition are paid for by much higher rates.

Higher rates in higher income brackets. Not across the board.

Nevertheless, you are correct that the aggregate effect is that we pay roughly the same cumulative tax as the average Western European citizen. A little less, to be sure, but we get vanishingly little for it in social benefits, particularly in the catastrophe that is health care. The result is that we have to pay both sides: pay the government, then pay (gargantuan sums!) out of our own pockets for things like tuition and health care.

That's why things like health care, transport infrastructure, PPP, median and average salaries, etc... are all factored in to quality of life rankings. And why the US isn't the best country to live in.

Obviously there's many people between homeless and billionaires, but I was responding to a post that claimed the US' quality of life was better because of the potential to live well.

You seem to not know the actual definitions of "third world" and "jingoism."

Oh and by the way. What part of "compared to" do you not understand?

As for the somewhat racist term "third world," I assume you really meant "underdeveloped economy." Which, for all of the United States' problems, it is not. The UN puts our HDI in the top 5, and it's nearly equal to Switzerland's.