Why US GDP is higher

It seems that US GDP always seems higher than European GDP. A fact that US pundits always seem to crow about. It seems that there may be a reason for this (other than the fact that the US is a dynamic environment to work in). As Philip Greenspun reports on his blog, if health and education are privatized (as they are in the US), then there are some additional monetary of this reflected in the GDP numbers that are excluded in countries with socialized health and education programmes. A conclusion that Philip attributes to Piketty.

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Social Collapse - Best Practices

Hmmm.... first I read this transcript from a speech by Dmitry Orlov entitled "Social Collapse - Best Practices", and then I saw on Boing Boing the post How are you coping with Collapse-Anxiety?

The first post describes what might happen if the US collapses in the same way economically as the USSR did in the 1990's. It then goes on to making recommendations about what to focus on - essentially food, transportation, shelter and security. I thought it was fascinating because although I have been thinking for a number of years that the economic situation was going to get bad, I didn't envision quite a collapse of that order of magnitude. As the crisis continues however, the possibility suddenly seems to become credible.

I found the comments interesting in the Boing Boing post. It seems as though quite a number of people were actually starting to find themselves in situations reminiscent of those described in the first post - primarily from posters in the US. Scary.