Krugman compares US conditions with those elsewhere
June Zaccone
The title of today’s post is a riff on a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal: “What happens when Europeans find out how poor they are?” The Journal’s management evidently liked that article, which revolved around the assertion that European economies are lagging far behind the U.S. A few days ago they published a video enlarging on the claim.
As I explained the other day, however, perceptions of European decline are largely based on a statistical misunderstanding. European incomes relative to American incomes have not declined, because GDP growth as conventionally measured doesn’t mean what many people think it means. For the extremely wonkish, I’ve posted a little mathematical model to explain what’s going on in the data.
But let me not stop there, and pose a challenge in the opposite direction: What will happen when Americans realize how miserable we are? Not in all respects, of course. But my guess is that relatively few Americans realize how much we are falling behind other nations on basic aspects of a civilized life, like health and safety.
Take the issue of life expectancy, which surely matters as much as GDP. After all, one important contributor to the quality of life is not being dead. Judging from reader reactions to earlier posts, many generally well-informed Americans are still startled to learn how badly U.S. life expectancy has lagged behind other advanced nations:.....
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