By Sam Pizzigati

August 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   We Americans tend not to pay much attention to our northern neighbors. Often, entire election cycles can come and go without anyone running for national office saying anything about Canada.

But that’s changing.

Canada now looms much larger in our politics, mainly because Canadians enjoy a health care system far superior to our own. Canada’s single-payer approach to health care has become — for many Americans — a guiding inspiration.

We need what Canadians have — in more ways than one. An innovative new report from the Canadian Centre for the Study of Living Standards finds that Canadians now enjoy higher incomes than their counterparts in the United States as well.

The new report challenges conventional economic wisdom on household well-being.

That wisdom, notes report author Simon Lapointe, typically defines well-being as “GDP per capita.” To calculate this yardstick, economists take the sum total of the goods and services a nation produces, divide that by the nation’s population, and tell us the resulting number measures how well a nation’s people are doing.

By this conventional measure, Americans are doing much better than Canadians. In 2016, the latest year with comparable stats available, GDP per capita in the United States ran over 20 percent higher than GDP in Canada, $57,798 to $47,294.

But GDP per capita can obscure reality as most households live it, especially in a deeply unequal society like the United States. American households certainly do rate as richer than Canadian on average. But “much greater incomes at the top of the income distribution” in the United States, explains the study, are inflating that average.