It's disingenuous to compare a country with another country with 1/30th the size. Otherwise, you'd come to the conclusion that Sweden would be better off as a tax haven like Luxembourg. Massachusetts matches the Nordic nations by most metrics, and blows them out of the water in terms of median income.
I cannot disagree with what you stated, but your last sentence misses the point.
Incomes are nominally higher in Massachusetts and costs for certain staples (energy, food, automobile) are nominally lower, compared to Western Europe. Yet I can’t say the outcome is better (note I have lived in France, Germany and Massachusetts).
The fact is life is more precarious in MA: it appears that you have more disposable income but crucial things like health care (perhaps best in USA), school (crucial for keeping your head above water) and such means you spend more of your time and money looking after your life and less actually living it.
You can see this in the numbers, too: not just life expectancy but in things like money available (and spent) on vacations and other leisure, reported levels of stress and debt.
I’m not trying to claim that any country is some sort of utopia. My root comment was simply that the analysis of the post we are discussing was simplistic and ignored confounding examples of countries with the claimed “bad” things doing better by their citizens.
We’re not talking about tax havens, or “exploits” such as those which require exploitation of a global financial system.
We’re talking about countries and the claim that the USA is too big for decent social systems is just about the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard.
Either you have enough GDP for each state that it could be it’s own country, or you don’t. But it feels picky and choosy to say “we are extremely wealthy” and then later say “ah. But we’re too big for social programmes. It would cost too much”.
It’s a weird kind of double-speak that might have an iota of truth in either direction, but those positions cannot be simultaneously held.
It isn't disingenuous at all if you compare per capita metrics.
Yes, you may have to exclude some very anomalous countries that have models that couldn't scale - Luxembourg for instance - but a country like Sweden is a mix of cities, suburbs, and rural areas with a mix of primary resource production, manufacturing, and services. It's big "enough" that you would expect normal country scaling laws to apply.
True, but I'm not sure that per capita matters so much. The USA has only about 5% of the world's people, but nearly 30% of the world's billionaires. That's a very large share (and nearly 1.5x as large as the next largest, China, with around 3x the population).
I don’t understand: are you talking about PPP GDP per capita? I agree that the US optimizes for that, but it doesn’t translate into higher quality of life by metrics like life expectancy, literacy, leisure time, malnutrition, proportion of “precariat” etc.
If you define socioeconomic status narrowly (gender, race, age, net wealth), then I was wrong to say that the success of European countries is rooted in their socioeconomic status. I'm happy to take that point back, and focus on why I don't think controlling for socioeconomic status is the right analysis.
However, even if the US shows better outcomes when controlling for socioeconomic status, the distribution of people within socioeconomic status is relevant.
If the US has 1000 impoverished people and 10 middle class people, and Germany has 10 impoverished people and 1000 middle class people, the relevant comparison is the German middle class to the US impoverished class.
In other words, you'd want to compare outcomes based on percentiles regardless of socioeconomic status.
Maybe it would be better to say "controlling for immigration policies"? But even then the US is going to come out behind because those countries don't have the legacies of slavery still weighing them down.
