alt Hacker NewsThe US also has GDP per capita of $90k and Japan has a GDP per capita of ~ $35k.
Put another way, in both countries a hip replacement surgery is almost exactly 1/8 of someone's per capita GDP.
Replies
The median salary in the US is around $61k a year and in Japan is around $42k a year. Salary-wise the difference is not as big as GDP per capita
This is called "purchasing power parity". There's an official index for it, as well as ad hoc measures like the Economist Big Mac Index.
To some extent it's circular: the US has a higher number of GDP because it spends more on healthcare. The broken leg version of the broken window fallacy.
The difference that using percentage of GDP instead that Japan moves close to the European countries. The US remains a very expensive outlier.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?locat...
The important question is: which fraction of people can afford it in either country?
“someone” in this case is in the 73rd percentile in the USA and ~40th in JP.
So the USA is still significantly more expensive as a portion of actual income. “GDP per capita” is a relatively useless figure
This feels like a misleading ratio, it's just saying the cost is the same in per capita terms but says nothing about the absolute cost or more importantly cost as a percentage of income, which matters for the majority of people in the denominator of the GDP per capita calculation.
Too bad Walmart greeter isn't making "per capita GDP".