To put into perspective, in Vietnam, 12 eggs cost only $1.22 maximum (this is considered expensive).
What is the median American income btw?
To put into perspective, in Vietnam, 12 eggs cost only $1.22 maximum (this is considered expensive).
What is the median American income btw?
According to this website the median US income is $19,300 while Vietnam’s is $3,150 (DISCLAIMER: these numbers are in a weird unit they call “Int$”, which is not actual USD; in actual dollars the US median is around 50,000 USD, but the relative ratio appears to be correct: median incomes in Vietnam are around six times lower).
$8 in the US is therefore only slightly higher proportionally to the median income than $1.22 is in Vietnam.
What this misses out on is that there are regional differences from state to state inside the US in both prices of goods as well as median income. The median income in Massachusetts may be almost twice as high as that in Mississippi for example.
It also has to be said that $8, according to this table, is significantly higher than the average price of a dozen eggs in all US states except Hawaii, with the national average being around $5.
According to this article, one chicken egg in Vietnam is around VND2,100, which converts to about $0.08, making a dozen eggs $0.96. Maybe there is also some variety in the price depending on whether you buy them in the supermarket or from a local farmers’ market, i don’t know if there are price controls on eggs in Vietnam like there are (were?) on rice…
If this data is correct then $5 is a lower proportion of an $19,300 income than $0.96 is of $3,150, meaning that eggs are more affordable for the median income in the US than Vietnam. (Again, the numbers are a bit weird here because they’re not in real dollars, but the ratios still remain the same; you can look at these as not full yearly incomes but something like 4-5 months of income).
But this still doesn’t tell you the whole story because we haven’t yet looked at the overall distribution of income for the lowest earners in society. It is possible that with Vietnam being a less unequal society than the US, the poorest people in Vietnam could still have more relative purchasing power than the poorest people in the US do.
Other costs of living such as utilities, phone bill, transportation, healthcare, rent, etc. are much lower in Vietnam too. Add to that a 90% home ownership rate compared to the US’s 65%, and poor people may well have a higher proportion of their income available for buying food than they do in the US. (I don’t know if this is really the case… someone would have to look into the numbers in detail.)
And then you also have to factor in people growing their own food which is very common in rural Vietnam, with a certain number of those households probably having their own chickens.
I found this page giving a detailed breakdown of costs of living in Vietnam, but i don’t know how accurate this is. I don’t see a source for their numbers.
You hinted at it but comparing ratios of median wages is meaningless because if you fracture a bone in Vietnam you don’t have to pay several thousands of PPP adjusted dollars for treatment.
It’s not entirely meaningless but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Still, it’s better than what you usually see people do when they try to argue which country is better off, which is simply comparing GDP, or GDP per capita, often not even taking PPP into account. Looking at the ratio of median income to costs of living, while not perfect, is still giving you a better picture of how people actually live than mindlessly citing GDP numbers.