And if you're perceiving the UCAS as being 'very authoritarian', I don't think you quite understand what the term 'authoritarian' means. As well, since I only possess a) GDP numbers and b) population, I can only do a GDP-per-capita calculus - not a median income. Provide me income figures, and we can talk.
As for Germany in Shadowrun? ... I don't think there's a single non-aristocratic/theocratic state in the old German boundaries, but I'm sure someone can correct me if I'm wrong - I'm well away from my Germany sourcebook right now.
Seems we started off of the wrong food, I didn't want to come across as harsh. Just asking for mor insight on the subject, since I think a discussion purely on average income(s) does not give a lot of insight on what living in the SR universe means to anyone, especially the masses. That is why I asked about median income values. Let me explain:
Edit: In the following text I commonly refer to gross domestic product as GDP and to purchasing power parity as PPP. The GDP is defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs)." The PPP on the other hand is a technique used to determine the relative value of different currencies. It thus exists to enable us to compare diffrent GDPs. [Thanks Ouroboros.]
The International Monetary Fund rates the USA at 53,101 $ GDP per capita (that ist of course PPP as the US-Dollar is also the unit for measurement) . This is close to numbers by the World Bank (53,143 $), the OECD (55,047$) and the CIA (est. 52,800$ in 2013). For Germany the numbers are 40,007$ (IMF), 43,332$ (WB), 42,121$ (OECD) and 39,500& (CIA) respectively. The countries vary from from ranking 6th (USA in the IMF ranking) to 21st (Germany in the CIA's table) though. They are both thus far outmatched by countries like Qatar or Luxemburg. Both are small, rich states that seem to be much harder to grasp for economists as there per capita GDPs vary considerably from source to source (Qatar: 98,814$ in the IMF table, but 131,758$ in the WB statistics; Luxembourg 78,670$ in IMF statistics and 90,790$ in those of the World Bank).
I took all figures from Wikioedia for simplicity'S sake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita These are pure income values, although PPP has already been established. It doesn't say anything about compulsory deduction, which can be very high (on
average 49.1 percent in Germany) or rather low (on
average 29.6 percent in the USA). Again, the magic word is "average", as taxes are often tied to the income level, while health insurance prices might not be. Any and all compulsory deductions might be capped at some level however, leaving those earning above the cap with more netto of your brutto income.
This leaves us with hugely diffrent amounts of gross income compared to disposable income. The OECD figures the US population to have a gross income of 55,047$ in average, but the disposable income is only 38,753$. The population of Germany however seem to have it far worse. While the gross income is already considerably lower at 42,121$, the hefty reduction of 49.1 percent allows only for 21,187$ of disposable income on average. Are Germans thus only half as rich as Americans? Is the powerhouse of the European Union in fact an impoverished second tier country OECD statistics compared to Americas first place might suggest? Especially since America is ranked first in the OECD statistics and Germany is ranked 16th, far behind Japan (11th) and South Korea (8th)?
Let's get back to the problem with average income as a source for information on how people in a society fare. It's obvious that the numbers are easy to obtain for any state that runs a (working) tax and revenue system. However the average is calculated by "the amount obtained by dividing the total aggregate income of a group by the number of units in that group" (again taking from Wikipedia for sake of transparency:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income). It's a completely fictional sum, as there is no guarantee that anyone earns exactly that amount. It also tells nothing about how many people earn considerably below that figure and how many earn considerably more. Thus it tells you nothing about income equality.
Median income does not, at least to some degree; and median
household income even tells you how much money is available per household, giving insight into what families might have at their disposal. On the downside relying on "household" means you loose all diffrences between single households, couples and large families. It simply states "what's in the pot".
And again, the population of the USA have a higher median income than people living in Germany. In the US the median household income is 30,932$, while in Germany it is only 24,623$ -- again it's already PPP. This still places Germany far behind the US (again on the first spot), ranking 12th on the list. But Germany is doing far better than South Korea (16th) and Japan (22nd) this time. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income)
Still not good enough though. Societies do not thrive on money only, let alone income. In the US the disposable income is always a much higher percentage of your gross income, no matter if you count median, average or your personal income. With an average deduction of 49.1 percent, Germans seem to loose almost half the earnings before they can even spend it. Or do they?
Right now, most Germans pay about 8.2 percent of their income directly to their mandatory health insurance provider and further 8-9 percent of your income tax goes to the churches and a couple of percent fund the federal unemployment and social services fonds. Since that is all handled by the government, you don't even get your full income monthly. All deductions are immediately transferred from your employer to the state. If you now deduct all these spendings the average American does not have to make, you land closer to the disposable income of Americans.
Still however inequality between income classes reigns madly in these statistics. Since money buys lots of things, but income doesn't tell you about equality and the development level of the society, we should also look at the human development index. It factors life expectancy, education and income. Now the USA is no longer in the first place, but on the fifth with Germany on the sixth, rich Luxembourg on the 21st and Qatar on the 31st.
This time, all factors are an aggregation of the whole society, giving no average or median figure for the HDI. For this there is the inequality adjusted HDI, which is usually lower than a coutnries respective HDI. Since the IHDI figures are concerned about average persons and views the unadjusted HDI as a potentially achievable figure were there no inequality.
"The IHDI takes into account not only the average achievements of a country on health, education and income, but also how those achievements are distributed among its population by “discounting” each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality. The IHDI is distribution-sensitive average level of HD. Two countries with different distributions of achievements can have the same average HDI value. Under perfect equality the IHDI is equal to the HDI, but falls below the HDI when inequality rises. The difference between the IHDI and HDI is the human development cost of inequality, also termed – the loss to human development due to inequality."
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/inequality-adjusted-human-development-index-ihdi
The United States have only weak mechanisms of control for the federal government when it comes to internal matters. That is by design and seems to be something many Americans want to keep. The result however is an enormous inequality in education, which directly influences income, health insurance and thus health and longevity (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States). About ten times more people earn half or less of the average income than duoble or more. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States)
If the initial assumption that the SR universe closely follows ours still stands, than this inequality should be the case for SR, too. However, after we deducted the corp's assets from the national economies, there is less to distribute. History shows that wars and financial crises lead to more inequality, if there are no strong governments that are willing the "keep the flock together" and spend huge sums on re-equalization programs. Here it starts to get tricky for SR. The whole world has basically been rocked by crises for almost all of the 21st century. So either governments managed to steer through the storms and kept the status quo in equality, or they failed.
Most likely the ultra rich simply fled into the megacorps, taking their money with them. In that case however, the nations would have benefitted from programmes to make it unlikely for richt people to "emigrate" into the megacorps. Something like a "you can leave, but your money stays"-laws. That's tricky, as it puts a nation on a collision course with the Corporate Court at some point. That however would make every nation state a 1990s Russia or a 1920s Germany just waiting for a strong leader to stabilize it, but with little care for international relations. It also comes across very authoritarian and forces the state to develop secret services that monitor everyone, but especially the rich. With everyone generating huge amounts of metadata about himself constantly, that becomes easier though.
In short, with national economies forced to give up huge parts of their financial power and with a world wide "warrior culture" and huge and violent cultures of anarchism, anti-establishment and shadowy corp wars, as well as constant wars and skirmishes world wide, I don't see how those nations in despair could not be vastly more authoritarian than today. Especially countries who are known to have huge militaries, large security apparatuses and thriving hate groups even today.
