Comments on: It’s the median, but I shouldn’t call people “stupid”

By: Sandra Haberkorn

Sandra Haberkorn — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 08:51:45 +0000

Roxette

It’s the median,…

By: bi

bi — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 09:19:26 +0000

Because whatever jet says is common sense, is common sense. That’s why it’s called common sense. If you don’t agree, you’re an anti-semitic traitorous Saddam-loving relativist fascist Islamic Stalinist pinko.

By: engels

engels — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 03:56:35 +0000

I think have huge incentives for being smarter and harder working than the average bear are just plain common sense Why?

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 12:44:16 +0000

I think that most of the difference is explained by the yearly number of work hours (under 1500 in most of the EU against some 1800 in the USA). Add a slightly greater working participation of the population and the difference may very well go away.

DSW

By: Barry

Barry — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 14:33:20 +0000

“Chris, 2004 was the second biggest year for largest number of millionaires created since 1999. And 1999 was itself a record year.”

Posted by jet

Jet, PLEASE take a stat course.

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 14:21:40 +0000

Sorry if that looks like spam. I couldn’t figure out another way to test this extremely irritating business with footnotes href=”http://www.bradchoate.com/mt/docs/mtmanual_textile2.html” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.bradchoate.com/mt/docs/mtmanual_textile2.html when the rest of it seems to work perfectly well.

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 14:16:03 +0000

does anything of the textiel formatting work?

I mean, is this
a list?

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 14:15:14 +0000

why don’t footnotes[1] work properly on CT[2]

fn1. They do when I use Textile

fn2. But they don’t here, do they?

By: bi

bi — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 04:47:17 +0000

I expect the next “objective” measure of economic wealth will be “number of citizens who are as rich as Bill Gates, never mind all the poor people around”. Or “number of people who are too fat to fly.” Or “amount of wealth owned by the President.” Etc. etc. etc.

By: jet

jet — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 03:19:26 +0000

Chris, 2004 was the second biggest year for largest number of millionaires created since 1999. And 1999 was itself a record year.

By: a different chris

a different chris — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 23:10:59 +0000

>and both appear to be happy with their choices.

Ah, “revealed preference” again. Those guys in line for Powerball tickets must just be there for the camaraderie, as they would never give up their 49 weeks of work…

Uh, an antelope is happy with its choice to run away from the lion, but I’m not sure it wouldn’t rather the lion not be lurking at all.

The real middle class, not the 20-something childless libertarians over-represented on the ‘net and here by “jet” would like not to have to worry about affording health care and good primary and secondary education for their kids. We don’t mind working so much, but we do mind the gun at our head.

Thomas @ 34—THANK YOU!! I always freaking wondered why every place I went in Yurp I seemed to meet the owners. I wrote it off as “touristy places” and was well aware that there were corps like Siemens that were so mind-bogglingly big that they probably have entries in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

Rueben, the term “defensive” is an oddity of the English language. People are really “offensive” in this sense. See, they know there is some hole in their “US uber alles” logic, but they don’t know where it is. So when you have a weakness in your line of defense, but don’t know where it is – you go on offense.

Then the second line of attack is always the conservatives who have to bash Europe to deflect the masses from their own discontent. You don’t have to look at any economic figures to see how the US economy is going – just watch the right wing. When a number of RW pundits suddenly seem concerned, for no discernable reason, with how Europe has structured itself, then you know they’re worried about the US masses.

It’s a distracting circus for the working class, and the Europeans are painted as the clowns.

You know bad things are coming – the lousy jobs report, the postponed Army recruitment report – when people who haven’t said boo about Europe for years are suddenly wanging away on their word processors.

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 21:25:22 +0000

Nice, Jet. However, it’s an average. And how does this justify the belief that “the US keeps its middle class just as well off or better than Europe while allowing more of its hard workers or lucky into the covetted realm of the upper class.”?

There are two hypotheses, one before the ‘while’, and one after. I haven’t seen much to prove either.

By: abb1

abb1 — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 20:18:09 +0000

...the US keeps its middle class just as well off or better than Europe while allowing more of its hard workers or lucky into the covetted realm of the upper class. No, it doesn't. The US is allowing fewer hard workers into the upper class, but those few supermen who do make it there (they actually belong to a different, better species) find themselves in a totally different realm.

By: jet

jet — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 19:56:51 +0000

Okay, well just using my favorite “quick look up but beware the source” site, the CIA World Factbook, I get the US’s GDP per capita purchase power parity at $40,100, France’s at $28,700, Germany’s at $28,700 , and the UK at $29,600 (all at 2004 est).

I’m not sure what the EIU was measuring, but with European Gini indexes being in the low 30’s and the US’s at 45, the average middle class worker’s salary is more comparable between Europe and the US than those GDP numbers would imply. But even with the US’s higher Gini score, the US keeps its middle class just as well off or better than Europe while allowing more of its hard workers or lucky into the covetted realm of the upper class. And while I’d support removing the lucky from the upper class, I think have huge incentives for being smarter and harder working than the average bear are just plain common sense.

By: roger

roger — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 19:48:42 +0000

Personally, I think there is something extremely silly about comparing, say, the Netherlands or Sweden to the U.S.—or France or Germany – without a sense of the historic paths travelled by each country. The story of the latter half of the twentieth century seems to me to be composed of two things: the amazing growth of the U.S. from the late nineteenth century up to 1929 slowed down relative to the growth of European economies up to the eighties. That makes some sense—until Europe came out of the the (self inflicted) wounds of total combat, the U.S. growth was going to be increasingly in a vacuum. The other part was the unexpected slowing of European growth after the eighties. Now, I can’t imagine that France or the U.K. or any European country would catch up with the U.S., save by some catastrophe. And comparing the EU to the U.S. is to exaggerate the political unity of the EU.

But given those paths, the thing that stands out is that Europe and Japan have to solve the problem of keeping the fruits of opulence (obviously, the Europeans CAN afford their system more, now, than they could when it started, because they are much richer than when it started) while starting growth again. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the slowdown is during the same period during which the various liberalizing treaties that created the EU came into effect—in combination with the inflation scared policies of the central banks. Those were killers. The lesson the EU should learn from the U.S. is to use the state to create a much stronger consumer credit market. Inflation isn’t an automatic bogeyman—it can be an indicator of growth. The U.S. has sublimated its inflation into debt per household and the cost of social services, and made up for stagnation of single worker household incomes by turning women into the workforce. This has worked—although I’d bet that we are coming to the limit of its total usefulness. The lesson the Europeans shouldn’t learn is to create American style inequality. It won’t help the average European, any more than it helps the average worker in any of the LDCs that have tried the most radical free enterprise medicines.