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It depends on the country. Haiti? There is no middle class there. There is a fraction of a percent that has money, the rest of the 98% are poor. However, a country like Portugal, Mexico, Estonia, Brazil? I'd MUCH rather be middle class there than poor here. Being middle class is less about the particular items that you possess, and more about the economic options and layers of protection you have.
Too many people, especially on C-D, think that possession of things like smartphones or 60 inch LED TV's mean someone is doing alright. You can have those things in America and be in a very bad situation. I don't know how many times I have to tell older people on C-D that TV's and phones are freaking CHEAP nowadays, and possession of them means NOTHING. I have basically every gadget imaginable - tablet, smartphone, e-reader, laptop, desktop gaming computer, gps, LED TV, home theater, and will probably soon buy a smartwatch. I tend to buy the previous year's best model of all those things off of ebay... they are about half the retail price that way. Total cost to me for all of it... maybe $3000? Plus of course the phone and internet service subscriptions.
I've lived in some developing countries, most notably Mexico. You may not even have the room in a typical middle class flat for a 60 inch TV in some countries, but they are much more economically secure.
My definition of middle class is having a security or insurance against negative externalities such as job loss, death in the family or health crisis. A poor or marginal person will be ruined by one of these events, probably cannot cope. A middle class person can weather one or more.
It also has to do with what kind of opportunities can be provided for the kids. A poor person will not be able to set up the kids at all. A middle class person will be able to set up the kids quite nicely. The family I lived with in Mexico did not have as many gadgets as I do. They did, however, own a business & were able to send their kids to college to get decent jobs. The son was going to school to be in the media business. He was going to be just as middle class as his parents, if not a little bit better. That's the difference.
The poor in America are worse off in every conceivable metric - health, life expectancy, job stability, divorce rate, etc... than the "middle" or what I'll call "Professional" class in developing countries. Oh, but they have a stupid LED TV.
I think a big part of the reason why the poor in America aren't well off as they could be is because of the family structure. Just to use your example of Mexico....in general, families cooperate a lot more and that is a big reason for their comparative sense of security.
I think europe has money for defense if it really wanted. So many people would love the defense related jobs which are denied from them because of that by the way.
Stuff like 35h work week? Perhaps for some , reality is very different. Is that paid you work 60h and have uncertain hours and are on standby all the time. Or are a forced entrepeneur. A increasing phenomena is people who work for peanuts for years on benefits or the other. Just because they are near to getting somewhere "soon". And it's not piling up boxes slowly... A new standard in eternal internships.
I have never been to the Us.
It is true there is a lot of substandard infrastructure . And I think everyone is aware of the high levels of poverty and poverty locks there as well. It is expensive there. Like many places the Us has a reputation for being overpriced. It is one thing to look out for. Cost of education is also crippling.
One thing which the Us has is jobs. Look at the job market. Near full employment means many people have a possibility to even enter the (legal) work market who elsewhere would depend on something else. Semi-employment or under the table might hurt people in their pension in 30-40 years. And it is happening to everyone. Us has mostly one or two languages across a huge area is also good. It is just more difficult to move around even if your credentials are legally accepted somewhere. Much of the workforce is in the trap of nontransferable skills. Teachers for example. The Us is so standardized the employers sometimes discriminate purely based on GPA averages. The us is very college centered and very educated on average. Much of the us high school education has a very bad reputation. It means people go to uni there who would not make it elsewhere. That's good if you are at least average . Europe has often had very rigid institutions where they did not modernize the schools for decades which are like damn institutions. I'm not complaining too much if it is subsidized and some is very good quality others would pay a fortune for indeed. By the way the top end possibilities in the us are unrivalled. Becoming an astronaut is very hard for americans , impossible for me.
Retiring somewhere in some more affordable country is good. Also running your business. But it depends many places are strict on immigration as well. If you stay out of the poverty trap it can be nice. Living as a bum may be nice. Or even if you can work working for home. But often you have to consider the job market. And also the possibility for your children and spouse as well.
It depends on the country. Haiti? There is no middle class there. There is a fraction of a percent that has money, the rest of the 98% are poor. However, a country like Portugal, Mexico, Estonia, Brazil? I'd MUCH rather be middle class there than poor here. Being middle class is less about the particular items that you possess, and more about the economic options and layers of protection you have.
Too many people, especially on C-D, think that possession of things like smartphones or 60 inch LED TV's mean someone is doing alright. You can have those things in America and be in a very bad situation. I don't know how many times I have to tell older people on C-D that TV's and phones are freaking CHEAP nowadays, and possession of them means NOTHING. I have basically every gadget imaginable - tablet, smartphone, e-reader, laptop, desktop gaming computer, gps, LED TV, home theater, and will probably soon buy a smartwatch. I tend to buy the previous year's best model of all those things off of ebay... they are about half the retail price that way. Total cost to me for all of it... maybe $3000? Plus of course the phone and internet service subscriptions.
I've lived in some developing countries, most notably Mexico. You may not even have the room in a typical middle class flat for a 60 inch TV in some countries, but they are much more economically secure.
My definition of middle class is having a security or insurance against negative externalities such as job loss, death in the family or health crisis. A poor or marginal person will be ruined by one of these events, probably cannot cope. A middle class person can weather one or more.
It also has to do with what kind of opportunities can be provided for the kids. A poor person will not be able to set up the kids at all. A middle class person will be able to set up the kids quite nicely. The family I lived with in Mexico did not have as many gadgets as I do. They did, however, own a business & were able to send their kids to college to get decent jobs. The son was going to school to be in the media business. He was going to be just as middle class as his parents, if not a little bit better. That's the difference.
The poor in America are worse off in every conceivable metric - health, life expectancy, job stability, divorce rate, etc... than the "middle" or what I'll call "Professional" class in developing countries. Oh, but they have a stupid LED TV.
You stated this beautifully. Yes, the poor in America, and I assume you are referring to the working poor, not the homeless living in tents, have more material possessions than those in developing countries, the education and healthcare available to the middle class in those countries is far superior.
Thankfully here in the USA we have opportunity to move around to lower COL regions. We do not need to get government permission to move to another state for example. We can just do it. You do not need an income higher than Minimum-Wage to support a family and own a home.
A person working a full-time minimum-wage job will find it virtually impossible to rent an affordable home anywhere in the US, according to a study that sheds new light the country’s housing crisis.
The report reveals that there is not a single county or metropolitan area in which a minimum-wage worker can afford a modest two-bedroom home, which the federal government defines as paying less than 30% of a household’s income for rent and utilities. And in only 12 counties in the country is a modest one-bedroom home affordable, according to the report, published Thursday by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
But how can you earn $1000 per month in Thailand? An engineer in Thailand can be paid a lot less than that.
I don't know, but the data say that 20% of the population earns $1200 a month or more. So do whatever they're doing.
One thing this thread overlooks is the dramatic improvement in salaries and living conditions in developing countries since about 1990. Those of us who wandered around the world in college - or around that time of life - would be very pleasantly surprised to revisit the places we went and see the improvement, especially in Asia although to some extent in Latin America and Africa too.
The US is also very child hostile. Current parents have nothing like the community support system my parents enjoyed 70 years ago. If a man had a wife and child to support, someone would find him a job, a place to live, furniture and clothes for the family. Of course, food consumed 30% of the family budget and nobody had much, so they didn't feel poor.
Really? Nobody "found" my dad a job in 1945 when he got out of the Army. He put himself through trade school and was recruited by a court reporting agency, and moved himself and my mother from New York out to the boonies of Ohio to take the job. He had no parents, one aunt, two half-siblings, and a bunch of friends in the same boat as him, none of whom were any help in getting him a job, a place to live (that takes money, so you go to work), furniture, and clothes (same thing). They didn't feel poor, but by today's standards they were poor.
The only sense in which I think today's U.S. society is child-hostile is that you don't see any children playing, anywhere. They are all programmed within an inch of their lives. Then we wonder why they can't function as adults...
Good grief, one hundred and forty five posts to state the obvious, of course the poor are materially better off here in America, the question should have been, why they wouldn't be......Why is it that any thread having the word "poor" in it seems to get bogged down in the old paradigm of hatred for welfare recipients. The poor in America SHOULD be doing better if we are to put our collective money where our collective mouth is, you know--"We're number one", and all of that..
and the poor are mostly poor because they buy all that junk in the first place... if they lived on with fewer goods, like other countries, they would be wealthier
funny seeing poor people complaining about being poor while they do so with a pocket full of $100-1000 toys
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