In addition, anecdotally, everyone I know in the EU that had a job pre covid has a job today. I can't say the same thing about folks in the US.
People in the US are so close to financial disaster that in order to avert disaster the US had to heavily subsidize those out of work. Many people got healthcare and unemployment benefits that would not have been otherwise available. This meant money for zero hours of work. When you average in $1/0 hours it does crazy things to the graph.
The reality is: During Covid the US rapidly adopted similar safety nets to EU countries and, in effect, aligned with their levels of poverty. Once the emergency measures ended we snapped back to our previous, precarious, poverty level.
Just my theory.
> Virtually everyone would agree that a 20-meter tree is twice as tall as a 10-meter tree. Conversely, everyone would agree that the 10-meter tree is twice as short as the 20-meter tree. There is no threshold or “shortness line” above or under which these relationships cease to hold: a 5-meter tree is twice as short as a 10-meter tree, a 1-meter tree is twice as short as a 2-meter tree, and so on. This reasoning remains valid when considering other multiples: a 1-meter tree is three times shorter than a 3-meter tree. To be sure, when assessing the height of a single tree, different people may disagree whether it is short or tall, as their judgment will depend on the benchmark they use for their assessment. However, when comparing two different trees, virtually everyone would make similar cardinal comparisons. In mathematical terms, shortness is the reciprocal of tallness. [...] In this paper, I apply the same logic to define a new poverty measure
So IIUC this "average poverty" (measured in time per international dollar) includes people living off social welfare? Otherwise, if it only included the working population, wouldn't we have
average poverty ≝ (average yearly income* of the working population / 1yr)⁻¹
*) Adjusted for purchasing power, i.e. measured in international dollars.
>For these purposes, income includes earnings from work, government benefits and other sources of money, and it is averaged among all family members.
Yes, it is supposed to include income from all sources.
https://theconversation.com/measuring-poverty-on-a-spectrum-...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
I get the "international" part - purchasing power. The number still seems way off, though.
In a time when minimum wage is $7/hr, how is the average American earning $1/hr?
Can anyone make that number make any sense?
So it's how much you earn per day divided by 24, or maybe by yearly earnings and hours per year
International dollars are normalized to USD, so there’s no conversion necessary. The figure he quotes of 63 min per dollar converts to $8343/year. However, his original paper states that he created this measure by inverting income, so the number 8343 is his starting point.
The closest guess I have is that is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $27700 (which divided by four is 6925).
If that is the case, what he is really doing is comparing poverty line definitions between countries.
In particular it seems weird that only we had a massive change during COVID.
Also seems a little odd that Germany was always better than the US, even in the 90’s when things were pretty good here.
Putting it together, we need to have COVID all the time here, so we can match the economic development of Germany immediately post-reunification.
It is not weird if you were old enough to be aware of the news during that time. Poor people in the US suddenly coming into money and being lifted out of poverty thanks to COVID stimulus checks was front and center in the news cycle as it was happening. The other countries noted did not follow the same "hand out free money" approach. Their safety nets were built around maintaining continuity during COVID.
> even in the 90’s when things were pretty good here.
Things being good does not necessarily equate to not requiring more time to get $1, which is what we're talking about. The American stereotype is that workers will work every single day of the year if you let them. Whereas the stereotypical German places much greater value on not working.
Germany’s economy is the worst in Europe since a couple of years.
Industrial complex vanish faster than a glassy menu opens on the MacBook Pro series.
Bankruptcy is on an all time high, car makers opening new factories in Hungary and close theirs no matter how modern they are in Germany.
A pharmacist in Germany begged me to pay with fiat money and not to use Apple Pay nor credit card due to the percentage hit on the invoice - and I bought stuff for roughly 350EUR.
Roads look like 1990 in the German Democratic Republic.
All that politicians from the Left discuss is higher taxes, higher medical costs higher everything even state debt while service declines and investment disappears.
It is dire here. Don’t fall for it, because it is only getting worse.
The youth wants to leave Germany with at a percentage rate never seen before: between 20 and 25%.
And the net balance is already negative for 3 years if I remember correctly for people moving here and people leaving - and these are folks from Germany and people who’s parents immigrated here generations ago.
So called “Knives Prohibition Zones” installed in the last years shall account for the massive increase in knife attacks in the public zones.
Christmas markets don’t open as well as many traditional public meet ups closed due to anti terrorist and safety measures they have to pay for - an unheard and unseen phenomenon 10 years ago.
I could go on and on - but yeah, Europe is great and such, so cool, that more and more former colleagues who lived here 10 years and more happily leave the country for good.
abighamb•41m ago
I would be very interested to find out how those stats are related to things like, GINI or old pre-GDP economic measures of raw production.
weberer•31m ago
The "old" way was to measure median net PPP per capita, which makes more sense to me:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Annual_m...
makapuf•25m ago