Comments on: How does U.S. economic growth compare to Europe and Japan?

By: Tim Josling

Tim Josling — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:36:19 +0000

Re your comment about housing prices in the US.

Given that and your usually inquiring mind, you might be interested to read “The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives” by Michael Heller.

He makes the argument that houses are a lot more expensive than they need to be due to an interesting economic problem. He calls it the anti-commons – the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. Too many people can stop you building the house you want to, so houses end up being a bad fit and expensive. The problem is worse in Japan. Parts of Kobe lay in ruins for years after the earthquake due to difficulties in getting building approvals.

By: Tim Weigel

Tim Weigel — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:33:13 +0000

Good point Jim
A small 1 room apartment in most urban Japanese cities goes for 1.5 million U.S. dollars. The cost of living is out of this world. I could comfortably go to the largest US city and have much higher standard of living. I mean gas is about 8 bucks a gallon and everything is out of this world. I’ve been there and other asian countries and we got it made compared to them. I guess I could say that I prefer the US to any other country I’ve visited as far as standard of living, development, taxation and prosperity. In no way am I putting anyone down though, because I love all the people in asia and they are very warm and hospitable.

By: Jim Howard

Jim Howard — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:29:33 +0000

Admit it Phil, you just hate hearing anything good about the Bush administration.

Your currency argument is bogus, because anyone who has lived overseas knows that everything you buy is far more expensive than the identical product in the US. In England, for example, the rule of thumb is that the prices for object X in sterling will be the same as the dollar price in the U.S.

Americans have far more purchasing power than their counterparts overseas, which is one of the many reasons why people all over the world vote with their feet and move here if they can.

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:30:26 +0000

You make some good points there about growth. Our workforce is clearly growing much faster than the workforce of countries such as Japan, Italy, etc. which have less immigration and lower birth rates. Some more interesting statistics to look at would GDP growth per capita, per worker and per hour worked. I’ve seen statistics that show that French workers, for example, are more productive than American workers, meaning that they produce more per hour worked. We achieve higher GDP growth, in part, by working more hours per year. At this point the typical American worker works more hours per year than his Japanese counterpart.

The UN comes out every year with something called the Human Development index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics) which combines GDP per capita with health and education statistics. By that measure we’re number 12 in the world. We’d probably be a lot lower if crime rates were included.