A Financial Times video, posted below, gives insight into cross national analysis of income and prosperity. It focuses on the differences between earnings in the United States and the BRICS countries and analyzes what those differences are as things stand. Posing the question, “What is the dollar in your pocket really worth?”, the piece uses several measurements to ascertain the answer.
Information is sleekly presented on the price of cinema tickets in each country, the comparative GDP per person and the age-old question of who drinks the most (it’s the USA). This is a great introduction to the problem of measuring incomes across countries to figure out which is the most prosperous. It’s a problem economists have been working on for years and one still not aptly solved.
The United States is still the largest economy by far a surprising fact when exposed to a media repetitively announcing China’s economic supremacy. The video quite cleverly shows the economies of the five BRICS nations as boxes neatly fitting inside the United State’s box with room to spare.
A more difficult pill to swallow is the fifth place of the United States in education despite its first place in education spending. The bubble in US expenditure on services has caused political and public outcry about the level of debt the country is currently holding.
The United States retains its raking among the world’s nations as the foremost economic power and that is clear from the information presented here. The actual information related to the current atmosphere in most of the media seems fundamentally disconnected.
Viewing prosperity in terms of prosperity in other nations, or prosperity in the past, is just about the only way to get a reasonable idea of how an economy is doing. Digestible representations of statistical information can be invaluable for informing educated opinion. Watch the video to learn more and find out how the United States really stacks up.
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