iirc about 75% of your household income in Germany goes towards your expenses, but in the US that’s more like 85%. if you take the median incomes of both countries (~46k in USD in Germany, around 70k in the US), it is very nearly a wash, with Germany slightly edging out the US in terms of the disposable income/money left over to spend on other things
this doesn’t contradict the point that the US is obviously a developed country (on which we agree), but i know you and i have talked about in the past the extent to which median income figures represent actually greater wealth vs just differences in cost of living in Germany and the US, and my subjective sense that because of subsidized healthcare, childcare, education, etc., smaller household incomes go as far or further in germany than they do in the US, and i wrote down this statistic when i ran across it in case it came up again
This actually mirrors an argument I had in Discord last week: I think that we should care more about the income than the disposable income, and apparently not everyone agrees.
So like first, yes, costs of living are different between the US and Germany. That’s why I’m using PPP, which adjusts for that: that puts the US at 69k and Germany at 57k. (Nominal has the Us at 70 and the Germany at 51; so doing the cost of living adjustment does close a big chunk of the gap, but not all of it.) Now PPP adjustment is highly imperfect, but let’s stipulate for the moment that this adjustment basically works.
But your figure points to another factor as well: “expenses” are bigger in the US. So what does that mean if it’s not just cost of living? I assume it means that Americans spend more on, like, housing and food and transportation. But importantly, they still get all that stuff.
Like it’s a real social problem that America basically imposes minimum house sizes, so you can’t free up some cash by downsizing your house. You have to buy the nicer, bigger house. But you do, in fact, still get the nicer bigger house. We eat out more, which is partly because lifestyle drives that but also eating out is nice. Etc.
(Or like, imagine your job gives you a huge housing allowance. That’s not as good as getting that as actual income, but it’s much better than not getting it!)
So my impression here is that we eat more food, live in bigger and nicer houses, drive newer and bigger cars, and still have as much cash left over as the Germans do. (And like the houses thing is definitely true: German houses appear to average like 1500 square feet, with an American average at like 1900. When I look for numbers I find wildly different estimates, but this is the closest-together estimate I can find.)
Now I think I said last time around that I’m guessing Germany has basically equivalent, maybe higher, quality of life. Germans are somewhat materially poorer, but they have more security in various ways, a smoother-functioning bureaucracy, less violence, and shorter working hours. Those are all valuable things to “spend” the excess money on! I think a lot of people would take that trade. But there is a trade there.