America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

DarkNova6

As somebody living outside the US, I would find moving to the states highly undesirable even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens. To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.

sokoloff

> We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population. GDP is not "the amount of money in a country". GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year). The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars). I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.

Havoc

I do wonder how real the base number - the GDP - is. The wealthy have been accumulating wealth rapidly but it’s all on paper and the entire thing is underpinned by assumptions of USD reserve currency status.

MrBuddyCasino

As if workers got paid by "what $wealth allows". As if there was a "right to dignified work" (what is "dignified"?). As if there was a "right to fair income" (whats "fair"?). This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.

charcircuit

>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line. You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.

nbardy

This is a weird number. And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor. If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything. Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.

roenxi

> America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals. They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

philipallstar

This is yet another article that doesn't understand what wealth is. There is almost no point talking about these numbers, because they mislead more than they inform.

feverzsj

That's why they let in massive number of immigrants from poor countries.

dauertewigkeit

I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere. Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry. So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make. And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.

gadders

"We set the bar at half of what a typical American household earns. " Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.

dist-epoch

As an (in)famous philosopher said recently, if you workers are not bone-skinny it means you are doing Capitalism wrong and are paying them too much.

refurb

Hmmm, this index scores US at 80% and Mexico at 86%. To say the results are suspect is understating things.

arthurofbabylon

I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem. My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented. This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize. So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc. Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.

snapplebobapple

I would expect fortune to be able to understand basic economics, but I guess not. I can't verify because it is a paywalled article, but if this article isn't about oligopolies abusing labor market power, then it is intensely wrong headed. Paying workers less is a good thing to a point, it means less dead weight loss to the economy from labor abusing market power (which is basically the worst thing you can do in economics). If it's about abuse of monopsony power in the labour market by oligopolies then I apologize, that's the one case where paying people less is bad, but it's also kind of rare these days.

josefritzishere

We are in the bad place.

lossolo

US ownership in capital markets by wealth level: Wealthiest 1% of earners - 50.1% Top 90-99% of earners - 37.3% Top 50-89% of earners - 11.7% Bottom 50% of earners - 1.1% Source: Federal Reserve/Reuters

louraider

It's hard to understand that more and more countries are becoming better than the USA. You can live in a "developing" country and feel safer and better.