> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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 just sounds like you're a retarded racist. People like you are why this country is such a shithole. This is why we need immigrants: dilution is the solution
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. Pakistan and India also both have far higher rape rates than the US; how does bringing people in who are statistically far more likely to commit sexual assault improve the country?
> 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.
These charts are seriously out of date though. Five years in the current economic climate? Might as well be ancient history.
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.
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.
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.
"we know this is dangerous, but we're not going to do anything about it"
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?
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.
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.
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.
That article does not even normalise for population, so I have little faith in their ability to correct for less obvious mistakes.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
Finding an NHS dentist is nearly impossible in most of the UK, though.
I'm in Poland, and with the private insurance through my employer I can get both the same day - a week sounds really bad.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Hmmm, this index scores US at 80% and Mexico at 86%.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
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.
> 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.
Also a great number of those services are valueless bullshit. It's much closer to the sum of all transactions.
That text is linked to a graph where the X axis is years.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
But if they made the minimum wage $1m/year then we would all be rich! /s
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.
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.
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?
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.
It just sounds like you're a retarded racist. People like you are why this country is such a shithole. This is why we need immigrants: dilution is the solution
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. Pakistan and India also both have far higher rape rates than the US; how does bringing people in who are statistically far more likely to commit sexual assault improve the country?