sorry but is there a point to it? "Economic freedom (however it is defined in this study you cite) is one out of many metrics. Secondly, GDP per capita is one of the worst metrics to measure household productivity or purchasing power, or savings, or discretionary spending, or anything relating to the actual citizen. It is because GDP measures overall output, including the one by machines. You can have 20% unemployment rate and huge human inefficient workforces and still have a huge GDP if you employ millions of AI capable machines that get the job done efficiently. Also GDP is a completely outdated measure. I am sure you can do better than this to make your point. I assume you are trying to suggest America is the greatest nation in the world, correct?
uh ?!? Talk about trying hard to make a point, care to find an unemployment rate near 20% among the countries with highest GDP per capita ? Hard to find one over 5 %. Luxembourg barely manages that, and below in the list Ireland, another european country, reaches almost a 10%. Among wealthy countries, high unemployement is more a sickness of european social democracies - not meaning they are necessarily wrong, Germany, Sweden, Norway that you cited are overall a success, but several others much less so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Besides the focus on income or wealth equality is a suspicious bias. Last I checked, a few years ago, the town in France with the highest Gini coefficient was Neuilly Sur Seine, which is also one of the very wealthiest towns in France (along a couple of downtowns parts of Paris) and has a great quality of life. Where you have extremely wealthy people living, you will find great wealth disparities even compared to the well off population, but the life standard is highly likely to be better than where people are poorer but with less wealth inequality. Which reminds me of an interview with an university professor : in France, when answering to a test he designed, the large majority of students favoured the idea of a poorer country with less income inequality than that of a wealthier country, with wealthier lower classes but with more income equality . Such a poor way to envision life, in large parts thanks to state sponsored education and media.
Luis, don't lose sight of the fact that the United States is not a democracy at the Federal level. Only half of one branch of government is elected democratically, the U.S. Senate. The House, the constitutionally, most powerful, government body, would be elected democratically were it not for gerrymandering which has undone the democratic element. The President is not elected democratically, and the Judicial Branch, at the top level, is of course appointed. It is true that the United States is a democracy at the local levels of government, but at the Federal level it is a representative Republic with a few democratic elements.
If there are countries with very high gdp/capita that have massive unemployment and poverty, it's your obligation to point them out, not mine. I notice you didn't.
If you will permit me to answer for Zzzz1, Brazil in 1996 and 2011, relatively speaking. But perhaps the most glaring example would be Saudi Arabia which has a GDP/capita in the top rank but nearly 20% of its people live in abject poverty. So it is possible. Giving the benefit of a doubt to Zzzz1, I think that is all he meant. His main point stands, viz., the GDP figure alone, particularly the GDP growth rate, is not a very reliable measure of the general well being of the entire population. The GDP/capita is going to be a less good measure of a countries general well being the more skewed the wealth distribution is.
According to wiki, Brazil's gdp/capita is 76th in the world. By population they're the 5th largest country in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita And they take the gold medal for corruption according to Brazil's Gold Medal for Corruption - The New York Times I wouldn't use them as an example of a free, capitalist country that explains the evil of free markets.
That's correct for the recent figure I believe. I used, however, figures from 2011 and 1996 to illustrate that it is possible to have a relatively high GDP and yet a lot of poverty. But Saudi Arabia , as I mentioned in an edit, is probably the best example. For comparison, the poverty level in the U.S. currently is approximately 14%. Interestingly, there are a lot of countries with a GDP lower than the United States that have a much lower official poverty rate than the U.S. Illustrating once again that per capita GDP is, by itself, an unreliable measure of the well-being of a country's population. I'm sorry to have to say it, but Zzzz1 wins this round.
The middle east countries like Saudi Arabia are great examples of countries where you can have a high gdp per capita and a great level of poverty to go with it. But they have nothing to do with freedom or capitalism or reaganomics causing it. The wealth of the countries is in oil and the monarchies own it by divine right or some such thing. Those countries prove that a ruling monarchy causes unequal wealth distribution.