I feel like I've sucked up a lot of the oikophobia/xenophilia of those around me, and I'm trying to work through the mildly negative opinion I have of the United States, especially after reading cautious optimists like Stephen Pinker. However, I'm stopped a little by the fact that I'm not very knowledgeable about economics or statistics.
For example, I've read articles like this one or this one which claim something like "the poorest quintile/decile of Americans are richer than the poorest quintile/decile of most countries / the richest quintile/decile of several countries / etc."
However, I'm not quite sure how to interpret them. What does it mean to say that "America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest" or "[I]f the U.S. “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest"? Presumably, America has a higher cost of living that's eating up more of this supposed wealth or something, right? Or am I just overestimating how well off India's richest are or Canada's median person is?
I've considered that I might have to branch out into more tangible numbers that get at things I actually care about, like:
Does anyone know where I could start looking for these kinds of statistics, or other questions I should start asking in order to get a better handle on the state of the American poor relative to people in the rest of the world? I have the intuition that American poor are probably better off than much of the world after all transfers are taken into account, but I want to have more than intuition to back up this position.