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All 3 of those cities have pockets of elite and rich people that are islands of wealth surrounded by a sea of the millions of working poor that serve them. That's not something I wish for SF to ever emulate or aspire to. NO THANK YOU.
To go from The Bay Area to London for the most part, is a downgrade in quality of life.
1. New York 2. London
3. Paris
4. Tokyo
5. Hong Kong
6. Los Angeles
7. Chicago
8. Beijing
9. Singapore
10. Washington
11. Brussels
12. Seoul
13. Toronto
14. Sydney
15. Madrid
16. Vienna
17. Moscow
18. Shanghai
19. Berlin
20. Buenos Aires
21. Boston 22. San Francisco
23. Frankfurt
24. Barcelona
25. Melbourne
All 3 of those cities have pockets of elite and rich people that are islands of wealth surrounded by a sea of the millions of working poor that serve them. That's not something I wish for SF to ever emulate or aspire to. NO THANK YOU.
To go from The Bay Area to London for the most part, is a downgrade in quality of life.
What San Francisco with the most expensive housing and most expensive doctors appointments in the entire US.
Most medical care is free in London, and part of the National Heath Service, whilst there is a minimum wage equicalent to $10.70 an hour and by law every employee is entitled to 28 days paid annual leave, whilst there are also welfare benefits relating to income and housing, as well as numerous social housing projects.
London may not be perfect but it does have a lot more social provision in place than many US Cities and indeed other cities across the world.
NYC has a high poverty rate but has areas such as the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn/Queens, which have very different poverty rates to say Manhattan. You can easily cut a cities poverty rates by changing it's boundaries, through gentrification so the poor can no longer live there and through differing international definitions of what constitutes poverty.
The British definition of poverty is different from the American one:
The survey uses the official definition of poverty, which is having a household income that is less than 60% of the national median income that year.
It's broader than the American definition.
Yeah, this^ offers no consolation when I look at how things are trending over there:
Quote:
Male full-time employees resident in London earned £15.54 per hour on average in 2012, compared with £16.14 in real terms in 2002 – a drop of 4%.
On a workplace basis, male full-time employees in London earned £17.33 per hour on average in 2012, compared with £17.81 in real terms in 2002 – a drop of 3%.
So £15.54 comes out to £621.60 for a 40-hr work week and Dec 31, 2012 exchange rate(US $1.61) comes out to $1,000.76 average weekly wage in London for all full time employed males.
That's $1,000 a week as the average weekly wage for all employed adult MALES mind you(men usually make more than women) in one of the most expensive cities on the face of the earth.
On the flip side, let's look at the average weekly wage for employed workers in the Inner Bay, 2012
San Mateo County $3,240
Santa Clara County $1,906
San Francisco County $1,694
Alameda County $1,265
Marin County $1,225
Contra Costa County $1,168 London $1,000
So £15.54 comes out to £621.60 for a 40-hr work week and Dec 31, 2012 exchange rate(US $1.61) comes out to $1,000.76 average weekly wage in London for all full time employed males.
That's $1,000 a week as the average weekly wage for all employed adult MALES mind you(men usually make more than women) in one of the most expensive cities on the face of the earth.
On the flip side, let's look at the average weekly wage for employed workers in the Inner Bay, 2012
San Mateo County $3,240
Santa Clara County $1,906
San Francisco County $1,694
Alameda County $1,265
Marin County $1,225
Contra Costa County $1,168 London $1,000
Further evidence that from the standpoint of quality of life, SF really offers a greater opportunity at upward mobility for more people.
Average median or average mean? How's it go with the cost-of-living? Are you accounting for the cost of things like medical care/insurance or the cost of higher education (or having to save up for higher education)?
And why is it little consolation that your stat comparisons were actually off? Isn't it great that what you imagined to be widespread dire poverty in London was actually due to your lack of understanding of differing poverty metrics between the US and UK and that London might actually be far less a cesspool of poverty than you thought? If you want to see actual dire conditions, you should try walking around some parts of SF and Oakland where you can see a remarkably large homeless population living in remarkable destitution in one of the most remarkably wealthy per capita parts of the world. Truly amazing.
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