Jokes aside, I was surprised to learn that there are 24 million millionaires in the U.S. that's more than 10% the working-age population. It's still a minority of course, and probably most of them are people who saved enough throughout their whole career (while here we were talking about people who made multiple millions every year), but still I found it interesting
There's a difference between having a net worth of a million dollars, ten million dollars and a hundred million dollars. There's also a world of a difference between having a million dollars and making millions of dollars every year.
If you own your house, you can easily be a "millionaire" based on the total cost of ownership but that doesn't mean you have anywhere near the disposable income or institutional power as an exec making upwards of 5 million dollars per year.
that's correct, there may be a lot of millionaires in terms of total wealth but very few can walk into a Porsche dealership and write a check for two 911 turbos.
You can be paying a mortgage on a house worth 100,000 dollars, have a dead-end job, live paycheck to paycheck, with no more than 1000 dollars in savings, and still count as a net-worth millionaire.
I always knew the USA was rich, but then I dug into the numbers. It’s actually staggering. It’s not really even about GDP per capita. What matters is accumulated wealth and existing infrastructure/social investments. Check out this report (https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...) net wealth of 560k per adult in North America, vs 180k in Europe, 77k in China, all the way down to 8.5k in Africa.
Even the median wealth in the USA is 94k per adult, vs 26k for China and Europe.
Not only is the USA ahead of the game by a ridiculous amount, they’re making progress faster.
And when I travelled there and to other rich countries, all this was confirmed again; in the material weatlh, but also culturally.
The numbers are in, and I think we can call a winner in the economic systems contest.
You're doing some heavy cherry-picking, net MEAN wealth is 560k in the U.S, 180 in Europe-aggregate, >400k in Denmark, >300k in France, Norway, Belgium, ...
And net median wealth is 93k in the U.S, 267k in Belgium, >100k in Spain, Italy, France, ...
As far as I remember, the American median salary was closer to 50k, Germany close to 45, France close to 40k. Don't have the numbers on hand, but off the top of my head.
My numbers also come straight from the comparison tables, the point is if you pick different numbers you paint a very different picture.
There are no salary numbers in your report about wealth, which is why I cited those from memory. If you want a source you can look it up, it'll change slightly depending on how you measure them (for example adjusting for PPP). Either way the broad point is that the salary numbers paint the same picture as the wealth numbers you omitted: People aren't dirt poor in Europe and walking on streets of gold in the U.S.
It’s the same picture. You are cherrypicking by isolating rich EU countries from the rest of Europe and comparing to the entire USA.
You can compare Spain and Germany to NY and CA, and Mississippi to Romania, and the same pattern holds true.
This is all borne out if you actually go and live in these places for a month or so. Life in the States is hugely comfortable and luxurious compared to everywhere else.
I'm comparing countries to countries. France, Germany, Spain, ... haven't stopped being countries with entirely separate populations, legal systems, cultures, histories, industries and so on... just because we formed an economic union. Every decade we include more states yet that doesn't mean the living standards and economic output of those rich countries magically average out lower than they were. When Estonia joined in 2004, for example, the lives of Spanish citizens didn't magically worsen compared to the U.S, even though the median European salary instantly lowered through the addition of a lower-wealth country to the Union.
Your thesis is that there is a gigantic gulf between the U.S and the next closest country and that no one else on earth comes even close, I can give you entire countries which are of similar levels of wealth, and many countries with less inequality and higher median wealth (20 in fact).
I've lived and worked all over Europe and in the states, for years, it never struck me that life in the U.S was any more luxurious than in a lot of other European countries.
“Entire country” is a word that encompasses Andorra, the Vatican, Luxembourg, Portugal, all the way up in size to India, USA, Canada, China, Russia.
Your second point does not reflect my experience. The average American simply has more and better stuff and a nicer house.
Edit: my point is not that Europe is some sort of hellhole and that the States have no problems. I’m saying this: the common focus is on GDP per capita or even salaries, but more significant than that is wealth per capita, and the US has the most by a very large margin
The values you're quoting are wealth per adult, which is a mean, not a median, and therefore very useful to Credit Suisse in context and almost entirely useless in the current discussion.
To get a better feeling for how things look in terms of the actual humans involved, a median isn't bad, or a percentile based distribution, or you can e.g. cut off the top and bottom 10 or 20% and then do some sort of analysis based on that.
'Mean net worth' is only useful for a very specific set of situations - it's also why you often get charities talking about 'look how tiny the net worth here is' but that includes people with debt having negative net worth, which drags the numbers downwards in just as distortionary a way as the richest people in the US are dragging the numbers you're using upwards.
Of course, it makes great propaganda for the charities, and they're not -strictly- lying - and Credit Suisse aren't lying at all, they're presenting total wealth by country and providing the 'per person' number to help gauge that information, not for use as remotely representitive.
However if you keep scrolling down the document, you'll find Table 2 provides the median - and lo and behold because the mean for the US is skewed by the small (compared to total population) number of extremely rich people, the US in No. 18 by median wealth as opposed to No. 2 by mean.
Statistics are great fun but you do have to be careful to apply the right -sort- of statistics for the purpose you have in mind.
They certainly count home equity and stocks, which could easily have doubled in the last 5 years. But none of that is very liquid. Salaries have been losing value due to inflation - there are plenty of millionaires living paycheck to paycheck.
Even $1 million is enough to not worry about those things, at which point we're in the range of what many tech workers working for hot startups or big tech have made in the past couple years.
They're often not saying who is being laid off. A bunch of engineers? Sales & marketing? I doubt that any of these companies (besides Amazon) even employ significant amount of low-wage staff, they get those via a staffing agency to avoid benefits and public responsibility for mistreatment.
Probably, though the founder of CSS-Tricks probably did when he sold it. But many on this site are SWE and they maybe didn't make a million in the past two years, but in the past 5 years, the number will be significant.
I assume DO didn't have 11% technical writers. These numbers are hard to judge if you don't know who got laid off.
Their tech writers were under their marketing team, and the CMO got exited as part of this. At least one tech writing team got laid off.[1] Their opt-in list includes six technical writers or editors out of about 152, but I've seen more writers announce on LinkedIn than are listed here. (Engineering took it on the chin, 73 listed.)[2]
DO had invested a lot over the last few years into expanding its technical content library as a SEO strategy. They seem to have completely backed out of that investment.
Coyier's $4M exit was nice, sure. Built on 15 years of work, though, alongside his primary job being a developer/designer and CodePen founder who also wrote, not as a full-time writer.
Still standing by my guarantee that no technical writer here got north of $1M of salary or compensation for two years of work. Not even close. If any got north of $500k they're both role models and were probably overpaid for the market.
Before we grab the pitchforks and guillotines, exactly how "rich" are DigitalOcean's executives?