I love how Americans just think there is no other country that might have, say, higher minimum wages or socialized medicine. It's just impossible they say. Not sense in comparing or seeing other places approach, America is just too exceptional.
Note that in Europe the economies are not as dynamic and has lower GDP growth on average. There are costs to higher taxes and more regulations. We're not exceptional, things are done differently.
Well, that GDP growth technically means you have a better opportunity to trade up in the USA than anywhere else in the world, if you apply yourself, get yourself trained, etc. you want to make people believe that these career choices are impossible to escape and they really aren’t.
It certainly is true, but academics who want to conduct sophistry can use the metric that gives them the answers they want. Comparing USA to Denmark using in-country income percentiles gives Denmark a much lower bar to hop over for this BS "social-mobility" as defined in the article.
Here's one: use USA percentiles for both countries. Or use Denmark percentiles for both. Only when you use a high bar for US and low bar for Denmark do they come out on top.
This may have more to do with the US not getting blown up during WW2, and the US being the largest single market(in the sense that everyone speaks the same language, has same culture, comparable laws everywhere etc.). And less to do with good policies.
>This may have more to do with the US not getting blown up during WW2
It's been 80yr and Japan and Korea are doing fine.
The USSR basically force created a large single market over the course of its existence. If it was such a net win for prosperity the economic would have stuck around.
Nobody says it’s impossible, just that there are trade-offs. France has a monthly minimum wage that works out to under $12/hour on a 35 hour week. It also had 8.5-9.5% unemployment over the last few years before COVID, while the US was half that at 3.5-4.5%.
Same thing with socialized medicine. Nobody says that socialized medicine is impossible, just that it requires a level of taxes nobody wants to pay. Again to use France as an example, health insurance is paid for with a 20% tax split between employers and employees: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=924192.... America could easily pay for socialized medicine with such a tax. That’s not how any proponents of socialized medicine in America have proposed to pay for their proposal.
Ironically, that’s just a different form of American exceptionalism. “We can have high minimum wages and socialized medicine like Europe without having higher unemployment and higher middle class taxes like Europe.”
