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The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
The US skilled working class (anyone above a call center worker, really) have higher QOL than any comparable workers elsewhere in the world except a handful of small rich European states like Norway, Denmark and Switzerland (Americans often still earn more, but one can reasonably argue the latter countries have superior QOL, are higher trust, have a better safety net, more vacation time etc).
What income do you figure being skilled working class begins at? Moving from the US to Europe in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more) was an almost straight QoL increase for me - better transport and other public infrastructure, cleaner and safer streets, better food, higher quality housing, better healthcare, more recreation options. The downsides were that housing is smaller by floor area, grocery stores are not open 24/7, and carsharing services are rare and clunky. I live(d) in countries that are not quite in your list of uncommonly rich, but near the top of "normal" Europe.
(If your experience is mostly with the UK, I guess I could see you seeing the US as being vastly superior in QoL? My memory of the UK after doing undergrad there is as a land of a thousand small gratuitous and avoidable inconveniences, like the split hot/cold taps. Do people still have those?)
$36k/year post-tax is significantly below the median full time American wage. And that's counting people without college degrees, much less PhDs.
And sure, post-docs are paid little; grad students even less. They are extreme outliers among college educated working Americans.
I would push back against "cleaner safer streets". I live in vastly cleaner, safer streets than the nearest large cities. I live in a suburb. The urban rot in America is real, but it is also hyper-concentrated. You crossed an ocean and correctly notice the improvement. I'm a half hour drive away and also notice a night and day difference.
Yeah, I mean, I'm aware of the numbers. It also seems to be the case that my American acquaintances that took the jump into industry, with their significantly higher salaries, do not seem to be doing particularly much better in terms of creature comforts - I don't know how much this generalises, but my sense was that new social/role expectations ate a lot of the surplus money without delivering much utility for it (living in areas that are more expensive without being better, running fancier dinner parties for their friends, ...).
Right, yeah, but for me it's still been a very comfortable salary. I took over half a year off doing basically nothing at all (well, actually travelling) on excess money saved during grad school (in the US) and still had more than half of the savings (on the order of $20k initially?) left over, and I would hardly consider myself frugal (being the sort of person to eat out all the time). I am honestly not sure what the hell it is that normal people spend all their money on. $1k for rent and utilities, $30*30 ~= $1k for food [I realise this might have to be adjusted upwards for inflation now], and then whatever occasional expenses you have like tickets, travel and replacing clothes from the remaining $1k; what else is there?
In Europe, you can have clean and safe streets and also have worthwhile things to do and go to by just walking out of your door. I understand that this is a cultural difference, but the idea that you would have to get in a car and drive for half an hour for any meaningful interaction with the outside world seems like hell to me. (I've lived in places where the inner city was 20 minutes away by bus, and that was already a chore. At least you can have a drink after going somewhere by bus. Also was marooned in the DC suburbs for a while during COVID, and I only have expletives left for that period.)
I do not drive half an hour to do things. I walk, bike or jog to local parks with my kid. I drive a few minutes to local businesses. Maybe 15 minutes to do something the next town over. 20 minutes to work, a very pleasant 20 minutes listening to music or podcasts. No American public transit schizophrenics allowed in my car.
I'm in a town, not on the middle of nowhere. I walk outside my door and do meaningful things. Mostly with children, since just about everyone with kids and financial means independently decided to move to my neighborhood or equivalent.
Were you living in a closet, Harry Potter style? I kid a bit, but that is less than half the cost of a studio apartment. I checked a bunch of listings and failed to find one under 2k. I'm sure there's some low income housing cheaper than that. Or renting a room in a house. I think this explains your wondering what people spend their money on: a home without flatmates and with multiple rooms so their family can share it with them.
You were the one who said half an hour away. I don't know where you find suburbs like that in the US - I had the misfortune of being marooned in a suburb of DC for about a month during COVID, and the only things that could be reached without a car were a patch of forest full of discarded needles and a Starbucks that could be reached by walking through that forest, another 20 minutes through a sort of industrial/warehouse area and finally crossing a six-lane highway.
Are you talking about something like Manhattan or the Bay Area? I got a place on the ridiculous order of 60m² for that in the small college town where I lived in the US (which locals seemed to believe was unusually expensive), and 30m²+ studio apartments in every European city I have lived (I gather Paris and Munich are more expensive now, but that might be about it?). I even had friends with a 1BR in Brooklyn that was on the same order of magnitude that they only paid 1400 a month for. No roommates in any case cited, and all but the first
I'm a no-traffic half hour away from the nearest major city. I don't generally go there. Not more than once every few months.
I just now checked a few suburbs along the west coast. Not counting the bay area. Typical prices are $2k+ for studio or 1bd. I was able to find sub-2k listing, but those are very few. The suburbs around Portland stand out as strangely cheap with plenty of sub-2k listings. Everywhere else almost every apartment ad is over $2k. I saw one for just over $1k but the size was less than $250 sq ft. "Harry Potter" style.
I've lived in various suburbs across the West coast. I don't know if I have ever lived more than 2 miles from a grocery store and series of large shopping centers. I have never had to cross a freeway to get to a store, unless you mean by biking along a normal road under an overpass.
I never lived outside of DC. Maybe they are particularly shitty.
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I once lived in a duplex with my husband and baby for $500/month including utilities, but it was in a small town, and did feel like a closet. I could walk to work there, which was fairly nice. But I'm more confused about spending $1,000 a month on food for one person. We spend about $800 on food for two adults, two children, a baby, and two cats, and aren't trying all that hard. Like, we just ate salmon sushi with miso soup for dinner.
That's about what it costs to eat out all the time.
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