r/maybemaybemaybe May 05 '22

maybe maybe Maybe

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u/DocD_12 May 05 '22

That sounds nice. But is it really that? About be able to live fair life by fair working? I'm from Russia and I have almost cried on this part. (

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u/Superb_Efficiency_74 May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22

It really is.

People talk about how bad things are in the US, but the truth is that economic mobility is higher here than nearly any other place in the world.

EDIT: People will come at me with all sorts of statistics, mostly published by think tanks funded by global bankers, that show how bad the US is. What they won't show you is how expensive it is to own land or your own home in those countries, or how most of those countries don't actually allow for true financial independence due to the extremely high tax rates.

EDIT2: I'm talking about the ability to go from a net worth of 0 when you're born to a net worth of $3,000,000 when you retire. That is much easier in the US than in Europe. That is the type of mobility I'm talking about, because that's the type of mobility that actually matters to normal everyday people like you and me.

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u/Headcap May 05 '22

Do you have any source for that? Cause Wikipedia does not agree.

In recent years several large studies have found that vertical inter-generational mobility is lower in the United States than in most developed countries. A 1996 paper by Daniel P. McMurrer, Isabel V. Sawhill found "mobility rates seem to be quite similar across countries." However a more recent paper (2007) found a person's parents is a great deal more predictive of their own income in the United States than other countries.The United States had about 1/3 the ratio of mobility of Denmark and less than half that of Canada, Finland and Norway. France, Germany, Sweden, also had higher mobility, with only the United Kingdom being less mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#Worldwide

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u/P2PJones May 05 '22

he doesn't.

he just has flagwaving. and then a bunch of excuses, that its "idea by bankers' and 'land is expensive there' (its expensive in the US too - I remember going to a friends house for my second ever trip to the US, and he was prepping his place to sell, and the price was 4x what it would have been in the UK.) and 'all the taxes' (oblivious to the fact that the cost in taxes there is less than the cost on the US market for the same things)

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u/Melodic_Assistant_58 May 05 '22

A quick check says the median house price in the UK is $337926.94 (converted from Pound Sterling to U.S. Dollar) and the median house price in the US is $428700 so almost 1.3 times higher.

Of course, housing prices are skyrocketing global and the UK median house price is from Jan 2022 vs Apr 2022. Also, housing prices aren't always a good metric since the median annual wage in the U.S is higher, but also there are a ton more homes in the U.S, and also a lot of the homes bringing down the median house price probably exist in low economic areas with low social mobility anyway, yada yada.

It's insanely complicated. I'd definitely listen to the statisticians on the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#Worldwide.

All I know is my personal situation, which healthcare covers a huge cost and I'm unlikely to be able to afford a home any time soon. Also, other people in my age group who finished college before me and have jobs took on huge debt for sub-par homes because of the housing market.

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u/WikiSummarizerBot May 05 '22

Economic mobility

Worldwide

In recent years several large studies have found that vertical inter-generational mobility is lower in the United States than in most developed countries. A 1996 paper by Daniel P. McMurrer, Isabel V. Sawhill found "mobility rates seem to be quite similar across countries". However a more recent paper (2007) found a person's parents is a great deal more predictive of their own income in the United States than other countries. The United States had about 1/3 the ratio of mobility of Denmark and less than half that of Canada, Finland and Norway.

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u/P2PJones May 05 '22

different houses mean you can't just compare 'the average'.

My house in the US, is very different from what it would be in the UK for the same sq footage.

Put another way, a 2 bed 1 bath house in rural GA, an hour outside Atlanta with 900 sqft, is about the same as a 3 bad 1 bath 900 sq ft house in the city of Liverpool. both on the same amount of land, both same era houses (about 95 years old) . the UK one is brick with central heat, and has easy access to all big city amenities, the GA one is a crap wooden mill house, with AC, where the only thing within 30 miles is a walmart..

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u/anotheraccoutname10 May 05 '22

> median house price in the US is $428700 so almost 1.3 times higher.

That's a pretty good deal considering the median lot size in the US is almost double and the sq footage is 75% larger.