Is Great Britain poorer than Mississippi? Poverty, of course, is a weird metric. The author of The Atlantic piece uses a few metrics like GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. That is definitely an important way to compare economies, and Mississippi comes out on top. Another way - one the author ignores - is the GINI index, which measures inequality. Great Britain, which has a more robust welfare state including universal health care, has a GINI index of .40. Not too bad, really. Mississippi's is .49. That actually is bad. It doesn't seem like a huge difference but it is.
Yglesias like to talk about how much wealthier America is than Europe and there are a lot of ways that this is true. We tend to have bigger homes and better consumer goods and options. But we also have more homelessness and more people with food scarcity.
Many European countries make a more conscious effort to reduce inequality and that comes at the expense of growth. Britain has a smaller welfare state than most European countries, but it also shot itself in the face with Brexit.
The question America has to ask itself is whether it makes sense to restrain some wealth in order to reduce things like homelessness and food insecurity. The idea that we could simply tax billionaires probably doesn't get us all the way there. Wouldn't hurt though, as I don't think a wealth tax, for instance, is going to de-incentivize the next Elon Musk from building a self-driving car that crashes, rockets that blow up or social media platforms that suck.
Policy tradeoffs are real. We tend to ignore that, because it's really important to "be right online".
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