> Switzerland is one of... three maybe (Luxemburg, Norway) countries with higher standard of living than the US.
You have to be kidding me. The average standard of living in the US is not the fourth best in the world. The US only got universal heathcare this century, it has a ludicrous work-life balance, the minimum wage in some states is very low (and sometimes includes tipping!), the infant mortality rate is lower than some third world countries, and maternity and paternity leave almost doesn't exist.
In fact America does have one of the highest standards of living. It also has one of the highest median incomes, and among the highest disposable incomes.
Maternity leave is common in America. You are free to choose your job based on the benefits you desire, including vacation time and maternity leave.
Switzerland and Germany to name two, are famous for not having fully socialized healthcare systems, instead they blend private and public. Poor Americans have had universal healthcare for a lot longer than just this century, via Medicaid. US healthcare has only become particularly expensive in the last 15 years as costs have soared, prior to that the US had a very affordable, mostly private healthcare system.
The infant mortality rate in some third world countries is far more likely to be fraudulent, including in places like Cuba where they force abortions to artificially prop up their infant mortality rates.
The minimum wage in the US is set federally, and all states must at least meet that line. It's also likely to jump by ~50% nationally in the next few years, as major cities move to $11-$15 minimum wages. Italy for example has no minimum wage, and Germany just finally got one. Only 1% of American labor earns minimum wage. The median income of the bottom 25% of workers in America earn as much as the median income in all of Italy.
Yes, in fact healthcare in America used to be affordable.
The two big price jumps were in 1990-2000, and then 2000-now. The last one is what finally broke the private system in the US in terms of affordability.
It's easy to look up the facts and demonstrate where the costs began to soar:
Healthcare costs per capita have gone up four fold since 1990 roughly. Real household income in the US was about $47,000 in 1990. Today it's around $58,000 or so. That means people in 1990, with just around 20% less income, were spending 75% less on healthcare. Yes, it was affordable back then.
You can easily prove this another way: look up medical caused bankruptcies, and look at how they surge from the 1990s forward.
> Vacation time is also the lowest (2 weeks) compared to Europe which on average has 4 weeks of vacation time.
As far as I know, no law requires employers to give their workers paid vacation days in the US. Although the most common vacation time is 2 weeks, there are some jobs with no paid vacation time at all. Also, from what I've heard, what the article mentions about people feeling guilty for taking vacation time is very real in American's work culture.
Here in the Netherlands, in contrast, the minimum paid vacation time by law is four times the number of working days in a week. For full time that's 20 days. Typically, companies provide a bit more than that.
Yep, in Sweden the minimum is five weeks with a lot of companies offering six. That is not counting "other" days off, e.g. "squeeze days" (a day between a public holiday and a weekend) that a lot of companies have. All of it 100.8% payed for and completely guilt-free!
> I am not sure in which EU countries you get less?
Normally none, as I said 4 weeks is the minimum mandated by the EU. The only way an EU country would have less is if it recently integrated the union and has yet to transcribe 2003/88/EC ("Working Time Directive") into local law.
For a lot of people healthcare would be a huge expense... I'm actually pretty happy about "Obamacare" even though I don't agree with the methods... I actually have better healthcare out of pocket today, for less money per month than my last job offered. I was surprised, as I'm big, and diabetic so the last time I looked at out of pocket it was a couple thousand a month. That said, I think there could have been better ways to do it, and the number of exceptions was too vast imho.
As for vacation, I'm feeling it... I've spent most of my career doing contract/hourly work, and for several years the only time I really had off was both unpaid and between jobs with half the time spent interviewing. The past three years I've forced myself to take a couple weeks off over the year, and it's a world of difference... Still unpaid, but worth it.
If I come across a company that gives me the freedom as an employee that I've had as a contractor, I'd be happy to be there. I've done far better in positions where I'm able to get work done, instead of minutia and meetings all the time. Where quality of output is worth more than the number of Jira tickets closed. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the majority of my work experience.
Who knows how things will work out in the end... at least it's not like the first .com bust.
That index is almost comical. They prefer quoting the average wage over the median, the indicator of water quality is asking people whether they are satisfied with their drinking water, and the US wins the category "percentage of people with access to an indoor flushing toilet" due to having successfully eradicated the traditional way of living for native americans.
> In fact America does have one of the highest standards of living. It also has one of the highest median incomes, and among the highest disposable incomes.
For the top X percent maybe; the US also has a poverty rate of over 16% [1], over half a million homeless [2], food stamps programs to support the poor, etc.
> You are free to choose your job based on the benefits you desire, including vacation time and maternity leave.
Do tell that to the big employers like McD's & co (who are now replacing their employees with order computers after they asked/demanded a minimum wage), Wal-mart, Amazon, etc. There's far too many people who do not have the luxury of choice - and even if they did, they can't get the education they'd need to get hired anywhere unless they have rich parents or happened to be eligible for a grant from somewhere.
And as long as people that don't tip in restaurants and such get mistreated or scoffed upon, don't even start about minimum wages.
This is laughable... I only checked your link and saw Poland's bottom 10% having a better life index than France's bottom 10% by quite a wide margin, and Poland's top 10% having a better life index than France's top 10%. It's a complete joke.
There are at least a dozen countries I'd rather live than in the US when it comes to well being. And that's not bad by the way, for a country of over 300 million, to rank top 5 or top 10 in an very broad and averaged parameter (like standard of living) is very hard to do. There's a ton of stuff the US gets wrong, but for a country of its size and age, it's a very successful experiment in politics that does extremely well, all things considered. But that doesn't mean it's among the top 10 in standard of living, which its not.
One of the key issues with a lot of these indices is that they have tons of factors that are based on nominal income. So the OECD better life index for example, has about 10 factors, one of them is how much you earn from a job, the other is wealth and household income, another is spending on housing and real estate prices.
But what it fails to mention is that in Germany, university is free. In the Netherlands, I pay about $2k per year and I get an equal stipend from the government for free (as long as I finish, if I don't it becomes a 1% interest rate loan). In France it's a few hundred bucks per year. Similar stories for all of scandinavia etc etc, only the UK is an outlier in this regard. And if you look at the rankings, probably half of Dutch universities are in the top 100 worldwide, the average US student pays orders of magnitude more and doesn't go to even remotely a world class educational institution.
In other words, would I prefer to be an average American and rack up $30k in debt and go to an unknown local university? Or go to a world class uni in the Netherlands for free? The answer is clear.
Which is why purely droning on about income levels is ignorant. Just to make this clear, would you be willing to reduce your income by 50%, if your expenses would drop by 90%? Obviously. Yet you only look at income, and don't look at expenses. I mentioned education but it's really broad. I live in a lovely apartment by the park with my gf for a few hundred bucks in Amsterdam. My net healthcare payments are a few hundred bucks a year for full coverage. Do I really care I could make a few grand more somewhere else? Nope.
You mentioned maternity leave, one of the issues within work life balance that was covered in this thread before... according to your OECD index the US doesn't even make the top 25 in work life balance, they're in place 29. Out of a possible 36, by the way. It's poor. So you have all these financial indicators that say 'we make this much money and it's the most', yet very little about 'things like healthcare is twice as expensive, education makes you a debt slave instead of being free or near free in many other OECD countries', and then to make all that money to pay for much more expensive stuff, you sacrifice work life balance and come in at an appalling figure.
Time devoted to leisure and free time? Oh place 32 out of 36. Must be amazing. You also work some of the longest hours of all the countries in the study. The only reason the final score isn't as bad is because gender equality was better than average. (which was quite suspect given the Netherlands, quite often respected for being a frontrunner country when it comes to equality in many forms, including gender, came in last by a wide margin. Why? Because Dutch mothers tend to work part-time out of choice, considering they're better educated than men and have financial independence without having to work overtime. And the positive effects of that shows. Yet it's regarded as the worst country of all of them.)
In short, I'm not terribly impressed with the OECD index, but I think that's clear to anyone who sees Poland's bottom and top 10% rank better than say the bottom and top of France or Japan, with all due respect to Poland.
Again, for a country of 300 million I can't think of a more successful country or region than the US, an absolutely great feat for a country and one of the reasons I do admire the US, but it doesn't mean that compared to smaller countries it ranks in the top 10, often not even the top 20 depending on the metric. That's not to bash the US as it's not a fair comparison, but if you do want to make the comparison and list countries of 1 billion and 1 million in the same list, then you'll naturally end up with a lot of the small countries that are outliers at the top.
My wife is from a very comfortable middle class Polish family and went to one of the best universities in Poland. In her summer holiday before starting university she worked in a factory in the UK for minimum wage assembling car headlights. She did this because the pound-złoty exchange rate made this work more financially rewarding than anything she could have done in Poland.
I have more examples of Poles who are working in the UK right now, simply because of the exchange rate.
I've met many UK-based Poles and not one has preferred life in the UK to life in Poland.
If anything, the exchange rate allows someone in the Polish bottom 10% to climb out of that 10% much more easily than a bottom 10% Frenchman could: Go to western Europe and work for the minimum wage for ten years. Upon their return they'll have more than enough for a nice house.
You have to be kidding me. The average standard of living in the US is not the fourth best in the world. The US only got universal heathcare this century, it has a ludicrous work-life balance, the minimum wage in some states is very low (and sometimes includes tipping!), the infant mortality rate is lower than some third world countries, and maternity and paternity leave almost doesn't exist.