This isn’t surprising, given the agenda of the so-called “conservative” right for the last 46 years…

I’m kind of relieved to see this new measurement because it gives back some credibility to the social sciences/economics.

Anybody who has been in the US cannot miss the abundant poverty, which is unseen and unheard of in Western Europe.

Nice read, I took a look at the paper and it looks like a really nice metric. Having people twice as poor counting twice as much makes a lot of sense. Very nice way to handle both relative poverty and absolute poverty while not ignoring how some people are much poorer than others.

Averages are affected a lot by outliers with very large values, and the effect is larger when there’s large inequalities. If measuring by income or wealth (higher is better) in a stadium with 1 billionaire and 999 homeless people, the average people is millionnaire.

This study still uses averages and flips the effect with a povery score (higher is worse). It gives more weight to the other end of a spectrum, very poor persons that need 300min to win 1$ makes the average much higher.

Using median values, or better 20-80 centiles values would be more meaningful.

How about a poverty measure that includes housing prices, which I believe are far higher in Europe relative to wages?

Going to bookmark this for the next time I hear Europeans chastise Americans for being rich and too comfortable and lazy to fight fascism.

Putting aside social safety nets, an average American needs to work nearly 2.5x as long for the same dollar as an average German. And because that number is inclusive of the whole population, I have a sneaking suspicion that the USA’s larger Gini coefficient makes that ratio even higher between the poorer American vs poorer German.