If it were my home

Recently a friend of mine posted a link to the website www.ifitweremyhome.com on her Facebook profile. It is a site where you can compare what your life might be like living in countries all over the world versus living in the United States. Since I am now living in Spain, I thought it would be interesting to see this comparision. There are 3 rounds in this bout.


Round one: The Good
  • People in Spain use 45.46% less electricity. (I can attest to this. We don´t have a dryer, we unplug everything when not in use, etc.)
  • People in Spain consume 38.71% less oil. (When a liter of gas costs 1.5 euro, you use public transportation. Big SUVs here are few and fair between).
  • People in Spain spend 63.3% less on health care. (It´s free here. For now).

  • People in Spain have a 32.25% less chance of dying in infancy.
  • People in Spain live 1.94 years longer. (This sort of surprised me since I assumed people lived much longer here. Jose still has all 4 grandparents!).


 Round two: The Bad
  • People in Spain have 31.02% fewer babies. (You will see why in a moment).
  • People in Spain make 27.37% less money. (See the above statistic. I can testify to this fact as well).


 Round three: The Ugly
  • If Spain were your home (which for me it is) instead of the U.S. you would have 94.62% more chance of being unemployed. BOOM! That is a very scary statistic. I think it helps explain some of the other stats as well. They calculated Spain´s unemployment rate as being 18% and I believe that now it is higher than that. But compared to the U.S. at 9% you see a big difference.
What I like about this website is that you can compare a lot of different countries. I also checked other countries I have lived in or visited. In Chile I would make 68.32% less money but consume 73.68% less oil. In Mexico I would have 40.2% more babies and spend 88.42% less on health care. This website helps to put things into perspective a bit. It shows both positive and negative aspects of living in different places around the world. I would recommend poking around a bit.

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