One of the things I have noticed in reading what people write about other countries, generally comparing the United States unfavorably with them, is how different their expectations are from mine. I’ve written about this before. My mom and my dad came from very different backgrounds.
My dad’s family was very middle class, arguably upper middle class, and politically connected. Although they weren’t wealthy they didn’t worry about when they would have their next meal, either. I’ll give you an example. My paternal grandfather died quite young—just before the beginning of the Great Depression. Through the Depression my dad attended college and law school; his mother didn’t work. They were able to live and pay their bills based on the assets they owned and what my dad inherited from his paternal grandfather (who also died just before the start of the Great Depression). They owned the two-flat in which they lived.
My mom’s background could hardly have been more different. My maternal grandmother grew up very poor, on the brink of destitution, indeed, sometimes over it. They lived in the cheapest housing in St. Louis—a houseboat on the Mississippi without plumbing or central heating, basically a single room for her mother, herself, and her three siblings. Her three younger siblings spent parts of their childhoods in orphanages because my maternal great-grandmother couldn’t support them and my maternal great-grandfather had deserted the family. No wonder my maternal grandmother ran off to join a vaudeville troupe! My mom was working before she could walk. After vaudeville, my maternal grandmother worked as a seamstress (she had made all of the costumes for the troupe as well as being one of its headliners). I don’t honestly know how my mom scraped together enough money to pay for college.
I combine both of my parents. I am highly entrepeneurial (I treat everything as a business) but internally I assume I’m going to be poor. When I compare myself with people in other countries I don’t imagine that I would be among the elites there or well-to-do. I assume I’d be average or even poor.
IMO it’s harder to compare the U. S. with other countries than you might think. Consider China. Despite China’s highly-touted percentage of people who own their own homes (90% or more), Chinese people actually own very little as we understand it. Fee simple ownership is practically unheard of. I believe that what they have is closer to fee tail. Very few people own automobiles. Mopeds are pretty common and taking the subway even more so.
Healthcare is even more difficult to compare. China actually has two different health care systems: western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine which we would hardly consider medicine at all. Most people in cities pay out-of-pocket for health care. The U. S. has almost twice as many medical doctors per capita as they do in China (we have half as many as Norway does).
I’ll write about Germany some other time. It’s more like the U. S. but different in a lot of ways, too.
