According to the International Monetary Fund, per capita GDP in the US is currently $85,000. This figure is adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, so it takes into account differences in living standards throughout the world. Here's how everyone else is doing:
The US is the richest large region in the world and the fastest growing except for China and India—both of whom are still far behind us.
This is remarkable.
Yes but something something INFLATION something Biden catastrophe depression something, and have you seen the price of
gaseggsalmonds lately oh my GOD!!!11!!Put another way:
Yes but how come it gets hoovered up by the slurptacular top of the income/wealth scale?
Followed up by "why are Americans paying so that China can build a middle class!!!!1111"
How much of the GDP gap with Europe is due to health care? We spend a lot more money on it for generally poorer outcomes---but it does make up a nice portion of our GDP (ca. 17% if Google's AI is right, whereas EU is at ca. 11%).
GDP isnt really concerned with outcomes or quality.
GDP doesnt care if you consume and produce more things that kill you or make you miserable. It doesnt even try to measure time or well being, the most valuable items we have.
How much of the GDP gap with Europe is due to health care?
Surely none of it, or it's a negative that weighs against America. US economic performance would be stronger if we managed to operate a healthcare system for around the rich country average (10-11% of GDP).
My understanding is that European GDP is lower than the US mainly because they work fewer hours. Their GDP per worker hour is similar to ours.
What's going on with the Middle East, there haven't been _that_ many wars going on.
Oil production has spread out to other areas of the world.
Also: although the middle east isn't just petrostates, a significant part of the middle eastern economy is from resource extraction for export. Resource extraction doesn't necessarily scale with population the way that a more diversified/balanced economy tends to.
Since the population of the middle east has exploded in the past 40 years, I'd imagine that GDP from oil/gas production is getting spread among more people, which is a drag on growth in GDP per capita.
Things may look good for the US right now but there's a 12-year-old girl in the Congo with stars in her eyes -- well, asteroids, in fact -- and she knows that NASA estimates the value of minerals in the asteroid belt to be $700,000,000,000,000,000,000. In a few years her space exploration and mining company will hit the jackpot and Elon Musk's wealth will look no bigger than the profits from an afternoon at a kid's lemonade stand.
Busy time on the campaign trail but never too busy for a little grifting.
"These cards show me dancing and even me holding some bitcoins."
Question: How does anyone hold bitcoins?
(OK, I didn't think so.)
Minerals in asteroids may be useful for building stuff in space, but it's extremely unlikely that they'll ever be valuable for Earth's economy. Asteroids are really, really, really far away, and the energy/fuel cost of moving apreciable amounts minerals ~1-2AU down the sun's gravity well from the belt to the Earth are incredibly colossal. JAXA and NASA sample return missions are miracles of science and engineering, but they took years and hundreds-if-not-billions of dollars and netted us a bit more than 100 grams of stuff. Astounding feats of scientific exploration, but a strong sign that asteroid mining is nowhere near feasible.
Plus, it's not like iron and nickel are particularly scarce on Earth; nor are they appreciably limiting factors on economic activity here--even if you could get near limitless free metals from space rocks down to earth, that still would just lower the cost of manufactured goods by a handful of percentage points. (example: the steel in a car represents a tiny fraction of its overall cost). Which would be great! But not transformative. Put another way: finding out there was a gajillion tons of ice on the moon might be great for a future moon base, but we would never, ever try to bring the stuff down here.
Now, maybe we develop fancy von neuman-esque robots that fly to asteroids and replicate themselves and automatically build distributed mining operations and automated I guess rockets to move the mined materials back to someplace where people live. That sort of sci-fi thing could work, but it would work even better here on Earth since for terrestrial applications we would just have to develop replicating automated systems rather than develop replicating automated systems that can work in a hard vacuum, survive cosmic radiation, be smart enough to operate independently because of the ~40 minute signal latency with terrestrial controllers, and use some sort of novel non-water-based chemistry for mining/refining mineralsm for work in space. In other words, it's probably more likely that we'll get to a fabulous post-scarcity machine-based economy here on the ground before we set up something similar in the asteroid belt.
A skeptic, eh? You're getting very science-y there, not to mention, terrestrial. Think like that and you could miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime.
“The economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.”
- donald trump
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-economy-better-under-democrats/
????. A rare bit of honesty from an otherwise extremely dishonest person.
A small aside here. If you are doing international comparisons where there are massive differences in the degree of inequality - median household income is a better measure. Making rich people, much richer is a really lousy use of resources.
Also, it might make sense to ask, "is GDP still a good measure of welfare?". Shouldn't we at least consider the quality of public services and average hours worked? Or how much price related information (like rents) has leaked into our (financial based) GDP measures? Or for instance, how much of GDP is actually going into getting people to work, rather than providing them what they need and want.
How do you measure quality of life, or happiness and comfort? People are often quite happy, yet without most of the amenities we'd be miserable without. Where do the lines of quality and happiness ideally cross?
Does "Europe" include Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, etc? I don't think the European Union fares quite so poorly in comparison to the US (more like 60%, not 45%), never mind the high-performing Western/Northern Europe.
Still a big gap, but not quite as bad as Kevin's graph depicts. Also, what happened to Australia, Canada and Japan?
You could always look at life expectancy to see who is really better off.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/life-expectancies-vs-health-spending-per-capita/
gdp per calories is bets metric than gdp. but much worse than gdp per hour worked. us on abstract works about 35% more hours than Denmark.
Now do Median income per capita or better yet median net worth per capita...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-top-countries-by-wealth-per-person/
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-wealth-per-capita/
Median per capita.
Jesus weeps.
Clearly our schools are not the best.
The drive to the global mean may be inevitable however, and get various pushes along the way…
But GDP/cap is still running away from wages in the US, unlike what was happening before the 70's:
https://www.skeptometrics.org/BLS_B8_Min_Pov.png
Most of the GDP increase has been going to upper incomes so inequality is still increasing (recent improvements in the lowest wages have not made much of a dent in this). Most European countries have less inequality. I think the median income in Europe is closer to that of the US than in the case of GDP/cap, although I don't have the data at hand.