As somebody living outside the US, I would find moving to the states highly undesirable even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
I live in the US. I disagree about the hostility towards non-citizens. If you are talking about ICE, it's more about racism. They are not gunning down Brits, Germans or Australians.
Agree about the rest. Can I come live in your country? :)
Well… your bike likely has several lubricants, and paints as well as coatings that especially in close contact with your skin… especially in the handle bars under friction indeed probably introduce chemicals that will increase some risks, versus never having done it.
That is the horror of what we have done with modern material science…
Would you prefer a label that gives you only risk increases above say 1% ? Alternatively you can just assume we have complicated the world so much with modern material tech that despite its benefits nearly everything you touch increases your cancer chances in America.
I've read the list of materials that California knows cause cancer and birth defects. It lists things that people encounter every day. Alcoholic beverages, aloe leaf extract and aspirin are some of the most notable examples from the "A" section.
>> Alcoholic beverages, aloe leaf extract and aspirin
Where I am, they all are known to cause birth defects. I never met woman with children that didn't take measures to avoid them (and a dozen of other products with similar effects) during pregnancy.
If you liken your bike to them, that's, uh. That's one hell of a bike. Probably should stay away from pregnant woman while riding it, huh
Asbestos, leaded gasoline, lead based paint, etc were things encountered everyday in the past. This is how science progresses and how our life expectancy and active life expectancy go up.
You can also search for studies that compare the societal cost/benefit of using a car vs a bicycle. The generally accepted conclusion is that cars have a cost while cycling has a benefit for society.
That's not what I'm saying. Based on OPs phrasing, their specific bike was marked as a health hazard. Maybe their bike is painted with lead based paint. There could be a million reasons a specific model could be unhealthy.
yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
To be fair, the UK isn’t high on my list either and I’ve lived in Finland and Austria before and I know people from china and their experiences with infrastructure and healthcare.
I am mostly comparing these places to all first world countries, rather than just the anglosphere.
Housing is the only one I can agree on. The place is so damn big that outside of places like New York, you can get 2/3 times the space for the same money, in a lot of places even more!
His ilk is the Heritage foundation, and not just nationalism, some fascism with a bit of 18/19th century great white man imperialism. They're arguably even the cause of this article as Raegan implemented many of their proposals that has lead to this.
>yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him.
Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural power of their demographic majority and identity. People forget how much of a joke candidate he was until racists took him seriously.
>if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare
If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
Per the AI:
> U.S. insurance coverage is broadly divided into Private Insurance (66% of the population) and Public/Government Insurance (36%), with about 8% to 10% remaining uninsured.
The US system is far from perfect, but the comic book depictions of some hellscape are slightly overblown. Healthcare _is_ great here, wait times are basically non-existent. That's why our healthcare is expensive: it doesn't scale, we use a lot of it, and demand the absolute latest, best technology and treatments.
Should we expand Medicaid to cover the gap of the uninsured? Probably. And once we stop fighting culture wars, maybe things can get done.
"estimates suggest that inability to afford costs of medical care contributes to at least 530,000 personal bankruptcy filings annually. Approximately two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are associated with medical expenses or illness-related loss of work."
> If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.
It very much depends on life situation. For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
Secondly, I would also debate the better health care. I recently had two health scares in my direct family (one time cancer, one time another tumor) and in both cases care was quick and excellent. Of course, there is quite a lot of variance between countries. We lived in Germany for a while and I was less impressed by health care there (though it's probably still much better and definitely cheaper than the average health care in the US).
Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Sorry, this is totally false. I checked the local established norm (49 days) and stats (generally between 30 and 150 days, depending on the hospital, which you can choose). And this doesn't depend on private insurance, because it does not exist in the county I live.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
I am able to see my general practitioner generally the same or next day and waiting time at the GP is typically less than 10 minutes. I can also visit my dentist the same day in the case of an emergency.
It's the same in many other European countries. I got kidney stones when we were on vacation in Denmark (I don't recommend). I visited a doctor twice, both times I called and I could immediately come to their practice and they ran tests, etc. I don't think we even got a bill for either visits. I only paid something like 10 euros at the pharmacist for a good stock of painkillers.
This often comes up in discussions pitting the US against the EU countries.
I'm not familiar with all of them, but here in "free, socialized healthcare" France, if you don't have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to "employer-dependant healthcare" in the US, you're going to have to pay out of pocket quite a lot of money. Maybe not as much as in the US (not familiar with that country), but very much not free. Think dental, glasses, needing to spend a night in a hospital for whatever reason (even public ones!), etc. On top of your salary being much lower.
Sure, you don't need an employer to have a mutuelle, you can pay for your own. But it's usually pricier and worse coverage.
Also in the US. In many other countries, you do not only initially get unemployment benefits, but also a form of basic income if the unemployment benefits expire and you haven't found a job, plus rent compensation, etc.
> In many other countries, you do not only initially get unemployment benefits, but also a form of basic income if the unemployment benefits expire and you haven't found a job, plus rent compensation, etc.
It's the same everywhere in the US. Colloquially called "collecting unemployment".
> Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though
It absolutely is.
America is great if you make at least 150k a year and never get sick.
The moment you get sick with anything serious your employer might fire you. Labor protections in America are a bad joke. Your boss wants to fire you because your taking time off to look after a sick relative, I guess you can sue, but they’ll blame something and probably win.
Your boss lies to your face about pay and benefits, ohh well sucks to suck.
Very minor illnesses turn catastrophic. Several stories have emerged of otherwise healthy young people going without insulin and not doing so well…
> Parents sue over son's asthma death days after inhaler price soared without warning
Cole Schmidtknecht, 22, had insurance but couldn’t afford to refill his asthma inhaler after the cost jumped from $70 to more than $500.
Half the country cheers this on. The idea of some ‘lazy’ person getting something they don’t deserve rationalizes this dystopian system.
Of course the American system ends up costing significantly more for worse outcomes.
Access to therapy is usually gate kept to those with expensive insurance plans. Medicare, if it covers it at all can easily have a 1 year wait list for therapy.
Not to mention that most people get no meaningful vacation time.
Want to quit because you’re burnt out. Even if you have savings you won’t have health insurance. You won’t be able to afford therapy without it.
Get back on the hamster wheel.
I do regret not making a better effort to leave earlier. It’s not going to get better
> Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
As an American who's had to deal with the ramifications of employer-based health insurance first-hand, I can confirm that this strikes me as accurate. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where even being out of work for most of last year did not hurt my financial situation very much (my wife and I were actually able to buy our house during my unemployment), but even being in that fairly privileged position, due to her autoimmune condition, we've had to go through quite a lot of annoying bullshit from a lack of healthcare options due to basically being stuck with whatever my employer happens to offer.
With my previous health insurance (from a startup where there were around 10 employees during my time there), we were able to get the semiannual procedure she's been getting for years from her specialist doctor approved relatively quickly, but with the insurance from my current job, it took months earlier this year to get it approved because they kept denying it due to her condition (which is pretty rare in general, and even more rare for anyone to have it as long as she has; one of the first doctors she saw for it years ago told us "you're not going to find a support group for this online", and we've literally yet to find anything online about anyone else ever having it for as long as she has) not being on the list of pre-approved conditions. This was typical across several insurance companies for the initial request, but with this insurance company, they put us through an extremely convoluted process for appealing. First, they told her doctor that he couldn't email or fax them his letter of medical necessity and had to send it through snail mail, which even a month later they claimed they had never received. They told me I could email it to them, which I did, only for them to later claim I didn't have authorization to do that on behalf of my wife (something that never came up in the call where they told me to email it to them despite us both being there on speaker phone), and she had to fill out and email them a form authorizing me. She did that, but then after a while they still just sent us a blanket rejection for it not being on the initial list (as if there were any chance of it magically appearing on the list between when they initially denied it and when they finally processed the appeal?), and they could not provide us with any evidence that an actual doctor looked at the letter where her doctor stated definitively that he would expect her to likely experience permanent and potentially fatal organ damage with the treatment due to none of the other options having mitigated her symptoms in the past. After filing a grievance, they insisted that if her doctor filled out the information in a separate form that they had never mentioned to either him or us before, they would take it into account, so he did that, and then after a while they still rejected it with identical language to before. Finally after three months, they gave us the ability to have her doctor talk directly to an actual doctor on their end, and then it got approved within the next week. No one was able to provide any sort of coherent explanation as to why they kept putting us through such bullshit procedures that had no effect instead of letting us just do that in the first place.
I don't pretend to have any first-hand experience with healthcare in other countries, but no sane system would end up with such disparate outcomes for the exact same condition for the exact same patient due to literally nothing but how much bullshit the insurance company feels like putting you though. There's literally no way for us to have stayed with the insurance company that managed to actually read the information her doctor sent them and approve it within a few days the first time because they're based in a different state that the company I was employed by happened to be based in, and my current employer has no other insurance companies as options for me to pick instead. Even without all of the potential awful things that you mention people might go through with a subpar employer, the situation actually still sucks even when you do like your employer because your insurance options are tied to them. I like my job, and other than the insurance company sucking, it works well for me, but I also can't reasonably expect them to pick up an entire new insurance option for the entire company because of the bullshit I went through, so as much as I'd love to literally never have to deal with this specific insurance company again, there's no way to do that without giving up the job as well. Realistically, that would end up causing a lot more stress and uncertainty that my wife and I don't want to go through (especially when there's no guarantee that whatever insurance we'd end up with from a new job would be any better). At least in another country, we'd have some level of consistency in trying to get her treatment approved.
America has some of if not the best hospitals in the world. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean equal access, but those are facts not ideology.
We can argue if that is fair or not, but if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC, America is [one of] the best places to be for medical care.
It is similar to universities, the US has some exceptional hospitals/universities and a lot of mediocre ones. Exceptional facilities are more accessible to certain groups than others. Many European countries strive for a high average, perhaps not as good as the US's best, but much better than the US average, and they are accessible to everyone [1].
My parents also lived in the US (and IIRC they were on private insurance), but no way would they want to trade European healthcare/education for the US counterpart.
At any rate, all the statistics show that the US pays ~twice as much for health care with worse outcomes for the general public.
if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC
It's always so surprising that people from the US do not see the issue with this. Let's say, assuming that you are in tech, I hope you don't get laid off in the next round.
[1] I have to add a bunch of qualifiers here, because the EU or Europe is not a single country and some countries have private insurance, private clinics, etc.
So basically you're saying "if you can afford it, the US is one of the best places to get medical care". Well, if I can afford it, why wouldn't I just fly to the US to get that care then? I don't have to be living there.
"If you can afford it" also conveniently glosses over the fact that a private insurance system means that the costs for paying out of pocket tend to be insanely high, since that an insurance company pays the hospital is basically entirely unrelated to the price that you'd get charged as an individual. Even if you're making a decent software engineering salary in the US, which would put you in a much cushier financial position than most of the country, you'd better hope that you don't ever have any major accidents or develop any uncommon medical conditions or you'll be eating into your savings at an alarmingly high rate.
It's sickening to watch America go from everyone being fairly equal to this sort of elitism. 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you are under 50 and have a great job, life is great'.
If you are 50+ with a average job in an average town, America is much worse now that it was prior to the 2000s. And nobody cares because 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you have a good job, aren't really all that sick or are on someone elses insurance plan, and if you are under 50'.
I'm in Canada. Earlier today I called the doctor's office to make an appointment for my wife. She'll be in tomorrow.
Last month had to get my son in to get checked out, turned out he just had a nasty cold, but they were able to get him in day-of. Mind you, that's not the emergency room, that's my _family doctor_.
Two weeks ago my mother had kidney stones, went to the ER. Had a stent put in, sent along her merry way in I want to say 4 hours?
When my sciatica flared up several months ago, I was in the ER for several hours just because there were much more severe cases ahead of me, which makes perfect sense. I got xrayed that day, bloodwork, among other shit.
I could go on and on, but these cases aren't outliers for us, they're the norm.
Healthcare varies widely in Europe. It's not one country. But the "on private health care" part is they key. It's really not that different in lots of parts of Europe with the difference that people who do not have that still have access to the healthcare system without going bankrupt, albeit slower.
This just isn't true and really glosses over the downsides of the US healthcare system.
Employer health plans are only good as long as you pay - if they are good. Lots aren't and they require you to pay so much upfront. Waiting time for specialists and surgeries depend on the area you live in: Not common to wait months for a specialist in the US. You won't get seen if you can't pay for the doctor upfront and medicines are expensive.
I moved from the US (Indiana) to Norway. I've never had an issue seeing a doctor or dentist if I'm sick or in pain since I've been here. I can plan routine things in advance, but I don't need to plan months in advance. I'm just not getting in the same day because they save those times for folks that are sick and need seen sooner. I'll never have a bill if I'm hospitalized. Doctors tend to offer less invasive treatments first - they would have tried to avoid a knee replacement. And if the wait was long (which again, really isn't different from the states, depending on where you are and if you have money enough), the safety net helps out. Reduced work hours and paid time off work and stuff like that. The emergency room sends folks home with medicine instead of expecting you to go to the pharmacy afterwards! ER waiting times aren't longer and honestly, I can call ahead and suffer at home instead of in a waiting room if it isn't actually an emergency, but need urgent care. My partner was seen immediately when he cut off part of his finger, I was seen immediately when I had severe pain, but you'll wait longer for an uncomplicated broken bone and things like that.
And this is all relying on the public system - People can get shorter waiting times if they use the private system.
UK: A dentist will see you for an emergency appointment pretty quickly. I can usually get a routine appointment within a few weeks, but if it's a routine check-up I don't mind scheduling it for a few weeks/a month out. If I'm going private I can usually get a routine appointment same week.
For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.
Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.
Aren't NHS medical workers in a constant state of protest over low wages and bad working conditions? I know the doctor/nurse brain drain from Canada and the UK to the US used to be really bad. I haven't seen what the statistics are recently.
In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance. A basic plan costs like 25 pounds per month. Affordable I'd say. Many people spend more than that on beer and public transport.
I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.
For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.
Whilst I understand that reasoning, I disagree with it. Private insurance should not be necessary to begin with, and if it must exist for whatever rational reason, the insurance should be public as well. Anything that has to do with healthcare (not talking about optional cosmetic surgery, of course) should be handled by / via public healthcare services.
Furthermore, I would say that it's wrong to look at the situation in terms of "reducing the burden on the NHS Dental", since that is literally what's there for. If people don't opt for cosmetic surgery, then it's a healthcare issue and we created this institution/branch for this very purpose. Otherwise we can easily end up speaking in terms of how much of a burden being alive is, and how eating (regular) food and drinking water are poor economic decisions, a topsy-turvy way of looking at the very reason to have an 'economy'.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want.
This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.
Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.
I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.
This is wrong, you can get same-day appointments for anything time-critical including dental. What takes a long time to schedule is mostly free preventitive care.
There is also the same private healthcare that americans enjoy. You have the option of spending $50 to $100 to go to a private clinic and get same-day admission. In the US services like that cost nearly 10 times the price due to the whole insurance bullshit.
I got free same-day heart check-up and $80 paid same-week heart monitoring check-up.
There are horror stories and footage of the UK NHS, but that's mostly just london and in reality pretty much every city that large suffers from that.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Can you share a reference for that statistics?
FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.
A lot of people in the UK (with professional jobs) top up their state health provision with private medical insurance provided by their employer. This isn't a bad mix.
I had skin cancer. I talked to my doctor and to the local skin care clinic. Because of my deductible, the final cost for removal would be the same with or without insurance. If I bypassed the American insurance hellscape, I could have the removal surgery that week. If I used my insurance, went to all the specialist referrals they wanted, etc it was minimum 3 months before I could get the surgery because of wait times for appointments to have confirmation what the skin care clinic tested/told me same day.
You are misinformed. A lot of people in Europe and Canada also have private insurance, sometimes paid by the employer as well, and with that the wait times are usually very short. Going through the public healthcare system you may indeed wait months for non urgent matters.
> if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada
Even if it's true now, I wonder for how long—insurance is getting worse and worse every year.
You read that? I can get either in a day or two if I need it, they want much longer-term planning though.
For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.
Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.
I regularly see this making the rounds that "you can see your doctor in the US right away whereas in <socialist healthcare country of your choice> you have to wait months!"
I call BS. I have a great healthcare plan and appointments with my PCP are weeks out if at all; I was lucky to find some other random PCP who was available for a Telehealth consult only. Our kid has a rare disability that requires lots of different doctors, and we have to book literally months in advance for consults.
My (now retired) parents live in Ireland and get better healthcare than we do in the US.
It is impressive how misinformed you are about the reality of health care in Europe. It is almost as if you were being lied to in order to make you accept being mistreated.
It really is astounding how bad national brands are. Everything loaded with sugar and salt. Lowest quality ingredients in everything, and I do mean everything.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
Yeah the USA has only given lip service for everything it claims to be. Especially in the last 18 months it’s been working overtime to make it even worse.
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Not to mention school shooting drills. Teaching kids how to behave when someone tries to shoot up your school, because it happens more than once a decade... And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
One could suspect that the number in the next decade should be between 2000-3000 incidents. Since 2000 is a bigger number than 1 yes more than once a decade.
Mass shootings more broadly are even worse with 167 in Jan-June 2026.
Training kids how to respond to school shootings is like training kids how to respond to dual engine failures on an airplane.
It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself.
And as a reminder, Europe sees more people die to heat than America sees people die to guns.
Maybe your guild should figure out how to beat the PvE server before lecturing the players on the PvP server on how ridiculous you think our freedom is. Major skill issue, noob.
It is statistically likely that one will happen somewhere in the country , but it is also statically unlikely that it will happen at the one you are at.
The odds a child will be killed by an armed assailant at a school in the USA are about 1 in 5 million per year, and if you narrow down to mass shootings at schools, that drops to about 1 in 10 million.
Between 2013 and 2022, a total of 77 students in grades K-12 have been killed in 11 school mass shootings, in a country with 50 million school children.
A child in America is about 500-600x more likely to die in a car accident than a school shooting.
A child in America is about 90-120x more likely to die from a pedestrian fatality than a school shooting.
A child in America is 70-90x more likely to die from choking than a school shooting.
A child in America is 50-60x more likely to die from drowning than a school shooting.
A child in America is 40-55x more likely to die in a fire or from smoke than a school shooting.
A child in America is 10-15x more likely to die in a bicycle accident not involving a motor vehicle than from a school shooting.
Comparable risks to dying in a school shooting include a fatal sting from a bee or wasp, (about twice a likely), or dying from being struck by lightning (about half as likely).
School shootings, while tragic, do not pose nearly as much of a statistical threat as you think they do, even if they still pose more than they ought to.
As a reminder, the heat killing Europeans right now is caused by America pumping ungodly amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere with virility-signalling cars and air conditioning set to 60 fahrenheit everywhere. You are literally mocking Europeans for being killed by your waste.
CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.
Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel. You're welcome.
Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Speaking of giving - since 2014, the EU has purchased approximate €700-€900 billion worth of oil and natural gas alone from Russia (total EU imports from Russia exceed €1T in that time period), while offering less than €300 billion in support to Ukraine.
The EU is responsible for funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and has given more than twice as much money to Russia than it has to Ukraine.
America, on the other hand, has appropriated nearly $200B to Ukraine (over $100B in direct aid), yet paid only a tiny fraction of that to total Russian imports since 2014.
In other words, America is a net economic supporter of Ukraine, while the EU is a net economic supporter of Russia.
>CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.
Global warming didn't start two weeks ago, nor two decades ago. Most of human generated CO2 and most of the calories accumulated by greenhouse effect are still directly caused by Americans, both in absolute numbers and relative per capita.
>Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel.
Americans also elected PV panel haters, and are still destroying whole regions to extract more oil, both overseas and at home.
>Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Hi, cool, are you going to give AC units to Europe? And the Middle East? And India/Bangladesh etc.? Maybe we should prosternate at your feet and thank you for you magnifiscence, oh great solvers of problem you caused.
> And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
We can't do anything to fix the root cause because the root cause is an inviolable Constitutional right.
So we simply must accept that school shootings/mass shootings/gun violence in general are the price we pay to be able to shoot watermelons and the occasional politician and remain the only truly free nation on earth.
> even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world[0], and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
> America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
International comparisons are tricky, and you should always check the data definitions carefully.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Salary alone is meaningless if you don't factor in purchase-power-parity and other quality of living aspects. E.g. a lot of people are happy to move to Denmark, and accept a paycut because they are leading with their social facilities and family support. Salary alone will not conjure good infrastructure
Yes, at the lower end of those salaries, you have to do things (and this is one single example btw) like have roommates, which drastically increases your housing instability. Why? Because you have to rely on your roommates' ability to pay rent. If they don't, what happens? You lose your PrIvIlIgE to live there! Most places in the US do not have protections for this. So you can try really hard to find another roommate, but you have a very limited amount of time to do so (basically until the next rent payment). So then you get evicted. Now your ability to find a new place to live is damaged because you have a permanent "evicted" mark on your credit/tenant report. Oh, and of course, the landlord can go to court and try to get the court to force you to pay the remainder of the rent or at least continue to pay the rent until they lazily find a new tenant. So now you're financially damaged too. There are so many footguns like this in the US that people, on HN especially, are ignorant to. Imagine trying to keep a job while also dealing with all these shenanigans. Can you even get time off work to go to the court hearing? If you don't, the landlord can get a default judgement.
Oh and sorry because this is HN and people will automatically assume I mean owning the property and renting rooms out to others, I mean both people are renters in this case.
> Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
> American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
You would also need to adjust for the huge medical expenses Americans face if you are doing that as Germans don't have that. Maybe the 401K savings Americans do for retirement (if Germans have a better societal retirement payout than Americans). And the other social benefits that are accounted for by German taxes that Americans still have to account for in some way. You can't just lump those in on the Germans and not account that Americans pay it some way as well.
I do wonder how real the base number - the GDP - is. The wealthy have been accumulating wealth rapidly but it’s all on paper and the entire thing is underpinned by assumptions of USD reserve currency status.
Wealth inequality doesn't cause ills, envy does. Envy should be regarded as a character defect, a sin, not something to be elevated to policy. You're not poorer because someone's richer than you, and indeed policies aimed to reduce wealth inequality will actually make you poorer, that's why average European salaries are much lower than US ones.
Envy is the completely wrong framing, it is about fairness. If you design widgets and 99 people build them and everyone works the same number of hours, then the fair share is 1 % for everyone. One percent of the work, one percent of the profit. If you take 2 % [1] while everyone else only gets 0.99 %, that is unfair. And look, the difference for each individual is tiny, 0.99 % or 1 %, that makes it easy to dismiss despite being the source of the unfair inequality.
He will get the same as the others if he works the same number of hours to run the company. The dept would ideally be company debt and not personal dept, after all one reason to found a company is to separate personal and business risks. But if you invest personal money in the company, you get that money back plus some risk and opportunity premium just as you would pay back any other loan. What fraction that is will of course depend on the amount, premium, and payback period. Just investing some money will not provide you a perpetual income.
The classic reply to this is that inequality reduces the agency of people to make decisions in the society - IOW it causes _power_ inequality.
But the reply to that is that it is orthogonal to the discussion. Power should be distributed in a way that increases efficiency and not just for the virtue of doing so.
All human relationships have inequalities. Attempting to use the government to destroy hierarchies is utopian bullshit. It always leads to worse outcomes than intendent because humans are imperfect. Intentions should never be the measure of success, only outcomes.
> Attempting to use the government to destroy hierarchies is utopian
yes, "destroy hierarchies" is utopian. But that's a complete straw man version of "reduce very high levels of inequality that have highly visible political impacts".
Non trivial number of people believe that everyone is equal in abilities. Non trivial number of people believe that communism is a preferable end goal - a goal that excludes hierarchies from forming.
>The classic reply to this is that inequality reduces the agency of people to make decisions in the society - IOW it causes _power_ inequality.
The only agency it reduces is the agency for people to make decisions about what should be done with other people's wealth. Which is not a productive agency for them to have as they've got an incredible conflict of interest to just waste it on themselves.
I have changed my opinions on this. Land reform initiatives have been carried out globally at different points and it has been seen as broadly useful and necessary. Why?
Medial and pre-medieval times, debt cancellation was also broadly necessary and done. Why?
Because the gap indicates unfairness and people care about that. If you are poor, raising the floor will be good enough, you primary worry will be sufficient income. Once you reach a comfortable life, your priority will - or at least may - shift, now you are in a position that allows you to worry if the situation is fair.
Also narrowing the gap is a way to raise the floor including in absence of growth while raising the floor without narrowing the gap depends on growth. But I think this is not too relevant in practice because taking a lot of money from a few wealthy people will often result in rather small changes as the money has to be spread among a lot of people.
Because the gap is the percentage of society's resources that are controlled by wealthy stupid people. Think about all the power companies that are cutting off power to homes to power AI data centers. That couldn't happen if the DC owners had less wealth and the homeowners had more.
Because needs and preferences of lower level are less and less reflected in policies and production. They are becomming permanent underclass with no future. They dont matter for politics nor for economics. Preferences of super rich are overwriting them, while super rich become richer, while super rich offload all risk they take on others.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
I would expect fortune to be able to understand basic economics, but I guess not. I can't verify because it is a paywalled article, but if this article isn't about oligopolies abusing labor market power, then it is intensely wrong headed. Paying workers less is a good thing to a point, it means less dead weight loss to the economy from labor abusing market power (which is basically the worst thing you can do in economics). If it's about abuse of monopsony power in the labour market by oligopolies then I apologize, that's the one case where paying people less is bad, but it's also kind of rare these days.
> We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population.
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
So the stereotypes are true. My friend in elementary school told an amusing story about his friend, in a Swedish family, who moved from our nice suburb to a suburb in another state, one like the grandparent is describing. They didn't understand why there was such a vast difference between the two. It seemed obvious to me, but I guess it's not obvious to foreigners.
You ran right past the GP's statement too:
> yet with terrible distribution
applies to the quality of a suburb too. Obviously. You wouldn't catch me dead in a Texas suburb or Florida suburb.
You can apply the same argument to wealthy dense neighborhoods in affluent areas full of designer coffee and organic produce vs dense neighborhoods in poor areas of a city with monthly food poisoning at local restaurants. Vast difference, go check Latin America for examples of terrible dense neighborhoods.
My argument is that not even nice dense neighborhoods are that nice compared to nice suburbia.
It's a matter of the person's life values and I believe the majority wouldn't necessarily pick the nice dense neighborhoods over nice suburbia. Also, I'd pick bad suburbia over bad inner cities.
This is yet another article that doesn't understand what wealth is. There is almost no point talking about these numbers, because they mislead more than they inform.
Agreed - it also doesn't understand rights. A right to someone's labor is slavery. It's great to have robust social programs. However, they aren't a right - they are benefits. Changing the definition of rights is a trick to idea smuggle politics.
If you're a politician you can tax $500 from one productive member of society and redistribute $100 to four unproductive and lazy members. You get four votes instead of one. It's called job security.
It sounds like you're statistically illiterate. Indian and Pakistani immigrants to the US overwhelmingly vote for the same socialist, anti-business practices that have kept their countries poor. And in business Indians engage in the same kind of anti-meritocratic caste-based discrimination.
>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
On other hand if you can not afford to pay your employees wages they can survive on you do not deserve to be in business. You should go out and any resources you use should instead be used in way that can reasonably sustain workers.
As much as I think you can't raise minimum wage indefinitely, I kind of agree with this a bit as well.
I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.
> You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage [...]
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
It's a voluntary agreement between people. It's not immoral to pay minimum wage to someone when they both agree. I find it to be immoral for the government to force themselves into the agreement.
Only ~1% of people in the US make federal minimum wage. ~58% of that 1% are serving related occupations who collect tips that are not counted in BLS wage data.
You need to use median wage - which is ~$24 for all occupations.
If that way of thinking is wrong, why not just make the minimum wage a million an hour and let everyone be mega wealthy? What do you think would happen if we passed that?
Edit: to the down voters, what is your answer to the question?
You didn't answer the question. I suspect that is because basic economics kicks in and you quickly realize that you can't just raise the minimum wage as high as you want and expect it to work. It is a complicated and complex and highly nuanced thing.
Your water example actually reinforces my point. If GP ignores the reality around drinking too much water, they will poison themselves, just like ignoring the reality around minimum wage would destroy things.
I don't go on Reddit, but you seem to still have people on here who are hard of thinking and believe that increasing the minimum wage has no second or third order effects.
As if workers got paid by "what $wealth allows".
As if there was a "right to dignified work" (what is "dignified"?).
As if there was a "right to fair income" (whats "fair"?).
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
After all of that, you still seem to be familiar with the concept of "fairness". And yet you feel you shouldn't try anything because you don't have the perfect universal answer... are you sure you're posting on the correct forum?
As somebody living outside the US, I would find moving to the states highly undesirable even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
I live in the US. I disagree about the hostility towards non-citizens. If you are talking about ICE, it's more about racism. They are not gunning down Brits, Germans or Australians.
Agree about the rest. Can I come live in your country? :)
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I’m not in the US, but laughed when I saw that my bike is ‘known to cause cancer or birth defects/reproductive harm.’
When everything is dangerous, nothing is dangerous.
Well… your bike likely has several lubricants, and paints as well as coatings that especially in close contact with your skin… especially in the handle bars under friction indeed probably introduce chemicals that will increase some risks, versus never having done it. That is the horror of what we have done with modern material science… Would you prefer a label that gives you only risk increases above say 1% ? Alternatively you can just assume we have complicated the world so much with modern material tech that despite its benefits nearly everything you touch increases your cancer chances in America.
And you know that it's not dangerous based on... Gut feeling?
Have you read the health warning in detail and disagree from an informed point of view or are you just generally opposed to regulation?
Even better, can you link the bike model and health warning and let others take a look at it for you? Or just your neighborhood chat bot :-)
I've read the list of materials that California knows cause cancer and birth defects. It lists things that people encounter every day. Alcoholic beverages, aloe leaf extract and aspirin are some of the most notable examples from the "A" section.
https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list
Well, here in France, pregnant women are also discouraged from drinking alcohol because of birth defects.
I don't know about aloe extract, but pregnant women are also discouraged from taking aspirin.
Here's a random online store selling it, with a big warning for "usage during pregnancy and breastfeeding" (French only): https://lasante.net/nos-medicaments/douleurs-et-fievres/aspi...
>> Alcoholic beverages, aloe leaf extract and aspirin
Where I am, they all are known to cause birth defects. I never met woman with children that didn't take measures to avoid them (and a dozen of other products with similar effects) during pregnancy.
If you liken your bike to them, that's, uh. That's one hell of a bike. Probably should stay away from pregnant woman while riding it, huh
Asbestos, leaded gasoline, lead based paint, etc were things encountered everyday in the past. This is how science progresses and how our life expectancy and active life expectancy go up.
You ignore gut feelings? Feelings from your second brain? That seems incredibly unwise. Sorry for the off topic comment.
The DOT has a list of interesting studies on the active transportation in the form of walking and cycling https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/active-transpo...
You can also search for studies that compare the societal cost/benefit of using a car vs a bicycle. The generally accepted conclusion is that cars have a cost while cycling has a benefit for society.
That's not what I'm saying. Based on OPs phrasing, their specific bike was marked as a health hazard. Maybe their bike is painted with lead based paint. There could be a million reasons a specific model could be unhealthy.
"we know this is dangerous, but we're not going to do anything about it"
yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
To be fair, the UK isn’t high on my list either and I’ve lived in Finland and Austria before and I know people from china and their experiences with infrastructure and healthcare.
I am mostly comparing these places to all first world countries, rather than just the anglosphere.
Housing is the only one I can agree on. The place is so damn big that outside of places like New York, you can get 2/3 times the space for the same money, in a lot of places even more!
His ilk is the Heritage foundation, and not just nationalism, some fascism with a bit of 18/19th century great white man imperialism. They're arguably even the cause of this article as Raegan implemented many of their proposals that has lead to this.
>yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him.
Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural power of their demographic majority and identity. People forget how much of a joke candidate he was until racists took him seriously.
>if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare
If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
Per the AI: > U.S. insurance coverage is broadly divided into Private Insurance (66% of the population) and Public/Government Insurance (36%), with about 8% to 10% remaining uninsured.
The US system is far from perfect, but the comic book depictions of some hellscape are slightly overblown. Healthcare _is_ great here, wait times are basically non-existent. That's why our healthcare is expensive: it doesn't scale, we use a lot of it, and demand the absolute latest, best technology and treatments.
Should we expand Medicaid to cover the gap of the uninsured? Probably. And once we stop fighting culture wars, maybe things can get done.
"estimates suggest that inability to afford costs of medical care contributes to at least 530,000 personal bankruptcy filings annually. Approximately two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are associated with medical expenses or illness-related loss of work."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2026/04/05/increasi...
> If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.
It very much depends on life situation. For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
Secondly, I would also debate the better health care. I recently had two health scares in my direct family (one time cancer, one time another tumor) and in both cases care was quick and excellent. Of course, there is quite a lot of variance between countries. We lived in Germany for a while and I was less impressed by health care there (though it's probably still much better and definitely cheaper than the average health care in the US).
Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Sorry, this is totally false. I checked the local established norm (49 days) and stats (generally between 30 and 150 days, depending on the hospital, which you can choose). And this doesn't depend on private insurance, because it does not exist in the county I live.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
I am able to see my general practitioner generally the same or next day and waiting time at the GP is typically less than 10 minutes. I can also visit my dentist the same day in the case of an emergency.
It's the same in many other European countries. I got kidney stones when we were on vacation in Denmark (I don't recommend). I visited a doctor twice, both times I called and I could immediately come to their practice and they ran tests, etc. I don't think we even got a bill for either visits. I only paid something like 10 euros at the pharmacist for a good stock of painkillers.
Isn't employer dependent healthcare basically slavery, blackmail or both ?
This often comes up in discussions pitting the US against the EU countries.
I'm not familiar with all of them, but here in "free, socialized healthcare" France, if you don't have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to "employer-dependant healthcare" in the US, you're going to have to pay out of pocket quite a lot of money. Maybe not as much as in the US (not familiar with that country), but very much not free. Think dental, glasses, needing to spend a night in a hospital for whatever reason (even public ones!), etc. On top of your salary being much lower.
Sure, you don't need an employer to have a mutuelle, you can pay for your own. But it's usually pricier and worse coverage.
Only to the extent that all waged employment is basically slavery (since healthcare is even less critical than food, water and housing).
Also in the US. In many other countries, you do not only initially get unemployment benefits, but also a form of basic income if the unemployment benefits expire and you haven't found a job, plus rent compensation, etc.
> In many other countries, you do not only initially get unemployment benefits, but also a form of basic income if the unemployment benefits expire and you haven't found a job, plus rent compensation, etc.
It's the same everywhere in the US. Colloquially called "collecting unemployment".
Only if you weren't fired for cause, are looking for full-time employment, have earned enough recently, etc.
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> Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though
It absolutely is.
America is great if you make at least 150k a year and never get sick.
The moment you get sick with anything serious your employer might fire you. Labor protections in America are a bad joke. Your boss wants to fire you because your taking time off to look after a sick relative, I guess you can sue, but they’ll blame something and probably win.
Your boss lies to your face about pay and benefits, ohh well sucks to suck.
Very minor illnesses turn catastrophic. Several stories have emerged of otherwise healthy young people going without insulin and not doing so well…
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...
Even if you have insurance, ohh well…
> Parents sue over son's asthma death days after inhaler price soared without warning Cole Schmidtknecht, 22, had insurance but couldn’t afford to refill his asthma inhaler after the cost jumped from $70 to more than $500.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/asthma-death-pres...
Half the country cheers this on. The idea of some ‘lazy’ person getting something they don’t deserve rationalizes this dystopian system.
Of course the American system ends up costing significantly more for worse outcomes.
Access to therapy is usually gate kept to those with expensive insurance plans. Medicare, if it covers it at all can easily have a 1 year wait list for therapy.
Not to mention that most people get no meaningful vacation time.
Want to quit because you’re burnt out. Even if you have savings you won’t have health insurance. You won’t be able to afford therapy without it.
Get back on the hamster wheel.
I do regret not making a better effort to leave earlier. It’s not going to get better
> Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
As an American who's had to deal with the ramifications of employer-based health insurance first-hand, I can confirm that this strikes me as accurate. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where even being out of work for most of last year did not hurt my financial situation very much (my wife and I were actually able to buy our house during my unemployment), but even being in that fairly privileged position, due to her autoimmune condition, we've had to go through quite a lot of annoying bullshit from a lack of healthcare options due to basically being stuck with whatever my employer happens to offer.
With my previous health insurance (from a startup where there were around 10 employees during my time there), we were able to get the semiannual procedure she's been getting for years from her specialist doctor approved relatively quickly, but with the insurance from my current job, it took months earlier this year to get it approved because they kept denying it due to her condition (which is pretty rare in general, and even more rare for anyone to have it as long as she has; one of the first doctors she saw for it years ago told us "you're not going to find a support group for this online", and we've literally yet to find anything online about anyone else ever having it for as long as she has) not being on the list of pre-approved conditions. This was typical across several insurance companies for the initial request, but with this insurance company, they put us through an extremely convoluted process for appealing. First, they told her doctor that he couldn't email or fax them his letter of medical necessity and had to send it through snail mail, which even a month later they claimed they had never received. They told me I could email it to them, which I did, only for them to later claim I didn't have authorization to do that on behalf of my wife (something that never came up in the call where they told me to email it to them despite us both being there on speaker phone), and she had to fill out and email them a form authorizing me. She did that, but then after a while they still just sent us a blanket rejection for it not being on the initial list (as if there were any chance of it magically appearing on the list between when they initially denied it and when they finally processed the appeal?), and they could not provide us with any evidence that an actual doctor looked at the letter where her doctor stated definitively that he would expect her to likely experience permanent and potentially fatal organ damage with the treatment due to none of the other options having mitigated her symptoms in the past. After filing a grievance, they insisted that if her doctor filled out the information in a separate form that they had never mentioned to either him or us before, they would take it into account, so he did that, and then after a while they still rejected it with identical language to before. Finally after three months, they gave us the ability to have her doctor talk directly to an actual doctor on their end, and then it got approved within the next week. No one was able to provide any sort of coherent explanation as to why they kept putting us through such bullshit procedures that had no effect instead of letting us just do that in the first place.
I don't pretend to have any first-hand experience with healthcare in other countries, but no sane system would end up with such disparate outcomes for the exact same condition for the exact same patient due to literally nothing but how much bullshit the insurance company feels like putting you though. There's literally no way for us to have stayed with the insurance company that managed to actually read the information her doctor sent them and approve it within a few days the first time because they're based in a different state that the company I was employed by happened to be based in, and my current employer has no other insurance companies as options for me to pick instead. Even without all of the potential awful things that you mention people might go through with a subpar employer, the situation actually still sucks even when you do like your employer because your insurance options are tied to them. I like my job, and other than the insurance company sucking, it works well for me, but I also can't reasonably expect them to pick up an entire new insurance option for the entire company because of the bullshit I went through, so as much as I'd love to literally never have to deal with this specific insurance company again, there's no way to do that without giving up the job as well. Realistically, that would end up causing a lot more stress and uncertainty that my wife and I don't want to go through (especially when there's no guarantee that whatever insurance we'd end up with from a new job would be any better). At least in another country, we'd have some level of consistency in trying to get her treatment approved.
America has some of if not the best hospitals in the world. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean equal access, but those are facts not ideology.
We can argue if that is fair or not, but if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC, America is [one of] the best places to be for medical care.
It is similar to universities, the US has some exceptional hospitals/universities and a lot of mediocre ones. Exceptional facilities are more accessible to certain groups than others. Many European countries strive for a high average, perhaps not as good as the US's best, but much better than the US average, and they are accessible to everyone [1].
My parents also lived in the US (and IIRC they were on private insurance), but no way would they want to trade European healthcare/education for the US counterpart.
At any rate, all the statistics show that the US pays ~twice as much for health care with worse outcomes for the general public.
if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC
It's always so surprising that people from the US do not see the issue with this. Let's say, assuming that you are in tech, I hope you don't get laid off in the next round.
[1] I have to add a bunch of qualifiers here, because the EU or Europe is not a single country and some countries have private insurance, private clinics, etc.
So basically you're saying "if you can afford it, the US is one of the best places to get medical care". Well, if I can afford it, why wouldn't I just fly to the US to get that care then? I don't have to be living there.
"If you can afford it" also conveniently glosses over the fact that a private insurance system means that the costs for paying out of pocket tend to be insanely high, since that an insurance company pays the hospital is basically entirely unrelated to the price that you'd get charged as an individual. Even if you're making a decent software engineering salary in the US, which would put you in a much cushier financial position than most of the country, you'd better hope that you don't ever have any major accidents or develop any uncommon medical conditions or you'll be eating into your savings at an alarmingly high rate.
It's sickening to watch America go from everyone being fairly equal to this sort of elitism. 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you are under 50 and have a great job, life is great'.
If you are 50+ with a average job in an average town, America is much worse now that it was prior to the 2000s. And nobody cares because 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you have a good job, aren't really all that sick or are on someone elses insurance plan, and if you are under 50'.
I'm in Canada. Earlier today I called the doctor's office to make an appointment for my wife. She'll be in tomorrow.
Last month had to get my son in to get checked out, turned out he just had a nasty cold, but they were able to get him in day-of. Mind you, that's not the emergency room, that's my _family doctor_.
Two weeks ago my mother had kidney stones, went to the ER. Had a stent put in, sent along her merry way in I want to say 4 hours?
When my sciatica flared up several months ago, I was in the ER for several hours just because there were much more severe cases ahead of me, which makes perfect sense. I got xrayed that day, bloodwork, among other shit.
I could go on and on, but these cases aren't outliers for us, they're the norm.
I live in Europe, I can make an appointment with my dentist tomorrow. I was sick 3 weeks ago and just went on video conference at 6am with my PCP.
Just to help out there :)
This has been the case in every country I've lived in within Europe (3 and counting). And a mix of rural (50,000 town) and big urban areas.
Healthcare varies widely in Europe. It's not one country. But the "on private health care" part is they key. It's really not that different in lots of parts of Europe with the difference that people who do not have that still have access to the healthcare system without going bankrupt, albeit slower.
This just isn't true and really glosses over the downsides of the US healthcare system.
Employer health plans are only good as long as you pay - if they are good. Lots aren't and they require you to pay so much upfront. Waiting time for specialists and surgeries depend on the area you live in: Not common to wait months for a specialist in the US. You won't get seen if you can't pay for the doctor upfront and medicines are expensive.
I moved from the US (Indiana) to Norway. I've never had an issue seeing a doctor or dentist if I'm sick or in pain since I've been here. I can plan routine things in advance, but I don't need to plan months in advance. I'm just not getting in the same day because they save those times for folks that are sick and need seen sooner. I'll never have a bill if I'm hospitalized. Doctors tend to offer less invasive treatments first - they would have tried to avoid a knee replacement. And if the wait was long (which again, really isn't different from the states, depending on where you are and if you have money enough), the safety net helps out. Reduced work hours and paid time off work and stuff like that. The emergency room sends folks home with medicine instead of expecting you to go to the pharmacy afterwards! ER waiting times aren't longer and honestly, I can call ahead and suffer at home instead of in a waiting room if it isn't actually an emergency, but need urgent care. My partner was seen immediately when he cut off part of his finger, I was seen immediately when I had severe pain, but you'll wait longer for an uncomplicated broken bone and things like that.
And this is all relying on the public system - People can get shorter waiting times if they use the private system.
UK: A dentist will see you for an emergency appointment pretty quickly. I can usually get a routine appointment within a few weeks, but if it's a routine check-up I don't mind scheduling it for a few weeks/a month out. If I'm going private I can usually get a routine appointment same week.
For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.
Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.
Aren't NHS medical workers in a constant state of protest over low wages and bad working conditions? I know the doctor/nurse brain drain from Canada and the UK to the US used to be really bad. I haven't seen what the statistics are recently.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/02/19/uk-nhs-doctor-s...
This is largely due to deliberate underfunding by a succession of governments taking ~~bribes~~ lobbying from private healthcare firms.
https://privatisation.everydoctor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/...
Finding an NHS dentist is nearly impossible in most of the UK, though.
In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance. A basic plan costs like 25 pounds per month. Affordable I'd say. Many people spend more than that on beer and public transport.
I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.
For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.
Whilst I understand that reasoning, I disagree with it. Private insurance should not be necessary to begin with, and if it must exist for whatever rational reason, the insurance should be public as well. Anything that has to do with healthcare (not talking about optional cosmetic surgery, of course) should be handled by / via public healthcare services.
Furthermore, I would say that it's wrong to look at the situation in terms of "reducing the burden on the NHS Dental", since that is literally what's there for. If people don't opt for cosmetic surgery, then it's a healthcare issue and we created this institution/branch for this very purpose. Otherwise we can easily end up speaking in terms of how much of a burden being alive is, and how eating (regular) food and drinking water are poor economic decisions, a topsy-turvy way of looking at the very reason to have an 'economy'.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want.
This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.
Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.
I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.
This is wrong, you can get same-day appointments for anything time-critical including dental. What takes a long time to schedule is mostly free preventitive care.
There is also the same private healthcare that americans enjoy. You have the option of spending $50 to $100 to go to a private clinic and get same-day admission. In the US services like that cost nearly 10 times the price due to the whole insurance bullshit.
I got free same-day heart check-up and $80 paid same-week heart monitoring check-up.
There are horror stories and footage of the UK NHS, but that's mostly just london and in reality pretty much every city that large suffers from that.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Can you share a reference for that statistics?
FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.
A lot of people in the UK (with professional jobs) top up their state health provision with private medical insurance provided by their employer. This isn't a bad mix.
There are some companies that give private health care to all it's UK employees. It's the best of both worlds.
Yes, agree. I only really know about office work. If people are giving it to their blue collar employees as well, that's great.
I had skin cancer. I talked to my doctor and to the local skin care clinic. Because of my deductible, the final cost for removal would be the same with or without insurance. If I bypassed the American insurance hellscape, I could have the removal surgery that week. If I used my insurance, went to all the specialist referrals they wanted, etc it was minimum 3 months before I could get the surgery because of wait times for appointments to have confirmation what the skin care clinic tested/told me same day.
I'm in Poland, and with the private insurance through my employer I can get both the same day - a week sounds really bad.
You are misinformed. A lot of people in Europe and Canada also have private insurance, sometimes paid by the employer as well, and with that the wait times are usually very short. Going through the public healthcare system you may indeed wait months for non urgent matters.
> if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada
Even if it's true now, I wonder for how long—insurance is getting worse and worse every year.
You read that? I can get either in a day or two if I need it, they want much longer-term planning though.
For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.
Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want
I am in the EU and I can do that too?
I regularly see this making the rounds that "you can see your doctor in the US right away whereas in <socialist healthcare country of your choice> you have to wait months!"
I call BS. I have a great healthcare plan and appointments with my PCP are weeks out if at all; I was lucky to find some other random PCP who was available for a Telehealth consult only. Our kid has a rare disability that requires lots of different doctors, and we have to book literally months in advance for consults.
My (now retired) parents live in Ireland and get better healthcare than we do in the US.
It is impressive how misinformed you are about the reality of health care in Europe. It is almost as if you were being lied to in order to make you accept being mistreated.
It really is astounding how bad national brands are. Everything loaded with sugar and salt. Lowest quality ingredients in everything, and I do mean everything.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ $22 for a package of toilet paper that has 1/3 less paper than before.
Prices are out of sight. 3 years ago, 1lb of real deli roast beef was $7. Now $20. Costs almost $30 to make a pot of stew. Used to cost $10.
I could write for hours on this subject. The garbage produced is that prolific.
Yeah the USA has only given lip service for everything it claims to be. Especially in the last 18 months it’s been working overtime to make it even worse.
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Not to mention school shooting drills. Teaching kids how to behave when someone tries to shoot up your school, because it happens more than once a decade... And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
235 last year down from 336 the year prior.
https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings#:~:text=NUMBER%20OF%20SHOO...
One could suspect that the number in the next decade should be between 2000-3000 incidents. Since 2000 is a bigger number than 1 yes more than once a decade.
Mass shootings more broadly are even worse with 167 in Jan-June 2026.
Training kids how to respond to school shootings is like training kids how to respond to dual engine failures on an airplane.
It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself.
And as a reminder, Europe sees more people die to heat than America sees people die to guns.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/heat-death-europe-ac-american...
Maybe your guild should figure out how to beat the PvE server before lecturing the players on the PvP server on how ridiculous you think our freedom is. Major skill issue, noob.
School shootings in America are not statistically unlikely, they are a regular occurrence.
It is statistically likely that one will happen somewhere in the country , but it is also statically unlikely that it will happen at the one you are at.
The odds a child will be killed by an armed assailant at a school in the USA are about 1 in 5 million per year, and if you narrow down to mass shootings at schools, that drops to about 1 in 10 million.
Between 2013 and 2022, a total of 77 students in grades K-12 have been killed in 11 school mass shootings, in a country with 50 million school children.
A child in America is about 500-600x more likely to die in a car accident than a school shooting.
A child in America is about 90-120x more likely to die from a pedestrian fatality than a school shooting.
A child in America is 70-90x more likely to die from choking than a school shooting.
A child in America is 50-60x more likely to die from drowning than a school shooting.
A child in America is 40-55x more likely to die in a fire or from smoke than a school shooting.
A child in America is 10-15x more likely to die in a bicycle accident not involving a motor vehicle than from a school shooting.
Comparable risks to dying in a school shooting include a fatal sting from a bee or wasp, (about twice a likely), or dying from being struck by lightning (about half as likely).
School shootings, while tragic, do not pose nearly as much of a statistical threat as you think they do, even if they still pose more than they ought to.
That article does not even normalise for population, so I have little faith in their ability to correct for less obvious mistakes.
You didn't even read your own article.
As a reminder, the heat killing Europeans right now is caused by America pumping ungodly amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere with virility-signalling cars and air conditioning set to 60 fahrenheit everywhere. You are literally mocking Europeans for being killed by your waste.
Right now? Or a few weeks ago? Fewer weeks ago, America suffered the same heat wave but worse, so they got karma.
CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.
Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel. You're welcome.
Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Speaking of giving - since 2014, the EU has purchased approximate €700-€900 billion worth of oil and natural gas alone from Russia (total EU imports from Russia exceed €1T in that time period), while offering less than €300 billion in support to Ukraine.
The EU is responsible for funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and has given more than twice as much money to Russia than it has to Ukraine.
America, on the other hand, has appropriated nearly $200B to Ukraine (over $100B in direct aid), yet paid only a tiny fraction of that to total Russian imports since 2014.
In other words, America is a net economic supporter of Ukraine, while the EU is a net economic supporter of Russia.
You are not "the good guys" that you think are.
>CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.
Global warming didn't start two weeks ago, nor two decades ago. Most of human generated CO2 and most of the calories accumulated by greenhouse effect are still directly caused by Americans, both in absolute numbers and relative per capita.
>Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel.
Americans also elected PV panel haters, and are still destroying whole regions to extract more oil, both overseas and at home.
>Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Hi, cool, are you going to give AC units to Europe? And the Middle East? And India/Bangladesh etc.? Maybe we should prosternate at your feet and thank you for you magnifiscence, oh great solvers of problem you caused.
Prime example of American exceptionalism, laughable.
Uh huh. And Europe is carbon neutral, and has been for the last couple of decades?
The head killing Europeans right now is caused by everyone pumping CO2, including Europeans.
> And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
We can't do anything to fix the root cause because the root cause is an inviolable Constitutional right.
So we simply must accept that school shootings/mass shootings/gun violence in general are the price we pay to be able to shoot watermelons and the occasional politician and remain the only truly free nation on earth.
> even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world[0], and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?tab=line&coun...
Now look at the same metric per capita - USA immediately loses its 1st place.
> America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
International comparisons are tricky, and you should always check the data definitions carefully.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Salary alone is meaningless if you don't factor in purchase-power-parity and other quality of living aspects. E.g. a lot of people are happy to move to Denmark, and accept a paycut because they are leading with their social facilities and family support. Salary alone will not conjure good infrastructure
Yes, at the lower end of those salaries, you have to do things (and this is one single example btw) like have roommates, which drastically increases your housing instability. Why? Because you have to rely on your roommates' ability to pay rent. If they don't, what happens? You lose your PrIvIlIgE to live there! Most places in the US do not have protections for this. So you can try really hard to find another roommate, but you have a very limited amount of time to do so (basically until the next rent payment). So then you get evicted. Now your ability to find a new place to live is damaged because you have a permanent "evicted" mark on your credit/tenant report. Oh, and of course, the landlord can go to court and try to get the court to force you to pay the remainder of the rent or at least continue to pay the rent until they lazily find a new tenant. So now you're financially damaged too. There are so many footguns like this in the US that people, on HN especially, are ignorant to. Imagine trying to keep a job while also dealing with all these shenanigans. Can you even get time off work to go to the court hearing? If you don't, the landlord can get a default judgement.
Oh and sorry because this is HN and people will automatically assume I mean owning the property and renting rooms out to others, I mean both people are renters in this case.
> Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
These charts are seriously out of date though. Five years in the current economic climate? Might as well be ancient history.
Perhaps so. In what direction do you expect "the current economic climate" to be moving the charts?
I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
> American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
My expectation is that Germany has higher taxes than the US. What happens if you look at median net salary rather than gross?
You would also need to adjust for the huge medical expenses Americans face if you are doing that as Germans don't have that. Maybe the 401K savings Americans do for retirement (if Germans have a better societal retirement payout than Americans). And the other social benefits that are accounted for by German taxes that Americans still have to account for in some way. You can't just lump those in on the Germans and not account that Americans pay it some way as well.
I do wonder how real the base number - the GDP - is. The wealthy have been accumulating wealth rapidly but it’s all on paper and the entire thing is underpinned by assumptions of USD reserve currency status.
"We set the bar at half of what a typical American household earns. "
Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Wealth inequality itself causes a great number of ills in this country. We should absolutely aim to lower this gap as a goal in itself.
Well, I guess there are two parts of it:
1) Raise the floor for everyone
2) Work to make sure that the path for talented (however you define that) people to go from low earners to high earners is as simple as possible.
Wealth inequality doesn't cause ills, envy does. Envy should be regarded as a character defect, a sin, not something to be elevated to policy. You're not poorer because someone's richer than you, and indeed policies aimed to reduce wealth inequality will actually make you poorer, that's why average European salaries are much lower than US ones.
Envy is the completely wrong framing, it is about fairness. If you design widgets and 99 people build them and everyone works the same number of hours, then the fair share is 1 % for everyone. One percent of the work, one percent of the profit. If you take 2 % [1] while everyone else only gets 0.99 %, that is unfair. And look, the difference for each individual is tiny, 0.99 % or 1 %, that makes it easy to dismiss despite being the source of the unfair inequality.
[1] 1.99 % if we want to be precise.
What about the chap that mortgaged his house to rent a factory and buy a widget maker and employs these people? What % should he take?
He will get the same as the others if he works the same number of hours to run the company. The dept would ideally be company debt and not personal dept, after all one reason to found a company is to separate personal and business risks. But if you invest personal money in the company, you get that money back plus some risk and opportunity premium just as you would pay back any other loan. What fraction that is will of course depend on the amount, premium, and payback period. Just investing some money will not provide you a perpetual income.
> Wealth inequality doesn't cause ills, envy does.
No, it really is the wealth inequality.
The classic reply to this is that inequality reduces the agency of people to make decisions in the society - IOW it causes _power_ inequality.
But the reply to that is that it is orthogonal to the discussion. Power should be distributed in a way that increases efficiency and not just for the virtue of doing so.
All human relationships have inequalities. Attempting to use the government to destroy hierarchies is utopian bullshit. It always leads to worse outcomes than intendent because humans are imperfect. Intentions should never be the measure of success, only outcomes.
> Attempting to use the government to destroy hierarchies is utopian
yes, "destroy hierarchies" is utopian. But that's a complete straw man version of "reduce very high levels of inequality that have highly visible political impacts".
Non trivial number of people believe that everyone is equal in abilities. Non trivial number of people believe that communism is a preferable end goal - a goal that excludes hierarchies from forming.
Those hierarchies are the result and consequence of goverment being captured by super rich.
Removing it and weakening sociopathic predators is correct. They will cauase less damage when they are not constantly given advantages.
>The classic reply to this is that inequality reduces the agency of people to make decisions in the society - IOW it causes _power_ inequality.
The only agency it reduces is the agency for people to make decisions about what should be done with other people's wealth. Which is not a productive agency for them to have as they've got an incredible conflict of interest to just waste it on themselves.
I have changed my opinions on this. Land reform initiatives have been carried out globally at different points and it has been seen as broadly useful and necessary. Why?
Medial and pre-medieval times, debt cancellation was also broadly necessary and done. Why?
You missed the point, If the floor and the medium are rising, why does the gap need to narrow?
Why is this better factually, not ideologically.
Because the gap indicates unfairness and people care about that. If you are poor, raising the floor will be good enough, you primary worry will be sufficient income. Once you reach a comfortable life, your priority will - or at least may - shift, now you are in a position that allows you to worry if the situation is fair.
Also narrowing the gap is a way to raise the floor including in absence of growth while raising the floor without narrowing the gap depends on growth. But I think this is not too relevant in practice because taking a lot of money from a few wealthy people will often result in rather small changes as the money has to be spread among a lot of people.
Because the gap is the percentage of society's resources that are controlled by wealthy stupid people. Think about all the power companies that are cutting off power to homes to power AI data centers. That couldn't happen if the DC owners had less wealth and the homeowners had more.
Because needs and preferences of lower level are less and less reflected in policies and production. They are becomming permanent underclass with no future. They dont matter for politics nor for economics. Preferences of super rich are overwriting them, while super rich become richer, while super rich offload all risk they take on others.
Yes you want to raise the floor, but the US is doing a famously bad job at that.
I generally agree that if it was true that the inequality would lead to consistent floor raising it would be fine, but it doesn't.
This is a weird number.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
I would expect fortune to be able to understand basic economics, but I guess not. I can't verify because it is a paywalled article, but if this article isn't about oligopolies abusing labor market power, then it is intensely wrong headed. Paying workers less is a good thing to a point, it means less dead weight loss to the economy from labor abusing market power (which is basically the worst thing you can do in economics). If it's about abuse of monopsony power in the labour market by oligopolies then I apologize, that's the one case where paying people less is bad, but it's also kind of rare these days.
> We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population.
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
That text is linked to a graph where the X axis is years.
“The first is an apple and the second is an orange.”
“The first is linked to something showing the author knows it’s an apple.”
“Agreed.”
it's not that either. it's the total value of all transactions.
if you paint a masterpiece worth millions and keep it in your closet it has negligible impact on GDP. only once it is sold does it have an effect.
And on the contrary, there’s this method of increasing GDP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37395566
And if its sold 5 times in the year its 5x the GDP. Of course the value of the painting hasn't changed and their remains only 1.
Also a great number of those services are valueless bullshit. It's much closer to the sum of all transactions.
Hmmm, this index scores US at 80% and Mexico at 86%.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
We are in the bad place.
I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
I love suburbia.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
So the stereotypes are true. My friend in elementary school told an amusing story about his friend, in a Swedish family, who moved from our nice suburb to a suburb in another state, one like the grandparent is describing. They didn't understand why there was such a vast difference between the two. It seemed obvious to me, but I guess it's not obvious to foreigners.
You ran right past the GP's statement too:
> yet with terrible distribution
applies to the quality of a suburb too. Obviously. You wouldn't catch me dead in a Texas suburb or Florida suburb.
You can apply the same argument to wealthy dense neighborhoods in affluent areas full of designer coffee and organic produce vs dense neighborhoods in poor areas of a city with monthly food poisoning at local restaurants. Vast difference, go check Latin America for examples of terrible dense neighborhoods.
My argument is that not even nice dense neighborhoods are that nice compared to nice suburbia.
It's a matter of the person's life values and I believe the majority wouldn't necessarily pick the nice dense neighborhoods over nice suburbia. Also, I'd pick bad suburbia over bad inner cities.
This is yet another article that doesn't understand what wealth is. There is almost no point talking about these numbers, because they mislead more than they inform.
Agreed - it also doesn't understand rights. A right to someone's labor is slavery. It's great to have robust social programs. However, they aren't a right - they are benefits. Changing the definition of rights is a trick to idea smuggle politics.
That's why they let in massive number of immigrants from poor countries.
We should really be letting in an order of magnitude more if we don't want our economy to drive off a cliff
If you're a politician you can tax $500 from one productive member of society and redistribute $100 to four unproductive and lazy members. You get four votes instead of one. It's called job security.
Those immigrants will just vote for the same shitty policies that made their countries poor; it's not a solution.
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Chart go up
It sounds like you're statistically illiterate. Indian and Pakistani immigrants to the US overwhelmingly vote for the same socialist, anti-business practices that have kept their countries poor. And in business Indians engage in the same kind of anti-meritocratic caste-based discrimination.
>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
Check out https://arindube.substack.com/p/a-minimum-wage-natural-exper..., very good post comparing states with minimum wage and without, that seem to go against this often repeated argument.
Then why not raise minimum wage to $100? Obviously there's a limit.
"we should make murder illegal"
"then why not make sleeping illegal? obviously there's a limit"
On other hand if you can not afford to pay your employees wages they can survive on you do not deserve to be in business. You should go out and any resources you use should instead be used in way that can reasonably sustain workers.
As much as I think you can't raise minimum wage indefinitely, I kind of agree with this a bit as well.
I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.
> You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage [...]
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
It's a voluntary agreement between people. It's not immoral to pay minimum wage to someone when they both agree. I find it to be immoral for the government to force themselves into the agreement.
Only ~1% of people in the US make federal minimum wage. ~58% of that 1% are serving related occupations who collect tips that are not counted in BLS wage data.
You need to use median wage - which is ~$24 for all occupations.
If that way of thinking is wrong, why not just make the minimum wage a million an hour and let everyone be mega wealthy? What do you think would happen if we passed that?
Edit: to the down voters, what is your answer to the question?
> “Oh water is healthy for you? Why don’t you drink a hundred gallons a day? Checkmate atheists!”
Brilliant argument you have there.
You didn't answer the question. I suspect that is because basic economics kicks in and you quickly realize that you can't just raise the minimum wage as high as you want and expect it to work. It is a complicated and complex and highly nuanced thing.
Your water example actually reinforces my point. If GP ignores the reality around drinking too much water, they will poison themselves, just like ignoring the reality around minimum wage would destroy things.
But if they made the minimum wage $1m/year then we would all be rich! /s
I know on Reddit this sort of thing earns you karma but it doesn't work like that on HN.
I don't go on Reddit, but you seem to still have people on here who are hard of thinking and believe that increasing the minimum wage has no second or third order effects.
"oh you think drinking water is good? why don't you just drown at the bottom of the ocean?" is a 100% reddit-tier comment.
As an (in)famous philosopher said recently, if you workers are not bone-skinny it means you are doing Capitalism wrong and are paying them too much.
Maybe pay them with GLP-1 drugs if that's your goal.
As if workers got paid by "what $wealth allows". As if there was a "right to dignified work" (what is "dignified"?). As if there was a "right to fair income" (whats "fair"?).
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
After all of that, you still seem to be familiar with the concept of "fairness". And yet you feel you shouldn't try anything because you don't have the perfect universal answer... are you sure you're posting on the correct forum?