Not really - By converting pasture back to woodland you could potentially restore some of the released carbon from agriculture-driven destruction of old forest land. But it won't make up for the vast reserves of carbon that have been dredged up from deep underground and released to the atmosphere. If it's necessary to re-balance that withdrawal we're going to need to put something back down there, or come up with something novel.
AFAIK, every other method requires massive electricity input; and we’re still not getting enough energy from renewables for that not to mean spewing more additional carbon than we sequester for each unit sequestered.
(Of course, trees also require massive energy input. The difference is that we don’t have to supply that energy.)
Which leads back to my question: is it not possible that we may find a technological alternative to trees which scales better and does not require us to supply so much energy.
Being able to look stuff up on the go. (Turns out this laundromat is closed because COVID; where’s the next nearest one? What time does that plane land, again? And what color was the sweater I bought my mom last year, so I can get her a sweater than matches?)
Yeah, looking at GDP per capita rather than median income totally disregards the inequality that makes $54k/person ludicrous to describe as typical in the US.
European countries ahead of the US: Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland, France, UK, Spain,Austria, Italy, Malta, Norway. Interesting how many countries (France for example) is ahead of Germany in both mean and median net wealth per adult.
In the US 34.5% of population has wealth between 100,000 USD and 1 million, In UK 44.8%, France: 46.3%. US has significantly more people with wealth over 1 million. German Gini index is 81.6, France 69.6. USA 85.2.
EDIT:
Table 3-3 is super interesting. Membership of top wealth groups for selected countries, 2019. (absolute number of people).
Over USD 100,000; Number of adults (thousands)
China 113,410
United States 103,198
Japan 55,370
Germany 26,012
United Kingdom 25,388
France 25,110
Italy 23,284
China already has more people with wealth over 100,000 USD. (20.8% of total) than any other country. No wonder why US companies want to stay in Chinese markets.
And yet more than half of Americans don’t have $400 to cover an emergency. I wonder how the US would stack up in 25th percentile wealth against European countries?
Also, there are measures like food insecurity that I suspect would be very telling.
Per the government, the median American household has >$1000 remaining every month after all ordinary expenses, far more than enough to cover a $400 emergency. The "can't cover $400" trope doesn't imply what you think it does, it is pulled out of context from a survey about how people would cover an emergency, not whether they could. Many popular financial stats used in the media are misleading in service of a narrative.
As another example, you'll see many articles stating some large percentage of Americans don't have any savings, which is only true because they define "savings" as having a savings account, which many Americans with plenty of money don't even have (myself included). And then there is the one about Americans having no retirement savings, where "retirement savings" excludes any real estate investments, taxable brokerage accounts, etc which is where many Americans have the majority of their retirement savings.
The "food insecurity" surveys are a similar story. Same with "food deserts". If you dig into the underlying studies none of them imply what the media tries to imply with them. It is a hazard to uncritically accept statistics from the media. They have an incentive to paint the most dire story possible.
The term of art for this is "discretionary income". I think it is a more informative than disposable income, but it is much harder to find for many countries. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) publishes surprisingly detailed statistics on consumer expenditure at decile resolution which allows it to be easily computed.
Discretionary income is defined as disposable income after you subtract housing, utilities, food, clothing, healthcare, and transportation costs based on actual survey data. Roughly speaking, discretionary income is the amount of money available for saving or spending on fun. If you want to know the mean and distribution of how much a person spends on eggs or fresh vegetables in each decile, the BLS can tell you that. It also tracks a lot of non-essential expenditures. It is a great resource.
I don't like wealth comparisons because they do a poor job of accounting for usable vs. locked up wealth. What I mean is that you could easily live in California and have $200k in counted wealth, but virtually all of it is in your home's equity and more or less inaccessible to you while someone living in a cheaper country with $200k in wealth likely has a lot more of it in liquid form.
Disposable Income is a better indicator of "money you get and can actually use" than total median income or wealth. The US is easily #1 in this category by PPP mean [1], and only drops to #3 by median.
If you have a sudden $1000 expense, you can't magically sell your house to pay it off next week. Also if you sell your house, what are you going to do then? Live on the street with all your belongings in shopping carts? Magically find another job paying the same amount somewhere cheaper?
Home equity is not liquid. It's locked up. There's a reason finance distinguishes between liquid and fixed assets - they are different classes with different dynamics.
The median household income in the US is ~$64k currently. Since disposable income is net various income and social taxes, it implies an effective tax rate of 30% at the median income.
This number is deceptive in that the US is geographically massive and the economies, State governments (taxes), and cultures vary widely across thousands of kilometers. The difference between the median income of the highest and lowest States is almost 2x, so your experience will be very different depending on which State you live. Also, in terms of discretionary income, cost of living varies a lot so disposable income isn't the entire story.
Note that the average discretionary income (money left over after all ordinary expenses) in the US is ~$2k/month whereas the median discretionary income is $1k/month. This implies that high income earners (think $100k, not FAANG) have a few thousand dollars left over each month after expenses.
I've worked in Europe for several years and the differences in discretionary income are stark, both due to income levels and taxation. Americans are kind of oblivious to just how freely they spend money due to having so much discretionary income; we tend to assume the rest of the developed world is similar when that really isn't the case.
How does this account for things like taxes and shifting of expenses?
It is common knowledge that in the USA, they will pay you extra in the corporate world, but that extra money goes to family health care, education, transport, and other things that are covered by European taxation schemes.
If you look at discretionary income, the median corporate employees are making similar incomes.
And of course, SWEs are outperforming in USA, and manual laborers are outperforming in EU
I have not researched that until now but it appears the US is #3 for median disposable income behind Switzerland and Norway. If there’s a better metric I’m interested. However, I think it’s safe to say the typical US resident is not relatively impoverished. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
Indeed. Don't be fooled by North Dakota as the top GDP per capita state in the US. There are a relatively small number of landowners in the western half of the state making crazy passive income from oil rights their great-grandfathers lucked into when they immigrated a hundred years ago. The state is very working-class. It maybe doesn't have the same amount of abject poverty that you see in other places, but people here work hard for a living.
Also, the numbers in the article are from 2014 when the oil boom was in still full swing. That's what provided a lot of the highest paying jobs in the state. Drilling levels today are less than 10% of what they were at the peak, and consequently many of those jobs have gone with it.
Doesn't focusing on consumption completely obscure to bulk of inequality, which takes the form of endless billions constantly accumulating among a minuscule portion of the population?
And even looking at median income would still leave other things out -- like the much higher fraction of that household income which goes to medical expenses in the US than in, well... the entire EU for starters.
That's an average again. Also not sure what you mean by "No."
That data neither proves nor disproves what your parent comment said.
Additionally disposable income doesn't account for "optional" spending on healthcare etc. by the individual.
When you look at median disposable household income, the US still comes in somewhere at the top, but the top 15 countries all have about the same ballpark figure (~30k USD), with US being the only country among them that doesn't have unemployment benefits, affordable healthcare, etc.
Is there any particular point you're trying to make?
You keep responding to people with at best tangentially related data that is not relevant to the discussion.
Now suddenly we're looking at median gross income.
And this time I don't know at all how to respond to that in a manner that will somehow make it relevant to the discussion again.
Come now. Why would whether income is median or mean affect expenses?
My larger point is that, contrary to your and others' claims, income rankings that show the US at or near the top do not suddenly greatly change the US's position once healthcare expense is included. See mdorazio's comment elsewhere regarding median disposable income.
> My larger point is that, contrary to your and others' claims, income rankings that show the US at or near the top do not suddenly greatly change the US's position once healthcare expense is included.
Disposable income (except confusingly on some US tax forms) does not account for private healthcare expenses (the figure that is post other necessary expenses like health insurance is called discretionary income).
In countries where a huge chunk of insurance is private or people are paying out-of-pocket, subtracting such healthcare expenses from disposable income can drastically change the picture:
Your average American spent about $5000 of their disposable income on just private health insurance and out-of-pocket expenses in 2018[1]!
It's hard to reconcile averages with a median (I still refuse to use numbers that can be easily skewed by a handful of billionaires), but since healthcare costs should be more or less constant regardless of your income bracket, it would likely be a huge chunk of the median disposable income figure. Which was the point of the person you originally replied to.
>Disposable income (except confusingly on some US tax forms) does not account for private healthcare expenses (the figure that is post other necessary expenses like health insurance is called discretionary income).
You've already been called out for claiming that the US "doesn't have unemployment benefits"; when challenged your response was more or less "feelz over realz". No matter how often you try to claim that using median income would invalidate OP's point, as I and others keep telling you, it does not. "since healthcare costs should be more or less constant regardless of your income bracket, it would likely be a huge chunk of the median disposable income figure" doesn't even attempt to be coherent. Please stop.
Go to Appendix B and have a look at the table if you're in a hurry.
I'll give you a chance to re-phrase the thoughts in the latter half of your post in a more polite manner, since I have been patient and am prepared to be so a while longer. I'm not looking forward to this conversation degrading in that way.
>Where did you get the idea that the US doesn't have unemployment benefits?
I do not know why I wrote it that way, really. I am aware the US has some social security and unemployment benefits, but not much compared to many other rich western countries. It's pretty much at the bottom right next to Germany, which has a comically low (cash) benefits imho.
I realize those numbers may be skewed by stuff like:
- Food stamp programs (US)
- The state directly paying for apartments etc. in some cases (Germany)
- Whatever else infrastructure etc. you get to use for free as an unemployed person.
In any case "social security" is hard to quantify, and depending on how and who does it you'll see countries jumping all over the place in rankings. So I'm pretty much just going by what the general perception of social security is in various countries.
Even per capita is misleading. Go to get stitches in the eu vs america. Buy a regular pizza in the eu, get quality, buy it in the usa get synthetic yuk.
There’s a pretty good chance your monitor is too low and your keyboard too high relative to one another. Make sure it’s comfortable to type and that you can look directly forward at your monitor while doing so rather than looking downward, which induces slouching and curling your shoulders, which in turn makes it more difficult to sit upright.
Make sure your desktop is at the right height for you to sit with leg joints at right angles rather than adjusting yourself or your chair to a desk that’s at some “standard” height.
In my experience, taxes are based on your home address and your employer’s address of record, regardless of where you physically go to work.