23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

To begin with, having a higher averageincome than other countries does not necessarily mean that all US citizens live better than their foreign counterparts. Whether this is the case depends on the distribution of income. Of course, in no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live, but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries. And this conjecture is indirectly supported by other indicators of living standards. For example, despite having the highest average PPP income, the US ranks only around thirtieth in the world in health statistics such as life expectancy and infant mortality (OK, the inefficiency of the US healthcare system contributes to it, but let’s not get into that). The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan – in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan – shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US.

Second, the very fact that its PPP income is more or less the same as its market exchange rate income is proof that the higher average living standard in the US is built on the poverty of many. What do I mean by this? As I have pointed out earlier, it is normal for a rich country’s PPP income to be lower, sometimes significantly, than its market exchange rate income, because it has expensive service workers. However, this does not happen to the US, because, unlike other rich countries, it has cheap service workers. To begin with, there is a large inflow of low-wage immigrants from poor countries, many of them illegal, which makes them even cheaper. Moreover, even the native workers have much weaker fallback positions in the US than in European countries of comparable income level. Because they have much less job security and weaker welfare supports, US workers, especially the non-unionized ones in the service industries, work for lower wages and under inferior conditions than do their European counterparts. This is why things like taxi rides and meals at restaurants are so much cheaper in the US than in other rich countries. This is great when you are the customer, but not if you are the taxi driver or the waitress. In other words, the higher purchasing power of average US income is bought at the price of lower income and inferior working conditions for many US citizens.

Last but not least, in comparing living standards across countries, we should not ignore the differences in working hours. Even if someone is earning 50 per cent more money than I earn, you wouldn’t say that he has a higher living standard than I do, if that person has to work double the number of hours that I do. The same applies to the US. The Americans, befitting their reputation for workaholism, work longer hours than the citizens of any other country that has a per capita income of more than $30,000 at market exchange rate in 2007 (Greece being the poorest of the lot, at just under $30,000 per capita income). Americans work 10 per cent longer than most Europeans and around 30 per cent longer than the Dutch and the Norwegians. According to a calculation by the Icelandic economist Thorvaldur Gylfason, in terms of income (in PPP terms) per hour worked in 2005, the US ranked only eighth – after Luxemburg, Norway, France (yes, France, that nation of loungers), Ireland, Belgium, Austria, and the Netherlands – and was very closely followed by Germany.[1] In other words, per unit of effort, the Americans are not getting as high a living standard as their counterparts in competitor nations. They make up for this lower productivity through much longer hours.

Now, it is perfectly reasonable for someone to argue that she wants to work longer hours if that is necessary to have a higher income – she would rather have another TV than one more week of holiday. And who am I, or anyone else, to say that the person got her priority wrong?