# Are You Richer, or Just More Expensive? - Published: 2026-04-05 - Canonical URL: https://www.ambacelar.com/blog/are-you-richer-or-just-more-expensive GDP measures how much money moves through an economy, not how good life actually is for the people living in it. --- Eventually, you grow up and realise that GDP, on its own, tells you almost nothing about how good life actually is. It tells you that a lot of money is moving around. It does not tell you whether ordinary people can afford a home, raise children without financial panic, or live with any real dignity on a normal salary. A city can be globally prestigious, economically powerful, and still offer the average person living there an absolutely miserable deal. And yet we keep using GDP as shorthand for success. As if a bigger number means a better life. As if "the economy is strong" and "people are doing well" are the same sentence. They are not. --- GDP measures output. It measures the total value of goods and services flowing through an economy. What it does not measure, at all, is whether life feels affordable, stable, or humane for the person earning an ordinary wage. It cannot tell you whether a 30-year-old on a normal salary can rent a flat alone. It cannot tell you whether two working parents can afford childcare without drowning. It says nothing about commute times, housing quality, savings rates, or whether "getting by" requires constant, grinding financial stress. Here is what it *can* do: it can make an expensive, high-pressure system look like a prosperous one. Because sometimes a huge GDP simply means that huge amounts of money must circulate for ordinary people to maintain an ordinary life. If rent is brutal, childcare is brutal, healthcare is brutal, and the cost of simply existing in a city keeps climbing, then yes, more money moves through the system. GDP goes up. But that does not mean anyone is thriving. It means the cost of normality has been inflated to the point where large incomes are required just to stand still. --- The numbers make this painfully clear. In London, the Trust for London's 2025 Minimum Income Standard found that a single working-age adult in Inner London needs **£54,400 a year** just to reach what researchers consider a minimum acceptable standard of living. Not comfort. Not luxury. The minimum. And rent alone eats **49%** of that budget. Meanwhile, office administrator roles in the City of London average around £36,000. Graduate median salaries fifteen months after finishing university sit at £28,500 nationally. The gap between what London demands and what London pays ordinary people is not a crack. It is a canyon. Housing? London had the highest house-price-to-earnings ratio in England and Wales in 2025: homes cost **10.6 times** average earnings. Cross the Atlantic and the picture does not improve. New York City's median household income is $80,483, which sounds robust until you see that average asking rent for a one-bedroom is around $3,595 a month. In San Francisco, the MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates that a single adult with no children needs $32.44 an hour just to meet basic needs. Two working parents with two children? They each need **$48.99 an hour**. Annual childcare costs for that household sit around $54,400. The median value of an owner-occupied home is $1.39 million. These are rich cities. On paper. For ordinary earners, they are expensive systems demanding expensive incomes, and calling that arrangement "prosperity." --- So here is the question nobody in the GDP conversation wants to sit with. You live in London, New York, or San Francisco. You earn an average wage in an average job. Your parents are not rich. You do not own property. There is no family money waiting in the background. Do you actually live a better life than your rough equivalent in Bangkok, Tokyo, or Chongqing? Or do you simply live in a place with higher prices, higher stress, and a more globally powerful currency? Because in Bangkok, estimated monthly living costs excluding rent are about ฿22,255 for a single person. One-bedroom rentals in central areas start around ฿22,000–25,000 a month, with options available from ฿11,500. Numbeo estimates that Bangkok is roughly 53% cheaper than London excluding rent, and that rents are about 73% lower on average. Customer-service roles in Bangkok commonly pay ฿20,000–30,000 a month, and that money stretches in ways that a London salary simply cannot. In Chongqing, a vast, modern, dramatically vertical Chinese city, estimated monthly costs excluding rent are about ¥3,261 for a single person. Rental listings show one-room options around ¥1,300 a month. Three-bedroom family apartments can be found for ¥2,000–2,500. Tokyo complicates things in a useful way. It is not cheap. It is not a low-GDP city. But it is a place where ordinary life tends to function more coherently than in London or San Francisco. Rents are serious but not absurd relative to earnings. Public transport works. The cost of food, healthcare, and daily services does not carry the same extractive weight. Tokyo is proof that a high-GDP city does not have to punish its average residents as a condition of existing. If the answer to the question, "does the person in London or San Francisco obviously live better?", is not a clear yes, then GDP has already failed as a measure of ordinary prosperity. --- But there is another layer to this, and it is the one that makes the whole thing harder to stomach. GDP is not just a domestic statistic. It is a geopolitical tool. When you live inside a high-GDP, strong-currency economy, you gain something beyond a local paycheque: international purchasing power. You can fly abroad. You can book hotels in other countries without flinching. You can study, holiday, invest, or relocate in ways that people from lower-GDP economies often cannot, even when those people live as well as you do at home. Sometimes better. That is the real obscenity of the GDP illusion. Someone in Bangkok or Chongqing might have more space, less rent stress, cheaper food, a shorter commute, more time with family, and more money left at the end of the month than someone in London. But the person in London can afford to fly to Bangkok. The person in Bangkok often cannot afford to fly to London, to see, firsthand, that the Londoner is house-sharing with strangers into their mid-thirties, spending half their income on a room, and calling it a career. Two people. Similar quality of daily life, or one arguably better than the other. But only one of them has the currency that travels. Only one of them is assumed, by default, to belong to the more successful economy. That is not a measure of civilisational achievement. That is a measure of whose currency projects furthest. --- None of this means GDP is meaningless. It measures something real. But the moment people start treating it as proof that ordinary life is affordable, secure, or worth the price, that is where the lie begins. The real question was never how large an economy is. It was always what kind of life an ordinary person can actually build inside it. And right now, some of the largest, most prestigious economies in the world are offering their average citizens a pretty brutal answer. --- ## Sources ### London / UK - [Trust for London – A Minimum Income Standard for London 2025](https://trustforlondon.org.uk/documents/1027/A_Minimum_Income_Standard_for_London_2025_final.pdf) - [ONS – Housing affordability in England and Wales: 2025](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingaffordabilityinenglandandwales/2025) - [HESA – Graduate Outcomes 2022/23 salary summary](https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/17-07-2025/sb272-higher-education-graduate-outcomes-statistics/salary) - [Reed – Average Office Administrator Salary in City of London](https://www.reed.co.uk/average-salary/average-office-administrator-salary-in-city-of-london) ### New York City - [U.S. Census QuickFacts – New York City](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/PST040225) - [MIT Living Wage Calculator – New York](https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/36) - [Zillow Rental Manager – New York rental market trends](https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york-ny/) ### San Francisco - [MIT Living Wage Calculator – San Francisco County](https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06075) - [U.S. Census QuickFacts – San Francisco](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocitycalifornia/PST040225) - [Zillow Rental Manager – San Francisco rental market trends](https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-francisco-ca/) ### Bangkok - [Numbeo – Cost of Living in Bangkok](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Bangkok) - [JobsDB – Customer Relations Officer salary in Thailand](https://th.jobsdb.com/career-advice/role/customer-relations-officer/salary) - [DDproperty – Condos for rent in Bangkok](https://www.ddproperty.com/en/condo-for-rent/in-bangkok-th10) ### Tokyo - [GaijinPot – Average Salary in Tokyo](https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-tokyo/) - [Numbeo – Cost of Living in Tokyo](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Tokyo) - [SUUMO – Tokyo rentals](https://suumo.jp/chintai/tokyo/) ### Chongqing - [Numbeo – Cost of Living in Chongqing](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Chongqing) - [TeamedUp China – Average Salary in Chongqing](https://teamedupchina.com/average-salary-in-chongqing-china/) - [58.com – Chongqing rentals](https://mob.58.com/zujin/cq-cqftl/)