More hours doesn't mean more productive. It's a lot of performative work. Managers managing managers. A lot of pretending and time wasting.
American Economics Thread
- Thread starter Bernard
- Start date
Most of it is McMansions with smaller amounts of multifamily; mostly due to land use. Still indicative of market demand and revealed preferences since municipal governments that set zoning regulations are elected.
You answered it yourself: 16 days.
The broader point I was trying to make that simply because "housing, food, and transportation" take up large portions of household budgets is not indicative of just surviving, when a substantial part of the housing, food and transport is unambiguously elective.
Another wrinkle to which you allude to is that aggregations of US households aren't particularly insightful since the United States is a highly unequal country with a high gini coefficient (any distribution of income/wealth/vacation/etc is going to be highly concentrated in >~p75); nevertheless, at the same income percentiles compared to the EU, most everyone except the poorest US households do better than similarly situated European household counterparts.
antiterror13
Brigadier
In NZ minimum 20 days of paid annual leave and 10 days paid sick leave. PLUS 12 days of paid public holidays ... so total minimum 42 days
Sure they earn more but doing better? I doubt it
First the healthcare, not all jobs have great healthcare. Move outside the tech and finance field, and healthcare insurance have huge co pays.
Then the education, colleges cost significantly less in eu than American counterparts.
These two are essential for social mobility. so sure at same percentile, Americans earn more but leave the top10-20% and for the rest the situation isn't better from the Europeans
Yep. no doubt about it that for lower income strata in the United States, they have fewer days off than other developed/industrialized economy counterparts
Eurostat reports that 12% of EU GDP is spent on healthcare and it is split 6%-6% between public and private payers (). Meanwhile, 8% of the US CPI is healthcare so if anything, costs are largely comparable outside of catastrophic accident and injury.
For households under 400% of the federal poverty line, exchange subsidies should mitigate their healthcare costs and the ACA mandated out-of-pocket maximums and soft premium caps so those all combined substantially limit healthcare burden on US households.
Certain state flagships and private universities are quite expensive but the majority of US households (i.e., those not in the top10-20%) send their children off to 2yr or regional 4yr universities where tuition prices are quite low.
doing better? no. earning more nominal dollars? yes. big difference.
doing better doesn't mean rapidly declining life expectancy and increasing maternal mortality rates.
33/100k as a comparable:
You are correct in this, but most advanced economies don't seem to struggle with inequality.
| 8.8 | 41.6 | 2017 | |||||
| 18.5 | 9.4 | 14.0 | 2014 | 41.5 | 2019 | ||
| 54.4 | 8.6 | 68.1 | 2001 | 41.1 | 2012 |
in fact it seems that inequality is significant and detrimental.
at this point, policy might as well be physical. could they build 500k Russian style apartment blocks to sell to the poor with income price ratio equal to that in the 1950's? due to the political changes required, it might as well be asking them to build a colony on Alpha Centauri.
Yes. We absolutely could.
The issue with infrastructure, which Noah doesn't explicitly say for some reason, is relying on contracting Unions to build it. Because every government program also has to be a jobs program.
Things would get built a lot faster if there was competitive bidding (along with quite a few other parameters) without a requirement to use union labor and this and that and whatnot.
If I was in charge, I would simply hire Chinese firms. I'd probably get the boot or get voted out within 2-3 years, but at least I would've actually built something.