So you imply that this erroneously or misleadingly skews the results.
Does it?
A few Americans created Google, an invaluable business tool that increases my productivity when I'm looking for data to do my job with (so much so that I can still jack around on FR and get my job done!!!)
We could take those 10,674 people, put screwdrivers in their hands and have them assemble bicycles.
That would 'bring back blue-collar jobs' and 'fix' the averages, wouldn't it?
Actually, they were foreigners. Shhhhhhh.
I don’t imply it, I state it as fact. Google no more distorts this data than does Bill Gate's net worth distort the average of per-capita wealth, as Gate's wealth of about $53 billion exceeds the GDP of a number of nations. To get a full picture, we really need to see the distribution table along with the rest of the rankings. Norway’s results are probably also skewed by a few special situations.
Norway illustrates another aspect of these types of comparisons: there is a big difference between per-employee productivity and the standard of living after taking the tax burden and other local factors in to account.
For example, a person on a even a modest income can afford their own modest home in the part of Missouri that I live in, while such a pay-scale would not pay for much at all in Manhattan.
Indeed, on August 27 the Heritage Foundation released a background report, “How Poor Are America’s Poor? Examining the “Plague” of Poverty in America” [1] and it points out from just released Census Data that 43% of people classified as “poor” in the US own their own homes, and “[t]he average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)”
The wages in some countries are high because they have to be in order to pay the taxes.
But to your latent concern for “blue-collar jobs”, in truth we cannot un-ring the bell so to speak. We cannot stop peasants in China, or Pakistan from going to school and learning a skill that they are willing to practice for far less than someone in the west thinks they deserve. The only answer is for people in the US to create more value. There are a variety of factors in play here which are far beyond the scope of this topic.
Needless to say, Google is a delightful example of innovation, and of the benefits of having the environment that can nurture a business idea, nurture that includes access to venture capital and a culture that is well practiced at how to maximize the potential of a good idea. At the time, Google could not have started, let alone grown into the heavy (information) industry it has become in anywhere else in the world except California. Even today, there is more startup and VC activity in California than occurs on entire continents elsewhere, but the jobs that are created are far more white collar than blue and that is the way it is. We cannot un-ring that bell.
[1] How Poor Are America’s Poor? Examining the “Plague” of Poverty in America by Robert E. Rector Backgrounder #2064
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm