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

> As of 2025, the time needed to earn $1 is 63 minutes in the US.

Confused, I clicked one of the links and tried to understand. Found this:

> The time to get $1 refers to a day of life for anyone at any age and in any circumstance, not just the hours worked by someone with a job.

Clicking another link took me to the abstract at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4785458 but that didn't answer any questions either.

I can't find anything really of substance in this, other than someone trying to redefine a lot of terms in confusing ways

$1 every 63 minutes would be $8343/year. I cannot think of any way to reconcile that with the US average household income or any other related figure.

In particular it seems weird that only we had a massive change during COVID.

Also seems a little odd that Germany was always better than the US, even in the 90’s when things were pretty good here.

Putting it together, we need to have COVID all the time here, so we can match the economic development of Germany immediately post-reunification.

Although I wish this sparked a conversation on how we can do better instead of national dick measuring contests. Those don't help.

Median workers in the US have some of the highest hourly wages at PPP in the rich world and they have been increasing, but they are pretty similar to those in Germany. The big difference in annual pay at PPP is down to hours worked.

For 2022 average annual hours worked per worker in the US is 1790 while in Germany it is 1340 [1]. Meanwhile average hourly wages at PPP in US are $34.9 vs $34.6 in Germany [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-hourly-earnings

So IIUC this "average poverty" (measured in time per international dollar) includes people living off social welfare? Otherwise, if it only included the working population, wouldn't we have

  average poverty ≝ (average yearly income* of the working population / 1yr)⁻¹

*) Adjusted for purchasing power, i.e. measured in international dollars.

I would be very interested to find out how those stats are related to things like, GINI or old pre-GDP economic measures of raw production.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Germany’s economy is the worst in Europe since a couple of years.

Industrial complex vanish faster than a glassy menu opens on the MacBook Pro series.

Bankruptcy is on an all time high, car makers opening new factories in Hungary and close theirs no matter how modern they are in Germany.

A pharmacist in Germany begged me to pay with fiat money and not to use Apple Pay nor credit card due to the percentage hit on the invoice - and I bought stuff for roughly 350EUR.

Roads look like 1990 in the German Democratic Republic.

All that politicians from the Left discuss is higher taxes, higher medical costs higher everything even state debt while service declines and investment disappears.

It is dire here. Don’t fall for it, because it is only getting worse.

The youth wants to leave Germany with at a percentage rate never seen before: between 20 and 25%.

And the net balance is already negative for 3 years if I remember correctly for people moving here and people leaving - and these are folks from Germany and people who’s parents immigrated here generations ago.

So called “Knives Prohibition Zones” installed in the last years shall account for the massive increase in knife attacks in the public zones.

Christmas markets don’t open as well as many traditional public meet ups closed due to anti terrorist and safety measures they have to pay for - an unheard and unseen phenomenon 10 years ago.

I could go on and on - but yeah, Europe is great and such, so cool, that more and more former colleagues who lived here 10 years and more happily leave the country for good.

That seems like a complicated way to "talk about median income without talking about median income". By the end, they do describe the basic situation: US has greater total wealth and total income but that wealth and income is so unequally distributed that more people are poor.

I get the "international" part - purchasing power. The number still seems way off, though.

In a time when minimum wage is $7/hr, how is the average American earning $1/hr?

Can anyone make that number make any sense?