4380

Thanks!

I am surprised this hasn’t crossed my dash. I’ll have to dig.

4381

I have to confess this made me jizz too.

4382

I had never read the Philadelphia Inquirer before, but I like the cut of their jib:

4383

Great thread on how income inequality makes poor people worse off in the US and UK than they are in other developed countries.

Tl;dr: compared with the rest of Europe, the US and UK are essentially poor countries with some very rich people in them. The poor in other countries have better standards of living than they do in the US / UK, because the income distribution is flatter, and the effect is so extreme in the US / UK that it’s better to be poor in Slovenia.

4384

I’m very sympathetic to the point, bud that thread does a bad job presenting data to support it. Maybe the article is better, but it’s pay walled. Why are those charts SoL over time rather than an actual present day income distribution like makes sense for the argument? What are the countries in the bottom of the chart? What is the life of poor people in Slovenia like? Does the chart include just income from wages or also state support (which likely exacerbates the problem)?

4385

I don’t see why the answer to any of those questions / objections would weaken the argument. Showing the data over time doesn’t weaken the argument for the current state of affairs. Enough of the countries are labeled from one graph to the next to get the gist of the argument. The chart makes it clear they’re using PPP to establish the standards of living. Whether state support is included is an interesting question, but the answer to it doesn’t make the US / UK comparison better.

I can’t read the article either, which is why I appreciated the tweet thread on it.

4386

I think the thesis “The United States is a poor society with some very rich people” is misleading. It’s definitely true that poverty in the U.S. is not great and that inequality here is a big problem that needs addressing. But most people in the United States are not poor. Average household income for the OECD countries is about $30,500. Only 23% of households in the United States are below that level. The United States scores high on the OECD Better Life Index, which looks at income, education, employment, life expectancy and satisfaction. (Slovenia, BTW, scores about average, i.e. it’s not a hellhole and I’m not sure why that thread uses it for comparison.)

Here’s a maybe interesting tidbit: homelessness per capita is higher in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and Australia than it is in the United States.

I am fully on board with the notion that we need a much stronger safety net and that the rich here need a whole lot of soaking with taxes. But I think saying the United States is a poor country is overstating the case.

4387

That Better Life Index is pretty sus - United States has comparable safety to Japan? wut?

4388

Perhaps, but “compared with other developed countries, the US is a poor society with some very rich people” seems spot on. That comparison is the context of the thesis.

4389

I just think it would be more accurate to say “the United States is a rich country with some very poor people and some very very rich people.”

They provide detail: Japanese are less likely than Usians to say they feel safe walking alone at night. Japan’s homicide rate, however, is less than 10% that of the U.S. Japanese are safer but don’t feel safer. And Japan rates an 8.4 in safety on that index, while the U.S. is at 7.5. The fact is no OECD country is particularly unsafe so variations between them aren’t particularly large.

4390

The fact of how safe people “feel” is a useless statistic.

Japan and US are not comparable on safety in pretty much any objective measure you use. Emphasis on “objective” which is the point. I’m sure many Russians feel Russia is pretty great these days.

4391

You are far more likely to get hit by a person jumping off a building in Japan than the US. One advantage off gun suicide in the US generally only the family sees it, not a body splattered on the ground or in front of a train. Also more likely to die from tsunamis, and earthquakes or be eaten or stepped on by Godzilla. But the Japanese being worried about crime is pretty neurotic on their part.

4392

I have a hard time agreeing with this although you might be correct in terms of a high level overview.

I am in the planning stage of a move to an area that I know nothing about other than what I can find on the Internet. As a perspective home buyer I want to know both the objective rate of various crimes and the subjective feeling of the residents who have lived there a while. The rates give me different information.

4393

Sure, but using survey data based on feelings to compare countries is just…dumb and useless. I mean, look at this disparity here.

4394

Quality of life has a subjective component. It’s not a useless statistic when that’s what you’re talking about. No question that Japan is very safe.

How about “likelihood to be a victim of homicide in any given year.” In the United States your chance is about 0.005%. In Japan your chance is 0.0002%. Those are both pretty close to zero, therefore comparable. Japan is safer, but both countries are safe. You’re more likely to die in an automobile accident in both countries.

Those stats are kind of suspect. AFAIK rape is a grossly underreported crime in Japan. Economic, political, and cultural gender imbalance in Japan remains fairly high (significantly higher than the still not-great United States.)

4395

What about the general set of violent crimes? You’re more than 140x more likely to get shot in the US than Japan.

I mean, if you’re seriously advocating for using survey data to compare countries when most people surveyed have likely have never left their own country to even know how other countries fare to do actual do any comparison I don’t really know what to tell you.

4396

What’s your take on living in low- or high-crime neighborhoods?

Odds are nothing bad will happen to you if you live in a high-crime neighborhood, but the chance is still significantly higher than in a low-crime neighborhood. So given the choice, would you take crime-rate into account when choosing where to live?

4397

But this isn’t comparative at all! Every developed country is basically a rich country with some very poor people and some very rich people, for reasonably broad definitions of ‘very’. The entire point of looking at the data was to see how such countries compared with each other; to see which ones had truly very poor and very rich people; to see which were, in effect, the outliers.

4398

That measure in the Better Life Index is labeled “safety”. The index labels it “murder and feeling safe” which are so opposite type of measures that makes the collation useless.

It uses the two extremes of safety indicators, and one that is mostly inversely correlated to objective reality (once you are into moderate safety levels, people feel more unsafe the more safe they actually are. See fear of flying).

Having possibly inversely correlated measures in an index is going to make most countries above a certain threshold score pretty much the same.

I maintain it’s pretty useless.

PS: and that’s not getting that the index ignores the most common type of crimes, which are the ones that make most people feel really unsafe (larceny, assault, etc…)

4399

I bought a house in a high crime neighborhood in low-crime San Diego. Obviously it’s a factor, but you weight it against many other factors like price, walkability, commute time, schools, etc, etc. When comparing one neighborhood to another in a low crime city, the differences aren’t huge anyway.

Regarding countries, the calculus is both simpler and more complex. I can’t just decide to move to Japan to take advantage of its low crime rate. The obstacles are significant: language, culture, immigration laws, employment, cost-of-living, etc etc. Most of those outweigh any consideration of crime rate.

Yes, that’s true. The United States is a developed country. Most people in the U.S. have a very high standard of living given worldwide comparisons. 3/4 of Americans have a household income higher than the OECD median. It is a dramatic overstatement to say we’re a poor country.