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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Today's newsletter from Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman has a lengthy review of various data sources comparing European countries and the US--here's a few paragraphs 
[quote]	
What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are?
Life is about more than GDP

As I explained the other day, however, perceptions of European decline are largely based on a statistical misunderstanding. European incomes relative to American incomes have not declined, because GDP growth as conventionally measured doesn’t mean what many people think it means. For the extremely wonkish, I’ve posted a little mathematical model to explain what’s going on in the data.

But let me not stop there, and pose a challenge in the opposite direction: What will happen when Americans realize how miserable we are? Not in all respects, of course. But my guess is that relatively few Americans realize how much we are falling behind other nations on basic aspects of a civilized life, like health and safety.

Take the issue of life expectancy, which surely matters as much as GDP. After all, one important contributor to the quality of life is not being dead. Judging from reader reactions to earlier posts, many generally well-informed Americans are still startled to learn how badly U.S. life expectancy has lagged behind other advanced nations:

Graph

Mortality is a useful point of comparison because it’s easily quantifiable. So, to a lesser extent, is work-life balance. As I noted in Sunday’s primer, the Germans and the French are roughly as productive per hour as Americans. They have lower GDP per capita than we do because they have more leisure time. Most German employees, for example, receive 25-28 days of paid leave every year. The average US private-sector worker receives only 10 days of paid vacation and 6 paid holidays annually.

And the US is, of course, the only advanced nation that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all its citizens.

Other problems with the US way of life — like our lack of walkable cities, access to public transportation, and feasibility of living without a car — are harder to summarize with simple numbers. But they are real failings.

I don’t mean to suggest that everything is worse in the U.S. We do, in fact, have substantially higher GDP per capita than European nations, and this is reflected in our material standard of living. For example, we live in bigger houses, which is nothing to sneer at, and drive bigger cars.

But there are many ways in which America’s quality of life is much worse than one would expect given the nation’s wealth. And we should always remember that economic growth is supposed to be the foundation of a better life. A nation that has high GDP per capita but whose citizens live worse than their counterparts in other countries is not a success story.[/quote]

I bet you're Paul Krugman. Who else would keep harping on about being a Nobel prize winner? He's also infamous for claiming inflation under Biden was only transitionary. He can be a hack, and I say this with the cheerfulness of someone who has been aware of Paul Krugman since college in the late 1990s and listening to my econ professors debate him.

Quality of life is in the eye of the beholder. And your own circumstances. [/quote]

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