Interesting comparison. It reminds me that the US and Canada are much more alike than they are different, and that one of Canada’s biggest problems is that we stubbornly refuse to accept this. Instead we cling to the idea that we’re unique, and make that supposed uniqueness our identity.
One minor quibble: I wouldn’t say that “We Canadians rejected the revolution,” as “we” weren’t here at the time, and there was no Canada, formally. More accurate to say that Canada was eventually formed by British subjects, indigenous people, and Americans who rejected the revolution.
GDP per capita obviously only measures so much. It's easy to compute your own "gross domestic happiness" or whatever you're trying to measure, but getting anyone else to agree with you is pretty much impossible.
So, it's a measurement that economists have agreed on and applied consistently, more or less. You can compare one state or country to another, or one year to another, which is definitely not nothing. What it means to its citizens is up to them.
This is why the good editors of Commonplace commissioned these pieces. Dispatches from real people adds texture and realism to the legible stats. Cheers to the editors!
I really enjoyed this, but I will quibble with the comparison of Wichita’s air connections vs Hamilton. Hamilton appears to be about 40 miles from Toronto, which has Canada’s #1 airport. Many people will choose to drive to Toronto to get a nonstop flight to wherever they want to go, versus flying from Hamilton with a good chance of having to connect (or pay higher fares). By contrast Wichita is more than 100 miles from the nearest major city- there are much stronger incentives for its residents to use its airport. Same logic is why Bridgeport Connecticut (about 60 miles from New York City) has virtually no air service.
Yes. Charles Bludhorn controlled Gulf & Westerm which owned Paramount as well as Simon & Schuster and many industrial companies. It was a different era.
The electric arc was good for recycling but not as primarily steel. I think lower quality rebar not the sheet and tube like for autos and Maytag. But between stringent environmental standards and unions and the slow atrophy of domestic autos, demand for primary steel in N America was not there.
Thank you for elaborating. Ill have to find that series. Bludhorn died veru young from a heart attack.
Hamilton is a Rust Belt town because Big Steel was bankrupted by an American company that developed a new technology and not because of government policies or whatever Republicans now believe…at least Vance realizes that Reagan has to get some of the blame for the decline in manufacturing jobs in America which is why he is promoting Nixon now.
The huge steel mills with blast furnaces that burned coke to make pig became obsolete in the 1970s. Although Youngstown Sheet and Tube was also a victim of the conglomerate craze as a New Orleans shipping company bought it and then ran it into the ground before Nucor could bankrupt it. Anyway, the technology is called mini mill and it uses electricity to recycle scrap in smaller mills that can be anywhere with cheap electricity…which America apparently has lot of scrap. A good show that deals with conglomerates is The Offer about the making of The Godfather where there is some Eurotrash guy that owns Paramount somehow??
GDP is an imperfect gauge of any state's character, but the anti-American contingent that attacks the statistic to disprove any U.S. accomplishment will take a victory lap when/if China's GDP ever exceeds ours.
Good article but there's a bit of a whitewash going on... where you say, "Americans honor and respect their military in ways that, at least to me, appear pretty healthy." As a veteran who talks to many other veterans about services, there's a total appearance over substance environment here. We visible pay homage where people can see it, but the substance our treatment of veterans is exactly the opposite. Service denials, funding cuts, and huge waiting lists for assistance. And heaven help you if you were a legal immigrant when you served. It the ICE boot for you...
Grew up in the US and now live in Canada and completely agree. In my view the main difference in the US is that companies and politicians have realized that they can sell tickets and products and get votes if they paint things in the flag and loudly applaud military personnel. But when it comes to actually funding the VA, for instance, nobody cares. Celebrating the military is about marketing much more than valuing service.
You see a *lot* less marketing in Canada that focuses on celebrating the military. But actual financial and community support for veterans after service seems anecdotally better up here to me--and at the absolute least it is no worse.
I am an American who has not visited Hamilton, but have visited many Canadian cities that include the large ones of Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and smaller ones such as Victoria BC and Halifax NS.
I have also driven about one million miles throughout the U.S., visited every state, and have a degree in economics whereby I appreciate what statistics on GDP per capita indicate about the "quality of life," and what they don't.
My general impression is that -- notwithstanding its generally harsher winter climate -- the quality of life in Canada is higher than in the U.S. Simple measurements of that -- indicating greater social cohesion -- are the lower incidents of crime, extreme poverty, and trashiness in Canadian cities, as well as longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than in the U.S., despite the complaints about "waiting times" in the Canadian socialized healthcare system.
If this sounds like a leftist post, I'll add that the main public policy difference that I support is the GENERAL willingness of Americans to finance our armed forces and use them in defense of ourselves and our allies, including Canada. And as a former Army officer, I support the military action against Iran, but also know that we would have more support from Americans as well as allies if Trump and his acolytes were more open to working with us and them rather than insulting us and them and even threatening us and them with various reprisals for not kissing his ass.
Culture and social considerations are every bit as important (if not much more so) to people’s perception of life as economics, and I think conflating all 3 of those into 1 number is a futile task.
I think it is statistically not contestable that Americans have much more money (ability to command goods and services) than pretty much any other country on earth (outside the city/petro states and some other small exceptions)
I *also* think most people (especially non-Americans) would agree that the things Americans spend that money *on* do not necessarily make their “quality of life” better.
I think you have to be more conscientious of what you’re choosing to do with your life than in other countries where things will just “fall into place” more easily in that quality of life direction, and many people simply don’t or can’t do so, even if they have access to slightly more resources
Just for the record, I'm not sure that comparing Hamilton's pricing to Pittsburgh is fair. The greater Pittsburgh area is only about 2.5 million people, and the greater Toronto area, including Hamilton, is north of 8 million. So have a look at housing in DFW, Chicago, or other top 10 cities in North America for comparison.
Excellent. Thank you. The idea that the Trump interregnum would be anything but a brief albeit painful pause in the tight relationship between neighbors has always struck me as ludicrous click-bate stuff.
Brian & Jeff, I agree with Brian's concluding sentence, "all happy countries, like all happy families, are alike". As a Canada-born, dual-passport-carrying, American living in Michigan for 33 year, who crosses the border 6-10 time annually I can attest that the similarities far outweigh the differences. May I suggest the next event in the series include an exchange with someone in Zambia, Venezuela, Czech Republic, etc. The Canada/Kansas differences will fade, we are blessed in how we "are alike'.
I think what we Americans don't understand about socialized healthcare systems is that they require the government to take an interventionist approach to maintaining the health of its citizens--the kind of intervention generally rejected even by the more left-leaning types who tend to be the most vocal supporters of universal healthcare. (Case in point: see the backlash against attempts to reduce the size of sugary drinks in deep-blue metropolitan centers like New York City or Boston.)
Good luck getting the U.S. electorate to sign off on tax or regulatory policies designed to encourage healthier behavior. The fact that we have some forms of socialized healthcare (e.g., Medicare, Obamacare) in place without serious public health initiatives is, to put it mildly, fiscally unsound.
Having lived on both sides of the border I'm not sure I see any difference at all in that kind of thing here in Canada. Canada has single-payer health insurance (ie Medicare for everyone), not government-run medicine. You can still consume all the sugar, booze and cigarettes you want all day long north of the border.
Of course it is legal in Canada to consume sugar, booze and cigarettes to your heart's content. But federal taxes on things like alcohol and cigarettes are, on average, double or higher compared to the U.S. The sin taxes that help fund Canada's single-payer healthcare system double as disincentives that are intended to discourage the average Canuck from doing things to his body that will eventually burden that system.
This is a mildly interesting piece about hypotheticals that establishment elites will surely cotton to. Meanwhile, in the real world, Don is implementing the latest iteration of his taco tariffs, while refusing to admit he's already lost MAGA's Middle East war. Life is good in the ivory tower...
Brian, more generally, I just can't get over the "other than that Mrs Lincoln" vibe of these pages. It's more concerned with retrofitting an intellectual veneer on a failing, incoherent administration than speaking truths that need spoken. It's concerned mostly with protecting the founder of the "new" right movement-Don, coupled with promoting and protecting the preferred inheritor of it-JD.
Speaking of tariffs, I'm still flummoxed by the 50% tariff we placed on Brazil. It's genesis was Don's pique over the prosecution of his fellow coup plotter, Mr Bolsonaro. If policy is to be determined purely by the revolving id of our dear leader, doesn't it render academic analysis irrelevant?
Been a while since I have been to Canada but when I was a frequent visitor mostly to Ontario, I was always stunned by the level of taxation on everything. I have my own health care story. Frequent sinus infections required surgery. On one of my follow-up visits, my doctor was on vacation and I drew a Canadian doctor down here on some sort of exchange program. She described the procedure in Canada which involved peeling off your face and scraping out the scar tissue with a scalpel. Here it was a laser gizmo up the nose. You can keep your "free" health care.
The US spends far, far more on health care, yet Canadians live longer. Maybe it's more complicated than your face peeling anecdote.
Here's hoping Don gets back around to the health care reform he promised a few dozen times, right around the time he promised infrastructure week and eliminating the entire US debt within eight years.
In America you pay for Bezos’ and Gates’ health care along with my friend’s health care that is a partner at a law firm and makes over $1 million a year. Basically anyone in America that can pass along health care costs and spread them out to as many people possible gets health care paid by other Americans. So remember whenever you purchase a service or a good in America you are paying for some wealthy Americans health care costs…Bezos thanks you!!
Interesting comparison. It reminds me that the US and Canada are much more alike than they are different, and that one of Canada’s biggest problems is that we stubbornly refuse to accept this. Instead we cling to the idea that we’re unique, and make that supposed uniqueness our identity.
One minor quibble: I wouldn’t say that “We Canadians rejected the revolution,” as “we” weren’t here at the time, and there was no Canada, formally. More accurate to say that Canada was eventually formed by British subjects, indigenous people, and Americans who rejected the revolution.
I agree, Edward. But I think the fact that we're still a constitutional monarchy, suggests our forebears were on to something. :)
GDP per capita obviously only measures so much. It's easy to compute your own "gross domestic happiness" or whatever you're trying to measure, but getting anyone else to agree with you is pretty much impossible.
So, it's a measurement that economists have agreed on and applied consistently, more or less. You can compare one state or country to another, or one year to another, which is definitely not nothing. What it means to its citizens is up to them.
This is why the good editors of Commonplace commissioned these pieces. Dispatches from real people adds texture and realism to the legible stats. Cheers to the editors!
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with looking behind the numbers, or saying "they don't measure everything."
But they obviously don't. They just give you a consistent measurement of SOMETHING: a place to start.
I really enjoyed this, but I will quibble with the comparison of Wichita’s air connections vs Hamilton. Hamilton appears to be about 40 miles from Toronto, which has Canada’s #1 airport. Many people will choose to drive to Toronto to get a nonstop flight to wherever they want to go, versus flying from Hamilton with a good chance of having to connect (or pay higher fares). By contrast Wichita is more than 100 miles from the nearest major city- there are much stronger incentives for its residents to use its airport. Same logic is why Bridgeport Connecticut (about 60 miles from New York City) has virtually no air service.
Yes. Charles Bludhorn controlled Gulf & Westerm which owned Paramount as well as Simon & Schuster and many industrial companies. It was a different era.
The electric arc was good for recycling but not as primarily steel. I think lower quality rebar not the sheet and tube like for autos and Maytag. But between stringent environmental standards and unions and the slow atrophy of domestic autos, demand for primary steel in N America was not there.
Thank you for elaborating. Ill have to find that series. Bludhorn died veru young from a heart attack.
Hamilton is a Rust Belt town because Big Steel was bankrupted by an American company that developed a new technology and not because of government policies or whatever Republicans now believe…at least Vance realizes that Reagan has to get some of the blame for the decline in manufacturing jobs in America which is why he is promoting Nixon now.
What was it about the Canadian environment that Hamilton’s steel company failed to upgrade and keep up with the technology? Asking for real.
The huge steel mills with blast furnaces that burned coke to make pig became obsolete in the 1970s. Although Youngstown Sheet and Tube was also a victim of the conglomerate craze as a New Orleans shipping company bought it and then ran it into the ground before Nucor could bankrupt it. Anyway, the technology is called mini mill and it uses electricity to recycle scrap in smaller mills that can be anywhere with cheap electricity…which America apparently has lot of scrap. A good show that deals with conglomerates is The Offer about the making of The Godfather where there is some Eurotrash guy that owns Paramount somehow??
GDP is an imperfect gauge of any state's character, but the anti-American contingent that attacks the statistic to disprove any U.S. accomplishment will take a victory lap when/if China's GDP ever exceeds ours.
Good article but there's a bit of a whitewash going on... where you say, "Americans honor and respect their military in ways that, at least to me, appear pretty healthy." As a veteran who talks to many other veterans about services, there's a total appearance over substance environment here. We visible pay homage where people can see it, but the substance our treatment of veterans is exactly the opposite. Service denials, funding cuts, and huge waiting lists for assistance. And heaven help you if you were a legal immigrant when you served. It the ICE boot for you...
If there was any justice, it would be a crime.
Grew up in the US and now live in Canada and completely agree. In my view the main difference in the US is that companies and politicians have realized that they can sell tickets and products and get votes if they paint things in the flag and loudly applaud military personnel. But when it comes to actually funding the VA, for instance, nobody cares. Celebrating the military is about marketing much more than valuing service.
You see a *lot* less marketing in Canada that focuses on celebrating the military. But actual financial and community support for veterans after service seems anecdotally better up here to me--and at the absolute least it is no worse.
I am an American who has not visited Hamilton, but have visited many Canadian cities that include the large ones of Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and smaller ones such as Victoria BC and Halifax NS.
I have also driven about one million miles throughout the U.S., visited every state, and have a degree in economics whereby I appreciate what statistics on GDP per capita indicate about the "quality of life," and what they don't.
My general impression is that -- notwithstanding its generally harsher winter climate -- the quality of life in Canada is higher than in the U.S. Simple measurements of that -- indicating greater social cohesion -- are the lower incidents of crime, extreme poverty, and trashiness in Canadian cities, as well as longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than in the U.S., despite the complaints about "waiting times" in the Canadian socialized healthcare system.
If this sounds like a leftist post, I'll add that the main public policy difference that I support is the GENERAL willingness of Americans to finance our armed forces and use them in defense of ourselves and our allies, including Canada. And as a former Army officer, I support the military action against Iran, but also know that we would have more support from Americans as well as allies if Trump and his acolytes were more open to working with us and them rather than insulting us and them and even threatening us and them with various reprisals for not kissing his ass.
Culture and social considerations are every bit as important (if not much more so) to people’s perception of life as economics, and I think conflating all 3 of those into 1 number is a futile task.
I think it is statistically not contestable that Americans have much more money (ability to command goods and services) than pretty much any other country on earth (outside the city/petro states and some other small exceptions)
I *also* think most people (especially non-Americans) would agree that the things Americans spend that money *on* do not necessarily make their “quality of life” better.
I think you have to be more conscientious of what you’re choosing to do with your life than in other countries where things will just “fall into place” more easily in that quality of life direction, and many people simply don’t or can’t do so, even if they have access to slightly more resources
Just for the record, I'm not sure that comparing Hamilton's pricing to Pittsburgh is fair. The greater Pittsburgh area is only about 2.5 million people, and the greater Toronto area, including Hamilton, is north of 8 million. So have a look at housing in DFW, Chicago, or other top 10 cities in North America for comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropolitan_areas_by_population
Excellent. Thank you. The idea that the Trump interregnum would be anything but a brief albeit painful pause in the tight relationship between neighbors has always struck me as ludicrous click-bate stuff.
Brian & Jeff, I agree with Brian's concluding sentence, "all happy countries, like all happy families, are alike". As a Canada-born, dual-passport-carrying, American living in Michigan for 33 year, who crosses the border 6-10 time annually I can attest that the similarities far outweigh the differences. May I suggest the next event in the series include an exchange with someone in Zambia, Venezuela, Czech Republic, etc. The Canada/Kansas differences will fade, we are blessed in how we "are alike'.
I think what we Americans don't understand about socialized healthcare systems is that they require the government to take an interventionist approach to maintaining the health of its citizens--the kind of intervention generally rejected even by the more left-leaning types who tend to be the most vocal supporters of universal healthcare. (Case in point: see the backlash against attempts to reduce the size of sugary drinks in deep-blue metropolitan centers like New York City or Boston.)
Good luck getting the U.S. electorate to sign off on tax or regulatory policies designed to encourage healthier behavior. The fact that we have some forms of socialized healthcare (e.g., Medicare, Obamacare) in place without serious public health initiatives is, to put it mildly, fiscally unsound.
Anyway, great pieces by Jeff and Brian!
Having lived on both sides of the border I'm not sure I see any difference at all in that kind of thing here in Canada. Canada has single-payer health insurance (ie Medicare for everyone), not government-run medicine. You can still consume all the sugar, booze and cigarettes you want all day long north of the border.
Of course it is legal in Canada to consume sugar, booze and cigarettes to your heart's content. But federal taxes on things like alcohol and cigarettes are, on average, double or higher compared to the U.S. The sin taxes that help fund Canada's single-payer healthcare system double as disincentives that are intended to discourage the average Canuck from doing things to his body that will eventually burden that system.
Re: Healthcare
High quality, affordable, universal: Pick any two.
This is a mildly interesting piece about hypotheticals that establishment elites will surely cotton to. Meanwhile, in the real world, Don is implementing the latest iteration of his taco tariffs, while refusing to admit he's already lost MAGA's Middle East war. Life is good in the ivory tower...
I would recommend you read my articles, in Commonplace, on tariffs. Definitely not a view from the ivory tower. I pay bills, Karl! :)
Brian, more generally, I just can't get over the "other than that Mrs Lincoln" vibe of these pages. It's more concerned with retrofitting an intellectual veneer on a failing, incoherent administration than speaking truths that need spoken. It's concerned mostly with protecting the founder of the "new" right movement-Don, coupled with promoting and protecting the preferred inheritor of it-JD.
Speaking of tariffs, I'm still flummoxed by the 50% tariff we placed on Brazil. It's genesis was Don's pique over the prosecution of his fellow coup plotter, Mr Bolsonaro. If policy is to be determined purely by the revolving id of our dear leader, doesn't it render academic analysis irrelevant?
Enjoyed this very much.
Thanks, Brandy!
Been a while since I have been to Canada but when I was a frequent visitor mostly to Ontario, I was always stunned by the level of taxation on everything. I have my own health care story. Frequent sinus infections required surgery. On one of my follow-up visits, my doctor was on vacation and I drew a Canadian doctor down here on some sort of exchange program. She described the procedure in Canada which involved peeling off your face and scraping out the scar tissue with a scalpel. Here it was a laser gizmo up the nose. You can keep your "free" health care.
The US spends far, far more on health care, yet Canadians live longer. Maybe it's more complicated than your face peeling anecdote.
Here's hoping Don gets back around to the health care reform he promised a few dozen times, right around the time he promised infrastructure week and eliminating the entire US debt within eight years.
In America you pay for Bezos’ and Gates’ health care along with my friend’s health care that is a partner at a law firm and makes over $1 million a year. Basically anyone in America that can pass along health care costs and spread them out to as many people possible gets health care paid by other Americans. So remember whenever you purchase a service or a good in America you are paying for some wealthy Americans health care costs…Bezos thanks you!!