Purchasing power is a reasonably objective measure.
If you look at other measurable, size of housing, prevalence of various appliances, percentage owning cars, purchasing power only considering the bottom quintile, the US also does better than the vast majority of countries including most rich countries, and all high population countries.
Which isn't to say life sucks there. US, any EU country, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, Qatar... the typical person in any of them is far better off than most people in the world today, even more so compared to people living in the past.
And they do get something for their lesser wealth. They might have smaller houses, and smaller paychecks, but they tend to get more vacation time.
"Standard of Living" or even more so "quality of life" doesn't just include such things, it includes more subjective things like the local culture, you can even include things like weather. I'm not trying to say everything is clearly better in the US than anywhere else, I'm just pointing out that Americans are richer then people in any large country or even any medium size country, and then in most small countries. All of this gets very subjective, its largely a matter of what different individuals prefer.
This conversation initially branched off of Koan's point about inequality. So what I'd say is an important and relevant point is not just that Americans in general have higher purchasing power, but even that the poorest fifth of Americans have higher purchasing power than their equivalent in most other wealthy countries (and obviously than in any non-wealthy country). |
