zlacker

This didn't pass the smell test, and sure enough Monaco, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Iceland, all have higher per capita GDPs. Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Finland are in the same ballpark or a little lower. Germany and Belgium are lower, but still above 1/3 lower.

UK and France are ~1/3 lower. Italy and Spain are ~50% lower.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
2018 numbers I found[1] show the EU as having ~69% the per-capita GDP of US. That's pretty close to 1/3 less.

1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/gdp-per-capita

>>aidenn+11
The EU includes a lot of less developed countries from former dictatorships, former communist countries, and the former Yugoslavia. There's a lot of catching up which hasn't finished yet. Plus it's mostly missing the US's oil resources. Straight-up GDP comparisons don't tell you so much about quality of life for the average person in the street.

>>aidenn+11
Right, and if the United States merged with a cross section of less developed countries our GDP per capita would look smaller, too.

>>standa+X6
but it didn't, and this is moving the goalposts. the original claim was correct.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
some of those countries have smaller populations than some US municipalities, of which there are many wealthy ones to cherrypick data from.

>>leetcr+ra
The original claim was also a bad and misleading comparison. It doesn't make sense to compare a single country to an entire continent of 44 different countries, which are quite different from each other in a large variety of salient ways.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
Not making any causal claims about unions, but using the OECD numbers[1]:

(USGDPPC - EU28GDPPC) / AVERAGE(USGDPPC, EU28GDPPC) = 0.338

So the comment you're replying to was correct, for at least one plausible definition of "1/3 lower than the US".

As for the countries you mentioned:

Monaco: < 1 square mile, not reproducible in a larger country

Norway: Giant oil reserves / tiny population, not reproducible without that

Switzerland: Valid

Ireland: GDP numbers shouldn't be taken at face value because tax laws[2] encourage corporations to attribute EU-wide revenues to Ireland. Reported GDP per capita is 135% of the US value, but 2016 median household income[3] was only 87% of the US value[4]. This cuts both ways, though - other EU countries should have their estimates nudged upwards.

Iceland: 92% of US GDP per capita[1]

Denmark: 91% of US GDP per capita[1]

Sweden: 86% of US GDP per capita[1]

Austria: 91% of US GDP per capita[1]

Finland: 79% of US GDP per capita[1]

UK: 75% of US GDP per capita[1]

France: 74% of US GDP per capita[1]

Italy: 68% of US GDP per capita[1]

Spain: 65% of US GDP per capita[1]

EU (all 28 countries): 71% of US GDP per capita[1]

[1] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

[3] https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-gpii/geog...

[4] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

>>standa+X6
If you drop Mississippi, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Alabama from the US numbers, then the US GDP per capita number would look bigger. Anyone can get different numbers by cherry-picking higher performers and dropping lower performers, but OP wrote "Europe" not "this list of rich countries in Europe".

>>standa+X6
The US isn't homogenous either. DC, Massachusetts, New York, California, Alaska, and Washington have much higher GDPs per capita than other states / provinces.

>>CydeWe+Ec
why not? the US is a large country (with more land area than the "entire continent" it's being compared against) with fifty states that are also quite different from each other. the US states are less autonomous than EU, but the country is large and diverse enough that it makes more sense to compare it to the entire EU than a very wealthy subset of US state-sized countries.

>>ummonk+Ff
The US is a nation state, the European Union is not. Comparing the two should only be done with a truckload of caveats to begin with. If anything, compare the Eurozone to the US.

>>oecdne+vf
It's not cherry picking. One of these entities is a nation and the other is not. It's a bad comparison.

>>CydeWe+Ec
It doesn't make sense to compare the EU to a federation with more than double its land area, composed of 50 different states, which are quite different from each other in a large variety of salient ways.

>>standa+Yf
With visa-free travel, common regulations, etc., the European Union is certainly starting to approach the United States (notice the plural in "States"?) in developing a similar federal structure.

>>standa+Yf
Using the OECD numbers[1]:

(USGDPPC - EurozoneGDPPC) / AVERAGE(USGDPPC, EurozoneGDPPC) = 0.283

Roughly speaking, you could write this as "The GDP per capita of the Eurozone is 28.3% lower than the US".

[1] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

>>standa+1g
No it isn't, people compare the EU and the US all the time. A bad comparison would be comparing the US to the Nordic subsection.

>>CydeWe+Ec
It assuredly does to citizens of the United States.

The hint is in the name.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
US population 330m gdp/capita 59k

--Higher GDP European state--

Switzerland pop: 8.5m gdp/capita: 65k -- reputation as a tax haven

Ireland pop: 6.5m gdp/capita: 69k -- reputation as a tax haven

Norway pop: 5.3m gdp/capita: 85k -- petrostate

Iceland pop: 364,260 gpd/capita: 54,753

Monaco pop: 37,497 gdp/capita: 162k -- french riviera

--Most populous Western Europe nations--

Germany pop: 82m gdp/capita: 44k

France pop: 67m gdp/capita: 38k

UK pop: 66m gdp/capita: 39k

Italy pop: 60m gdp/capita: 32k

Look I'm all for a larger welfare state, and there are plenty of things our nation could learn from Europe. But to pretend that if we made our country more European our economy would grow to resemble a tiny nation/tax haven like Ireland more than the UK, France, or Germany is unrealistic.

>>ummonk+bh
Brexit shows that there's still a major difference: member states can elect to leave. Economic penalties etc follow, and political fallout, but here in the US we fought a major war to demonstrate that states are _not_ allowed to secede from the union. (As much as many blue states might wish they could ...)

>>JamesB+qs
Thank you for pulling up the numbers. It seemed very suspicious when the comment above selected the smallest EU states.

>>standa+X6
I think the merged-with-less-developed countries is a red-herring. Run the calculation against the Eurozone and it doesn't change much.

There's no single apples-to-apples measurement we can make; the US has more natural resources than the EU, suffered far less harm from all the major conflicts up through WW2, &c.

I don't know whether or not liberalizing the economy of the EU would raise per-capita GDP or not, but the post I was replying to was claiming that a very specific and easy-to-check fact was wrong, so I checked it.

>>gknoy+4y
There are only two states in USA that could secede and not feel crippling economic impact. Texas and California. One Blue, one Red

>>JamesB+qs
> Ireland pop: 6.5 million

Reality: 4.8 million

>>anigbr+2G
Oh yeah it looks like the number I found was for the island not the country.

>>JamesB+hI
Yeah, the problem is you double-counted the population there due to also including the UK. I didn't check the others.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
In fairness, Monaco, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland and Iceland are all tiny, distorted one-trick ponies.

Norway is all oil, Ireland is the tax haven of the Fortune 500, Ditto Switzerland, Monaco is the tax haven of the rich, and Iceland is pure tourism.

Pulling out Iceland or Monaco and comparing them to the entire US is like pulling out Palo Alto and Seattle and comparing them to all of the EU.

UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc are a much better representation of what larger, mores diverse European economies look like.

In fact, if you take the whole EU together (as you should, the US number also includes places like the South and the Midwest), the parent comment is correct.

>>standa+X6
Yeah, we call it "the South" here in the United States.

>>djohns+Ro
People doing something all the time doesn't make it a good comparison.