If they paired average metrics with gini coefficient, I'd be happy
Whilst it's common to interpret "average" as "mean", this isn't strictly accurate or reliable.
The Economist's article errs in failing to distinguish which measure of central tendency is actually meant by "average".
Like are we just comparing simple goods: grocery, white wares, cars, fuel/electricity etc the price of these things there. Or are we also considering things such as: need to save money for Healthcare, University, credit card transaction fee, housing cost (mortgage), required amount of fuel for basic functioning of everyday life?
The latter is basically stuff that is either cheap or free in certain places while astronomically high in other (US, but I guess housing price is everywhere if city).
I feel like layman AND economist doesn't truly account (or even understand) how different some countries have it on those metrics; A person in Tokyo or most capital cities in Europe can get away with ZERO fuel + car cost, while for Americans that's a death sentence. Same for Healthcare. So comparing those prices doesn't even make sense to begin with, but leaving it out is a major boost to places where salaries are high (US) but the (hidden) cost are not measured.
Healthcare is absolutely not free anywhere. It maybe that the costs are indirect via government taxation and benefits are curtailed via rationing or simply unavailability of certain types of care.
Others will find fault with the tiniest thing, even if 99% of everything is perfect.
And others can be incredibly content with very little. It gives absolutely no insight into how good life actually is anywhere.
Q: Why will Ireland eventually be the richest country in the world?
A: Because its capital is always Dublin.
(I'll see myself out.)
Can't say I blame them. The Irish and Dutch are the worst when it comes to tax evasion.
it should try. because it's using gdp per capita it's stating that it cares how the entire gdp is averaged out over the entire population. the more inequality there is the less useful or representative this averaging out is
Measuring median also ignores that the upper middle can be doing very well, as it's literally just a slice from the 50th percentile.
It's like the US, where the top 10% make as much as the top 1% in Canada (as an example), but if you simply take the median it ignores the massive middle and upper middle class in the US.
If the measures ignore the sources of wealth discovered and not yet extracted, it doesn't accurately indicate what's happening. The whole story is left untold. Not reporting worth basing economic decisions on, except to hire better economists.
Didnt know Qatar scored so high on GDP per hours worked metric, but I guess they dont measure hours worked in construction as that one is largely immigrants working in unsafe conditions with confiscated passports. Source - the book Inside Qatar.
It also quickly becomes meaningless as people risking life and limb tend to flee to the nearest stable country. For example, Syrian refugees for the most part tended to stay close to their home country with the majority fleeing to nearby Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq--or, moving elsewhere within Syria.
Measuring wealth of a country by measuring how many refugees it takes in is like projecting future revenue/success of a convenience store by measuring how many people come into the store during an active-shooter situation.
Going by your metric, it would suggest that a Pole is wealthier than a Brit because Poland has nearly 1 million Ukrainian refugees to the UK's .25 mil.
But that's not entirely fair, since Africa to Europe may mean risking your life on a tiny boat, but Mexico to US is at least a land border.
Also UK gets it's share of life risking boats.
I guess Australia was the winner on this, until they took drastic measures to get people to stop risking their lives in tiny boats.
Edit - lol and here come the down votes, even in the face of actual evidence in the article.
Not good, but better. Take it with a grain of salt.
Japan, Singapore, or even Eastern European capitals felt more prosperous to me.
