how can the world economy perform badly and crash?

Question

what is the standard or benchmark for good economic performance worldwide? is there anyone doing better than us?

Answer 1

This is two separate questions.

First, true failures seem to be monetary events. When people are unwilling to forgo possession of money today in exchange for future rewards you tend to get economic crashes. More importantly, it seems critical that some component of the economy, at the same time, has become inflexible and rigid. For example, real estate prices are not falling far enough to keep the marketing time down. Prices are downwardly rigid. People are unwilling to accept the market clearing price.

On the second side, it is probably GDP per capita, but there are other measures of "well-offness." Some, such as life expectancy, leisure time or median wage imply America is well below its peers.