> America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
International comparisons are tricky, and you should always check the data definitions carefully.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Salary alone is meaningless if you don't factor in purchase-power-parity and other quality of living aspects. E.g. a lot of people are happy to move to Denmark, and accept a paycut because they are leading with their social facilities and family support. Salary alone will not conjure good infrastructure
Yes, at the lower end of those salaries, you have to do things (and this is one single example btw) like have roommates, which drastically increases your housing instability. Why? Because you have to rely on your roommates' ability to pay rent. If they don't, what happens? You lose your PrIvIlIgE to live there! Most places in the US do not have protections for this. So you can try really hard to find another roommate, but you have a very limited amount of time to do so (basically until the next rent payment). So then you get evicted. Now your ability to find a new place to live is damaged because you have a permanent "evicted" mark on your credit/tenant report. Oh, and of course, the landlord can go to court and try to get the court to force you to pay the remainder of the rent or at least continue to pay the rent until they lazily find a new tenant. So now you're financially damaged too. There are so many footguns like this in the US that people, on HN especially, are ignorant to. Imagine trying to keep a job while also dealing with all these shenanigans. Can you even get time off work to go to the court hearing? If you don't, the landlord can get a default judgement.
Oh and sorry because this is HN and people will automatically assume I mean owning the property and renting rooms out to others, I mean both people are renters in this case.
You do realize just about everyone in the whole world is complaining about rent and how expensive things are, and the consequences of not being able to afford them. Based on what you've said here, Brussels is probably worse than that (the 1-3-6-9 rule on rent is extremely surprising to people here)
If you are not in the US, there can be a lot of surprises in these comparisons.
You might see that you make $X in tech and in Silicon Valley someone makes $3X for same job and that sounds awesome on paper.
But how much is health care coverage, both insurance and out of pocket after insurance? In SV I pay over $20K in insurance and the additional out of pocket depends on what happens but can be $10K-$20K. But if you have some catastrophic health problem, can be in the millions of dollars. Compare this with health expenses outside of the US.
How much is daycare, school and university for the kids? The costs in the US are mind-blowing, vs. either free or cheap in other countries. Here in SV I pay ~$45K/year just for high school, university will probably be a lot more.
Home insurance? If you can even get it, will be outrageous. Car insurance, think 4K-10K year depending on details.
And so on.
Don't compare gross salary, compare net leftover salary after ALL required expenses.
> Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income