Phrases like "the American economy is booming" or "America is out-performing Europe..." are simplistic and ridiculous. My least favorite part of getting a degree in economics was the endless story-telling that pretends to be scientific. "America" is not equivalent to the asset portfolios of the richest 1% of the population. Just say what you're measuring (rich people's wealth) and don't try to dress it up as a measure of a thriving nation. Don't call it "America" or "the economy", call it GDP.

Purchasing power is down, birth rates are down, life expectancies are down, young people's expectations of the future are down. We should account for things we care about when we talk about how the country is doing.

> Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.

This doesn't sound right.

Googling around, the median income (a much better metric than average) between Mississippi and Germany are about the same.

A huge difference: Britain, Canada and Germany don't have to pay for health care and education. I'm not sure how to factor that in, but something tells me if you do you'll find our Canadian and European friends are doing drastically better than those in Jackson, MS.

A lot of the charm of this kind of triumphalism wears off when one spends time in those other rich countries. It becomes rather sharply obvious on one’s return what America has traded off while min-maxing its GDP score.

America is the ultimate example of fortune favors the fortunate.

A well diversified economic powerhouse with a friendly neighbor to the north and a cheap labor neighbor to the south, comparatively politically stable, and annnddd its energy independent?

America is ridiculously OP from an economics standpoint. Even more over it only looks like the position is going to strengthen, at least until either AI or climate change upend everything.

The important thing being missed here is that America, unlike the rest of the G7 or China against which it is being compared, is not aging as rapidly.

Take the book with a massive grain of salt, but the mechanisms are well described in The Accidental Superpower.

https://archive.md/VHpcm

It is ridiculous on its face to compare America with other nations by raw numbers as if there were some single measure like that... dozens of quality-of-life and cost-of-living indicators in many regions of the USA are strongly in the opposite direction for many real households.

ten percent of people are vastly wealthier while fifty percent plus of people are worse off and more so ..

the machinery of economics are driving their own numbers. ref Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

American economy is really about cheap oil/gas. They had a leg up in semiconductors and then that led to mega tech corps.

Average GDP per capita looks good on paper, but heathcare and education are really expensive. They increase the GDP because money is spent but in Europe it's a lot cheaper so they seem poorer but by purchasing parity they are richer.

If you earn in USD for US company and spend in another country, then yeah the money goes further, otherwise median American isn't doing that much better.

I'd love to learn more about exactly why Europe fell behind. Only a few decades ago Britain and France had competitive or higher GDPs per capita than the US.

Many people argue the stricter business and environmental regulations hampered European growth, but these things were mostly even stricter 30 years ago.

Whatever the cause is, it's something that's happened in the last 15 years or so.

GDP is increasingly a poor measure of economic well being, as wealth inequality becomes so bad a handful of individuals capture the lion's share of growth.

This is the perfect example of why, when you read "the economy" in a mainstream publication, you should replace it with "rich people's yacht money".

In the past the Us making other countries poor via the printing press was very often the applicable explanation.

Is it now any different?

But the us american economy is subsidized by everyone on the planet that trades in us currency and thus buys up the money its able to print. So those numbers are- dubious baseball stats at best?

Does this translate into better quality of life for the majority of the population? I don't think so.

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Long personal anecdote deleted (it was too personal)

Lies like this story, which I can't afford to read, are why absolute bullshit artists like Trump are able to get votes at all.

Consider this, and the more than 1 gun per person state of the US population, and things don't look good for the future.

Civil wars are horrible, but they do boost the profit of the arms industry.

And yet it doesn't make the top 20 in happiness.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

Really makes you think.

Huh. An incendiary article about the economy, a few weeks from election day.

Who would've guessed?

IMHO this is entirely miss-measurement or miss-characterization.

Probably if you look at dollar gains of stocks, land prices, etc you'll find Americans leading, but look at the actual lives of average people, and they are not so much better off, if at all. In other words it's mostly accounting/financial mirages.