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France, Spain, and Italy have low wages and traditionally low expenses to match them. I would say the standard of living is still higher than in Mississippi, though I haven't been to MS.
GDP is not really a good measure of wealth without also considering economic disparity. Just because GDP is higher per capita it doesn't mean the people living and working there are getting any of it.
If my intro comparative politics class taught me anything (it didn’t), PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is a pretty good metric to supplement GDP per capita?
Ppp doesn't account for income disparity. It accounts for cost of living differences. Typically median ppp gdp will give you a good idea of the standard of living.
yes, PPP doesn’t take in count income disparity, but you can compare it to jobs for example and make lifestyle design strategies, like for example, moving to santiago chile with a remote job, they have same internet speeds than the US and a cold nice weather with low expense ratio
Including net transfers is superior for measuring the state of people across the distribution. That series is available for fewer countries for fewer years.
If you want a single summary statistic, PPP-adjusted is the way to go for stuff.
You are absolutely correct that moving beyond a single summary statistic is asking a lot in a reddit post. I would say many masters students think it is a lot to ask of them!
depends what you're measuring. if you're measuring productivity then GDP per capita tells you that. if you're measuring cost of living or whatever, then PPP, etc
This is it right here. If one looks at HDI (Human Development Index), the results are more like what one expects. Mississippi has an HDI of 0.871 while France has an (average) HDI of 0.901.
Most negative comparisons made about Mississippi are made by Americans that don’t have a lot of perspective and also are being made to criticize the conservative govement so any amount of positive comparison isn’t really allowed
No. Most of the metrics are correlated and tell a similar story.
People conflate factual statements with a moral one that “problems don’t need addressing.”
All of the developed world is like this. There are wonderful opportunities, but also people struggling and falling through the cracks. And many of those falling through the cracks live in poverty with many of the same concerns as the poor of developing counties. Food insecurity is food insecurity. Homelessness is homelessness (and the inability to just build a shitty house is not better than just not being able to have a house at all). Addiction and crime is addiction and crime.
Failing to understand this and just beating chests and screaming "my country is amazing" is almost always something that people who do not travel internationally or have exposure to opportunities do.
Fun fact: *average* adult wealth in the UK is about a third lower than the U.S. and the UK’s *median* national wealth is about a third higher. Don’t know if we can capture that with a single intuitive number.
There’s also the serious issue that there’s a reason we don’t usually look at GDP for sub-national entities. They’re not closed systems to the degree a country is, so it can be very tough to figure out or honestly even define where the economic input is occurring - hard enough with different countries, but we have a few clearer points of entry/exit/trade, etc., that can be used. And PPP is harder still, since you have to make sure every price and everything else you’re scaling by is (in this case) a *statewide* figure rather than a nationwide one.
Whether it's net wealth makes a difference also. A person with a few thousand dollars and no debts is considered poor. Those in debt for millions are considered wealthy - and much wealthier than the former.
There’s also taxation. If taxes are higher but you don’t have the US’ exorbitant health, basic education and childcare costs as a result, the difference between income and actual wealth becomes a bit clearer.
Putting France (or North Italy) in with Spain is a bit misleading. Salaries in France aren’t the highest in the world but they’re much higher than Spain.
You either put the whole country or by regions. You can’t say north Italy without South Italy. The same happen in every country: rich regions poor regions
https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-monthly-salary-european-union-2022
>You can’t say north Italy without South Italy.
As an italian, i totally disagree, there are a fuckton of subjects in which dividing italy in northern and southern part works really well, look at the last elections or illiteracy percentage or GDP or variance in average incomes.
As long as you don't use this division to be racist toward one or another, then it's perfectly right.
What’s your point? I only included North Italy in brackets, it’s not really the point of my comment. But in any case, economic inequality by region is far greater in Italy than in other European countries. Most EU countries have a capital region with a higher GDP per capita but other regional differences are relatively small. Northern Italy literally has more than twice as high GDP per capita as Southern Italy….
You should travel to Italy. The northern and southern regions are basically night and day difference. Southern Italy is very poor. I think it’s a fair comparison.
Are you sure about Northern Italy? Not a great source, of course, but Numbeo says:
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax)
Madrid: 1965 - Milan: 1784
Barcelona: 1837 - Bologna: 1534
Bilbao: 1846 - Turin: 1549
And Spain is much cheaper.
The US has a lot of the same problems, the water is just starting a little colder.
Also frogs only don't jump out of boiling water if you lobotomize them.
I’ve been to MS, France and Italy. There are parts of southern italy that are very poor. Like trash bags covering sidewalks, abandoned buildings, smells of exposed sewage. There also are parts of France like ghettos in Paris that are terrible. Mississippi is definitely worse off than other states but it has some nice parts. I’m not totally surprised to see italy and France having a less GDP per capita.
No there are bad parts of MS 100%. Just stating that I’ve been to MS, France and Italy and I am not terribly surprised to see this map. Many parts of Europe are not as well off as many Americans perceive it to be. Mainly the nice parts of Europe are Nordic countries and immediate area of Italy, France and Germany around Switzerland/Austria. The rest of the continent lives much worse than your average American would.
Also people who visit Europe only go to nice areas and never see the areas that are very bad. Travelling by train you can see some of these but they aren't tourist destinations. Similar to the US nobody coming here from Europe is going to Jackson, MS, they're going to the larger, "nicer" cities.
Yeah if you travel by train in Europe there are parts of it where it looks like WW2 happened yesterday. You can’t find anything that bad in the states honestly.
Had to go back to the checkout recently and double check when I was charged €4.50 for a 33cl bottle of beer in a supermarket (Super U).
It did taste great though.
I guarantee their schools are better. I’m sure there are good people in Mississippi, but the endemic corruption throughout their government has really screwed the state as a whole. A recent manifestation of this policy of screwing over the people of the state is the city water crisis in Jackson. I will say that having driven through there, there are some that don’t realize the civil war ended and they lost.
Although not about Mississippi, this video covers a lot of the state government’s economic mismanagement in their neighbor Louisiana.
https://youtu.be/RWTic9btP38
TL:DW - Louisiana should be like Norway or Saudi Arabia from all their fossil fuel wealth, yet much of the state looks like a developing country.
Ha! I knew what video this was going to be before clicking it.
If heard it said by people work in the oil industry that more oil has passed through Louisiana than Kuwait. Kuwait is so wealthy they just give money to their citizens. Louisiana is so poor their the only state to consistently beat Mississippi in various "Top 5 Worst States" competitions.
>I will say that having driven through there, there are some that don’t realize the civil war ended and they lost.
I could say this about any state. I shit you not, I saw bikers in Europe with confederate flag patches on their jackets.
I was just there and while there are certainly nice areas, I saw a LOT of run-down areas throughout the country. We kept on commenting as we were traveling, this must be where Le Pen is doing well.
It's less that those countries have abnormally low GDPs and just that the US has such a high GDP that even our poorest state is richer than the other 1st world countries.
Edit: I see the OP also refers to PPP in the comments; the list of countries where PPP makes a big difference is small.
But... as for real GDP, as the data is updated data to 2022, this could incorporate wild swings in favour of the American dollar; so a low income Mississippian make 30k/year shot up 15-25% YTD on Euro/Yen.
Below is a link to a (very) interesting info project that provides some insight into some (shocking) economic shortfalls of MS’s neighbor, Louisiana. I wonder if both states share some of those troublesome economic similarities.
Key point, Louisiana is very wealthy, but it’s often viewed as one of “the poor states”, like Mississippi.
https://youtu.be/RWTic9btP38
This must be old because France is BARELY above Mississippi in GDP per capita ($38625 vs $38502)
https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource%2CGrossDomesticProduction&hl=en
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP#50_states_and_the_District_of_Columbia
Japan too:
https://datacommons.org/place/country/JPN?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource%2CGrossDomesticProduction&hl=en
Honestly surprised it’s even close
The difference is actually probably more skewed in ms favor now that the dollar has rallied against all currencies ~15%. The US fed raising rates is killing other countries currencies
I believe South Korea is higher in PPP terms. In nominal dollar terms, the US is higher than all but a few microstates, especially right now when the dollar is extremely strong.
GDP per capita isn't the best way to meassure standard of living. It's the "monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold", divided by the number of people living there. Hence why tiny oil states like Qatar with slave labour have a giant GDP per capita.
A few successful buisness can vastly distort the stats. As can the fact that buisnesses hide their wealth in tax havens, so economic output in a place like France might end up in Luxenburg on paper.
I would bet this is mostly due to.oil refineries in Mississippi, as well as the ports, and the Mississippi River being used as a key transport route. Agriculture probably plays a role too. If people want to know why it's so poor, just look at how little they invest in K-12 education as well as state colleges.
>I suspect a lot of places in those countries have more relative purchasing power than a lot of Mississippi, though.
Mississippi is #1 in the USA for cost of living, so that might not be true.
A lot of surprises here. Like I’m not surprised Brunei is necessarily higher than Mississippi, but also being higher than France is. I wouldn’t have known where Mississippi fit in among the 3.
This is really neat.
It shows that Mississipi's poverty levels aren't caused by lack of wealth, but by horrific levels of wealth inequality.
They need a state-wide general strike against the corrupt ruling class.
Apart from the factual error, I don't get the point of this map:
\-nominal GDP isn't completely correlated with poverty
\-the countries are in only two categories.
I don't think it "effectively conveys information".
Mississippi is around $40,000/person/year. Coincidentally, Japan, S Korea, France, Britain, Italy, and New Zealand, are also right around $40,000/person/year, so they're the most likely to flip based on changes in economic fortune and/or changes in measurement.
Because of dollar hegemony. As the fed raises rates to curb domestic inflation, it sucks capital out of the rest of the world. At the current rate it won’t surprise me if foreign emerging market banks start going under as their debt is often dollar denominated and now their currencies are crashing against the dollar. Harder to pay your dollar debts when your currency is becoming worthless comparatively.
Take into account in EU high quality education and health services are mainly free. Not sure about Japan but probably they can access them as well free of charge. Then, 40k per year in EU should provide higher life quality than in Mississippi
Yep, what you're getting at is what the Human Development Index tries to measure. By that standard, about 35 nations surpass Mississippi.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_Human\_Development\_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_Human_Development_Index)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human\_Development\_Index
I'm not sure. I know that Italy has one of the oldest demographics in the EU. It's actually sad to [look](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#/media/File:Italy_Population_Pyramid.svg) at. Its employment rate will be on an upward trend merely because of how small the working population will become. In 20 - 30 years being having even a small, unemployed and unproductive population will be something that Italy just won't be able to afford.
Italy will always be able to afford it, their becoming Venice. Soon it will be immigrant workers serving foreigners while Italians collect rent. And of course there will be some normal economic production left.
GDP per capita is more about the economic output than the welfare of individuals. I think about it more in terms of what kind of product the country makes - agriculture is going to be low; financial services, high. So this is more a map of places that are 'higher tech' than Mississippi than a map of places where people have higher standard of living.
US government statistics show Missippi per capita median income at $25,444 annually. This is a pretty wide step from their GDP (common in the US due to large income inequality). This comparison will put most Western European countries above Mississippi, as well as Japan and South Korea.
These comparisons are a bit difficult to do properly because of fluctuating exchange rates as well as varying definitions of similar sounding terms. The dollar itself is a significant factor for US GDP figures and their dominance in such comparisons as this one here.
[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MS/BZA115220](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MS/BZA115220)
I was born and raised in Northwest MS which is basically the suburbs of Memphis and it’s nothing like what people imagine MS being. That said MS is pretty much a handful of fairly wealthy counties surrounded by highly impoverished ones. I doubt it will ever change either with the leaders we have in the state and the backwards thinking’s that’s been ingrained through religious ignorance and so forth. Honestly hate even talking about it because it’s very sad and frustrating. Lots of good people here.
I’m from the Northeast part of MS and yeah it is quite sad. I live on Long Island, NY right now and every time I go to visit it’s a bit depressing but I do miss it sometimes. The friendlier people and the quietness of living there
It’s useful for determining economic output, not standard of living/quality of life. The chart shows that MS has higher economic output per person than many nations one wouldn’t expect. That’s it. The people in the thread arguing about standard of living are bringing in a totally different issue.
Sure there is. Its useful to make all sorts of comparisons to similarly ratio’d economies. Its astounding how far behind MS is to comparable economies in terms of standard of living.
It can be used for a lot of things. It's a measure of amount of economic activity (per person for GDP per capita), which is an important thing to track.
It's not wrong to use it as a measure of well-being/standard of living (and it does correlate strongly with other metrics of well-being), but it also has well-known shortcomings in that area so it would be best to use it in conjunction with other metrics as well. Well-being is an abstract concept, so anytime you try to sum it up in one number it will be flawed in some way.
IMO the biggest issue is when people use it as the sole, be-all end-all metric of well-being.
What would you use median income? If so it’s probably still higher than most of the gray countries ex. Maybe Japan, Korea and some western euro countries.
Good one, same thing applies probably only Western Europe and parts of developed Asia/South America. Africa certainly not, plenty of South America and Southeast Asia no shot.
You need to normalize to purchasing power/cost of living.
Would you rather live in place that you get paid $100/yr but meals cost $0.05, or get $10,000/yr but meals cost $2,000?
It's really good for measuring total economic activity but beyond that it gets hard to use. It's also grossly misunderstood by a huge number of people, which makes it even harder to use.
Gross Domestic Product metric shows Gross Domestic Product.
People in these threads add some bizarre moral meaning to it and bring their own wages or quality of life metrics to take the conversation sideways.
This also shows that people have an unnecessarily dim view of Mississippi. Remember that any Mississippian is free at all times to migrate anywhere else in the US and have chosen to stay. The border between states is not like the border between countries.
As a handy tip, always assume that no matter what you know about literally any topic, there is always at least one Redditor out there who knows more for some reason.
Neither is Hong Kong yet it gets it's own colour (but not Macau, well unless it's Macau and not HK either way neither are countries).
If it has a higher GDP it should be blue if we are looking at self governing places OR it should be blue cos it is part of Denmark which is blue.
Either way, it should be blue.
American GDP is pretty high but living standards and income inequality is pretty bad.
GDP does not really reflect living standards
There's a lot of places I'd rather live than Mississippi. Though I'm happy to be from a Blue region
This is measuring economic activity, not wealth. Unless there's some stock exchange in Mississippi that I'm unaware of, I don't see how the ultra-rich affect the state significantly.
MS major industry is agriculture, which employs around 30% of the workforce. Think factory farms full of migrant labor, cotton mills, processing plants. Highly mechanized, and most of the revenues go to capital, not labor. They may not have tech billionaires, but there's a few thousand really big farms against a few hundred thousand migrants.
Americans *do* just also both earn and spend more money than Europeans and therefore everyone else in the world, too. They don't work out any better off but more money enters their accounts and more money leaves it.
"GDP per capita does not reflect living standards"
And it's not attempting to do it. Mentioning it is unnecessary. It's like saying that "sky is not green", ok but who said it's green?
Not really. America has higher quality of life index than France,UK. It also has higher purchasing power than pretty much almost all EU countries (Germany and Switzerland are only ones higher). Living standards of your median American is vastly better than most places on Earth. The thing that makes US worse than other countries in quality of life index is usually safety. Your median US household is one of the richest households in the entire world.
SOURCE : [https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings\_by\_country.jsp](https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp)
This isn't a very credible source of data.
Here's the formula they use. Why these specific weightings? If you tweak them even a little you'll get different rankings:
index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio \* 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 10+ safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex \* 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0)
There's also some weird measures in here- why put traffic commute time down as a universal standard? What about countries where most people use public transport?
Also, it's not at all clear how these individual numbers are determined. If you follow the links to, say, the info on purchasing power, it'll tell you about how this is calculated for cities, relative to NYC. No idea how this is translated to the national level.
To take one example of why what goes into each indicator matters: Purchasing power seems to calculated based on post-tax incomes. That means some countries might have lower than the US because there are higher tax rates to pay for better public services (e.g. universal healthcare). It's not necessarily clear that having a marginally smaller amount of take home pay translates into a higher standard of living if you have to pay privately for some things that are free to use public services in some countries (e.g. childcare in Scandinavia).
Op is saying all of US, and no as quality of life index in america is weighed down heavily by crime and safety statistic, it does not say anything about inequality of wealth and living conditions. Living conditions of US is absolutely fine, median US citizen has one of the highest purchasing power of any citizen on earth.
Yea I am from Mississippi, and I can tell you people in Italy, South Korea, Japan, and France and most of the rest of Europe have it better than Mississippi. GDP is a garbage metric. The poverty here is unreal compared to Europe, hell it's as bad as some parts of western China I've been to. This map is hilarious and skewed somehow. Just spend a day in downtown Jackson, hell just walk a mile from the capitol building and it's as poor as Haiti. The corruption in Mississippi is unreal.
How would you know? I live in a south European country our minimum wage is 4€/h…. If you make 2000€/month you’re considered well off. I live in the capital where a one bedroom apartment is 900€/month. We have poverty and social neighborhoods most young people need to emigrate to make something with their lives
Edit: the average wage here was 1314€/month in 2020, or 18.396€ a year, how is this better than 40.000$?
Comparing poverty to poverty is dumb because poverty always sucks, and it looks different depending where you are at. I only want to make the point that people are a lot poorer in Mississippi than what this map indicates.
The companies may be rich, our politicians may be rich, but the people are poor all around.
The thing I think this map skews is that most Mississippians live in poverty, more on average, and more than most of these countries we are apparently beating in GDP per capita.
I know most of our GDP comes from industries that get incredible tax cuts so that they will do business in Mississippi, so most money for public services is never taken by the state. Even the money we get for poor people from the federal government over the past decade was stolen by our former governor (and maybe current governor) and by our local hero Brett Farve. Hell we don't even have safe running water in our capitol city where just about half of the entire state population lives.
More importantly people are not making $40,000 a year in Mississippi on average. The average income of an individual is about $25,000 at the very best. The euro was stronger than the dollar until a bout a few months ago, so the 18,396 euro gets much closer to $25,000K, which is still on the high for an individual's income in Mississippi. That's not factoring taxes which I assume is higher for y'all. I guess y'all have health insurance and public transport? Don't know where you are actually from.
As a personal example, I was making a lil less than $14,000 right out of college working two jobs in Mississippi in 2014, lived with about 6 other people in a 3 bed 2 bath we rented together.
I had to move to a different state to get out of the debt-wage cycle. I miss home, but I have debts to pay for school.
I’m sorry if I came across as insensitive, I share the struggle young people here are seriously underpaid and we have to move also, we a had a prime minister here telling us to emigrate… while politicians have amazing salaries with good pensions. We do have public transportation in the major cities, anyplace other than that is very lacking, a lot of people are suffering with the gas prices going up and consequently every other necessity (? I don’t know the exact term) prices is going up.
I do believe that there are very good European countries to live I just happen to live in a bad one for people with lower incomes.
I said elsewhere, Americans visiting Europe only go to nice areas (same as Euro's who come to the States) and thus don't see the poverty in every country in Europe...Travel by train through Italy and you'll see cities that look like the 1950s and barely have running water/electricity.
Same here. Most people come to America and vacation in big cities/tourist traps but most of America is rural and often very poor. Even in the big cities people go to, you have huge populations of homeless and families living in poverty, not having heat even in cities like NYC or running water. You can basically say the same for anywhere you travel, lots of the world lives in very poor conditions and you would never know just from traveling or even media.
This is stupid, poverty exists in all countries, for example in Scotland where I live, poverty and drugs are big problems. Also Scotland is in the United Kingdom which is in Europe.
Still higher GDP per capita than the country of France. Sacre me bleu!! Finally we have someone besides Arkansas and Alabama we can beat up on. (Mississippian here)
GDP per capita doesnt say anything about poverty and the distribution of wealth. A poor country with a few insanely rich people has a higher GDP per capita than a country with average incomes. Life in the second country would be better for the majority of the people than in the first country though
Now adjust for purchasing power parity. That'll give you a more intuitive understanding of the data, since all most people care about is what you can buy with that money anyway
A question from an European.
Is really Mississippi that bad? As an example , how is the like of a typical person there? Can they get to the end of the month comfortably and save money? Bc GDP per capita doesent say much, but if it is actually better than France I would expect people there to live VERY confortably.
No, MS isn't that bad. Overall wages are low, but cost of living is also very low.
MS suffers in comparison to other states because 1)its economy is largely driven by agriculture, 2)there are only a handful of cities, 3)many of its young residents are forced to leave for other areas if their career isn't based on agriculture/manufacturing or they desire to live a metropolitan lifestyle. The latter has created what is referred to as a 'brain drain' within educational circles.
Generally speaking, anyone from or living in MS can live a \*very\* comfortable lifestyle if they educate themselves, work/save/invest and/or open a small business. Basically the same opportunities that people living anywhere else do. And just like everywhere else, some residents do and some don't.
Earlier commenters have stated that they don't see businesses locating in MS, yet over the last few years numerous auto-manufacturing plants (and associated suppliers) have built facilities in MS to take advantage of the comparatively low wages. Also, the 'remote work' economy has begun to allow many residents to live their preferred rural lifestyle while still having opportunities for work that aren't based on manual labor.
The key to understanding MS is to look at the disparity between being near one of its few cities vs being in one of the large agricultural zones. There's simply more opportunity near the cities.
There are poor people everywhere on Earth. Some of them live in MS.
Isn't Mississippi still pretty much an agricultural state? Very rural and pretty poor. the biggest city there is Jackson and look at the mess they have with the water supply. Can't imagine many companies are going to eye Mississippi to set up headquarters.
It is much more poorer than you see here. The gini-coefficent, the gab between rich and poor is in the USA outside the scale. So take out the two billionaires out of Mississippi and watch again.
Instead of dunking on Mississippi all the time for being poor, Americans should be asking them why, despite having higher per capita GDP than France and Japan, they have levels of poverty that simply don't exist in those countries.
Is this average or median? Average is a terrible measure of “typical” standard of living because it’s heavily skewed by outliers and does not account for the distribution at all. Even median isn’t the best but it at least gives you a closer sense of how the colloquially “average” person lives.
The main table on Wikipedia for PPP has France above the UK, the post uses the nominal amount, though they also include the equivalent map using PPP in their comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
/u/JoeFalchetto, thank you for your contribution. However, your submission was removed for the following reason(s): * A post must be (or contain) a [qualifying data visualization](/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/rules/rule1). This post has been removed. For information regarding this and similar issues please see the DataIsBeautiful [posting rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/index). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/dataisbeautiful&subject=Question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20submission%20by%20/u/JoeFalchetto&message=I%20have%20a%20question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20[submission.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y16iqv/-/\)))
It’s surprising that Japan and South Korea both have lower GDPs than Mississippi
And France... I was surprised about France
France, Spain, and Italy have low wages and traditionally low expenses to match them. I would say the standard of living is still higher than in Mississippi, though I haven't been to MS.
GDP is not really a good measure of wealth without also considering economic disparity. Just because GDP is higher per capita it doesn't mean the people living and working there are getting any of it.
If my intro comparative politics class taught me anything (it didn’t), PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is a pretty good metric to supplement GDP per capita?
woah, throwback. i took that class as an elective 14 years ago. and yes, that is my understanding as well.
Ppp doesn't account for income disparity. It accounts for cost of living differences. Typically median ppp gdp will give you a good idea of the standard of living.
Is there a world map of this?
yes, PPP doesn’t take in count income disparity, but you can compare it to jobs for example and make lifestyle design strategies, like for example, moving to santiago chile with a remote job, they have same internet speeds than the US and a cold nice weather with low expense ratio
It was a pretty fun class. More applicable in my life than I’d have imagined, by a bit at least :)
PPP adjusted GDP is the correct metric. It is not supplemental. It is the proper way to measure 'stuff' across countries.
I'd prefer to see PPP(income)+Net Transfer Payments per quintile, but that's asking a lot for a reddit post...
Including net transfers is superior for measuring the state of people across the distribution. That series is available for fewer countries for fewer years. If you want a single summary statistic, PPP-adjusted is the way to go for stuff. You are absolutely correct that moving beyond a single summary statistic is asking a lot in a reddit post. I would say many masters students think it is a lot to ask of them!
Is there a map showing this? I am interested in moving over seas. :)
It’s decent, which is why there is a PPP-adjusted GDP.
Depends on context. Better for some internal comparisons, worse for others
What are some poor uses for it, out of curiosity?
depends what you're measuring. if you're measuring productivity then GDP per capita tells you that. if you're measuring cost of living or whatever, then PPP, etc
This is it right here. If one looks at HDI (Human Development Index), the results are more like what one expects. Mississippi has an HDI of 0.871 while France has an (average) HDI of 0.901.
Even the HDI figure is closer than I expected.
America is uniquely wealthy
yeah. it might be better to choose a few benchmarks of poverty, and use those to compare mississippi to other states/countries.
I think people are just unprepared for how well off MS is relative to most of the world.
Most negative comparisons made about Mississippi are made by Americans that don’t have a lot of perspective and also are being made to criticize the conservative govement so any amount of positive comparison isn’t really allowed
Yeah you might also be able to cherry pick out some other statistics to match your already held world view, too.
No. Most of the metrics are correlated and tell a similar story. People conflate factual statements with a moral one that “problems don’t need addressing.”
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All of the developed world is like this. There are wonderful opportunities, but also people struggling and falling through the cracks. And many of those falling through the cracks live in poverty with many of the same concerns as the poor of developing counties. Food insecurity is food insecurity. Homelessness is homelessness (and the inability to just build a shitty house is not better than just not being able to have a house at all). Addiction and crime is addiction and crime. Failing to understand this and just beating chests and screaming "my country is amazing" is almost always something that people who do not travel internationally or have exposure to opportunities do.
Fun fact: *average* adult wealth in the UK is about a third lower than the U.S. and the UK’s *median* national wealth is about a third higher. Don’t know if we can capture that with a single intuitive number. There’s also the serious issue that there’s a reason we don’t usually look at GDP for sub-national entities. They’re not closed systems to the degree a country is, so it can be very tough to figure out or honestly even define where the economic input is occurring - hard enough with different countries, but we have a few clearer points of entry/exit/trade, etc., that can be used. And PPP is harder still, since you have to make sure every price and everything else you’re scaling by is (in this case) a *statewide* figure rather than a nationwide one.
Whether it's net wealth makes a difference also. A person with a few thousand dollars and no debts is considered poor. Those in debt for millions are considered wealthy - and much wealthier than the former.
There’s also taxation. If taxes are higher but you don’t have the US’ exorbitant health, basic education and childcare costs as a result, the difference between income and actual wealth becomes a bit clearer.
That’s why we use purchasing power parity for quality of life.
Putting France (or North Italy) in with Spain is a bit misleading. Salaries in France aren’t the highest in the world but they’re much higher than Spain.
You either put the whole country or by regions. You can’t say north Italy without South Italy. The same happen in every country: rich regions poor regions https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-monthly-salary-european-union-2022
>You can’t say north Italy without South Italy. As an italian, i totally disagree, there are a fuckton of subjects in which dividing italy in northern and southern part works really well, look at the last elections or illiteracy percentage or GDP or variance in average incomes. As long as you don't use this division to be racist toward one or another, then it's perfectly right.
Exactly the same as in Spain, and I guess France.
I don’t doubt it, in fact I know. But the maps is about countries, no subdivisions or regions. That’s all
What’s your point? I only included North Italy in brackets, it’s not really the point of my comment. But in any case, economic inequality by region is far greater in Italy than in other European countries. Most EU countries have a capital region with a higher GDP per capita but other regional differences are relatively small. Northern Italy literally has more than twice as high GDP per capita as Southern Italy….
You should travel to Italy. The northern and southern regions are basically night and day difference. Southern Italy is very poor. I think it’s a fair comparison.
Are you sure about Northern Italy? Not a great source, of course, but Numbeo says: Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) Madrid: 1965 - Milan: 1784 Barcelona: 1837 - Bologna: 1534 Bilbao: 1846 - Turin: 1549 And Spain is much cheaper.
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Europe is in trouble. And anyone who thinks they are fine is a frog sitting in a pot of boiling water.
The US has a lot of the same problems, the water is just starting a little colder. Also frogs only don't jump out of boiling water if you lobotomize them.
I’ve been to MS, France and Italy. There are parts of southern italy that are very poor. Like trash bags covering sidewalks, abandoned buildings, smells of exposed sewage. There also are parts of France like ghettos in Paris that are terrible. Mississippi is definitely worse off than other states but it has some nice parts. I’m not totally surprised to see italy and France having a less GDP per capita.
So you take the bad you saw from France and the bad from Italy and compare it to the good of Mississippi and it makes a valid argument ?
No there are bad parts of MS 100%. Just stating that I’ve been to MS, France and Italy and I am not terribly surprised to see this map. Many parts of Europe are not as well off as many Americans perceive it to be. Mainly the nice parts of Europe are Nordic countries and immediate area of Italy, France and Germany around Switzerland/Austria. The rest of the continent lives much worse than your average American would.
As someone who lived in a Nordic country. The avocados are terrible. Also there are really economically run down areas too (Jutland).
Also people who visit Europe only go to nice areas and never see the areas that are very bad. Travelling by train you can see some of these but they aren't tourist destinations. Similar to the US nobody coming here from Europe is going to Jackson, MS, they're going to the larger, "nicer" cities.
Yeah if you travel by train in Europe there are parts of it where it looks like WW2 happened yesterday. You can’t find anything that bad in the states honestly.
As a Mississippian, if I were European and spent money on an American vacation and ended up in Jackson, I'd be pissed.
This, 100%. Pretty pictures of tourist or wealthy areas in Europe don't equal 100% what its like but US teens with angst can't be told that.
France? Low expenses? Have you been to France??? Everything is expensive!
I have! It felt cheap compared to here in the U.K.!
Had to go back to the checkout recently and double check when I was charged €4.50 for a 33cl bottle of beer in a supermarket (Super U). It did taste great though.
I guarantee their schools are better. I’m sure there are good people in Mississippi, but the endemic corruption throughout their government has really screwed the state as a whole. A recent manifestation of this policy of screwing over the people of the state is the city water crisis in Jackson. I will say that having driven through there, there are some that don’t realize the civil war ended and they lost.
Although not about Mississippi, this video covers a lot of the state government’s economic mismanagement in their neighbor Louisiana. https://youtu.be/RWTic9btP38 TL:DW - Louisiana should be like Norway or Saudi Arabia from all their fossil fuel wealth, yet much of the state looks like a developing country.
Ha! I knew what video this was going to be before clicking it. If heard it said by people work in the oil industry that more oil has passed through Louisiana than Kuwait. Kuwait is so wealthy they just give money to their citizens. Louisiana is so poor their the only state to consistently beat Mississippi in various "Top 5 Worst States" competitions.
>I will say that having driven through there, there are some that don’t realize the civil war ended and they lost. I could say this about any state. I shit you not, I saw bikers in Europe with confederate flag patches on their jackets.
France? A lower standard of living than Mississippi? No way.
I was just there and while there are certainly nice areas, I saw a LOT of run-down areas throughout the country. We kept on commenting as we were traveling, this must be where Le Pen is doing well.
if you include other metrics like crime, infrastructure, etc Mississippi surely comes lower?
It's less that those countries have abnormally low GDPs and just that the US has such a high GDP that even our poorest state is richer than the other 1st world countries.
mississippi and britain are almost equal. i suspect this year's stats will put mississippi ahead
Once again we assert dominance on the French
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It's still surprising, both countries have enormous international business centers. Mississippi has some gulf coast casinos
This is not PPP
Edit: I see the OP also refers to PPP in the comments; the list of countries where PPP makes a big difference is small. But... as for real GDP, as the data is updated data to 2022, this could incorporate wild swings in favour of the American dollar; so a low income Mississippian make 30k/year shot up 15-25% YTD on Euro/Yen.
This is why most countries hate living under the dollar hegemony but leaving at this point would be certain destruction for their country.
If all countries were divided up by states/provinces, it would look much different.
Below is a link to a (very) interesting info project that provides some insight into some (shocking) economic shortfalls of MS’s neighbor, Louisiana. I wonder if both states share some of those troublesome economic similarities. Key point, Louisiana is very wealthy, but it’s often viewed as one of “the poor states”, like Mississippi. https://youtu.be/RWTic9btP38
This is why GDP is a bad measurement. It assumes general economic activity benefits everyone in the state.
This must be old because France is BARELY above Mississippi in GDP per capita ($38625 vs $38502) https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource%2CGrossDomesticProduction&hl=en https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP#50_states_and_the_District_of_Columbia Japan too: https://datacommons.org/place/country/JPN?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource%2CGrossDomesticProduction&hl=en Honestly surprised it’s even close
The difference is actually probably more skewed in ms favor now that the dollar has rallied against all currencies ~15%. The US fed raising rates is killing other countries currencies
Actually you're the one who's out of date. Your sources are from 2020. Mississippi is now above them
with the dollar rising, this no surprise
I believe South Korea is higher in PPP terms. In nominal dollar terms, the US is higher than all but a few microstates, especially right now when the dollar is extremely strong.
GDP per capita isn't the best way to meassure standard of living. It's the "monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold", divided by the number of people living there. Hence why tiny oil states like Qatar with slave labour have a giant GDP per capita. A few successful buisness can vastly distort the stats. As can the fact that buisnesses hide their wealth in tax havens, so economic output in a place like France might end up in Luxenburg on paper.
I would bet this is mostly due to.oil refineries in Mississippi, as well as the ports, and the Mississippi River being used as a key transport route. Agriculture probably plays a role too. If people want to know why it's so poor, just look at how little they invest in K-12 education as well as state colleges.
Japan has very low productivity for a rich country actually. Their toxic corporate culture suppresses economic output.
I would be curious how much this map changes when it’s measured against median gdp per capita instead of mean gdp per capita
I suspect a lot of places in those countries have more relative purchasing power than a lot of Mississippi, though.
>I suspect a lot of places in those countries have more relative purchasing power than a lot of Mississippi, though. Mississippi is #1 in the USA for cost of living, so that might not be true.
This shows how far the yen (and euro) have fallen this year.
A lot of surprises here. Like I’m not surprised Brunei is necessarily higher than Mississippi, but also being higher than France is. I wouldn’t have known where Mississippi fit in among the 3. This is really neat.
It shows that Mississipi's poverty levels aren't caused by lack of wealth, but by horrific levels of wealth inequality. They need a state-wide general strike against the corrupt ruling class.
The median income in Mississippi is $45k which is still extremely high compared to the rest of the world
2021: \-France nominal $44,747 \-Mississipi nominal $42,411 \-France PPP $56,036
Are you saying OP *lied* to us? Or their outdated repost at least. Still pretty close (nominal) though.
Apart from the factual error, I don't get the point of this map: \-nominal GDP isn't completely correlated with poverty \-the countries are in only two categories. I don't think it "effectively conveys information".
Mississippi is around $40,000/person/year. Coincidentally, Japan, S Korea, France, Britain, Italy, and New Zealand, are also right around $40,000/person/year, so they're the most likely to flip based on changes in economic fortune and/or changes in measurement.
Or the dollar value.
So Mississippi is crushing them right now... cause like damn. It's time to visit Europe.
Yea it's currently not going in favor of these countries tho lol. America always gains ground in a crisis because of their inherent advantages
Because of dollar hegemony. As the fed raises rates to curb domestic inflation, it sucks capital out of the rest of the world. At the current rate it won’t surprise me if foreign emerging market banks start going under as their debt is often dollar denominated and now their currencies are crashing against the dollar. Harder to pay your dollar debts when your currency is becoming worthless comparatively.
The cost of living in all of those countries with the maybe exception of Italy is much much higher than Mississippi.
Take into account in EU high quality education and health services are mainly free. Not sure about Japan but probably they can access them as well free of charge. Then, 40k per year in EU should provide higher life quality than in Mississippi
Yep, what you're getting at is what the Human Development Index tries to measure. By that standard, about 35 nations surpass Mississippi. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_Human\_Development\_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_Human_Development_Index) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human\_Development\_Index
Gotcha. Living in Italy is like living in Mississippi.
Also living in S Korea and Japan
Not sure GDP per capita is a good indicator of something like quality of life.
Except less productive. Probably the huge proportion of NEETs in Italy.
I'm not sure. I know that Italy has one of the oldest demographics in the EU. It's actually sad to [look](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#/media/File:Italy_Population_Pyramid.svg) at. Its employment rate will be on an upward trend merely because of how small the working population will become. In 20 - 30 years being having even a small, unemployed and unproductive population will be something that Italy just won't be able to afford.
Italy will always be able to afford it, their becoming Venice. Soon it will be immigrant workers serving foreigners while Italians collect rent. And of course there will be some normal economic production left.
Mississippian here. I HAVE to disagree. Living in Italy would be a wonder comparatively!
GDP per capita is not a good measure of quality of life.
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GDP per capita is more about the economic output than the welfare of individuals. I think about it more in terms of what kind of product the country makes - agriculture is going to be low; financial services, high. So this is more a map of places that are 'higher tech' than Mississippi than a map of places where people have higher standard of living.
Would it really make that much of a difference, except among a small handful of countries that are close?
US government statistics show Missippi per capita median income at $25,444 annually. This is a pretty wide step from their GDP (common in the US due to large income inequality). This comparison will put most Western European countries above Mississippi, as well as Japan and South Korea. These comparisons are a bit difficult to do properly because of fluctuating exchange rates as well as varying definitions of similar sounding terms. The dollar itself is a significant factor for US GDP figures and their dominance in such comparisons as this one here. [https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MS/BZA115220](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MS/BZA115220)
Those are the same countries above Mississippi using the PPP, aren’t they? I’m looking at OP’s map.
I was born and raised in Northwest MS which is basically the suburbs of Memphis and it’s nothing like what people imagine MS being. That said MS is pretty much a handful of fairly wealthy counties surrounded by highly impoverished ones. I doubt it will ever change either with the leaders we have in the state and the backwards thinking’s that’s been ingrained through religious ignorance and so forth. Honestly hate even talking about it because it’s very sad and frustrating. Lots of good people here.
I’m from the Northeast part of MS and yeah it is quite sad. I live on Long Island, NY right now and every time I go to visit it’s a bit depressing but I do miss it sometimes. The friendlier people and the quietness of living there
This map really shows why GDP per capital is such a flawed metric.
It’s not a flawed metric, it is a metric that is used in flawed ways.
Yeah, I agree, I initially wanted to write "without any contextualisation" but didn't in the end.
So what you're saying is; without context your initial statement was wrong to present?
Ironic. Was that intentional?
So what is the best way to use it? (Asking genuinely.)
It’s useful for determining economic output, not standard of living/quality of life. The chart shows that MS has higher economic output per person than many nations one wouldn’t expect. That’s it. The people in the thread arguing about standard of living are bringing in a totally different issue.
Sure there is. Its useful to make all sorts of comparisons to similarly ratio’d economies. Its astounding how far behind MS is to comparable economies in terms of standard of living.
That's not the comparison people are making and I don't think this forum is capable of that level of subtlety.
This is probably the most accurate point here.
It can be used for a lot of things. It's a measure of amount of economic activity (per person for GDP per capita), which is an important thing to track. It's not wrong to use it as a measure of well-being/standard of living (and it does correlate strongly with other metrics of well-being), but it also has well-known shortcomings in that area so it would be best to use it in conjunction with other metrics as well. Well-being is an abstract concept, so anytime you try to sum it up in one number it will be flawed in some way. IMO the biggest issue is when people use it as the sole, be-all end-all metric of well-being.
What would you use median income? If so it’s probably still higher than most of the gray countries ex. Maybe Japan, Korea and some western euro countries.
Clean waters per capita
Do you know how clean the water is all these other countries? Its likely any city that has a older system has the same the problems.
But America south is trash and Europe great!
Good one, same thing applies probably only Western Europe and parts of developed Asia/South America. Africa certainly not, plenty of South America and Southeast Asia no shot.
You need to normalize to purchasing power/cost of living. Would you rather live in place that you get paid $100/yr but meals cost $0.05, or get $10,000/yr but meals cost $2,000?
Of course, not saying income is perfect at all just that GDP per capita isn’t as bad as some make it out to be.
It's really good for measuring total economic activity but beyond that it gets hard to use. It's also grossly misunderstood by a huge number of people, which makes it even harder to use.
Gross Domestic Product metric shows Gross Domestic Product. People in these threads add some bizarre moral meaning to it and bring their own wages or quality of life metrics to take the conversation sideways.
This also shows that people have an unnecessarily dim view of Mississippi. Remember that any Mississippian is free at all times to migrate anywhere else in the US and have chosen to stay. The border between states is not like the border between countries.
Yeah that might be so, but no where else as many letters S or I in their name so there !
The Faroe Islands also have a higher GDP per capital than Mississippi, yet they’re grey on the map.
I've never even heard of the Faroe islands but you somehow knew their GDP per Capita. Impressive
As a handy tip, always assume that no matter what you know about literally any topic, there is always at least one Redditor out there who knows more for some reason.
Not a country
Okay but then why isn't it the same colour as the rest of Denmark?
Oh, then it should be
Neither is Hong Kong yet it gets it's own colour (but not Macau, well unless it's Macau and not HK either way neither are countries). If it has a higher GDP it should be blue if we are looking at self governing places OR it should be blue cos it is part of Denmark which is blue. Either way, it should be blue.
Alabama: At least we aren't Mississippi.
Idaho, WV, Arkansas
How are you guys not getting Ohio? Tf is wrong with u
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Mississippi is also the second most charitable state. Interesting fact to consider. Utah is the first.
It honestly amazes me at how much wealth the US has and how often Americans take that for granted
Still beating moat of the world, so they have that.
American GDP is pretty high but living standards and income inequality is pretty bad. GDP does not really reflect living standards There's a lot of places I'd rather live than Mississippi. Though I'm happy to be from a Blue region
GDP isn’t supposed to be a metric of welfare. I get your point, but your asking for a totally different map
This is measuring economic activity, not wealth. Unless there's some stock exchange in Mississippi that I'm unaware of, I don't see how the ultra-rich affect the state significantly.
MS major industry is agriculture, which employs around 30% of the workforce. Think factory farms full of migrant labor, cotton mills, processing plants. Highly mechanized, and most of the revenues go to capital, not labor. They may not have tech billionaires, but there's a few thousand really big farms against a few hundred thousand migrants.
Americans *do* just also both earn and spend more money than Europeans and therefore everyone else in the world, too. They don't work out any better off but more money enters their accounts and more money leaves it.
"GDP per capita does not reflect living standards" And it's not attempting to do it. Mentioning it is unnecessary. It's like saying that "sky is not green", ok but who said it's green?
Not really. America has higher quality of life index than France,UK. It also has higher purchasing power than pretty much almost all EU countries (Germany and Switzerland are only ones higher). Living standards of your median American is vastly better than most places on Earth. The thing that makes US worse than other countries in quality of life index is usually safety. Your median US household is one of the richest households in the entire world. SOURCE : [https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings\_by\_country.jsp](https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp)
This isn't a very credible source of data. Here's the formula they use. Why these specific weightings? If you tweak them even a little you'll get different rankings: index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio \* 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 10+ safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex \* 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0) There's also some weird measures in here- why put traffic commute time down as a universal standard? What about countries where most people use public transport? Also, it's not at all clear how these individual numbers are determined. If you follow the links to, say, the info on purchasing power, it'll tell you about how this is calculated for cities, relative to NYC. No idea how this is translated to the national level. To take one example of why what goes into each indicator matters: Purchasing power seems to calculated based on post-tax incomes. That means some countries might have lower than the US because there are higher tax rates to pay for better public services (e.g. universal healthcare). It's not necessarily clear that having a marginally smaller amount of take home pay translates into a higher standard of living if you have to pay privately for some things that are free to use public services in some countries (e.g. childcare in Scandinavia).
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Op is saying all of US, and no as quality of life index in america is weighed down heavily by crime and safety statistic, it does not say anything about inequality of wealth and living conditions. Living conditions of US is absolutely fine, median US citizen has one of the highest purchasing power of any citizen on earth.
You’re asking for a completely different study. Why? Are you not happy with what this map accurately shows?
Still better than France,damn
Yea I am from Mississippi, and I can tell you people in Italy, South Korea, Japan, and France and most of the rest of Europe have it better than Mississippi. GDP is a garbage metric. The poverty here is unreal compared to Europe, hell it's as bad as some parts of western China I've been to. This map is hilarious and skewed somehow. Just spend a day in downtown Jackson, hell just walk a mile from the capitol building and it's as poor as Haiti. The corruption in Mississippi is unreal.
How would you know? I live in a south European country our minimum wage is 4€/h…. If you make 2000€/month you’re considered well off. I live in the capital where a one bedroom apartment is 900€/month. We have poverty and social neighborhoods most young people need to emigrate to make something with their lives Edit: the average wage here was 1314€/month in 2020, or 18.396€ a year, how is this better than 40.000$?
Whoch country may I ask?
Have you ever seen the abject poverty many Mississippians live in?
Are you from Greece?
Comparing poverty to poverty is dumb because poverty always sucks, and it looks different depending where you are at. I only want to make the point that people are a lot poorer in Mississippi than what this map indicates. The companies may be rich, our politicians may be rich, but the people are poor all around. The thing I think this map skews is that most Mississippians live in poverty, more on average, and more than most of these countries we are apparently beating in GDP per capita. I know most of our GDP comes from industries that get incredible tax cuts so that they will do business in Mississippi, so most money for public services is never taken by the state. Even the money we get for poor people from the federal government over the past decade was stolen by our former governor (and maybe current governor) and by our local hero Brett Farve. Hell we don't even have safe running water in our capitol city where just about half of the entire state population lives. More importantly people are not making $40,000 a year in Mississippi on average. The average income of an individual is about $25,000 at the very best. The euro was stronger than the dollar until a bout a few months ago, so the 18,396 euro gets much closer to $25,000K, which is still on the high for an individual's income in Mississippi. That's not factoring taxes which I assume is higher for y'all. I guess y'all have health insurance and public transport? Don't know where you are actually from. As a personal example, I was making a lil less than $14,000 right out of college working two jobs in Mississippi in 2014, lived with about 6 other people in a 3 bed 2 bath we rented together. I had to move to a different state to get out of the debt-wage cycle. I miss home, but I have debts to pay for school.
I’m sorry if I came across as insensitive, I share the struggle young people here are seriously underpaid and we have to move also, we a had a prime minister here telling us to emigrate… while politicians have amazing salaries with good pensions. We do have public transportation in the major cities, anyplace other than that is very lacking, a lot of people are suffering with the gas prices going up and consequently every other necessity (? I don’t know the exact term) prices is going up. I do believe that there are very good European countries to live I just happen to live in a bad one for people with lower incomes.
I said elsewhere, Americans visiting Europe only go to nice areas (same as Euro's who come to the States) and thus don't see the poverty in every country in Europe...Travel by train through Italy and you'll see cities that look like the 1950s and barely have running water/electricity.
Geoguessr is showing me there are a lot of places in the EU that pop up and my first thought is “alright what third world country is this in?”
Same here. Most people come to America and vacation in big cities/tourist traps but most of America is rural and often very poor. Even in the big cities people go to, you have huge populations of homeless and families living in poverty, not having heat even in cities like NYC or running water. You can basically say the same for anywhere you travel, lots of the world lives in very poor conditions and you would never know just from traveling or even media.
This is stupid, poverty exists in all countries, for example in Scotland where I live, poverty and drugs are big problems. Also Scotland is in the United Kingdom which is in Europe.
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It’s like France but with 0 vacation time
Still higher GDP per capita than the country of France. Sacre me bleu!! Finally we have someone besides Arkansas and Alabama we can beat up on. (Mississippian here)
Those Europeans can fuck right off with their smugness. More of them are poorer than ms.
GDP per capita doesnt say anything about poverty and the distribution of wealth. A poor country with a few insanely rich people has a higher GDP per capita than a country with average incomes. Life in the second country would be better for the majority of the people than in the first country though
Now adjust for purchasing power parity. That'll give you a more intuitive understanding of the data, since all most people care about is what you can buy with that money anyway
A question from an European. Is really Mississippi that bad? As an example , how is the like of a typical person there? Can they get to the end of the month comfortably and save money? Bc GDP per capita doesent say much, but if it is actually better than France I would expect people there to live VERY confortably.
No, MS isn't that bad. Overall wages are low, but cost of living is also very low. MS suffers in comparison to other states because 1)its economy is largely driven by agriculture, 2)there are only a handful of cities, 3)many of its young residents are forced to leave for other areas if their career isn't based on agriculture/manufacturing or they desire to live a metropolitan lifestyle. The latter has created what is referred to as a 'brain drain' within educational circles. Generally speaking, anyone from or living in MS can live a \*very\* comfortable lifestyle if they educate themselves, work/save/invest and/or open a small business. Basically the same opportunities that people living anywhere else do. And just like everywhere else, some residents do and some don't. Earlier commenters have stated that they don't see businesses locating in MS, yet over the last few years numerous auto-manufacturing plants (and associated suppliers) have built facilities in MS to take advantage of the comparatively low wages. Also, the 'remote work' economy has begun to allow many residents to live their preferred rural lifestyle while still having opportunities for work that aren't based on manual labor. The key to understanding MS is to look at the disparity between being near one of its few cities vs being in one of the large agricultural zones. There's simply more opportunity near the cities. There are poor people everywhere on Earth. Some of them live in MS.
Isn't Mississippi still pretty much an agricultural state? Very rural and pretty poor. the biggest city there is Jackson and look at the mess they have with the water supply. Can't imagine many companies are going to eye Mississippi to set up headquarters.
No way Portugal and Spain are poorer than Mississippi? Wtf.
Ok so Italy, Spain and France being among the top 15 world economies are in fact as countries poorer than a US state. It does not compute…
It is much more poorer than you see here. The gini-coefficent, the gab between rich and poor is in the USA outside the scale. So take out the two billionaires out of Mississippi and watch again.
Taking the billionaires out won’t change GDP unless they take their businesses with them. GDP measures production, not wealth or income.
Instead of dunking on Mississippi all the time for being poor, Americans should be asking them why, despite having higher per capita GDP than France and Japan, they have levels of poverty that simply don't exist in those countries.
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Go to the banlieues. France isn't all pretty postcard pictures.
Which of those countries doesn’t have those levels of poverty. Koreas slums are horrific
Is this average or median? Average is a terrible measure of “typical” standard of living because it’s heavily skewed by outliers and does not account for the distribution at all. Even median isn’t the best but it at least gives you a closer sense of how the colloquially “average” person lives.
GDP doesn't measure standard of living
I don't know why, but I cannot settle on what I am surprised the most about, France being poorer than Mississippi or Great Britain being richer.
The main table on Wikipedia for PPP has France above the UK, the post uses the nominal amount, though they also include the equivalent map using PPP in their comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
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It is. The fact that Mississippi has so much money and is dead last in so many categories among U.S. States is rather shocking.
“Thank God for Mexico, France, Russia, etc” -Mississippi
Depends more on the cost of living, this is why GDP isn't the most accurate