There *is* a left tendency to pretend nobody in the US lives well, which doesn't do the movement any favors, but when the other side is going "ah, but would you REALLY trade your spacious single-family home for social democracy?" I don't think it's us that needs to get a clue
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Vastauksena käyttäjälle @PetreRaleigh
I think it is fair to say that the experience of poverty in the USA is insufficiently considered in the analysis, but its worth noting that the square-footage advantage in the USA runs through almost all of the income ladder and like, 60+% of Americans own their own home.
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Vastauksena käyttäjille @BretDevereaux ja @PetreRaleigh
But it's also worth considering the quality of those homes and the resale value, right? Like, what proportion of those of 60% have something worth selling or passing down to their kids?
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Vastauksena käyttäjille @MBryandroid ja @BretDevereaux
Also how does that number look generationally
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Vastauksena käyttäjille @PetreRaleigh ja @MBryandroid
Well, it was 65% in 1960 and it is 64% now, though it got all the way up to 69% in the early aughts and all the way down to 63% in 2016, so there is long-term stability in the statistic, but you are right to note that millennials trail older generations in home buying.
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In terms of home value, the issue frankly is that housing values are too high, not too low. That's part of what is keeping millennials out of home-buying and why I think we need policies that lead to building a lot more houses, even if it means that per-unit values stagnate.
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Nevertheless, it is just statistically true that even among the younger generations, actually owning a house on both a per-unit and per-square-foot basis is more affordable in the United States than in most - nearly all - countries.
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Vastauksena käyttäjille @BretDevereaux ja @MBryandroid
That's not really the point. The point is, how many millions of people don't enjoy the life McArdle describes at all, and are they able to provide education and health care for their children?
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Vastauksena käyttäjille @PetreRaleigh ja @MBryandroid
I mean, the point really is what percentage of people don't, otherwise all you've proved is that the United States is the largest rich country, which is true but besides the point.
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Generally though, the answer to the question, "what % of people has access to that middle class lifestyle" is that it is a somewhat larger % in the USA than in the average EU country, once you insist on using the same purchasing-power metric for everyone:https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-american-lens-western-europes-middle-classes-appear-smaller/ …
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Which, to be clear, you ought to do. I get really frustrated seeing 'poverty rates' compared across countries that have substantially different definitions of what constitutes poverty (e.g. different poverty lines).
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Anyway, my own sense, fwiw, is that the United States does fairly well, on average, by both the rich (of course) and the bulk of the middle class, which together represent a majority, but not all of American society, but it does somewhat badly by the rest of folks.
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I suppose the real question here is often 'is the US some sort of monstrous outlier in this regard' and I think the answer is 'no.' If you cf. the USA to much smaller, rich countries, we look bad b/c Denmark's poor workers live in Hungary, whereas the USA's live in West Virginia.
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