Re: Copper theft

dagmargoodboat@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
David Brown wrote:
dagmargoodboat@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

<snip European per-capita GDP chart>

These figures are already scaled in the mythical "parity purchasing
power" (it's mythical, since different things cost different amounts in
different countries - there can be no single scale factor. In Norway,
for example, material goods are cheap, but services are expensive).
Thus differences such as cheaper oil in the USA will scale in the favour
of the USA. Looking at the nominal figures (not adjusted by cost of
living estimates) puts the USA at about $20,000 below Norway.

I'm not going to defend parity purchasing power as _the_ end-all,
be-all prognosticator; The relative importance of various purchases
can be debated endlessly, as can the distribution of wealth, fairness,
who buys what, etc. The data was there, so I cut and pasted it. The
PPP adjustments are modest, with the exception of Norway, where a large
part of GDP comes from oil exports and is not individual income in the
ordinary sense. Here's the raw data in official currency units for
comparison:

----------------
Population Per capita GDP Debt
(PPP) off. curr (% GDP) Unemployment
---------- ------- ------- ------ ------------
Belguim 10,379,067 $33,751 $31,400 94.3 8.4%
France 60,876,136 33,757 29,900 66.2 9.9%
Germany 82,422,299 33,122 30,400 67.3 11.7%
U.K. 60,609,153 36,760 30,300 43.1 4.7%
Norway 4,610,820 53,548 42,300 50.1 4.6%
Spain 40,397,842 25,224 25,500 42.9 9.2%
Italy 58,133,509 29,415 29,200 108.8 7.7%
Netherlands 16,491,461 35,249 30,500 52.7 6.6%
Isle of Man 75,441 28,500 -- 0.6%
United States 298,444,215 41,850 41,800 64.7 5.1%

Norwegian oil revenue, per capita: $12,347
(assumes $45/bbl, 2001 exportation level)


Additionally, these figures are based on arithmetic mean averages, and
are therefore skewed by the USA's greater spread of incomes. The
GDP(PPP) may represent the average purchasing power of citizens, but it
doesn't represent the purchasing power of the average citizen.

One could also argue that certain pockets of the US population
unfairly drag the average down. One year after Katrina, 80% of the
100K+ refugees who fled to Houston are still unemployed--what's that
about?

http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com/2006/08/29/the-usas-economic-inequality/

Again, this argument is unwinnable. Since the issue was the
affordability of transportation, a more proper comparison might be
disposable income, and include the fact that, whatever a Europeans
make, he keeps less after taxes.

Here's my only current anecdote: a good friend of mine, a minister,
returned to his native Germany circa 2000-1. There, he reported making
the same salary in DM as he had made $ in the US, but the exchange rate
was, very roughly, 2 DM per $. His taxes, however, were the same in
both countries when expressed in US dollars.

He did get various offsetting benefits, but the net effect was that
he was struggling, and had no money in his pocket.

Best regards,
James Arthur


I tried Googling for figures on disposable income, but I didn't really get much. There were various reports for the USA, but I could not see any sensible comparisons for other countries.

Ultimately, of course, it is all statistics - and it is easy to choose the values you want to match the results you want. If you wanted to make Americans appear richer than Norwegians, you could look at the numbers of cars per family - while if you wanted to make Norwegians look better, you'd look at housing, especially towards the lower end of society.
.

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