I've spent a lot of time in a lot of different countries/cities with wildly different economics and I have a very different view of things.
PPP in the real world is a bit of a fraud, at least in the way people commonly use it. A lot of things you compare between two countries are in fact very different in reality. You might actually end up paying a lot more in nominal dollars for a lot of things in countries which are supposedly "cheap" to get not even the same quality. I find that the cost to maintain the same quality of life between different countries ends up being much more similar between countries than the statistics would have you believe.
I'm in a relatively poor country at the moment. On paper meat costs a fraction of what it does in the US, but what you get at the local market tastes absolutely terrible, uneatable to my spoiled western standards. I think they literally feed the animals trash. To get quality meat you need to go to specialty stores in the rich neighborhoods that caters to the country's elite. There it's actually about 10% more than what I pay at a US supermarket and it still is not as good. The same thing goes for housing, household goods, clothes, etc. In many countries you pay a huge premium for goods imported from the west, and the selection is often quite limited.
This has been my experience everywhere in the world. Excluding a few cities where you pay a premium just on the basis of the local job market, you more or less get what you pay for no matter where you go. The differences that don't fit into spreadsheets are quite significant and almost fully account for the pricing differences from location to location.
This is the common expat mistake. Your cost of living can grow very high, if you try to replicate your old lifestyle in a country that doesn't support it. With the same approach, you can also find that living in the US is 2x to 3x more expensive than in Western Europe. (I personally settled for 2x by making some compromises.)
No, not really. I specifically use meat as an example because you can buy a chicken pretty much everywhere in the world. To be clear, there are SOME things everywhere that are exceptional and cheap. Here for example I can hire a cook, two maids, and a driver for next to nothing even paying well above average wages, but having a dishwasher or air conditioning is an unthinkable luxury and even a vacuum is quite rare. Then there are a million little things you can't change at any price; you can't drink water from the tap even in my sparkling luxury apartment on the poshest block of the nicest city, and if I ever needed serious medical care I'd be on the first plane back to the US. There are tradeoffs everywhere but when you factor everything in including the overall quality of life in the city itself, prices are quite similar everywhere around the world...as you'd expect, since that's how markets work.
My point is that the cost of things is more similar than people think, not what you should or should not buy as an individual, and that these adjusted PPP numbers do not make for valid comparisons. 99% of the time when PPP is used in the popular press someone is trying to bend the numbers to distort the real economic situation to try to further whatever narrative they're pushing. You will never see these people making the argument that Alabama is poised to overtake New York economically because on the average salary you can afford a larger apartment in Mobile than in Manhattan. To me these arguments sound equally ridiculous.
PPP in the real world is a bit of a fraud, at least in the way people commonly use it. A lot of things you compare between two countries are in fact very different in reality. You might actually end up paying a lot more in nominal dollars for a lot of things in countries which are supposedly "cheap" to get not even the same quality. I find that the cost to maintain the same quality of life between different countries ends up being much more similar between countries than the statistics would have you believe.
I'm in a relatively poor country at the moment. On paper meat costs a fraction of what it does in the US, but what you get at the local market tastes absolutely terrible, uneatable to my spoiled western standards. I think they literally feed the animals trash. To get quality meat you need to go to specialty stores in the rich neighborhoods that caters to the country's elite. There it's actually about 10% more than what I pay at a US supermarket and it still is not as good. The same thing goes for housing, household goods, clothes, etc. In many countries you pay a huge premium for goods imported from the west, and the selection is often quite limited.
This has been my experience everywhere in the world. Excluding a few cities where you pay a premium just on the basis of the local job market, you more or less get what you pay for no matter where you go. The differences that don't fit into spreadsheets are quite significant and almost fully account for the pricing differences from location to location.