re: A new way to measure poverty shows the US falling behind Europe

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As of 2025, the time needed to earn $1 is 63 minutes in the US. This is about twice the average across Germany, France and the UK. In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, it takes 26 minutes. In France, the figure is 31 minutes, while in the UK it rises slightly to 34 minutes.

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How about you also subtract taxes and other costs in Europe that we don’t have to pay in the US?


But I will say this in the US there are hidden taxes like healthcare costs, that vary from state to state and is income dependent, if you get subsidized healthcare and you have other costs where if you live in an urban center, you don’t need additional expenses like a car because of mass transit, but that varies in different places on both sides of the pond.

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Average poverty builds on a simple intuition. If someone I’ll call Alex earns half as much as someone else I’ll call Barbara, then Barbara is twice as rich as Alex and Alex is twice as poor as Barbara.

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This is all you really have to read to know his methodology is biased because he's more concerned about "inequality" than anything.

It's flawed thinking. Just because I'm 99.9999% poorer than Elon Musk, doesn't mean I'm bad off. He's putting more weight on the super wealthy, which of course will make the US look bad.

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This means that poverty can be defined as the inverse of income, and its unit is simply inverted. If incomes are measured in dollars per day, poverty is measured in days per dollar.

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Wait a second, am I understanding this correctly? He's basically just inverting income to measure poverty? This means the higher the average income the more the poverty?