And yet Vienna is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the world, with its masses of public housing, while major U.S. cities have homelessness crises and TV shows about house flipping for profit. Perhaps we should stop debating things based on the hokum of Econ 101 textbooks and look at what in the real world has actually worked (e.g. abolishing most forms of zoning, massive investments in public housing, robust public transportation, drastically curbing real estate speculation).
Vienna has had the luxury of having had relatively little demand for housing for over a century. The population peaked in WWI and still hasn't recovered (it was 2.24m in 1916, 2.00m in 2023).
vienna also had a lot of buildings destroyed in the war which increased the demand. population was as low as 1.5 or 1.6m in the late 80s/early 90s. it grew back to 2m in just a few decades, and it is going to continue to grow, so i'd argue that it has recovered quite well.
Right, that makes a lot of sense because the city absolutely exploded during the preceding decades. But having the population stagnate has certainly made it easier for them to catch up than if the population had kept increasing.
Manhattan's population dropped 25% from its peak in the early 1900s. Pre-war was just a different era, this is more of a function of changing living standards, people live larger, not of contemporary housing dynamics.
The US also has a per capita GDP 50% higher than Austria ($52,131 vs $76,399). At $52,131 a year per capita GDP, Austria would be neatly in second to last place as the poorest state in the Union, as it would beat Mississippi at $47,190 but be beaten by West Virginia at $53,852. So perhaps the US policy is doing something correctly.
A more relevant measure might be median income per capita/household, adjusted for purchasing power. On that basis Austria does quite well.
Additionally, quality of life amounts to more than measures for disposable income etc. If you consider access to education and healthcare the picture might take on greater depth.
How is GDP per capita relevant, especially not adjusted for purchasing power parity? For Austria the GDP per capita PPP is at $67-69k depending on the estimate, which would put it somewhere between 27 and 33 place of US states, so roughly in the middle.
If you compare the Quality of Life Index, Austria is 9th, USA is 15th. Freedom Index - Austria is 93, USA is 83. HDI USA is 20th with 0.927, Austria is 22nd with 0.926. Another fun one is Cost of Living index which shows that Austria is significantly cheaper to live in compared to the US (66.8 vs 72.9 out of NYC).
I can go on, but it's frankly ridiculous that you think GDP per capita is relevant, or somehow directly impacts the lives of Austrians and invalidates the good choices Austria and Vienna have made.
I don't think most indices are very valuable - when you drill down into them, you usually find out there's a lot of decisions about what that really means made for you by some NGO or think-tank in order to get the desired result. That's not to say they still can't reflect some underlying true reality about "freedom" or whatever to some degree, but I don't think it's worth citing them in a discussion.
You're quite correct he should have used GDP w/ PPP, but I don't think the fact that Austria would rank merely below-average rather than second-worst is a very powerful argument. And there is some truth to this: visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European. I remember being particularly shocked by the state Germans live in and find acceptable.
> You're quite correct he should have used GDP w/ PPP, but I don't think the fact that Austria would rank merely below-average rather than second-worst is a very powerful argument
It is, because they were implying that Austria having the social housing policies that it does, it severely impacts GDP; but it doesn't. A tiny mountainous country that was twice in the middle of disastrous wars in the last century, has practically no raw materials... and would be in the middle of the US GDP PPP-wise, which has a much bigger market, a lot more workers, a lot of raw materials, etc etc etc etc. And again, this is assuming GDP matters for the average person's life... and it doesn't.
> visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European
At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
> A tiny mountainous country that was twice in the middle of disastrous wars in the last century, has practically no raw materials... and would be in the middle of the US GDP PPP-wise, which has a much bigger market, a lot more workers, a lot of raw materials, etc etc etc etc.
Austria got screwed by WWII for sure, but it still had a literate, educated, relatively wealthy population and was once the center of a great empire that amassed great wealth. And, I mean, Vienna was practically the cultural center of Europe for a brief period.
> At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
I'll be the first to argue that the American safety net needs improvements, but Social Security, (retirement and disability benefits), Medicare (65+ government health insurance), Medicaid (poor, unemployed, and disabled health insurance), and unemployment insurance all exist in the US, and together with other benefit programs constitute the majority of US spending. Indeed, US government spending per capita on health care is higher than many European countries. It'd be a good example of where having a higher nominal dollar value doesn't buy as much even adjusted for PPP, since obviously despite this the US doesn't have universal public health care.
This is considered uncouth to say, but household debt is sometimes due to horrible exigencies, but it's much more often the result of easy access to debt and material consumption. It's really shocking to see the people you know cannot be making more than 40-60k driving around 50-70k vehicle, and who also have a nice boat and a huge house. But even people not doing these things tend to live more materially comfortable lives than most Europeans I know.
GDP Per capita isn't pa particularly good metric, but it is a measure for how productive a country is. So when the original poster laments that Vienna has this model of subsidizing housing while the US needs to "get rid of econ 101 hokum", I think it does do a good job as showing that for their differences, the US does do a good job at things (creating economically productive value in this case).
I have worked for some time in Austria and I have many friends who are US citizens.
While the latter have indeed revenues that seem much higher, I would say that there is no doubt that the quality of life of my former Austrian colleagues was higher, based on purchasing power, balance between job and personal life and quality of food and environment.
I look at the numbers and think they demonstrate how much more efficient Austria is compared to any US state. I would prefer living in Austria to Mississippi.
Less than 5% of households in Austria have air conditioning, vs 93% in Mississippi. Granted it gets hot and humid in Mississippi, but the average summer highs in Austria is a sometimes-muggy ~27C and it will probably get worse with climate change - heat waves up to 40C have already happened. I'll take the AC and the other conveniences the Americans have, though it would be nice to have the social atmosphere Austria has too. To a large degree, Austrian efficiency is just getting by with less than an American does.
European lack of AC is mostly that they historically haven't needed it. It's not like they can't afford ACs. Also, 27C (80° in freedom units) as your normal peak temp is pretty firmly in "why bother with AC" territory.
This is one of those things that are harder to compare. Mississippi, like all of the US, has free public K12 education. The public university system also extends automatic full scholarships for academically qualified (and the qualification is not that high) students, and also admits basically anyone else who is able to pay, though without academic qualifications they will have to take advantage of Pell Grants (free money but not much) and federal student loans. Of course, you could argue about the results of the system, and admitting students who are not going to succeed in college and thereby saddling them with debt in exchange for nothing is a failing of the US system.
For health care, there are many publicly owned hospital systems in Mississippi, and of course Medicare is available for everyone 65+. Mississippi is not a Medicaid expansion state, so while Medicaid (free health care) is available for children, pregnant women, and the disabled, there is a coverage gap between that and qualifying for the ACA subsidies for health insurance (aka "Obamacare") which is sort of similar to the German system if you wave your hands; I think Austria has something similar, but I'm not familiar, but obviously the coverage is broader.
Only an American could make this argument. Vienna tops global comparisons for quality of life all the time. Life expectancy is higher in Austria, as are safety, education standards and all other meaningful indicators.
Who cares about some silly numbers on a bank account? We live good lives.
To be honest West Virginia is the best US state (I also am close with back to landers communities, and visited through their lenses, so I am biased). Homemade booze (I don't drink, but still), homemade goat cheese (best cheese I had in the US), best kayaking rivers, great hiking trails, great people, great horses, great musicians. What's not to love.
If you used housing prices an an indication of desirability (and an attempt to stay on topic) people much prefer to live there than the smallish mid-western town that I bought a house in.
I mean, trees and mountains instead of miles and miles of corn...
