(4) is total bs though. If you look into the better life index, it's a total joke. Here's one quick tidbit, it rates the bottom 10% in Poland as having a better standard of living than the bottom 10% of France or Japan.
You think that's a joke? It gets better! It rates the TOP 10% of Poland as better than the top 10% of France or Japan, too!
If you know anything about these countries you'd laugh (with all due respect to Poland, great country for the resources they're working with right now and the history they've endured).
(5) is partially false. You can find an equivalent population in Western Europe (e.g. UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Scandinavia) the size of the US population, whose welfare state policies make the US look poor. Of course on a world scale it's great, when you figure there's more than a billion in all of Africa, China and Asia, where the story is quite different. But compared to the best in the world, the US doesn't rank at the top, and we don't have to look at countries of 5 million to make that comparison.
(6-7) Least important. Long-term, yes, but you're mostly referencing a snapshot in time that's not very meaningful without context. After all, if you see your economy drop by 50%, high growth rates after aren't anything special, you're simply returning to where you were years ago. And if you come from a low position like China, getting growth rates that outpace e.g. the US by gigantic amounts isn't very special either, as you're merely catching up slowly to where others have been for decades. The growth number in and of itself is a small indicator without context. Don't forget, Greece and Spain and Ireland's 2015 and 2016 growth forecasts are double that of Germany (guess where you want to live. Germany). And China's is more than 2x that of the US (guess where I'd want to live, the US). Besides the claim that Europe hasn't grown in 8 years is false. Look at Real GDP per Capita, that removes inflation and population changes. You'll find Europe grew a tiny bit. The US isn't really any different, barely any higher than in 2007 [0].
(9) Partially true, partially not true. So for one, rankings wildly differ. The QS rankings have 18 out of top 50 universities in the US. Just 2 in the top 5, compared to the UK (a country with a population 5x smaller) which has 3 in the top 5. Other rankings are more favorable to the US, it depends. But what I think is important is that a lot of these rankings have little to do with education, and a lot to do with your point (8), which is research by 1% of the student base. Almost all of these rankings put a gigantic weight on peer review and citations. So if Chomsky is at MIT, well that boosts up the rate by a gazillion because he's one of the most cited people in the world. Even if he doesn't teach, or even if he teaches in a field that only 10 students in that university actually study.
You'd be surprised that quality of education isn't at all really measured, only by crappy proxies. So for example for QS (it's a horrible ranking, but very popular), 40% is peer review (i.e. almost completely irrelevant to the majority of bachelor/master students), 20% is citations, 10% is faculty/student ratio (have a lot of non-teaching research staff? Well you get peer review, citations and a high faculty/student ratio, without any of that directly translating to students getting taught. Have a popular professor who teaches a wonderful class to 200 students instead of 100? Your rating on this variable just got halved.) And another 10% is international students/staff, which I think is super important in some ways (internationalisation of education is a big deal!) but can also be completely meaningless. i.e. a university which has amazing education and happens to be in a low-immigration country, isn't any less amazing.
In short, rankings differ wildly, rankings are crap, and rankings often don't say much about the quality of education. I can say this because I studied at a top 50 university, top 20 actually, as well as 3 other ones not ranked even in the top 100, and the top 20's quality of education wasn't remarkable (actually had the best grades with the least effort there, too). The difference? The top 50 uni had a load of money, reputation and had brilliant PhDs doing amazing research and got cited a lot, which did 0 for my education but everything for its reputation, the other ones simply had great education without deep and well funded PhD programs.
So what must you do? Look at educational outcomes. More importantly, not look at the top universities, either. Does it matter for a typical student to study in the US if Harvard is in the US when it only takes in 2.000 students per year? The answer is mostly no. 99% of the population goes to different schools, so let's look at them.
You'll find the US does quite poorly compared to the aforementioned European region of equivalent size. And you'll find that whereas in most of Europe education is free or de facto free. (e.g. in Germany, free, in France a few hundred bucks per year, in the Netherlands $2k but you get $2k from the government as a loan, which turns into a gift if you graduate, i.e. free etc) And average student debt is $35k for 2015 in the US.
Having universities like MIT or Harvard is important for point (8), being a leader in science, innovation etc etc. But it's not for point (9), quality of education for a normal person, at a particular cost. You can get better quality cheaper in Europe. My education in the Netherlands compared great with having studied in America, for example.
(10) It's really hard to compare nations, income is a particularly tricky one to rely on. My healthcare is free, my education is free, sports and arts are heavily subsidised, cities are built so I don't need a car etc etc. In short, you can get a much better standard of living with less money. Would you like if your income was $1m per year if your health insurance was $250k, your education was $250k etc? It's an exaggerated example but you get my point. I find if you talk to people who've lived in Western Europe and the US (like I did), that standards of living aren't better in the US.
Household debt to income is rarely used, it's household debt to disposable income. And that's my point, if my healthcare is paid for me for example, does it matter disposable income is a little less? It wildly varies, too. Countries that are usually wonderful to live in have high ratios (Denmark the highest, then the Netherlands, Switzerland of all places comes in fourth. Who comes in last? Slovenia, Poland, Slovak Republic. Not places you want to live. It also masks the fact that Net Household Wealth to Income in the Netherlands (remember, the 2nd worst country on your debt to disposable income rating) is much better than that in the US.) You also have to understand where it comes from and what it entails. Two thirds of household debt reduction in the US was because of defaults. So the number is low because the US had an epic fail, defaulted on the majority of debt reductions and lost people a lot of money. That's not a great situation is it? Beyond that it's important to look at the type of debt. In the US household debt consists of a lot of credit card debt (i.e. empty debt at ridiculous 20% interest rates per year.) In Europe it's a lot more because of recent housing price crashes (i.e. people owing the bank on much lower interest rates on long-term, asset-backed loans, whose value is forecasted to bounce back in the coming years as the housing market picks up as it did this year already). It's important to look into the statistics, I can name a million and one empty statistics that make the US look poor. For example the US owes a ridiculous shit ton of money, $18 trillion, people always like to say. But nobody mentions that the rest of the world owes the US about the same amount.
(11) I think everyone knows that crime rates in a typical American city aren't as good as those in a typical European city. Hell the notion that there are deep issues with even feeling safe around police in the US for substantial portions of the population is insane. I agree fully with you that if you want, you can find very safe cities to live in in the US. But that's cherry picking cities, and if I did that for any of the other points you mentioned it'd be easy peasy, that's why we're having a discussion about countries no?
(12) I just don't see how the US compares to Western Europe in this regard. I mean it's on a completely different scale. I'll cherry pick one number real quick if you allow... it's that the US shot and killed 59 people in the first 24 days of 2015. In the last 24 years, the England & Wales shot and killed fewer, 55. Just think about that. Police shot and killed more people in 0.33% of the time, despite the population being barely 6 times bigger. Or Iceland, a population that is bigger than that of Stockton, California. They had 1 fatal police shooting in 71 years. Stockton? 3 in the first 5 months of this year alone. In I mean I'm cherry picking here obviously but I really think you should scrap this point from your list, cause I can go on and on here and it gets worse.
(13) Absolutely ridiculous. I'm a minority in Europe, my girlfriend is a sociologist. From my experience and the academic perspective, social mobility in the US is not the best in the world, not even close.
> You can find an equivalent population in Western Europe (e.g. UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Scandinavia) the size of the US population
If we're going to compare the top 25% of Europe versus the US, then let's use the top 25% of the US for the comparison, and use the bottom 25% of Europe to compare against the bottom 25% of the US. Given the population numbers are a lot closer for that comparison, it makes drastically more sense than trying to compare Finland to the US. It also makes far more sense on a diversity basis, given across all of Europe you get a lot of diversity, and the same is true for the US (with ~140 million minorities, and a vast number of national and cultural backgrounds).
It's absurd to compare solo countries like Norway to the US. There's no scenario under which that can ever make sense.
How does Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Romania, etc compare to the bottom 25% in America?
How does all of Sweden compare to even the top 50% in the US? (that's 165 million people, so I feel like I'm giving you an extraordinary benefit there, comparing against tiny countries)
It's blatantly obvious what happens when you use a full European comparison, instead of just picking the top European nations. I've been accused a lot in this thread of cherry picking data, well only picking the top European nations is extreme cherry picking.
I think you missed my point. I'm talking about bundling all those countries so you can get an equivalent population and then make comparisons. I wasn't comparing Norway to the US, I mentioned it as part of a bundle of countries that get to an equivalent size of the US population. If you take the countries I mentioned you get something close to 300 million. The US population is a little less than 320m. Western Europe has a population of 400 million for example.
I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with the premise of picking the top outcomes in Europe, while ignoring the other half of Europe that represent quite poor outcomes.
When comparing the US vs European nations, there are certain requirements to get a positive outcome for Europe. You have to drop most of the medium countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Turkey from the comparison - to say nothing of Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia, Belarus, Russia, Albania, Moldova.
The focus has to be on: France, Germany, UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium.
If you deviate from that exact list, Europe's ratings on everything implode rapidly.
It points to the persistent intellectual fraud in most comparisons to the US that you see with regards to Europe. People always want to stick to talking about just a few nations. They never want to do even a EU vs US comparison (eg twice the unemployment rate of the US, with next to zero GDP growth for eight years and with only ~60% the GDP per capita). US life expectancy is also as high as the EU, despite our supposedly inferior healthcare system. Median incomes are quite higher in the US than the EU, and median household wealth is also higher. The US also produces greater total output in terms of science, innovation and nobel prizes than the EU does.
Well if you're not missing the point then why make an unfair comparison? Even western europe alone has a population much, much bigger than the US. So if you want to include all of Europe you're comparing apples to oranges just as much as comparing Germany to the entirety of the US.
Now it depends on what comparison you want to make. I'm telling you you can find a portion of Europe that's all next to eachother and is the developed part of Europe, that has a population that is comparable to the US, and is an interesting basis for a discussion.
If you want to include previous Soviet Union countries, or countries that have been independent states for since 2008 like Kosovo which you mentioned, go for it.
I'm not interested in that discussion, nobody is, nobody is talking about how we should all move to Kosovo or how the US can learn from Kosovo, it's a joke of a discussion and one I'll easily concede the US comes out ahead (surprise surprise! Hell I've literally lived in countries in Africa that do much better than Kosovo, which isn't even recognised by half the world population's governments, let alone part of the EU).
May I ask a question by the way, have you ever lived in the EU?
I ask because of your extreme bias. Because I've shown you countless examples of you citing things without understanding them, or citing them wrongfully, all to make a point regardless of whether the information supports it.
Like say the US producing nobel prizes more than the EU. Guess how many the US produced? 350. The EU? 462. I mean it's a joke. You keep spitting out random blobs of information, many of them flat out false or simply missing the point entirely. (like your info on homicide rates in Amsterdam being a total joke). You switch to national numbers when it suits you, then per capita numbers when it suits you, then shift to individual cities to cherry pick particular variables, and switch between comparisons between the US and individual countries, or the EU or Europe as a whole (yeah let's put Germany and Kosovo in the same basket and compare it to the US, and let's compare a group of countries like Germany and Russia to the US, even though Germany and Russia are like the US and Iran to eachother right now, fighting each other with sanctions and economic warfare, because hey Germany and Russia are both in Europe right? They must be politically united like say the individual states of the US, fair comparison to compare outcomes! /s).
And you make the same mistakes you're attacking others for, calling it 'persistent intellectual fraud' to make faulty comparisons. So let's look at one you brought up: life expectancy The EU life expectancy at birth is slightly better than the US, but as you say, it's comparable. So fair enough, right? But you fail to mention the European Union has more than 500 million people, about the same as the population of all 23 countries in North America, fair comparison? Not so much.
Mexico for example has a horrible life expectancy, even less than the West Bank for crying out loud. [0] Guess who is below Mexico even? Romania. Guess who invited Romania to join their union the past few years? The European Union. Now let's see what happens if the US builds a union in North America with countries like Mexico or say, Haiti, to get to the same 500 million people as the US, and watch what happens to your 'fair comparison'. You'd see variables drop extremely hard across the board. Again you're being a total hypocrite. Just because the EU happened to expand beyond western europe into a group of countries (not a country, but a group of independent states) way bigger than the US, allowing way poorer countries than Mexico for example to join, doesn't mean you can compare the EU to the US and then call 'intellectual fraud' when someone instead makes a more sensible comparison to western europe, or the original EU members. And don't get me started on the comparison to Europe, it's ONLY 750 million people, including hundreds of millions who are politically diametrically opposed and waging economic warfare and even a proxy war in the Ukraine right now. Makes total sense to compare their 'union' to the combination of the united states. And mentioning Kosovo, man I'm still laughing about that one, you're right though the US is totally better than Kosovo, I'm glad we put that controversy to rest.
Ah thanks for that, I thought it was an English thing (here in the Netherlands we just say 'Ukraine') but I always heard it as 'the' on english television. After your correction I looked into it and it turns out saying 'the' is actually insulting!
(4) is total bs though. If you look into the better life index, it's a total joke. Here's one quick tidbit, it rates the bottom 10% in Poland as having a better standard of living than the bottom 10% of France or Japan.
You think that's a joke? It gets better! It rates the TOP 10% of Poland as better than the top 10% of France or Japan, too!
If you know anything about these countries you'd laugh (with all due respect to Poland, great country for the resources they're working with right now and the history they've endured).
(5) is partially false. You can find an equivalent population in Western Europe (e.g. UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Scandinavia) the size of the US population, whose welfare state policies make the US look poor. Of course on a world scale it's great, when you figure there's more than a billion in all of Africa, China and Asia, where the story is quite different. But compared to the best in the world, the US doesn't rank at the top, and we don't have to look at countries of 5 million to make that comparison.
(6-7) Least important. Long-term, yes, but you're mostly referencing a snapshot in time that's not very meaningful without context. After all, if you see your economy drop by 50%, high growth rates after aren't anything special, you're simply returning to where you were years ago. And if you come from a low position like China, getting growth rates that outpace e.g. the US by gigantic amounts isn't very special either, as you're merely catching up slowly to where others have been for decades. The growth number in and of itself is a small indicator without context. Don't forget, Greece and Spain and Ireland's 2015 and 2016 growth forecasts are double that of Germany (guess where you want to live. Germany). And China's is more than 2x that of the US (guess where I'd want to live, the US). Besides the claim that Europe hasn't grown in 8 years is false. Look at Real GDP per Capita, that removes inflation and population changes. You'll find Europe grew a tiny bit. The US isn't really any different, barely any higher than in 2007 [0].
(9) Partially true, partially not true. So for one, rankings wildly differ. The QS rankings have 18 out of top 50 universities in the US. Just 2 in the top 5, compared to the UK (a country with a population 5x smaller) which has 3 in the top 5. Other rankings are more favorable to the US, it depends. But what I think is important is that a lot of these rankings have little to do with education, and a lot to do with your point (8), which is research by 1% of the student base. Almost all of these rankings put a gigantic weight on peer review and citations. So if Chomsky is at MIT, well that boosts up the rate by a gazillion because he's one of the most cited people in the world. Even if he doesn't teach, or even if he teaches in a field that only 10 students in that university actually study.
You'd be surprised that quality of education isn't at all really measured, only by crappy proxies. So for example for QS (it's a horrible ranking, but very popular), 40% is peer review (i.e. almost completely irrelevant to the majority of bachelor/master students), 20% is citations, 10% is faculty/student ratio (have a lot of non-teaching research staff? Well you get peer review, citations and a high faculty/student ratio, without any of that directly translating to students getting taught. Have a popular professor who teaches a wonderful class to 200 students instead of 100? Your rating on this variable just got halved.) And another 10% is international students/staff, which I think is super important in some ways (internationalisation of education is a big deal!) but can also be completely meaningless. i.e. a university which has amazing education and happens to be in a low-immigration country, isn't any less amazing.
In short, rankings differ wildly, rankings are crap, and rankings often don't say much about the quality of education. I can say this because I studied at a top 50 university, top 20 actually, as well as 3 other ones not ranked even in the top 100, and the top 20's quality of education wasn't remarkable (actually had the best grades with the least effort there, too). The difference? The top 50 uni had a load of money, reputation and had brilliant PhDs doing amazing research and got cited a lot, which did 0 for my education but everything for its reputation, the other ones simply had great education without deep and well funded PhD programs.
So what must you do? Look at educational outcomes. More importantly, not look at the top universities, either. Does it matter for a typical student to study in the US if Harvard is in the US when it only takes in 2.000 students per year? The answer is mostly no. 99% of the population goes to different schools, so let's look at them.
You'll find the US does quite poorly compared to the aforementioned European region of equivalent size. And you'll find that whereas in most of Europe education is free or de facto free. (e.g. in Germany, free, in France a few hundred bucks per year, in the Netherlands $2k but you get $2k from the government as a loan, which turns into a gift if you graduate, i.e. free etc) And average student debt is $35k for 2015 in the US.
Having universities like MIT or Harvard is important for point (8), being a leader in science, innovation etc etc. But it's not for point (9), quality of education for a normal person, at a particular cost. You can get better quality cheaper in Europe. My education in the Netherlands compared great with having studied in America, for example.
(10) It's really hard to compare nations, income is a particularly tricky one to rely on. My healthcare is free, my education is free, sports and arts are heavily subsidised, cities are built so I don't need a car etc etc. In short, you can get a much better standard of living with less money. Would you like if your income was $1m per year if your health insurance was $250k, your education was $250k etc? It's an exaggerated example but you get my point. I find if you talk to people who've lived in Western Europe and the US (like I did), that standards of living aren't better in the US.
Household debt to income is rarely used, it's household debt to disposable income. And that's my point, if my healthcare is paid for me for example, does it matter disposable income is a little less? It wildly varies, too. Countries that are usually wonderful to live in have high ratios (Denmark the highest, then the Netherlands, Switzerland of all places comes in fourth. Who comes in last? Slovenia, Poland, Slovak Republic. Not places you want to live. It also masks the fact that Net Household Wealth to Income in the Netherlands (remember, the 2nd worst country on your debt to disposable income rating) is much better than that in the US.) You also have to understand where it comes from and what it entails. Two thirds of household debt reduction in the US was because of defaults. So the number is low because the US had an epic fail, defaulted on the majority of debt reductions and lost people a lot of money. That's not a great situation is it? Beyond that it's important to look at the type of debt. In the US household debt consists of a lot of credit card debt (i.e. empty debt at ridiculous 20% interest rates per year.) In Europe it's a lot more because of recent housing price crashes (i.e. people owing the bank on much lower interest rates on long-term, asset-backed loans, whose value is forecasted to bounce back in the coming years as the housing market picks up as it did this year already). It's important to look into the statistics, I can name a million and one empty statistics that make the US look poor. For example the US owes a ridiculous shit ton of money, $18 trillion, people always like to say. But nobody mentions that the rest of the world owes the US about the same amount.
(11) I think everyone knows that crime rates in a typical American city aren't as good as those in a typical European city. Hell the notion that there are deep issues with even feeling safe around police in the US for substantial portions of the population is insane. I agree fully with you that if you want, you can find very safe cities to live in in the US. But that's cherry picking cities, and if I did that for any of the other points you mentioned it'd be easy peasy, that's why we're having a discussion about countries no?
(12) I just don't see how the US compares to Western Europe in this regard. I mean it's on a completely different scale. I'll cherry pick one number real quick if you allow... it's that the US shot and killed 59 people in the first 24 days of 2015. In the last 24 years, the England & Wales shot and killed fewer, 55. Just think about that. Police shot and killed more people in 0.33% of the time, despite the population being barely 6 times bigger. Or Iceland, a population that is bigger than that of Stockton, California. They had 1 fatal police shooting in 71 years. Stockton? 3 in the first 5 months of this year alone. In I mean I'm cherry picking here obviously but I really think you should scrap this point from your list, cause I can go on and on here and it gets worse.
(13) Absolutely ridiculous. I'm a minority in Europe, my girlfriend is a sociologist. From my experience and the academic perspective, social mobility in the US is not the best in the world, not even close.
(14) More of the same.
[0] http://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita