United Nations: Best Places To Live 09

[Moxie]

Norway has a population of 4.6 million, about the same as Alabama. Let's see them scale to 300 million people.

Alabama gets to be ranked per capita against Texas and California. Southern and northern California might be a lot different, but that's how the borders are, so all Californians have to stand together.

The rankings are just a look at certain stats and they don't actually call it "best places to live." On their site :

"Is the HDI enough to measure a country's level of development?

Not at all. The concept of human development is much broader than what can be captured in the HDI"

 

[Instrumentalist]

brainwashed mofo !

oh yes, you're totally right. working at home on my own business and all, i'm totally brainwashed. i should just quit now, and join the army.

 

[Angel of Wealth]

See but there's a difference with their labor, namely that they lack some of the technology we do, so their work is actually less efficient.

So yes, we work smarter than third world countries (technology), and harder than nations developed like ours.

The thing that makes USA great is our work ethic. If you want a big house, or to retire with a few million in the bank, the opportunity is there for everyone. This pushes for things like work efficiency, technology, communications, innovations, etc, to help reach that goal.

You do realize all your shit is outsourced right?

 

[justo_tx]

You do realize all your shit is outsourced right?

Which would lead to the natural conclusion that he is working smarter, not harder. He can work hard in one of two ways: put forth the effort to coordinate campaigns, lp design, etc... among his agents, or he could do it all himself on a much smaller scale. Both require hard work, but provide different levels of return.

 

[bprimeelite]

To be honest I think the United States work ethic is one thing that is killing us right now. Everyone wants to get rich and/or famous with little to no work overnight. This helps those who sell google biz kits and e-books but for our nations economy it makes it shitty. We outsource all of the shitty work we do not want to do such as support to India and farming to Mexico, etc. What has happened is the ones we outsourced it to have now built up their economies to the point they can compete on a global scale with technology playing a role in this too. If you think US is the only place you can get rich and live well then you need to leave the states and travel around.

 

[LazyHippy]

To be honest I think the United States work ethic is one thing that is killing us right now. Everyone wants to get rich and/or famous with little to no work overnight.

It seems like Americans are conditioned to be constantly wanting to better themselves, always ambitious, never content with what they have. Not that different in most western countries, but America appears to be worse (or better, depending on how you look at it).

Very hard to be happy if you can't be content.

 

[LogicFlux]

Let's look at #1... They work 400 hours less than the USA, yet incomes in Norway are $40,000 higher per person ($12,000 higher if you adjust for cost of living). Their GDP per capita is higher also, even with the fewer hours worked.

I think the recent boom in Norway is all on account of striking oil recently.

At any given point these numbers will fluctuate and countries' respective positions in these tables will fluctuate. Some countries will move up and down, but the US, I suspect, has had one of the highest per capita GDPs for a long time, has had one of the top average hourly wages for a long time, one of the top average and/or median yearly incomes for a long time.

Also Norway is a fraction of the size of the US. I'm not an economist but I have to believe that there is something in economics that is somewhat equivalent to the scaling laws in physics, you know, the laws that allow an ant to carry many times its body weight.

I would suspect that when you scale the size of an economy(taking into account land area, population and GDP) that it gets harder and harder to maintain the same per capita numbers.


In other words if you scaled Norway up to the size of the US, would it be able to sustain its per capita numbers?

The reason I suspect this is because I don't know of any other country our size in history that has maintained top spots in key metrics for as long of a time. I wonder what the USSR's peak per capita GDP was?

I found something, if the numbers are to be trusted:
Per Capita GDP USSR (Former) - Swivel

USSR's was around $5000 when ours was around $20000. China's is now around $5000 where ours is around $50000.


Also, you have to account for the per capita numbers of smaller countries being more easily skewed. Look at the per capita numbers for the tiny country of Liechtenstein. They have a population of 35,000 and a per capita GDP(PPP) of $118,000. Why? Maybe Ryan Eagle has dual citizenship?

 

[LogicFlux]

Our crime is so high in some of our cities now you would be better off in Baghdad and unemployment keeps getting worse.

Smart not to mention Detroit specifically or else unarmed gunman might have popped a cap in your ass.