They served as bases to spread the American culture through music and cinema and later with the industry through the coal and steel community, to create a single and unified market
The US did not want to create competition, but to break monopolies and to create a unified market for its industrial complex
The remnants of that goal are visible today with Big Tech
That manchester capitalism with different decorations rhetoric does not hold up to scrutiny. In particular when you hold it against current examples of economic colonialism like the chines lend & own campaign in Africa .
The army is provided by the local dictator or by playing different ethnic groups against one another.Britain never had enough soldiers to conquer India , but india had. Same for Russia .
My dad was part of the occupation of postwar Germany.
The bases were there to protect Germany against the Soviets.
I remember once on the autobahn around 1970, and a fighter came by hedgehopping at high speed. He was a few feet off the ground, and looked like just under Mach 1. The citizens didn't particularly like the noise and disruption, but they understood the need for the Air Force to train hard.
I also remember touring East Berlin (yes, East Berlin) in 1969. Going through Checkpoint Charlie and seeing the Wall is plenty convincing of the need for the US military being there.
France, on the other hand, didn't much care for the US military bases and wound up pushing them out.
BTW, the US Military was pretty thorough in making sure US personnel and military families behaved like guests in Germany, as they were invited guests.
Ever since the Berlin Airlift, the US was friends with Germany.
The Americanization of Germany came later. I recall visiting a shopping mall in Germany in the 2000's, and you could not tell you were in Germany rather than in any suburb in America. Shopping malls did not exist there in 1970.
>BTW, the US Military was pretty thorough in making sure US personnel and military families behaved like guests in Germany, as they were invited guests. Ever since the Berlin Airlift, the US was friends with Germany.
All the more sad that the chief component of Japanese animosity towards Japan-stationed US forces are sexual crimes, particularly in Okinawa where the Marines especially don't seem to know how to keep their dicks in their pants. There have been at least two incidents just this year if I recall, and that's just of the ones we know.
I really can't blame the locals wanting Americans to get the fuck out, security be damned.
That is indeed sad. Such crimes against the locals should be severely punished.
I found out many years later that if I had committed a crime like shoplifting in Germany, my father would have been cashiered. The military took their guest status very seriously. An officer who could not control his family was not fit to be an officer.
Not saying that is good, but you really have to analyze something like that in terms of rates, not anecdotes. Everywhere you put people there are going to be incidents.
I don't blame locals for feeling however they feel. It's their country.
The US places its military worldwide out of its own interest, not to protect anyone. That's a very rose colored glasses interpretation of the past and the present you have there.
It's the opinion of my father who was in the early occupation, and later was doing military planning work with generals and such - all focused on repelling possible Soviet invasion scenarios.
Protecting Germany's sovereignty also protected America's interests. They were aligned.
Germany (like France could and did) could have expelled the US military any time they wanted to.
When I lived near Luke AFB in the early 70's, Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots to fly F-104 Starfighters. I used to ride my bike onto the base and go to the flight line, and watch those lawn darts take off. They'd get halfway down the runway and light the afterburners! Freakin' awesome. Oh I wanted to be a pilot soo bad.
An F-104 was little more than a pilot strapped to a monster of a jet engine.
Meanwhile in the real world, when Washington DC talked Bonn listened. Still applies today to some level.
Edit: Public opinion can also be shaped, not least after the trauma of the Nazi period and in the midst of the Cold War. Actual influence behind the scene is usually not made known to public, and the influence of the US over Germany has been overwhelming.
I lived in Germany from 68-71. The Germans wanted us there, because they were afraid of a Soviet invasion. Wanting the US military there is quite different from the US forcing themselves on them.
Not once living there did I ever get the impression that the Germans felt the US presence was forced on them. They appreciated that the US was there to keep the Red Army at bay.
Of course, sometimes they'd complain about the Americans having bad manners, usually justifiably, and sometimes they'd envy the wealth of the Americans. I even attended a German elementary school for a while, and nobody bullied me because I was an American. I was even invited by other students to their homes to play.
The US bases were of mutual benefit to the Germans and the Americans.
Perhaps there was an aggressive imperialistic authoritarian empire next door that had split germany in two and run their half into the ground economically? No, it must be that America is bad and this country had no agency as you said
This is childish. I never made value judgements and just pointed out that the reality is not what's sold to the public in official stories (and that holds true everywhere).
Germany after the war was an occupied country, split up into various zones by their opponents in the war. There is no fundamental difference in the way the US or the SU setup their bases there. Sovereignty implies they had a say in whether or not the US army is stationed there, which I think is a ridiculous claim. Thus, as there was no sovereignty, there was no sovereignty to protect.
That in 1955 Germany had a realistic way of saying, we're a sovereign country and don't want US troops on our soil?
But that in the end has nothing to do with my original response, which was "the US sets up its bases out of its own self interest". Even if those interests align, it doesn't mean it's there to honor German wishes. If those interests had not aligned, the US would've still stayed there, this is as clear as the header of this page being orange.
After 1955, the Germans could have asked the US to leave. The Germans weren't stupid, though. They had very good reason to want the US military there. I've already covered it in this thread.
Recall I've lived through that, and my father was pretty involved in it in the military bases there. I've had German friends, and been in their homes, and interacted with them.
My comment was not about Germany, but about the US. It was "they do it out of their own interest". If you think Germany had the possibility in 1955 to claim sovereignty and ask the US troops to leave, I will respectfully disagree. The troops would stay because they were there out of their own self interest, whatever Germany wanted is immaterial.
You haven't presented any evidence whatsoever for your conclusion. I've presented first hand, second hand, and documentary evidence for my case.
P.S. My dad also spent time stationed in France. He said the French made it very clear they wanted the USAF out. He said it was quite a contrast with Germany.
I was there, and my father told me is not evidence, it's an anegdote. I live in Germany now and when people back home ask me what it's like I say I don't know because I only live in a small part of it. You have very simplistic views of complex situations which those involving tens of millions of people surely are.
I can only repeat, I wrote "The US places its military worldwide out of its own interest, not to protect anyone". Whatever Germany wanted there does not make any difference.
Also again, the best I can do is respectfully disagree about the idea Germany asking the US to leave, and the US respecting its sovereignty. That West Germany was sovereign since 1955 is only part of the story, East Germany became sovereign in 1954, but it would be difficult to argue it meant anything of value (because it didn't).
> Germany (like France could and did) could have expelled the US military any time they wanted to.
No, not legally. (And also not in reality)
1955 were the treaties, conventions, protocols and schedules of the Bonn-Paris Conventions, the Pariser Verträge in German. The treaty terminating the occupation of (West) Germany was the revised “Convention on Relations between the Three Powers and the Federal Republic of Germany”, in German often short „Deutschlandvertrag“. The three powers in article 2 of that convention explicitly reserved the rights for Berlin and Germany as a whole and relevant for this the right to station armed forces in Germany (article 2, articles 4 and 5).
The 1955 conventions were a package deal. Part of it was the “Convention on the Presence of Foreign Forces in the Federal Republic of Germany”, which further assured the Three Allied Powers right to station forces in Germany, although limited to what was already there.
Both conventions were only to be terminated by all signatory states or by a future German reunification agreement and peace treaty. That was in effect the “Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany“ of 1990, the 2+4-treaty, in which the allied powers, including the Soviet Union, terminated their rights. Hence final settlement.
Not at all surprised that despite your years of railing against socialism your dad was in the military. A true free market would provide for its own defense, not steal from taxpayers.
Saying Germany embraced the free market is not correct. Germany under Erhard had a social market economy (even during the "Wirtschaftswunder*, the economic miracle). While some free market principles were followed (price liberation, free trade) and it was certainly more market liberal than France at the time, it still came with substantial protection (universal healthcare, strong labor protections and unions, anti monopoly regulations etc.)
The situation back then was decidedly _not_ what the term "free market" (of the libertarian variety) would imply today.
Definitely, just wanted to make sure that no one who's passing by your comment thinks that post-war Germany had some gung ho modern definition style free market.
East Germany did better than its peers in the Soviet block, and West Germany did better than its peers outside of it.
People love to point at policy, because it's a thing we can control, but the most important factors are often cultural issues we both don't control, and don't entirely understand.
Housing and healthcare costs are insane. When you're older, you need a lot more healthcare (and you won't have that nice insurance plan you had at your big company job when you were working), and housing keeps getting more expensive, which is a problem if you're on a fixed income. You could move to much cheaper locales (i.e. rural areas), but those are "healthcare deserts" where there's no competent doctors left and hospitals are all closing left and right, plus when you're infirm how exactly do you drive yourself? Living in a walkable city (or any city really) is much more doable when you're older for these practical reasons (less need to drive, healthcare providers close by), but then you can't afford the housing there.
Housing in US is in fact one of the cheapest... everywhere, measured as price per square foot as percentage of income. Several times cheaper than in many countries and at least somewhat cheaper than almost every single one, rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian.
It's just that "normal" housing in the US is what's only attainable to the very rich and only because they inherited it, in most of Europe let's say: even 1% won't be able to buy an equivalent of median new US single family house, in EU - that 1% probably owns a similar or somewhat better house but simply because they bought or built it generations before.
Got a source for this?
I'm only finding sources that vehemently disagree, and say the only countries worse for this are Portugal and Canada. Everywhere in the world is better.
That's probably because what you are googling is a ratio of price of average house to average income... Which only means that American houses are much much bigger and thus more pricey, because Americans have many times more disposable income per family than just about any nation in the world.
But if you compare the price of the SAME sized house to the average income, the situation is opposite. U.S. is the 3rd best after Oman and Saudi Arabia. It's just that Americans are not satisfied with houses even twice the size of what people in many rich countries are happy with.
American houses are large and unaffordable. The usual term for a situation like that is inefficiency.
Price per square foot is not a very useful metric, because neither utility nor construction costs scale directly with the size of a house. A 3000 square foot house is not 2x as good as a 1500 square foot house, and it should not cost 2x as much to build. Roughly speaking, walls are expensive, while making the rooms larger is cheap. And bedrooms are cheap, while bathrooms are expensive.
Well, in Germany health care is affordable in terms of cost.
However, while 20 years ago you just went to a doctor when you were sick, these days you will wait hours and hours even at your family physician's crowded waiting room.
You need a specialist?
6 months if it's something serious like a cardiologist.
If you're on private health insurance, alright, only 3 months.
I don't know if this is specific to Germany, or similar in all of Europe.
But that is a change many people notice that I speak with.
In the US before Obamacare I could make an appointment with a specialist on the same week. Now it takes more than six months. Three different specialties that I know of and the only three I tried. Apparently we're catching up with Europe.
Americans are discovering that giving universal healthcare access to everyone means those who already had access, now have to wait longer to make room for everyone else. That's how it works.
No they aren't. Americans are finding out that when you abuse medical workers by calling them "essential workers" who have to continue working during a pandemic while hundreds of thousands of patients berate you for saying things like "you should get vaccinated" or "don't eat an anti-parasite medication for horses" and overwork them and pay them shit, they quit in droves.
They are then finding out that for profit businesses have no interest in re-hiring all the workers they had before the pandemic, because they didn't lose as much business as they saved money in salary, so everyone is just running a skeleton crew that they overwork.
Meanwhile the data I find for emergency room visits are that there's barely been any increase in percentage of the population that visited an emergency room since 1997.
Companies are spending less on services and letting us just suffer because we don't have better options and YET AGAIN dumb Americans for some reason blame the government for completely independent companies making self serving choices?!
This is literally not true if you live close to any urban center. Plenty of specialists available in any city. The US healthcare system is broken in many, many ways but "obamacare made me wait 6 months" is not one of them.
This is Albuquerque, which is a three hour drive. There used to be a couple of these specialists in a closer, smaller city, just two hours away. They have all gone. Along with more than half of the rural general practitioners in the surrounding 100 miles. One closed his practice entirely after completely failing to find a replacement. I recently went to an appointment with a specialist in Albuquerque that took me six months to get ... and spoke only with a nurse. No doctors are available even after that long. This was after six months of waiting while in pain and bleeding out of my ass daily.
Shortly before Obamacare I went to the same variety of specialist in that closer city. I called on a Monday and was in to see him on Thursday morning. Now, the three closest clinics to me have no doctors at all between them, just nurse practitioners and physician assistants. If your condition isn't on their short script you get an appointment in six months with a different nurse, or directions to the emergency room. I'm not claiming this is the general experience, but my experience has vastly enshittified.
The specialist nurse that took me six months to see? He ordered a test and scheduled me to come back and discuss it with him in another six months. Maybe I'll get another five minutes of his time then.
It sounds like you live in a rural area. In those places, the providers are drying up as the doctors get old and retire, and there's no one to replace them. This has nothing to do with Obamacare; it's like this in many places, including here in Japan. They actually offer more money here for people to work in the medical field in rural areas, but people would rather get paid less to live in Tokyo, because no one with an education wants to live in rural areas these days if they don't have to.
Basically, if you want really good healthcare, you need to live in or near a very large city. (Albuquerque is not a very large city.)
Another thing that's probably changed in the US is larger healthcare companies taking over doctors' practices and enshittifying them to increase profits. Doctors are happy to sell because they're getting close to retirement, and/or tired of dealing with all the administrative hassle on top of actually being a doctor and caring for patients. I've read about this type of thing greatly affecting veterinary care in the US too.
While that does absolutely suck, and I’ sorry you find yourself in that situation, it’s not a consequence of Obamacare. It’s just that the time you remember when things were better happens to be before Obamacare.
As another commenter said, there’s been an exodus of specialists from rural areas. This is a global phenomenon, not limited to the US.
The waiting is similar in the U.S., only the cost is wildly different. Actually, it sounds like you can see a family doctor the same day in Germany? That would make it better in Germany.
In the U.S. I can see a midlevel the same day by paying $200 for an annual membership in a mass-affluent pseudoconcierge practice plus $800ish for the appointment+labs, the $800 may be partly or entirely covered by insurance depending on how the conversation goes with the "provider". I have to wait several months if I want to see a real doctor outside of an emergency room. 6 months is about right for seeing a specialist with a preexisting relationship, might need a little more lead time for an initial consultation.
IDK this is my experience over the past few years with 10+ appointments with two specialists and three PCPs in the SFBA; my understanding is that it is typical in this area and becoming typical in other regions of the U.S. as well.
If it's so easy why isn't everyone in Europe doing this life hack?
Could it be that moving to a place with high salaries means that job market is more competitive with higher bar to entry, with more stress, and CoL and housing is proportionally higher so once you factor in housing, healthcare, childcare expenses etc you realize that unless you scored some FANG job that pays orders of magnitude more than the local median, you're more or less at the same wealth point as in the lower CoL locations?
Feels like the solution is to find the place when you can earn more than the median there and not just blindly move to the most expensive places in the world hoping that will make you rich.
> If it's so easy why isn't everyone in Europe doing this life hack?
Language barriers, mostly. USA doesn't have those, that is the biggest difference I'd say, language barriers is such a massive hindrance to movement even if you are legally allowed to.
Even if the work language is English you still have to live with all the signs etc being in a language you don't understand, and learning a new language is a massive undertaking.
However if you don't care about that then it is really simple. And lots of people are doing just that, people spending a few years working in a high wage place isn't uncommon at all.
also the massive difference between cultures is a thing aswell.
Not to mention people tend to not move asmuch in europe compared to the US, and people like to stay close to their community and families in my experience.
And have no major health issues/accidents, and be quite lucky, and start with a lot of money in the first place, and be born in the right place in the country.
It's instructive to see what's happening in Britain right now where many people dare not take jobs or even join training schemes to improve their prospects - because they will lose their benefits. To quote from the Spectator: "A Channel 4 (TV) program Britain’s Benefits Scandal hears from some of those affected – people who are often missing from the debate. We have 3.2 million trapped in a system in which they are given a decent payout – some I spoke to said about £1,300 a month, some significantly more – but who want to get back to work."
I know two (educated and hard-working) people in my immediate circle who intentionally keep their income below $30k/year so they qualify for state healthcare programs that they couldn’t otherwise afford unless they were making upwards of $150k.
So we have accountants and scientists who need back surgery intentionally working part-time barista hours.
As a programmer I’m all for gaming the system by knowing and navigating the rules, but the situation is comical.
I'd invite you to give a counterpoint to what I posted, this type of post is not really in line with the guidelines of HN. You're a dad, act like an adult, please.
As you noticed by your flagged comment, it doesn't matter what you think of me (I really don't care) but it matters how you behave here. It's ironic because this pathetic behaviour seems much more enticing to ridicule than someone sharing opinions :) don't be pathetic.
Getting money for living expenses as you study is the life of the average middle class student in USA, he didn't say it funded Musks ventures. The emerald mine made them rich compared to other Africans, but that doesn't say much compared to the average American.
Would there be any ventures if Errol didn't fund Elon's trip to the USA? That's the point, without the emerald mining funding there would be no Elon in the USA, no Elon taking risks in ventures, etc. It can't be looked at in a vacuum of "he didn't get direct money for his ventures", it was only possible for Elon to start ventures because of the emerald mines.
I know several people who emigrated to the US with a suitcase and became millionaires. None of them had a family emerald mine, or any family wealth at all.
If you live in the USA already, why didn't you start SpaceX? Millions of immigrants come to the USA. Why didn't anyone else start SpaceX?
Anecdotal, but… I'd be willing to put the time and effort in to start a company, but I would not be willing to lose my home or fail to provide for my wife & three children in the process as neither my wife nor I have any family capable of taking us in.
You're risk averse. That's fine - but it does not justify being envious of those who do take risks. Musk bet everything he had on Tesla, and at one point was within hours of personal bankruptcy as well as Tesla's.
With that being said, I'm not sure personal bankruptcy is a particularly meaningful risk when the individual in question can enjoy substantial riches by sheepishly(?) returning home to the care of their parent(s).
Granted, neither you nor I know if this is an option for Musk, but given that his mother speaks quite fondly of her son in public, it seems reasonable enough to me to believe that it is.
What I'm trying to say here is: Musk's risks are not mine. Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Celebrating someone for having taken a risk while omitting what exactly was on the line for them is a debate tactic built on a false equivalency which can be used as a cudgel to beat opponents down in arguments if its foundational trick goes unnoticed.
>> He jumped from the building and survived! Why can't you jump from the building too?
> The fire department erected a life net for him beforehand. All I have is sidewalk.
People go bankrupt all the time in the US. That doesn't mean they starve to death.
> Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Musk did spend time in the US with no money. He got a job. It was a dirty job cleaning industrial machinery. A job anyone with a willingness to work could get.
Instead of doing all this guessing and assuming and making up things about Musk, why not read an actual biography of him? The one I read is by Vance:
If you know you can always go live with your rich family, then the cost of failure is pretty close to 0, so you can repeatedly take big risks until one of them pays off.
Terrible place to be poor more like. Being poor is not enviable in any country, but you're better supported in some countries compared to others. Obviously this comes at a cost for the economy as a whole. At some point you need to think about what kind of society you want to live in.
I wouldn't necessarily make the assumption that welfare support "costs" the economy as a whole.
It's really expensive to support homeless population since they use up critical important resources such as emergency care, compared to just giving them a home. They may recover faster and become a productive member of society again.
For sure, it costs real dollars in a national budget, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing for the economy.
Nobody needs to work in USA either, but people do it anyway since the free stuff isn't comfortable enough. Its the same in Europe, people don't view the free stuff as good enough for them so they work to get more.
But then who's gonna be the delivery man who delivers your post/packages? Who's gonna be your teachers in school? Who's gonna be the baker making your food? Who's gonna be the builder and plumber building the shelter you live in? Who's gonna be the doctor healing you? If nobody needs to work.
They don't need to, they work anyway since we are still living in a capitalist nation where working pays off, that goes for both Europe and USA, you get supported by the state so you don't starve if you don't work but people still prefer working over not working thanks to the extra benefits you get.
Communist nations force people to work, there is no need for that in capitalist nations, people work for the extra rewards.
Yeah they do. I live in a socialist European country and if you refuse to work you'll end up on the streets and only live off charity of others or starve/freeze to death.
You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get sent to you by the unemployment agency, like for example working in a warehouse or in an Amazon fulfilment center. Nobody would willfully take those shit jobs if they wouldn't have to work.
Yeah, there's some people who made a lifestyle out of gaming the system who choose not to work and still get welfare but that's a minority.
> You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get sent to you by the unemployment agency
That depends on the country, but in the USA you get food stamps regardless of anything else so you wont starve. Then you can live on public lands in a tent or so, many do that in California.
> Virtually no one wants to live on the bare minimum
Many people prefer that to working.
The Seattle Times wrote an article decades ago where they interviewed a woman on welfare. They asked her what she'd do if her welfare was taken away. She replied "get a job".
They asked a couple of guys in a car with fishing equipment why they lived on welfare instead of getting a job. They replied that on welfare, they get to fish all day and enjoyed it.
I also knew a fellow for years who was on and off unemployment. He said he'd work at a job long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he'd f'up and get laid off. He'd then live off of unemployment, and would fail the requierd job interviews (amazing!). When that ran out, he'd have no trouble finding a job.
A friend of mine ran a nursery. He tried to hire a couple people who said they wanted the job, but would wait until their unemployment ran out before taking it. They were quite open about it.
Hence why I said "virtually", having a few anecdotes from interviews or from someone you knew doesn't cover it. Of course there will be people who choose to live on welfare, the vast majority would rather not. It's a small price to pay to have welfare programs saving countless lives from falling deeper into the hole of abject poverty... We just view this very differently, you prefer the "stick" approach, punish people who you deem unworthy because of their lack of motivation to work; while me on the other hand prefer the "carrot" where I think it's an okay price to pay to have some people choosing to not to work while society can protect people caught in bad times from falling away from the margins.
It's still absurd the straw man you created, please provide me data covering the whole population and we can discuss it, while it's based on these anecdotes you just being guided by your feelings and ideology.
Making people work is an assumption that work in itself is valuable, or at worse, mostly valuable. This isn't necessarily the case for jobs, and some jobs are probably actually detrimental to the well being of our society.
I honestly think this idea just needs to die. So many people I know don't even bothering applying for welfare because they think they won't get it.
In reality, most US states are insanely generous.
I recall once my mom had to help a friend's dad who was uninsured and dying of prostate cancer simply apply for benefits. He didn't think the state would pay for it and had just resigned himself to death. My goodness, how silly... Instead, he applied and it was paid for.
I myself have fallen into this trap. When I was laid off, I was going to pay COBRA, instead of just biting the bullet and applying for medicaid. There's almost always a free government provided option if you need it. Literally people don't even bother.
Make no mistake, the US is a fantastic business. It makes a lot of money, and some people get fantastically rich while others toil for life and hover at the poverty line.
With a vastly higher percentage of its citizens in jail than any other developed country, much higher crime and violence than developed countries and many other very bad indicators it is, however, not a good country. It does not provide for or look after its citizens in the ways other developed countries do, and does not appear to be a healthy society.
State is not a country and European countries are not states...their federal governments handle their healthcare and etc.
That's my point the US's federal government would be handling free healthcare directly or indirectly thru the states. As well the amount of money Americans would have in their pockets would be a lot less and that's not after over 300 years are what we are use to. Recent election shows the majority does not want change in many regards.
Recent elections show that capital interests are able to spend unlimited amounts of money buying political influence to prevent a pro-working-class candidate from ever touching any true levers of power.
> It does not provide for or look after its citizens in the ways other developed countries do
It's worth asking why.
> NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US. Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging populations. As a result, much of Europe’s military has become, in the view of some US defense experts, a “Potemkin army” that is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.
If we take a look at the % of US forces stationed in Europe, and assume all of them are there only out of the goodness of the US' heart to protect Europeans, and subtract them from total US military costs, it isn't even a drop in the bucket. It's less money than the Pentagon doesn't know what happens to.
(This only covers the running costs; even an unfair assumption that the US would need less F-35s and troops if they weren't deployed in Europe, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the $916 billion yearly budget).
That’s not a sensible analysis, given how NATO works. It isn’t even difficult to see how misguided that thinking is because you could simply recall the mounting hundreds of billions we’ve lately been sending to two non-NATO nations.
> It isn’t even difficult to see how misguided that thinking is because you could simply recall the mounting hundreds of billions we’ve lately been sending to two non-NATO nations.
Which the US is doing only to protect European country and wouldn't have done it if it were anywhere else? Strongly doubt it. Also it's important to clarify, the US isn't sending "hundreds of billions" to e.g. Ukraine. It's sending material worth that much, which them it replaces (and sometimes it would have had to anyways, in the care of expiring ordinance or obsolete stuff) by paying American companies.
This is an interesting take, because it contrasts with GDP PPP [0] which is suggesting that America is in fact being overtaken by its rivals although it has managed to outpace the EU. China is claiming to already be ahead and India is well on track to gain absolute economic ascendancy relative to the US. And I expect that Asia is going to start developing some serious military muscle on the back of that because they have access to the history books and have a pretty good view into how Western leadership thinks.
If the US is benchmarked against Europe then all is well. The problem is that Europe is now a distant 3rd in terms of economic power - it can't face up to China. Arguably, if we put China in its own category and India into "Asia" then the EU might be pushing towards 4th. Everyone is still ahead of Africa I suppose.
The EU is number one in quality of life and that’s all that matters to me. If we work just hard enough to maintain and maybe even improve it, other countries can do their pissing contest.
It's crazy how so many people don't get this basic economic fact and think public welfare in EU just rains from the sky for free. No, EU welfare state is not some magical hack nobody else thought of, it's just paid from the working class' wages and then redistributed to those in need.
Without innovations and highly profitable industries generating well paying working class jobs, with what will you pay for that welfare and quality of life? Billionaires and corporations certainly aren't gonna pay for it out if their profits, so the working class has to. But if the working class has no more high paying wages anymore due to stagnating growth , then your welfare budget also goes bye-bye.
You can't just vote yourself more welfare and higher public sector salaries and pensions out of thin air without an economic growth to back that up. I mean, you technically can, but it doesn't end well as was proven every single time this was tried.
Well paying job just mean that the primary distribution mechanism of wealth is through having a job, rather than only creating only jobs that are necessary. That's grossly inefficient. I rather pay people to stay at home rather than gunk up our industries with make-work, or worse actively making things worse.
Innovation is important sure, but also efficient use of resources, including cramping down on negative externalities. That increases welfare and quality of life, ideally with no need to spend an extra dollar.
That's some idealistic stuff that's not gonna happen. The real world doesn't work like that.
Yeah it's ineficient but it's the one we got right now. You're not gonna change it with your comments and beliefs. Meanwhile rent is due next month and you need to pay up by using these "ineficient" mechanisms set in place by powers higher than you.
Idealistic? So what? I am just pointing out the contradiction of people's thought. I perfectly know well it's not how things should work but how it works right now, but if people believed silly things I am going to point it out.
You are welcome to point out flaws in my thinking.
Stop thinking in terms of dollars. Think in terms of stuff - that's the actual wealth. You can move dollars around with or without jobs, but somebody has to make the stuff. Someone has to grow the food. Otherwise, you have dollars but not food, and you can't eat dollars.
So the thing about jobs is, we really need jobs that actually produce stuff. We don't just need jobs, we need somebody to create the wealth. First it has to exist, then we can worry about how it gets distributed.
So if you have a bunch of people who are not necessary, then the best thing to do is not to let them starve (which is also immoral), nor to give them pointless jobs (which is soul-destroying), but to find something useful for them to do.
We have had the capacity to produce more stuff than we can consume for almost a century now. Take cars for example. We could easily produce one for every man woman and child. If someone can’t afford a car it isn’t because we can’t make it, it is because we have decided not to make it.
This isn’t a production problem, it is a social problem.
>If someone can’t afford a car it isn’t because we can’t make it, it is because we have decided not to make it.
Its because the person making the car doesn't want to make one for someone who isn't making something of equal value in return. It makes them a sucker for being the one to make the car.
You cannot legislate, policy change, indoctrinate, or force your way around this. It's why all attempts to do so always have failed. Every single time. Always.
The only way to create actual value is to put in actual work.
> Without innovations and highly profitable industries generating well paying working class jobs, with what will you pay for that welfare and quality of life
I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that there is no innovation whatsoever in the EU. Falling behind the US doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing. I think a lot of people in the EU would be fine with being 3rd on "productivity" if it was enough to maintain a high standard of living and decent competitiveness.
>I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that there is no innovation whatsoever in the EU.
I never said that. Please follow HN rules and reply to the strongest interpretation of one's argument, not the weakest.
The EU economy was at the same level as the US economy 15-20 years ago., now it's only half the US. The EU missed out on all the major technological innovations in that time and therefore missed out on a lot of income for welfare while welfare expenses only grew due to ageing population and increasing cost of living.
>Falling behind the US doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing.
No, it means less money for welfare. Especially with an ever increasing ageing population. If you want to take care of all of those people at a high quality of life, it's gonna cost you, and we don't have that kind of money anymore.
So you either get Europeans to accept slowly sliding into poverty due to declining welfare and rising CoL, OR, you need to bring in more money to the state somehow. Previously it was done in Europe via slavery and theft through colonialism, but since that conveyor belt of free money is gone and what's left to bring in more money is innovation in highly profitable high-growth industries where EU is almost absent. No, ASML, Airbus and some struggling German mittlestand companies can't support a whole continent like they did in the 1980's.
>I think a lot of people in the EU would be fine with being 3rd on "productivity" if it was enough to maintain a high standard of living and decent competitiveness.
They would be fine, if those losses would come out of the pockets of tax dodging corporations, but they're not, they're being eaten up by the working class and the taxpayer who still expects the same welfare quality like in the good ol' days when the EU economy was as strong as the US.
Do you you see how this level of welfare is unsustainable without matching economic growth?
> Without innovations and highly profitable industries generating well paying working class jobs, with what will you pay for that welfare and quality of life
Without presumes with none, and you're saying it like it's true.
> The EU economy was at the same level as the US economy 15-20 years ago., now it's only half the US. The EU missed out on all the major technological innovations in that time
Really, all major technological innovations? Why is the leading music streaming provider Swedish (Spotify)? Leading and most advanced airplane manufacturer European (Airbus)? Why are there so many fintechs which are a decade ahead of US counterparts (Revolut, Monzo, MyPOS, SumUp, Bunq, Qonto) and why is finance-related tech so much ahead - you can pay contactless pretty much anywhere in most of the EU and UK, you can accept card payments with your phone and just an app, all banks have to have an API with Oauth to be able to aggregate accounts and whatever? Also I'd like to add advancements in nuclear fusion. Also I haven't experienced healthcare in the US, but from what I've seen it doesn't look like there's anything even close to the seamlessness of Doctolib in France.
The EU is indeed falling behind, IMO mostly due to lack of capital, risk/gambling averseness, and the much smaller individual markets. But to say it has missed all innovations, or that it has no innovation is simply untrue. We need more of them, we need to invest into more of them, because there's a lot of potential that needs to be nurtured and grow.
Only if you want to be a sticker and take things literally while deliberately ignoring the context to score a cheap shot gothca, then sure, it then means without.
> Leading and most advanced airplane manufacturer European (Airbus)?
Because of government intervention, and moat of a highly regulated and expensive to enter industry that keeps new players out. Why is SpaceX ahead of EU aerospace companies?
>Why is the leading music streaming provider Swedish (Spotify)?
Spotify wasn't even profitable until recently and only made it where it is today, due to to massive capital investments form the US, not from EU investors.
>Why are there so many fintechs which are a decade ahead of US counterparts
Are they also ahead in earnings/profits too? Because you fund welfare with taxes on profits and on wages. You can't tax innovations that bring you no money.
That's where
While you keep blabbering on about Airbus, Monzo and Spotify , have a look at the top 100 companies in the world by market cap and see how many are from the EU and how many from the US and that's case closed. AIrbus, Spotify, etc are the rare exceptions, not the norm for Europe.
“A system of non-competition clauses enforced by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) workforce suppliers is allegedly trapping aerospace professionals who work at ESA’s facilities across Europe in a professional dead-end street” [1].
Europe is absolutely riddled with this crap, and it tends to come top down from the EU.
Well, not many viable orbitial launch sectors in continental Europe - that by itself is already a blocker. :P And arguably USA was also quite lucky to end up with SpaceX, given how many traditionalists in the industry were so full of "this can't be done!". :P
Innovation means stock market growth? So no innovation happens at any university for instance? Or private companies? And the stock of e.g. United Healthcare Group going up doesn't mean that any innovation happened whatsoever.
Why do so many people, especially on HN, confuse market cap or GDP growth for innovation? Surely, especially here, people can realise that innovation can come in different forms, and some do not move the needle of a stock market or won't show up in GDP graphs. Is CERN not innovative because it's not a public company whose stock is growing?
> Why do so many people, especially on HN, confuse market cap or GDP growth for innovation?
It's not confusion. It's rather an acknowledgement to the reality that to fund a generous welfare state, one needs taxes. To tax, you first need a dynamic private sector economy. Taxing public sector is like shifting money from the left pocket to the right pocket.
GDP or stock market caps are just a proxy for the size of the private economy. Europe has lagged on both. Maybe there is something else which would indicate that European private sector is growing fine and dandy. I am not aware of it. Are you?
CERN innovation is awesome but it will need to be translated into private sector economic activity in order for the society to benefit from it; either directly via products and services, or indirectly via taxation and welfare programs based on that.
The innovation that happens at university level in the EU is mostly a means to get a degree. Most university research leads to nothing but a piece of paper that no one will read. Certainly when someone picks a bachelor, masters or PhD, it's not done out of the wish to later start a company around it.
I didn’t read that whole comment but wow, you must be delusional. If you think that European companies in the last 20 years hold a candle to American companies in the last 20 years delusional.
"There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Argentina, and Japan."
One must be very careful drawing conclusions for other societies based on Japan as a sole example. I somewhat agree that Japan illustrates that massive infrastructure investment, combined with diligence in maintaining functioning societal systems, does in fact yield a high quality of life that appears sustainable even if the metrics of economic growth look terrible. That's because GDP as a measure of "quality of life" is a shitty indicator IMO, but that's a whole 'nother rabbit hole to go down...
Japan is a monoculture that acts almost like one big family. Economic rules and values kinda go out the window similar to the way they do when you are selling your brother your old car or repairing your grandmother's sink.
> It's crazy how so many people don't get this basic economic fact and think public welfare in EU just rains from the sky for free. No, EU welfare state is not some magical hack nobody else thought of, it's just paid from the working class' wages and then redistributed to those in need.
If the US took the entire medicare/medicaid budget and split it evenly per person it would be left with more money than the UK spends on healthcare.
Its not just how much you spend, its how much you waste.
Road infrastructure in the United States might as well be a form of digging holes and then refilling it back up again. Grossly inefficient when we could invest the infrastructure money into world class public transit.
I think you fail to grasp just how big the US is. Driving from Chicago to Minneapolis is ~430 miles/ 6.5 hours depending on weather and traffic. Every 10 miles or so there is an exit and usually some small town. Every 50 to 100 miles a bigger town.
As I recall, after the Chicago suburbs you hit Rockford, Janesville, Madison, Baraboo, Tomah, Eau Claire, Menominee, and Hudson before you get to the St Paul collar communities.
So 9 stops on on a single track running between two major cities, with only 1600 more miles to Seattle. And while the distance between stops increase, the population greatly decreases as you head west.
Now road construction could be better. Because while Illinois has 300k lane-miles of road, it seems like they only have 200k of asphalt and 100k under construction at any given point in time.
This is a bit misleading as those countries tend to have the vast majority of the population crowded into a handful of cities that are fairly close together and then a vast untamed wilderness where close to nobody lives. It's easy(ish) to have rail between Oslo and Bergen, less practical to extend that rail to Oldervik.
I think you fail to grasp just how big the US is. Driving from Chicago to Minneapolis is ~430 miles/ 6.5 hours depending on weather and traffic. Every 10 miles or so there is an exit and usually some small town. Every 50 to 100 miles a bigger town.
Why do people trot this out every time? Driving or traveling across the US isn't particularly relevant to most people's life experience. Ok, I'll bite.
Yes, the United States is big, but some areas are more dense than other and would need good heavy investment in public transit infrastructure. For example, the north eastern corridor would in particular benefit from investment in true high speed rail.
There's also the need for investment in freight infrastructure, especially if we want to take off more trucks off the road. This is a safety benefit too. Less vehicles on the roads just mean less people risking their neck.
Now let's talk more local public transit.
Atlanta for example, really need to expand heavy rail. Traffic there is one of the worst in the country. MARTA at time outpaces cars, even with all the stops they have to make. Rather, a lot of time is eaten up just waiting for the train. A more frequent schedule would help here, but Georgia would need to actually contribute funding to make this possible. If they extend it more into the surburb, I would have less of an incentive to move. As now, I am considering moving because of how frequent I commute into Atlanta.
> I can drive nearly 200km on any given weekend to visit friends
In a typical vehicle that's about 50kg of CO2. 100kg if it doesn't include the return leg.
Not having a dig at you, but this is a big part of our problem. We believe that because we can do something, we are entitled to do it. Not only that, but we've structured our society in such a way that it's actually necessary for people to do these harmful things just to get by like commuting distances that would have been considered absurd 100 years ago. They are still absurd.
We talk about long distance travel because it's the only thing that makes sense. None of the cities parent listed outside maybe Chicago are walkable. You WILL need a car at all those destinations. So why wouldn't I drive my own car? It's a requirement to own one in the Midwest (I live there). I'd love rail but it just doesn't make sense as none of our cities are walkable and the bus routes are either once an hour at best or non existent. If you put a rail line from Chicago to Madison to Twin Cities, I highly doubt it would get any use because all of these people already own cars and would get there faster and more conveniently.
That's great but it's not going to happen for a generation or two even if people wanted it. This isn't SimCity, we can't just rip everything up and start over. The fight to make cities walkable will take sustained efforts for the next 100 years.
I have had this niggling feeling for a long time that money (and capitalism) gets increasingly more divorced from reality, particularly as money is printed and these astronomic speculative stock market valuations are created based on some optimistic future scenario.
This is not some pearl clutching moralistic argument, but a practical observation based on:
- Transfer of ownership is not necessarily possible. You can't buy a technologically sensitive company because of regulations. Even if you can buy a foreign firm, transferring the talent, operational base etc. might not be possible. A CEO can't sell off his share of stocks even if they're worth billions because the loss of investor confidence.
- Physical limitations on quantities of goods. There is a finite supply of real estate. If everybody in the world wanted a new car suddenly (and had money for it), car prices would go through the roof, and only a small fraction would actually get it.
Imo capitalism is not flawed in the way that it is incapable of handling these situations, but it is very flawed in that money is an increasingly poor proxy for the abstract concept of value.
This flawed nature of capitalism has been long since endemic (and dare I say integral) to the system, much more value has existed on paper than in reality (see banks), but I think there might be a breaking point at which the system might collapse and hyperinflation would set in.
It is precisely because individuals suck so much at correctly perceiving the allocation of value that free market economies ("capitalism") completely blow centrally planned ones ("socialism") out of the water.
So the fact that you think money is divorced from reality is a very normal, mundane misconception.
You're taking my argument in the direction I never intended, then taking the dicothomy to the extreme, and then claiming victory unsupported by evidence.
- I never wanted to contrast 'capitalism' and 'communism' or whatever. I merely wanted to point out that the fundamental absurdity of capitalism requiring infinite growth in a finite system has been resolved by having the growth of wealth coming from speculation on future unrealized value. Since I (or anyone else) can't predict the future, it might happen that things do not come to pass as they were expected and that future value might not be realized. Money is divorced from reality, it derives its value from the collective trust and belief by the people participating in the system that it can be exchanged for goods and services. In a system of rational and impartial actors, that belief is backed by chiefly existence of said goods (which is the real size of the economic pie) and less by the speculation of future potential that might or or might not happen. So in summary my argument is not between communism or capitalism, but a captialism that is backed by real world value and one that is backed by future speculation. Even if the former can create less economic growth, we can be certain that growth is real.
- Central planning works. Great public works certainly are dreamt up and funded by governments yet they contribute enormously to the wealth of nations and enable a lot of value to be created. The moon landing was centrally planned and executed by a country whose per capita wealth was on par with modern day Poland, yet is considered the greatest achivement in history.
- There are no real 'centrally planned' or 'free market' economies, as all countries employ both concepts to some degree. But if we were to make a argument, we could say that the US belongs to the 'free market' camp and China belongs the 'centrally planned' camp. Both countries are doing extremely well, this very discussion is about finding which one is actually doing better.
All "capitalist" economies have very large amounts of central planning for them to function (not to mention state subsidies and other protections from failing to make money), and use taxation and the national debt for that. Socialism plans centrally to the same extent that capitalist economies do, but also has the state owning the infrastructure that the economy relies upon. So it doesn't need to tax for that purpose. Socialism in that sense has never actually been practiced historically though, in the same way as there has never been "capitalism" in the sense of no central planning or regulation. Luckily.
"capitalists" have many central planners each planning the same thing but coming up with different results. Then we reward the ones who are right. Socialism features one planner - they may have helpers, but just one. If one planner gets it wrong in capitalism you can go with a different one.
cost of acquisition sets a floor on price. Value sets a ceiling on the price. Supply/demand sets the price you pay. (in economics we further talk about curves - there many oil wells and some costs more to run than others, there are also many buyers and some value oil more. Similar for water where it is often free from a nearby faucet but people will pay a lot of it in bottle form anyway.
Exactly and the fact that, for example, West and Central Africa are waking up [1] to the fact that France has been scamming them out of untold billions, probably trillions is going to shift power significantly.
This is happening now. Senegal are following Chad in cutting ties with French military.
Because of the travle game(1) I learned that it was/is common for the leader of the former French colony to send hundreds of thousands in bribes to the president of France...
(1) Travle posted here on hn months ago, but unfortunately a Webapp that downloads so I can't give you a url
Most parts of the global economy are. If you're selling cars for example, there's a fixed amount of drivers on the road you can sell cars to, so if you're VW, you're now competing with cheaper cars from Asia for those same drivers.
You can't create new drivers out of thin air to expand the market demand for cars. Once the market is saturated, without having any moat, you enter in a race to the bottom.
And that's what Germany's economy is discovering right now and why Europe's share of global GDP has been declining for the past 20 years.
If other countries are doing better, they will want to buy status symbols as well. This is how Germany profited from China developing in the first place. As long as markets continue to develop, chances will continue to appear.
Also, we shouldn't care about Europe's share of global GDP. We should care about how the poor people in our countries are doing. Like I said, we should maintain or improve our quality of life. Producing cars is just a means to an end.
This is exactly where manufacturers like SAIC, BYD, and Dongfeng are winning. Building cheaper cars than were previously available and selling them in countries where "premium" brands like BMW, Toyota, Ford, Fiat, Volvo, GM, etc... don't try very hard to compete.
Head to any country without a domestic auto industry to protect and see what new cars people are importing. Sure there will be some rich people buying the brands you recognize, but call an UberX and they're going to show up in a Chinese brand you've never heard of. Or some zombie brand like MG.
I think what you're really getting at is that the more efficient a market it, the closer to the Pareto frontier it is, and things become competitive instead of cooperative there.
When you boil it all down, the economy mostly is about ownership and use of resources, and those are naturally limited. So if we're talking about doing well in terms of having greater claims to the world's resources, then it essentially is zero sum.
The primary sector is only a very small part of the economy though. Prices for raw materials are low because it's easy to mine etc vast quantities nowadays and there is a lot of competition in global commodities. Most minerals are found in a LOT of places all over the world.
Land. Total value of it is about 25 trillion in the US alone I believe. If I'm not wrong, globally stock markets are around 100 trillion (and that will include a lot of assets in the form of land).
25 trillion is just 1 year worth of GDP. With interest rates of 5%, that's only further evidence for my point.
Edit: as an exercise, consider the land value of a typical office, and compare to the annual income of the part of the company based there, and the personal income of the employees who work there.
Zero sum game means for someone to benefit someone else must be worse off, but a positive sum game doesn't mean that everyone must benefit. It only opens the possibility that the total sum can go up, but that can still be because every time one player gets 10 points another player loses 3.
Many people don't realise. America has been exporting inflation around the world while China has been exporting deflation through cheaper goods. China is the main reason for World's prosperity.
And China was able to scale up the mass manufacturing of cheap goods because rich western companies dumped their money into China to capitalize that manufacturing. It's all interrelated
You are correct but it’s also more complex than that since competitive can mean many things. Currently the vast majority of government income for European countries is income tax, and income tax is usually more profitable when the market is actually competitive. Which means you need small local businesses and local production.
Having completely optimised and global logistics and value chains isn’t necessarily good for wages. We can tax the wealthy and fortunes more than we do, and we probably should, but within the current systems it wouldn’t change that much.
So in some sense many European countries are better prepared for economic downturns than the US even though European countries don’t have a lot of major corporations which don’t produce anything locally.
Obviously it’s even more complex than this. Part of what is bringing down the economies in France and Italy is workers rights. Being able to retire at 60 is great, but it was also something that was obtained when people didn’t live as long and have as few children. Though Greece seems to have managed ok without having new public management plunder their country.
>Being able to retire at 60 is great, but it was also something that was obtained when people didn’t live as long and have as few children.
Short aside this reminds me of:
In the US, my Boss's neighbor is an 85 year old woman who retired 42 years ago. And still gets a paycheck twice a month (with CoL increases) and full health insurance. She became a municipal clerk when she turned 18, worked 25 years to get a full pension, then retired at 43. The optimism (maybe pessimism?) people had back in the day was wild. I nearly fell out of my chair when he told me this.
Life in the EU is amazing for me, and probably for you too, as well as many others enjoying it here. However, we can't overlook the struggles of those who are turning to radical populist parties.
I don't think the far-right is fueled by economic stagnation, but I do think that, were we living in an economic golden age, people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of foreigners on "their" streets.
No, it's just an inspid rant. Let's pick a spot at random:
But at the same time the state somehow has money to house feed and medically care of millions of illegal immigrants
Do you honestly think the government is literally simply "housing" all the authorized immigrants? As in, literally writing checks to their landlords? And literally paying their grocery bills, each and every week? Do you actually think that's what's happening?
Remember, the rant wasn't referring simply to new arrivals, but literally to all the "millions" who have been here for decades. With the tacit approval of US society at large, for the simple reason that (authorized or not) the vast majority form an indispensible part of its workforce, doing the hard work that most Americans refuse to do.
I'm not saying the migrant crisis isn't a huge, costly mess. But for whatever is happening, I just don't get these weird, distorted and emotionally manipulative narratives.
It depends on the country. I know that in the UK this actually tends to be the case last I checked. I was reading this from a UK perspective (western) not a US . I don’t know how much housing the US provides
Actual estimates for the total number if illegal migrants (including children) in the UK top out at around 800,000. Yet the commenter above said that your government was paying to house and feed "millions" of them. Last we checked, "milions" means >= 2,000,000.
Do you still think that what the commenter is saying "actually tends to be the case" in the UK?
Previously you said authorized (legal). Now you’re changing your argument to illegal.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house vs getting emotional and changing the goalposts. I suspect the number is not millions, but this does not include medical care or other humanitarian care.
The GBP/EURO/USD spent is in the billions and the cost was the premise, not necessarily the number of people. If OP exaggerated, correct it and move on to the substance of the argument. It doesn’t make their entire post insipid (your words)
Previously you said authorized (legal). Now you’re changing your argument to illegal.
I meant "unauthorized". It was just a typo, honest.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house
It was the conflation of "refugees" with "illegal immigrants" in the commenter's post that I took issue with. The two categories might sound the same but are entirely different.
In particular the latter category definitely do not receive subsidized subsidized housing or benefits the way actual legally recognized asylum seekers, aka "refugees" do.
This exact attitude is what gets the right wing growing.
> As in, literally writing checks to their landlords?
In some EU countries (where I'm from), yes. A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
But thank you for your valuable contribution to this conversation.
A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
And are they there ... illegally? Or legally?
Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
I know you said "illegal immigrants and refugees", so I misquoted you slghtly. But the bigger point is -- why conflate the two, when the numbers and overall situations are obviously entirely different? (In particular - while legally recognized asylum seekers might be eligible to obtain housing subsidies, illegal migrants quite definitely cannot).
To be charitable, one can assume there was no manipulative intent, and you were just being careless. But if so, then you'll have to acknowledge that that's why your missive appeared, at first glance, to be well, a rant.
The solution is to listen to their worries and take action to fix them instead of ignoring them and calling them stupid
It isn't the concerns of the voters, but the relentless cognitive distortions we keep hearing about push-button topics such as this one (generally promoted by ideologues and pundits, rather than the voters themselves) that are, for want of a better term, stupid.
(And on the subject of stupid, my initial response contained a horrible typo -- should have said "unauthorized", rather than "authorized").
This is part of the illusion that it is as if our politicians let anybody in. Not a single politician would welcome even one more asylum seeker.
The immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe. It is the failure of our societies to help the countries like Syria, Afghanistan, etc to be liveable. We are paying the price for this failure.
> Not a single politician would welcome even one more asylum seeker
There were absolutely pro-migration politicians, e.g. Merkel.
> immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe
Europe continues to have generous refugee obligations, protections and benefits. There also isn’t a robust deportation regime, in part because there isn’t anywhere to legally deport them to. That’s probably what these voters take offence to. (I unfortunately don’t see any non-radical solutions.)
In Portugal, illegal immigrants have lots of rights. For example rights now the government is struggling with having enough medics and ambulance drivers to meet demand. To the point several people died waiting for ambulance because no driver was available.
Yet, the government gave 100% free treatment to 48k immigrants that had no information. Many of then pregnant women from Asian countries with complicated situations that coat lots of money. Some illegal immigrants even got right to have treatments with medicines that cost millions.
> Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
There is North of 700 000 illegal residents in France alone. So yes, millions in the UE. Here, they have free health care (CMU) costing more than a billion euros per year while the government wanted reduced refunds on medical acts and medicine for people paying for it. How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off? It's exactly why people as voting for the so-called "far"-right party, with are still quite leftist in comparison to the ruling parties of countries like Japan, Thailand, etc.
That's why I stressed the "being housed" part, which the commenter to whom I responded asserted was being provided for all illegals residents (or at least multiple millions of them anyway). And in France would cost (at the very inside) some 4.2 billion euros per year, by some napkin math. That is, at least 4x the cost of health care.
So that was my concern -- what purpose is served by promoting a grossly exaggerated characterization of the actual cost of having these people around?
How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off?
If it were up to me, I'd stick it incrementally to you-know-who have you also getting a Solidarité reduction. But that's obviously not kind thing the voting public wants to hear these days.
I think you misread me there. It wasn't a denial at all.
It was simply saying: whatever the state of the mess -- weird, distorted narratives about the mess don't help us out of the mess. And in fact are a huge part of the mess.
This is one of those moments I wish people had a way (I guess you could just add it in the notes) to mark their HN account with a region. Are you in the UK, maybe?
The immigration issue sounds very different in the EU vs US, even if many of the sound bites rhyme.
You're commenting from a US perspective but the person you're responding to was commenting from a European perspective.
In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
I don't know what the solution is, as an immigrant to the UK myself I find it difficult to judge or comment, but you need to keep in mind that Europe has a welfare model quite different from your US. We typically pay more taxes and have a higher expectation of public services. When those services are deteriorating, people look for someone to blame.
Immigrants are an easy target.
In reality, it is much more to do with the aging population and fewer in the workforce, but that doesn't mean that we're also not paying a lot of money for asylum seekers.
The UK costs are due to the previous government not processing asylum seekers and other irregular immigrants in a timely manner and also the fact all the processing, care etc is outsourced to profit making private companies
We’re generally only talking about 50,000 people a year coming in via these routes
Of course Brexit didn’t help with the policing of it all either
> In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
That number sounds big, but for some perspective my city (Seattle) is spending more than that to build light rail tracks to one particular (not that very dense!) neighborhood.
0.42% of the UK budget is spent on helping people who have had everything in their lives ripped away. People who have watched family members get shot, had their houses destroyed by bombs, and for some, their entire homeland turned into rubble.
The UK populace spent decades electing corrupt leaders who purposefully destroyed civic institutions. Of course things are falling apart. Immigrants don't have much to do with that...
'Scare quotes' is not the only use of the double quote.
In this case it seems that the author is pointing out that the incumbents do not in fact have any inferred or conferred ownership of these public spaces.
I think that is the most likely interpretation, but it doesn't seem like a reasonable interpretation of what was said literally in context. From a local v. foreigner perspective the roads are literally their roads. Locals do have an inferred and conferred ownership of public spaces in their capacity as the public. The foreigners don't own the streets, the streets are commons property to the locals.
I decided to treat it as a minor typo and read it as 'people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of "foreigners" on their streets' instead. Ie, the foreigners aren't really foreigners, just citizens of non-aboriginal ethnicity.
The public spaces of a state belong collectively to the citizens of that state. The state government only administers them. That's essentially what statehood means.
By putting the word their in quotes the poster is implying the unstated assumption that states aren't legitimate.
The actual "far right" is much smaller than they'd have you believe. It is very small. It's just that the term is abused to create fear.
I don't think that the economy in general is key, though high immigration does dampen wages and that is mostly felt at the lower end of incomes. I think what we're seeing are the social and cultural consequences of very high immigration from countries of completely alien cultures and whose people do not assimilate in Europe. This has been going on for decades now but completely ignored by successive governments and that only hardens people's reaction against it. This is compounded by the apparent powerlessness to act "because whatever treaty/law" that we seem to have shackled ourselves with...
> I do think that, were we living in an economic golden age, people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of foreigners on "their" streets.
I don't fully know what's going on in Europe, but in the US we have several TV news networks dedicated to making you upset about the increased prevalence of foreigners. And they've been doing it for 30+ years, so it's working, no matter how good the age is or isn't.
In Europe the terrorist attacks and crime is real though, that doesn't happen much in the US but in Europe it happens quite a lot since the immigrants are different. So there is no need for any propaganda to get people to turn against unlimited immigration, what they see on every news station paints the same picture.
The news in western EU never cover the bad parts of illegal immigration, only the rosy part, so the people turning against immigration aren't doing it due to what they see on the news but mostly due to what they, rightfully or wrongly, perceive themselves .
Not sure about the EU, but in the UK the support for the far-right is highest in areas with the fewest numbers of immigrants. It's not about peoples personal perceptions, as the areas with relatively high numbers of immigrants are invariably also the areas where there's low support for the far right.
We need to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Plenty of legal immigrants also vote right wing because they hate illegal immigrants which is the core issues.
Except the places in the UK where illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, tend to congregate (cities) are the places with the lowest support for Farage etc.
I.e. people voting for Farage are not the ones living next door to asylum seekers.
Maybe it's different in the EU and US.
People see problems (mainly caused by the cost of housing) and hear people like Farage blaming it on the "small boats", and people on the other end of the spectrum blaming it on millionaire landlords.
The reality is it's not caused by the 3 asylum seekers per 10,000 people increasing demand, but instead by essential legal immigration (to perform jobs as the native workforce reduces in number) and crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone.
This thus pushes up price thanks to the age old supply/demand curve. How else would we ration housing? Nepotism? Sexual favours? Lottery?
>crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone
Sure, but if you have an inability to produce more housing, how is importing more foreigners helping with the situation of the locals who are already struggling with the housing market?
I'm not defending Farage or his voters, but don't people have a right to be pissed about this situation?
But people aren't actually pissed at the cause of the problem. They will go out and march against a new housing development in their local area before turning around and sending a letter to the paper complaining about a lack of housing. They'll moan about a lack of staff in their local hospital but then support the immigration rules which prevent people from working for the NHS. They'll complain about low wages in the public sector but then fight against the growth in the economy which would allow those wages to increase. They'll complain about millionaires and then whine that it's unfair millionaires are taxed "so much".
>In Europe the terrorist attacks and crime is real though, that doesn't happen much in the US but in Europe it happens quite a lot since the immigrants are different.
I don't need any TV channel nor statistics for my girlfriend to come home shocked because a friend of her got his apple watch and bag stolen that day, to witness a Japanese girl at an event having her bag stolen during the night, to be aggressed verbally in the station, to have a friend shot in a terror attack (Bataclan), to have an islamic attack at the Christmas market in my town, etc. all the common point here are immigrants or their descendants from non white and non Asian countries.
> I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
Go touch grass ffs! Your reply is infuriating to any victim of terrorism. A single death or wounded from islamic terrorism (the only that really exist) is too much already. If that's not enough for you, please line up with your family and friends and sign to be the next victims and we'll see if "not even 100 deaths" is a good thing or not.
Should we extend that "zero tolerance" principle for, say, traffic deaths? Even 1 death is too much right? Yet over a hundred people die on European roads every day. Surely we should tackle this many times more seriously than we tackle the comparatively minor issue of Islamic terrorism?
What about pollution? Kills thousands upon thousands of people too! Why are we wasting our time and attention with 24/7 news reports about terrorism every time some nutter stabs someone in the street, when we could be directing our efforts towards eradicating coal, diesel engines, etc?
I have lived in Europe all my life. I cannot name a single person I know, nor anyone that they know, that has ever been remotely affected by Islamic terrorism.
I can however name a hundred other things that affect most of their lives daily like inflation, racism, corruption of both the media and political organs by corporate interests, degrading of public infrastructure and institutions that are not aimed at churning out a profit, declining quality of the education system to systemic stress imposed on teachers, etc.
I didn't mean to belittle anyone impacted by terrorism personally. I just am saying it is so rare that it doesn't register as relevant for me. I worry more about speeding cars.
As a society we must focus our attention to those things which really matter. Terrorism is just trying to get our attention.
I also live in a town of 4m which was impacted in the last 10 years by a single terror attack. Should it affect my life? Should I be suspicious of every member of the ethnic group from which the terrorist comes? I couldn't even identify them.
The last terror attacks in my country were part of an organised campaign to try and burn down mosques explicitly because of unhinged propaganda on TV and online. The fact that these attacks were not called "terrorist attacks" on any single news station tells you all you need to know about propaganda here.
That is just because of inequality those populists feed on, while at the same time being rich. However, being unconvential, having a sound media strategy, and no doubt being helped by (foreign?) disinformation - they quickly gain a foothold in an era of unlimited social media.
However, I often think about that drawing where three people are at a table. A blue-collar worker (mine worker or construction worker), a black sad looking black person (immigrant), and a rich guy in suit.
The blue collar worker has a single cookie on his plate, the immigrant no cookies at all, and the rich guy a plate full of cookies. The rich guy with his plate full of cookies, looking at the worker, points to the immigrant. “He wants your cookie”.
People prefer jobs, not handouts, but handouts is what your scenario implies--wealth distribution from the rich to the workers. This is where the academy has led liberal/left parties astray. Yes, inequality is at the root of discontent, but the academy over stresses inequality of outcomes rather than of opportunity; and while inequality of outcomes matters, people gauge their success by looking to their neighbors and social circles, not to groups far removed from their physical and social geography. Likewise, modern economic theory says that tax + redistribute is the most economically efficient solution to addressing inequality, but it falls short for the same reasons.
It's a very difficult sociopolitical problem, and it has as much to do with psychology as it does headline statistics. Contemporary media dynamics has much to do with the psychological aspect, but it's also corrupting the way people think about these issues across the ideological spectrum.
> People prefer jobs, not handouts, but handouts is what your scenario implies--wealth distribution from the rich to the workers
Labour's share of wealth produced (vs capital's share) has been declining in the developed world since the 1970s, and is now well past Gilded Age levels and still getting worse.
So yes, it's both about better jobs and about distributing away from the rich and towards the working class: these are the same thing.
I just think the current emphasis on inequality of outcomes and headline numbers like income share leads us down the wrong path. Those are effects, not causes or even the effects that directly drive discontent; yet by emphasizing those aspects we spend an inordinate amount of time on measures that attempt to address those symptoms specifically rather than the causes. But also...
1) Income share is complicated: https://equitablegrowth.org/labors-share-lost/ There are structural issues, like automation and immigration, underlying those trends. Immigration isn't, per se, irrelevant, especially when you consider dynamics like volatility and displacement. (But, again, it's complicated.)
2) Throughout history vilifying the rich has not worked out well for the poor and working classes, neither in absolute nor relative terms. Where sustainable improvements have been seen, they're the result of a flattening of the social hierarchy (not necessarily in monetary terms!), but in a way that shifts norms to the type of long-term, group management that you see in the upper middle classes, not the winner-take-all, rat race rules of the poor (at least, that they see as governing inter-class conflict, not necessarily among themselves). The cookie metaphor, both in the model it presents and the devious motivations it insinuates, is rat race rules, and rat race rules favor the rich much more than cooperative, inclusive norms. What you want is for the wealthier to identify with the poorer, but that can only happen (if at all) to the extent the poorer identify with the wealthier. If some wealthy person perceives themselves as having been wholly self-made, despite what's obvious to everybody below him, good! That implies he at least values agency and work ethic, norms that in the United States can be and are shared with people below him on the ladder, and therefore a way to sell political concessions as being in his self-interest (psychologically).
3) Wealth (as opposed to income) doesn't work as implied in the cookie metaphor. Elon Musk is a trillionaire, but there's no bank vault with a trillion in gold bullion that he can go to at will. At any point in time--hour by hour, even--his nominal wealth is primarily a function of the future expectations of others, including expectations of social contentment and economic growth. You can't take half of Musk's cookies and redistribute to everyone; it's entirely non-sensical to think that way. Our intuition breaks down at scale; certainly from a process perspective (as opposed to a static context). Just like running a $30 trillion national economy isn't the same as running a small business (for one thing, nobody runs it), the cookie metaphor leads to horribly misguided ideas about the nature of our problems and the viability of remedies.
Yes, inequality of outcomes matters (at least at the margins), it just doesn't provide much if any insight into causes and solutions. Imbibing in zero sum cookie narratives is counterproductive. Like other forms of social injustice, e.g. racism, it's paradoxical--how can you fix something without identifying the effects with an intention to address them; yet, such a fixation has a tendency to solidify (reify?) the divisions undergirding them. If you look at critical theory, especially critical race theory, you can see an admission of this paradox at the core of the literature. People like Frantz Fanon and Derrick Bell came to the conclusion that it's impossible to completely overcome racism--systemic and otherwise. Their perspective is understandable given the seeming intractability of these sorts of problem, I just don't share the fundamental pessimism at the heart of how these issues are framed by contemporary social justice thinking. And it's that framing that I saw in the cookie metaphor. I don't have the right answers, but history h...
The metaphor is not zero sum, and not about handouts.
It's about deliberate diversion of attention, obfuscating the source of inequality to those that experience it. This is something that absolutely happens, both overtly (by endlessly misrepresenting causes of poverty) and covertly (by cultural suppression of socialist ideas).
Yeah maybe if you abide by a god given ideology where you cannot question the distribution of resources with respect to one's relation to the productive organs of an economy on a microscopic level and instead only focus on re-distributive tax policies or reorganization of the political super-structure on a macroscopic level, without interrogating the underlying mechanisms.
@wahern. Nah you can just have a strongly progressive tax system that is used for large investments that create steady supply of jobs and innovation. Thats actually what the states so as well, via darpa and the like. It works very well.
If their kids could afford to buy houses nearby, they'd probably be a bit more OK with it. But when their own kids are priced out and told they don't have the relevant skills (thanks to education provided by the government unequally) for the new jobs, it's easy to point fingers at the new people in town.
And those people don't have to be foreign or a different race: just see the anti-tech waves that have rolled through the Bay Area in the past, directed more based on attire and mode of transport than race. And a lot of people here would agree those new workers are to blame for a lot of Bay Area problems, but it's easier to dismiss others as bigoted than wrestle with the reality of winners and losers behind each statistic.
Which country? This matters a lot. I doubt you are in Greece, or Italy, or Portugal.
Did you know on GBP PPP Warsaw and Budapest are now better places to live than Madrid, Lisbon and many other Mediterranean cities?
It’s crazy. Perhaps Berlin and Copenhagen are still ok, but even France is on a completely unsustainable path that will explode in the next 10-20 years.
Of course they can afford it, its just a cultural difference.
> Many Europeans cannot even afford proper AC in summer and heating in winter.
Basically nobody lacks heating in winter, that one is made up. The thing people lack is AC and its just because people aren't used to it so they don't see it as a need.
Edit: Saying this is like saying people can't afford shelter in USA, it is true and there are many homeless but it describes a tiny fraction.
Many Europeans have a mild climate where the few days AC is really better than no AC isn't enough to be worth it. Particularly if you stick to western Europe when you mean Europe, (eastern Europe has a harsher climate but also still coming out from soviet days and so doesn't have the wealth needed to put AC everywhere though some are getting close)
> The thing people lack is AC and its just because people aren't used to it so they don't see it as a need.
I suspect it's just that Europe is mostly north of the US and AC is more luxury than necessity. Places in the US like Seattle, which is still south of much of Europe, only recently rose above 50% AC prevalence. It's become much more popular as the climate as grown warmer.
We haven't needed this for the most time. I'm not spending on AC for a few days per year where it's really hot while it's really not most of of the year.
Besides: I'd rather put sedum/green stuff on our flat roof, which also helps insulate a little bit in winter but really really helps in summer.
Depends on whether you're talking about Europe the continent or eg the EU, though "many" if of course a vague enough claim to be technically true for any corner of the world.
But relateedly, US household energy expenditure is enormous compared to other countries and a lot of it is burning fossil fuels to run AC. There's a big money vs ethics tradeoff going the wrong way for emissions, more so from being a huge oil producer.
I'm interested in the numbers behind this. The location and timing of most air conditioning needs correlates strongly with the availability of PV. At this point I would have guessed that heating is strongly reliant on fossil fuels (and will be for many years to come) and air conditioning will be much greener.
>If the economy falls behind then quality of life will follow at some point.
If only Europeans would accept this truth and wake up that something has to change yesterday.
What's happening to Greece is just the mining canary for what's gonna happen in much of the rest of EU later, if there's no preventive change of course.
Only partially true though. A rising tide can lift all ships. The EU can benefit from advancements in the US invests in because of our wealth. This goes the other way as well, even thought he EU isn't putting out as much, they are putting out something and that benefits the US. So long as they don't fall so far behind that it isn't worth trying to bring them up - but this is unlikely, I'm not even sure how this could happen.
Noone claims that people in the third world enjoy great quality of life, for instance. You can't benefit from the advancements of others if you cannot afford them...
> I'm not even sure how this could happen.
It can always happen but it is gradual and takes time. Places like India or China were once the richest areas of the world, only to fall behind and become among the poorest later on because they stagnated while others progressed.
That is why it is partially true. There are many other factors as to great quality of life. If you have all those other factors as well then a rising tide can life your boat too. Some third world countries have seen this over the years, and others are seeing it now. Some have seen it and then something (often a coup) reverted them to bad quality of life.
Declining/Aging Population becomes the issue. Solutions will probably come from Biology/Nature.
Human Quality of life seems to flip the natural "evolutionary script" wrt to population growth. Shrinking population = shrinking landlords/bankers/labor/traders/military/scientists etc
In nature, where there is environmental instability/resource scarcity you see a Quantity over Quality reproductive survival strategy (which is similar to what we see poorer regions of the world) that fuels population growth.
On the flip side, where there is resource abundance and stability there is growth in population. But we don't see that happening in the richer/higher developed regions with humans.
Its like advanced human society/culture has worked out how to override biology.
We currently work around falling population(and the shrinking factors of production) with tech/automation, financial/military arm twisting and immigration which gives rise its own social and cultural instability.
Nature has found other population models though. Ants(Eusocial insects) have solved their population/survival issues by have a single Baby factory. There are theories that the Haplodiploidy it produces makes ant societies function smoother. While Meerkats have collective breeding model which is similar to what certain Feminists talk about when they say Make Kin not Babies.
It will take a couple generations of futzing about in unnecessary directions before we solve these issues. So patience with the people who don't know what they are doing is key.
I tend to agree to a certain extent. From my observation it seems that a certain amount of suffering in life creates strong motivation for overcoming it. If you just have a very happy life you don't have that strong motivation to change things.
>If you just have a very happy life you don't have that strong motivation to change things.
Or you see no way out, feel defeated and see that positive change is impossible or futile. It cuts both ways. Inaction doesn't always mean a rosy life.
While I fully understand and agree with you, there is an alternative take. Namely, given that cloud provider offerings are mostly incompatible, what you call "cloud-native" could as well be called "vendor lock-in".
The CNCF approach basically says, instead of just running your software in a traditional way, you run it in containers which run in the cloud, mostly managed by k8s which is the most popular even though not the simplest container orchestration platform. So what makes them truly "cloud native" vs "AWS/GCP/Azure-native" is that you can run them on any cloud, even private.
The “populists” request that their tax dollars go to citizens rather than foreigners and the elites respond with musings about the reproductive strategies employed by ants.
As has I’ve heard said, the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU. If you believe this is the case as I do, the next step is to figure out how to lifestyle arbitrage. Make US wages while living in the EU.
I’m older with bit more freedom than when I just started out, but this is exactly what I’m doing. My plan is to eventually quasi retire to the house I’m currently renovating.
I love living in the US and visiting the EU. For me, that seems to be the very best arrangement. Early on, I was infatuated with the perceived better quality of life in the EU, but I see now that I could not easily create something comparable to what I enjoy in the US unless I was an elite member of EU society. My guess is that this is true for the majority of US residents on HN.
The symbol has become "a unifying thread and call to arms" as yellow vests are common and inexpensive, easy to wear over any clothing, are associated with working-class industries, highly noticeable, and widely understood as a distress signal.
Rise of far right parties across Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, France and many other countries is another clear signal that EU's quality of life may not be great for everyone there.
Being number one doesn't say it's good for everyone here. It says more about how bad it is in the rest of the world.
Also, here in The Netherlands the yellow vests were mostly conspiracy theorists who would pull something to protest against out of thin air. That movement died down pretty quickly.
Protests here are almost always against (perceived) government overreach. In most countries even being able to protest is considered a luxury. That's why you don't see that many in the US.
Well being loopy isn't too good for economic success so that's a factor? Though for sure I've met some incredibly loopy people that had some great dice roll streaks.
But there are a lot of other factors in the problem and making it an economic issue really obscures some of the more important factors.
Intellectual laziness, idle brains, idle hands, toxic memes and bad actors making bad use of them.
schizophrenia has been proven to be stress triggered and im just not interested to listen to humanity idealization by engineers any more, with the endless utopias and perfect characters, and the blame on everyone not fitting into that template under duress. What good is a construction plan for a machine with all parts carved from diamond? If you cant integrate a real humanity in your perception , your plans and interests, why even waste public bandwidth on your ideas and the terrors they will become ?
Actually, I think our quality of life is going downhill. Things are very expensive and the taxes are still high. I think that the reasons the far right is winning everywhere is because people feel they have lost something. I agree. We have. We bought into the neoliberale thought mill and simultaneously lost our belief in social democratic welfare state. We are in short, becoming more like the states. But without the things that make the states so great. The states can basically print money and then other countries will begrudgingly buy dollars to keep it from inflating top much. So its basically global nation state socialism.
Pole here, what "far right" parties are you referring to? If it's PiS then they were ousted in the elections last year with a 30-year record breaking voter turnout of 75%.
As for the other party that fits this description they're their own worst enemy, as they're an amalgamation of groups which don't really have common interests aside from a few talking points.
If you believe that PiS doesn't have a strong base to count on, you're naive.
All it takes is another term of pain, and they'll be back.
Case in point, America. A former president who by all counts should have lost the election a year ago, was literally begging on Truth Social for donations, facing numerous criminal trials and convictions, just retook the hot seat.
> If you believe that PiS doesn't have a strong base to count on, you're naive.
I've met their voter base. The young, educated, city-dwelling part.
Of course they'll be back, but like every political movement based on cult of personality, they have no coherent plan what to do should Kaczyński die/retire, aside from infighting. Arguably the vultures started circling already. The MAGA party will face the same predicament once their leader inevitably leaves the stage.
My take is that since both Kaczyński and Trump haven't appointed a successor, their political projects will die with them. Their opponents need only to survive until that happens.
I so wish that you are right. I am afraid you are not though. Trump is a symptom of the growing discontent in the society. If not Trump, it would be Bernie or someone else. But the tinderbox is there. Someone just needs to take a match to that.
I mean, I know that right now every party not endorsed by liberal mainstream media is "far something", but calling PiS "far right" is an obvious hint that any further discussion on politics is pointless.
Yep. As a simple exercise, visit e.g. the Ireland subreddit and see how many young people there are complaining about the cost of living and are talking about emigrating.
I’m an American living in France for the past two years and cannot wait to move back to the USA. The taxes are so extreme and salaries so low that no one can even invest in the stock market. If I stay here, I will be able to leave virtually nothing to my kids when I die. The EU can take its 5 weeks of vacation and go fuck itself.
On the other hand, it's absolutely fantastic to have a young daughter and have her virtually not impact our finances at all for many years, between clothes/toy gifts from friends, gov subsidy, free healthcare, free education and low levels of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses on after-school activities, plus knowing I won't burden her financially either as I happily live out my retirement on a decent pension.
I may not leave her a lot of inherited wealth, but she may also not really need any to have options.
(That said, my personal frame of reference for why this is better and wonderfully stress-free is years lived in South Korea--that ultra-low fertility rate has reasons--, not so much the US.)
At the current trajectory of the EU though, don't count on it. She will regret you guys not having built up an inheritance for her, considering that EU tier 1 and tier 2 towns and cities are being rapidly bought up by American private equity.
Source is me. I worked at a major PE firm in a past life doing exactly that. Also check who's the new landlord at many European cities - Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Copenhagen.... More often than not it's either of the two American investment firms which start with B (and I worked at one of them). European real estate is highly attractive to hedge fund investors because of stable growth and low volatility due to forced undersupply - much better for them than actually working for their 2 and 20 paycheck.
“may not need any to have options”. I hope you’re right, but hoping the EU continues to prosper over the next 20-30 years is not what i’d call a plan. The future is unpredictable.
I think this is the fundamental cultural difference between countries like the USA (and Australia) vs most of the EU.
Folks here expect and trust the state to provide for the future, private provisions are easily dismissed as unnecessary. As a result of this the median household wealth of the area I live in is 5x lower than my home country of Australia, despite incomes (adjusted for purchasing power) not being drastically different.
Whether that trust is wisely placed we'll have to wait and see[1]. However I do need to narrow that down a bit, it's not the whole EU, mostly France/Germany. There are other nations moving ahead with private pension schemes etc and much higher household wealth (Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands).
1. My main concern is government investment is inherently slow, politically charged, and pathologically risk averse vs the private sector. This means in the aggregate, over the long term, private household investments will out perform.
This is entirely a problem of putting all of eggs in one basket. Or rather, only having one basket in which you’re allowed to put your eggs. The German pension system is already insolvent, and I suspect it’s not the only one. European welfare states are great n’all, but it would seem they were set up when the going was good and populations were growing. Now with stagnation, they don’t look much like staying solvent and populations don’t have anywhere else to turn
The German pension system is completely insane. There is no fund backing it, and disbursements already exceed contributions to the tune of 127B EUR per year (which is subsidized from the general budget) and the gap is only growing.
Probably explains a good chunk of Germany's and the EUs anemic growth. Simply put, that's 127B EUR that can't be spent investing in the future and growing the economy.
and this I think highlights a really big difference in perspectives: how do people feel about equality in origin, opportunity and outcomes? As an upper income Canadian I'm getting pretty tired of paying for all that equality, and I think Canada is not yet at the same level as most European countries. My kids may be the first generation that should leave Canada for opportunities.
> I won't burden her financially either as I happily live out my retirement on a decent pension.
What is a decent pension and where it will come from? I'm projected to get a decent SSA pension (bigger than a median income in top tier EU countries), but I am not counting on it. What gives you confidence that government will be able to support you through retirement?
It can't be overstated how much of this is cultural. Quality of life is simply less materialistically driven in Europe.
If Americans give up on home ownership and luxury items, they too can enjoy a European quality of life; living in an 800sqft rental and enjoying a rich social life.
Do people honestly think Americans don't have rich social lives? Just because we socialize differently doesn't mean it isn't rich. Most Americans seem to prefer church groups, and small friend and family gatherings at their homes rather than going out and mingling in urban entertainment districts and bars.
Europeans get most of their perspective on US social living conditions from the terminally online, who are disproportionately likely to have no social life. The average American living in, say, the Midwest doesn't show up in the anecdotes that stereotypes are built around.
I'm an American and it definitely seems like we are in a significant and worsening loneliness crisis. I have no idea to what degree any of it is unique to Americans. Social connectedness, socialization rates, and companionship have all been declining for quite a while now. Lot's of potential causes and theories about it. [1] is a decent overview.
Like personally I'm doing great, and so are a lot of people I know, and I'm sure you as well. But I think a lot of Americans are struggling badly with their social lives.
#1 Reason is likely the urban fabric of places being non-walkable & car dependent. It's a physical structure that doesn't lead itself to spontaneity and new connections.
I recommend reading Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000). American civic and social engagement has been declining in almost every measurable way for 50 years now. There is no way to deny this.
The largest contributor according the book's surveys and studies (and I love saying this) is television outcompeting in-person fun. Car dependency is a factor, but IIRC was factor #2 or #3. While this ranking was true at the time of publication, I would wager that time spent on "screens" is likely factor #1, #2, and #3 now.
I would wager that many people are fleeing their hometowns to socialize in cities not because they're walkable, but because the density of people increases, allowing you to have better odds meeting real humans who haven't been lost to the allure of the indoors.
Americans are much lonelier than their European counterparts.
In addition, lifespans in the U.S. are declining even post COVID relative to their European counterparts, largely due to increases in “deaths of despair” (drugs, suicides, etc).
The idea that Americans have a “rich social life” is not true relative to Europeans. Even the church going etc. is for most people forced upon them as opposed to something they want to do, as evidenced by the increasing number of people saying they’re faithless but onto church anyways.
That doesn’t mean that people with rich social lives don’t exist or even that the lack of such a rich social life is a problem for a majority of people.
What it means is that the U.S. broadly isn’t doing as well as Europeans and further things are getting worse.
I always wonder what would happen if you took these studies and actually broke down the US into units the size of the European countries we're being compared to.
It's easy to make a study that shows that the US has more X than some number of European countries—you just compare the entire US to all European countries and then cherry pick the ones where we do worse. But the US is a big place with a lot of variety in living conditions—even if you just broke down the results by broad geographic region rather than state, you would get dramatically different results than taking the US as a whole. What happens if you compare loneliness in the South with loneliness in Denmark? Or what about loneliness across the entire US with loneliness across the entire EU?
this is true but less and less so… I am European living in the US for the last 30+ years. spend my summers in europe and noticing each and every year that this culture is slowly dying. playgrounds where hoards of kids used to be are mostly deserted, mobiles and social media are slowly taking over the lives of europeans too. this may be difficult to see if you are not looking hard cause european cities get A LOT more tourists than US cities (tourists are on their phones too :) )
I have no doubt that materialism and consumerism is eroding social life in Europe too. My point is primarily that the US is way ahead of the curve on this, and it explains much of the difference.
I have a lot of friends who went the opposite direction of you, and chose a cheaper but more fulfilling life in Europe.
Instead of making 200k a year in the us, they make modest salaries and rent 100-year-old farmhouse flats that Americans would call a slum. They drive economy cars and spend their ample time socializing or outdoors.
My personal opinion is that Europeans simply place a higher priority on social interaction and incorporate it into their daily lives. Many of them have more modest financial aspirations, and don't expect to ever own a house, vacation property, or boat.
I basically explain this by comparing my life (US of A) to my sisters (EU). My sister makes great money - my sister spends ALL of this great money. she lives paycheck-to-paycheck which in US would mean she is poor, in EU she is living large (just came back from UAE, heading to Kenya in a couple of weeks, January Macedonia and Austria…). I make 789x what she does and put away 60+% - been doing this for 25 years now, almost done with working though
Go for a walk where? On the side of the stroad? With your friends who live 10Km away and have to drive to meet you because there's no public transport?
My take is that Americans like to make infrastructure an excuse for everything when it really boils down to priorities and preferences.
10 km is a 20 minute bike ride if you're not too obese to fit on one. 10 minutes if you pick a coffee shop, pup, or Park that is halfway. Unfortunately, most people prefer Netflix and the fridge which is even closer
in 89.65% ‘going for a walk’ is not possible unless you want to walk in circles around your house 76km away from the first tree/park/coffee house… you may though go for a drive in a pickup :)
Maybe if you're living in the Alaskan wilderness, but pull up a map of San Francisco, Austin, or Denver and you'll find a plethora of parks, coffee shops, and pubs. That doesn't stop people from sitting at home watching Netflix alone
lol america to non-american who watch a lot of movies might be SF, Denver, Austin… and even in those urban areas (which is not typical America) most people would need a serious drive to find a park (I used to live in Denver area, walking to a park would have been like 110k steps :) )
Strange, I pull up downtown Denver and I see like 20 parks within a square mile.
However, this kind of whataboutism illustrates my point. There's a near infinite number of places humans can congregate to enjoy each other's company. It can be a park or a coffee shop or a pub or your kitchen table for tea.
The fact that none of these are suitable demonstrates that the desire to get together is not there.
downtown Denver can house minuscule part of the population of the Denver metro area - only those affluent enough to afford it. America (again) is not downtown Denver or downtown SF or downtown anything...
hasn't this always been the case? most european land and cities has been densly populated for centuries.
Also, a lot of american homes seem to need space for luxuries which are simply weird for many europeans.
A bathroom per bedroom for instance? Why not share a bathroom with the entire household,and have a seperate small toilet instead?
American kitchens also seem really large compared to most european one's i have seen, but they also seem to have a more social function then what kitchens are used for normally. (preparing food)
Is that not a false dichotomy? I make quite a lot of income and still have lots of time with my kids. At least as much as I'd have anywhere in Europe, I bet. It is not a hard requirement to make good income that you sell your soul to the corporation.
It's not technically 5 weeks, but I'm American and get 24 days (96% of 5 weeks) of PTO plus 7 company-chosen holidays. And I take every one of them, even if some are just "I'm not working the next 3 Fridays, because I want to putter around the house."
We start with 19 + 7 days and get 1 extra day per year of service until 5 years. (We also get a 4 week contiguous block once every 5 years.)
Original post talked about 5 weeks vacation each year. I suspect the assumption is that working hard in the U.S. would not allow for that 5 week vacation.
Therefore that's 5 less weeks with the kids each year — or about 1.6 years total by the time they leave home for college.
Is that satire? The last time I seriously looked at moving to Europe, it was a pretty fundamental part of why I aborted the effort. Unless something has changed recently, for software engineers income is vastly better in the US.
I care about income as a proxy for quality of life, not as an end in itself. For me, the quality of life I get in Europe for X salary is better than what I would get in the USA for 1.5X salary. Ymmv
I agree, YMMV. But the average software dev salary in western Europe is half what it is in the US. The guy in the US can buy better insurance than what is provided through taxes in Europe, and still have way more money to invest in their future and increase their quality of life.
Leaving money to your kids isn't a bad inclination or anything but I don't see why it's the be-all end-all. Maybe my parents will leave me some money when they pass, or maybe not, I'm certainly not expecting or planning on anything. I hope they spend what they can to enjoy their life while they're alive.
Not to mention, you cannot predict the future and you might lose your wealth outside your control.
wealth is only able to grow if the state and society itself is stable, otherwise you might have worked for naught, and lose everything in the process thanks to war/climate change/economic depression etc anyways. (my SO's family lost all their wealth in world war two for example, and i am talking generational wealth here).
Raising your kids to be able to stand on their own and deal with the harshness of the world is far more important in my opinion.
How would your situation change if you didn’t have to account for US income tax while living abroad? Does it offset at all due to agreements with France?
What’s even nicer is if kids don’t need their parents to leave them an inheritance just so they can afford a roof over their heads.
The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy, which was doing economically terrible when I visited, didn’t even have a fraction of the homelessness problem as in the U.S.
I caution against trying to compare homeless statistics internationally.
The definition of who is homeless and how they are counted varies dramatically between countries to the point where comparing headline numbers is largely useless.
> Correction: the west coast is filled with homeless people due to democratic supermajorities. Most of the country is extremely clean.
This is such a bias tinted view of reality. There are homeless in all parts of the country including suburban and rural areas. You find the majority of homeless in cities because that is just where people in generally are so if by most of the country is extremely clean you mean most of the country is extremely empty and void of life then yeah.
But you don't find massive unhoused homeless encampments (which is really all that matters for most people) in all cities. The problem is of a completely different scale in East coast, Midwest, Southern cities.
Let's just ignore the rural areas and suburbs. Let's even ignore party (since most big cities are democrat run at this point).
Even with all of those things held the same, the West Coast cities are still uniquely bad not just in the people without permanent housing but also their lack of ability to do anything.
This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
Because nobody wants to live in the south, midwest and east coast.
The west coast was a great place to live, people moved there, they didn’t build enough housing, people lose their jobs and can’t afford rent, they go homeless.
Cities in the midwest and east bus their homeless to the west coast. California tried to do the same but turns out people really like the weather.
As far as they lack the ability to do anything, you're right. Cities are NIMBY trapped and unless they fix that they won't be able to make any real progress on the problem.
The Guardian did an article on this about a decade ago when this claim was still popular and found that this was not the case. Cities like SF bus more people out than are bused in.
> This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
That isn't a democrat problem, indeed the unwillingness to build new things is, by definition, a conservative tendency to "leave neighborhoods as they are".
Historically Seattle's city council was full of "conservative democrats" who didn't rock the boat much and who worked well with local businesses. The city council may be willing to build bathrooms for any gender, but no way in hell are they willing to rezone "historic" neighborhoods. However they've had no qualms about building large amounts of shelters in minority neighborhoods, devastating many of them. Likewise the police don't bother shutting down open air drug markets in Chinatown, but I'm pretty sure if a few dozen dealers and several hundred customers congregated on Queen Anne the crowd wouldn't last long.
Show me a republican candidate who is willing to run on the platform of "extreme property rights, get rid of all zoning except for heavy industry, do whatever you want on your land." The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
No city in the PNW has had anything resembling a conservative anything for many decades. The people here are so out of touch with the rest of the country, it's a bit worrisome honestly.
> The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
I mean... you're ignoring the largest Republican state for what reason exactly?
But anyway, I think a lot of zoning policy is set by the state.
For example (and this is frankly why efforts like DOGE are necessary), it is simply true that politicians of both parties will seek to maximize their power. State codes typically grant cities zoning powers. They don't have to. But most do. Thus, one can expect that any politician will wield that power.
I've never met a politician who didn't fully exercise their power. Those who do become folk heroes like Cincinnatus -- so rare is the accomplishment.
At the end of the day, we the people simply need to remove the power from the state, one way or another. If DOGE works, it would provide a good model for how this could happen.
From my perspective, I think that every decade, the citizens should elect a 'deregulation' committee whose only power is to remove regulation. Or, randomly pick a group of 12 people to sit on a grand jury to eliminate laws periodically. That's their only power, and they'd be anonymous. Maybe that'd work.
> No city in the PNW has had anything resembling a conservative anything for many decades.
Up until a year or two ago Kirkland had a long standing (and well respected) republican on its city council. Small r republicans used to hold multiple positions in the PNW, but after the party purge post 2016 the Republican party in Washington State has done nothing but run absolutely unelectable candidates. They used to run candidates who ran on a fiscally conservative platform and who didn't engage in culture war stuff.
But aside from that, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are two different axis, and historically Democrats in Washington have been rather fiscally conservative.
The Seattle city council worked very well with the local businesses communities and they were adverse to adding new taxes.
While the council's behavior has changed in recent years, the history is that up until less than a decade ago, Washington was rather purple when it came to actual policies.
Hell the super liberal local independent newspaper used to put some small r republicans on their voter guide now and then.
I don't want them to die. I would prefer they be warmed and kept alive in homeless shelters, but city governments are uninterested. For example, my city of Portland built a suitable building for a homeless shelter (well the county did) and immediately left it empty for 10 years until a private group bought it and is now running a shelter. Meanwhile, Oregon state is preventing them from running it at capacity, and the county is pulling funding.
They don't care. Meanwhile, 100s of millions were spent on tents.
Again, this is a simple problem where we fix it by funding homeless shelters and getting people off the streets. For a while, due to Oregon's incorporation of Martin v Boise into state law, police weren't even able to force people into a shelter. It's honestly insane.
100's of millions spent on tents? Please, where do you get your information? The expected cost for tents in FY 2025 is $230,000, paying for approximately 6,500 tents – or about 0.05% of the total Joint Office budget. Plus, they halted the tent procurements after commissioner Gonzalez protested earlier this summer.
"The U.S. is filled with homeless people." is a popular, completely unsubstantiated statement from people who live elsewhere. Everywhere is filled with homeless people would be more accurate.
> The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy, which was doing economically terrible when I visited, didn’t even have a fraction of the homelessness problem as in the U.S.
Interestingly, these are not unrelated. Italy's housing prices are very low because of how badly it's doing economically.
Not that closely related. Much of homelessness is still not a housing price issue, and housing price issues are partially but not completely remediated by a contraction in the economy.
And also... no -- homelessness is one bad problem, but there are other problems. Bad economies cause a myriad, including declining healthcare availability and reductions in life expectancy.
Idk why you think your kids should get your money when you die. If they didn’t earn it then they should get a small amount and have to work for the rest, just like everyone else.
1) Sorry I didn't list other reasons in order for you to understand that there is more than one reason it's done. 2) You bringing up feudalism is still completely random lol. I get you're trying to make the point "just because something was done in the past doesn't make it a good idea", but the contrary is also true - just because something was done in the past doesn't make it a bad idea. Using your logic, I suppose we should stop cooking food since it was done in the past and everything done in the past is akin to feudalism lol
Because I earned it and that's how I want to spend it.
Did a charity work for my money? No. They just supposedly will (but possibly not) use some of it for something aligned with my interests. Just like giving my money to my children.
After a certain stage, parents are working knowing that the value they are generating will be passed down to their children, it is no longer for them in their lifetimes, but their employer and society still benefit.
If parent’s work beyond what they can spend in their lifetime is not given to the children, who would continue to choose to work? Already in Canada you can exceed 50% tax rate and many adults who could see more patients, write more books, take more cases, do more work, choose not to as the marginal benefit decreases.
Ok, but then you end up with children who don’t need to work for as long because they have a head start. And so on until you have oligarchs who are born eating caviar and will never have to work.
Have you seen the steep exponent on the US debt? You won't be able to leave anything to your kids if you move to the US either. Might as well enjoy 2 weeks vacation, rather than 2.
Right. And the vacations are something you ‘give’ your kids too. You won’t lie on your deathbed and think: “I shouldn’t have taken my kids to Vienna that summer. Should’ve put it all in Vanguard ETFs. Man what a bummer.”
If your kids appreciate your money more than your time is when you know you screwed up.
heck, raising your kids is the one and only tasks which should really count in your life (if you have children ofcourse).
Wealth can dissapear in an instant, and considering the stability of the world seems to be only decreasing, raising and seeing your kids grow up seems far more important than investing in the stock market to me.
first the government will take 50+% of everything he leaves to his kids. if there is still significant funds that he leaves them they will 100% become bums.
he should spend every penny he’s got to spend every minute he can with his kids - especially while they are young. and his kids will say the same.
not noble at all - naive, dangerous and downright stupid thinking
If you will have under $7M in your estate, the slightest is literally nothing. You will not owe a penny of federal estate tax.
If you have over $7M in your estate, it's worth consulting an estate planner, but the basics look like gifting and establishing trusts while you are alive (and ideally while the exclusion amounts are high).
The current exclusion is $13.61M per person, or 2x that per couple and set to drop down to $5.6M in 2017 dollars on January 1, 2026.
If there's a chance that you'll have over $7M and die in 2026, the slightest is gift some of it now [directly and/or via trusts or 529 plans] while the estate tax exclusion is still $13.61M and file form 709.
I understand why one would prefer the US way, but these are some weird arguments.
I understand why you would want higher net income to enjoy a wealthy life, but for "investing in the stock market"? I also understand why you would want to earn more so that your kids can have a better life, but why "after you die"?
If anything, the latter can be turned into an argument for the EU way. Your kids don't need you dead, they need you to be alive and caring. So you have vacations so you can spend time with them, public education so that they have the skills to help themselves, so they don't need your inheritance, and healthcare to keep you alive even if your "stock market investments" are at a low point.
Daycare in my city in the US is around 30k a year.
The city just dismantled its gifted program for schools, so if your kid is a high achiever plan on another 40k a year for schooling.
Even swim classes have a huge waitlist and are expensive. Any type of children's activity is absurdly expensive due to the high cost of living.
Housing is absurd, if you have a couple kids plan on spending 4k a month on rent for a place in a nice neighborhood.
Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings and that is it. Americans are, by and large, not even able to save up for retirement, with zero hope of leaving anything to their kids.
Tech worker salaries are a small bubble in all of this.
> Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings and that is it.
Per the US government's own BLS, the median household has >$1,000 leftover each month after all ordinary expenses. Americans may not save much but it isn't for lack of available income.
Medians mean nothing in a society that has a bimodal distribution of wealth.
America is full of people who are working a job and a half (with a good chance both are 30hr a week jobs that offer no benefits, and may have "flexible" scheduling where the employee is called in to work different computed selected shifts each week), and people who are working in offices earning good money.
In the middle you have some people working trades still.
We switched over from a manufacturing economy that made things and gave people stability and enough money to raise a family to a "service" economy, and then we started telling everyone working service jobs that "those jobs aren't real careers, so of course you are being treated and paid poorly!"
I've lived in LCOL, MCOL and VVHCOL cities in the US. Just because everything is outlandishly expensive in the bay area, that doesn't mean the same is true everywhere in the country. In large swaths of LCOL and MCOL areas, your money absolutely goes further in all the areas you listed.
I would suggest, though, that if you didn't grow up in the bay area and have family property here, as a relocation target it should be considered similar to gold mining. You're moving here for work because of the amount you can save [as a result of ludicrous tech compensation] and then use elsewhere, not because it makes sense financially to actually be living here.
I'm not in the bay area! I'm in Seattle, which used to be the cheap west coast alternative to the bay area!
I'm third generation here. Although I'm remote, my wife's job is tied to a location here. We both want to live someplace with a strong international community, access to an airport with lots of overseas flights, and that is a reasonably large population center. (IMHO Seattle is still small, and we are lacking many things for it, although that has gotten better over the last decade or so.)
The only other locations that meet our criteria have either garbage politics or garbage weather. (not that I'm happy with Seattle's politics, but at least our city council is mostly incompetent and a little bit malicious, as opposed to mostly malicious and a little bit incompetent!)
So you want to live in what would be an extremely desirable area but also have the cost of living be very low, and feel like you have a high quality of life while you have a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of your community.
> So you want to live in what would be an extremely desirable area but also have the cost of living be very low, and feel like you have a high quality of life while you have a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of your community.
I don't want a super low CoL, but I realize that housing prices have gone up in excess of what they should have due to restrictive housing policies.
Seattle used to be 1/2 the price of the Bay Area, or less! Engineers here earned less than in the SF, but we were OK with it because the QoL was great at a much lower cost.
But the city and surrounding areas refused to upzone, to such a degree that the state legislature finally had to force the issue, but even then the laws passed are too little too late.
The reason for the high CoL is lack of construction, plain and simple. Getting simple residential permits can take half a year or more, environmental regulations have limited what even homeowners can do with their own houses, and the majority of the city is still zoned for only single family homes.
The high price of building means that daycares can't open (too expensive to justify), and workers in all fields demand ever higher pay just so they can afford rent, which drives up the cost of everything.
For the last decade we've built 1/2 as many houses as we've had people moving to the city, and a large percent of new dense construction is rental only, which means money leaving the city and residents not building up any equity (or long term stake) in the city.
Several years ago (when I was a manager at Google) one of my employees needed to relocate overseas in order to facilitate coming back under a more preferable visa type, and they were looking at options. For the same role where they were earning $135k base in Mountain View, it was going to translate to about $115k in London, $155k in Zurich, and only $89k in Paris. They chose Zurich and ended up staying there for over five years before moving back to the bay area.
You can't leave money for your kids in the USA unless you have several million dollars lying around, because health care will eat up all of your savings in old age.
There are gaps in Medicare coverage. There's long term care that isn't covered by Medicare; people can self insure, or purchase separate coverage, or many rely on Medicaid which requires exhausting assets first.
I've watched both my parents go through this, with significant chronic health issues. They had good private insurance on top of Medicare, they routinely had $10-30K annual itemized deductions for health related expenses that were not covered by their insurance. And that was with a daughter who is an MD who invested a massive amount of time and effort to get insurance to cover as much as possible.
> The taxes are so extreme and salaries so low that no one can even invest in the stock market.
There's a special "retirement plan by actions" (PEA) with lower capital gains tax, and the reason why most French people don't invest in the stock market is mostly lack of education around it. For most, real estate is the main way of investing/saving money. The stock market is dangerous and you can lose everything, and many have personal references (their parents/themselves bought stock from efforts such as the Eurotunnel that failed, financially) to that effect.
That's what the chinese thought in the 18th century :).
A fun quote for the europeans here:
"Our land is so wealthy and prosperous that we possess all things. Therefore, there is no need to exchange the produce of foreign barbarians for our own." - The emperor at the height of Qing China
That is the point - the Brits were able to force the matter. If you aren't up-to-date on technology, specifically military tech, you're going to have matters like this forced upon you. Que the Ukraine giving up the nukes (and later getting rid of even non-nuclear missiles).
Though it has very much decreased in recent years due to rampant inflation. My real wage has decreased since increases have been lower than inflation. For unemployed and low earners it is even worse.
This always went both ways with the EU providing a market. When the US stops to provide defense, watch and see the EU reaction, starting with all things digital.
As India and China both produce solid middle classes demanding American products, this will matter less and less. We're already seeing this on the West Coast of America (what I know) where Asian and Indian cultures are gaining more and more influence.
It will not matter less and less because China can and will satisfy that demand themselves without relying on American products. So far the US exports about half as much to China compared to the exports to the EU (2022). And it will likely export less to China in the future.
India is not even close to replacing the huge European middle class and even if it were it has proven to be a highly unreliable partner. And so far the US exports to India are not even 15% of what is exported to the EU (2022).
The EU middle class comprises around 280 million people. Almost as many as the whole US population. And it is culturally and politically aligned with the US to a large extent. It‘s a huge market to loose.
Nobody would drop 15-20% of their exports to try to save 5% of their defense budget all while loosing influence and power.
To reverse roles in your argument: Imagine if the US put sanctions on EU companies because EU militaries aren't doing enough to help the US fight cartels in Mexico. Seem reasonable?
The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin of error. I've travelled a fair amount and everywhere is basically the same.
For an individual it's really going to come down to lifestyle and what you prefer. Some people like urban living and walkability, if that's you then you probably want Japan or old world metropolitan European cities. Some people want a house on a few acres and national parks the size of countries, if that's you then you probably want the US.
Working cultures are different but then there is no average on that either. People on HN tend to assume everyone is an office worker or something which is actually a fairly narrow slice of the middle of the spectrum.
Equally though, online (you can see it in this thread) there's sometimes a weird focus on the absolute worst outcomes which I've always found baffling. If you're planning to become a poor fentanyl addict then yeah, don't go to the US, find a country with a safety net, it'll be more fun.
The bizarre thing is that the problems are fixable. The federal government already spends more per capita on healthcare than other developed countries, just that our healthcare is so much more expensive and for no good reason.
Our healthcare system, to the extent that it was intentionally designed at all, implicitly prioritizes consumer choice and immediate access over cost efficiency. While there are certainly gaps in access and affordability, the typical middle-class voter can still get elective care quickly from a variety of local providers. Most other developed countries have longer queues or certain services are less available. We also subsidize drug development costs for the rest of the world. Whether those are good reasons for paying more is a matter of opinion.
Of course there's also a certain amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that inflate our costs.
> The US certainly does not subsidize drugs for the rest of the world.
It literally does. The costs of producing drugs are mostly borne by the US market, allowing drug manufacturers to charge less elsewhere while still investing the billions of dollars necessary to develop the drugs.
No one claimed that it's for the benefit of the rest of the world. But the reality is that if US drug prices were fixed by the government at lower levels then there would be less new drug development. The US develops around 75% of world's new drugs. Would you prefer to have fewer new drugs going forward?
Nope. Nobody changed the argument. No one said "USA subsidizes drug development out of a societal sense of charitable obligation to the rest of the world." It just so happens that - due to the unfortunate design of our system - the rest of the world is receiving a subsidy.
In fact, there are European-HQ'd pharma companies that also make the lion's share of their profits in the US - so that's certainly not benefiting the US.
Economists, and pharma lobbyists, argue against US drug price regulation because new drugs produce large positive externalities.
I think it's a mix of pharma lobbying and also altruism. Pharma lobbies Congress to do the altruistic thing, and many Congresspeople agree, because they believe in markets and understand incentives.
There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And greed is good, right?
> the problems are fixable
Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and even judicial capture by financial interests. Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only seems to get worse.
It's not just profits and management. Administrators, nurses, and yes, definitely doctors, get paid far higher in the U.S. than in other countries. Who wants to be the one to say we need to cut staff, and cut wages for nurses and doctors, in order to bring down costs? Just cutting fat from insurance companies, or having the government step in as insurer with no other changes, wouldn't move the needle much.
I'm pretty sure healthcare costs in the US are also higher as a percentage of GDP compared to EU, so higher wages would not explain the difference. Also productivity should be higher?
I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal companies take all the money.
Yes there’s tons of overhead and extra costs, but it isn’t mostly at the insurance company level. It’s spread all around the system, that was my point. There’s no one “quick fix” that leaves everyone with the same job and fat salary as they had before.
Most of the murders are just in a few zip codes[1]. In some cities they are literally concentrated in a few city blocks. So if you move to the U.S don't live in obvious high crime areas and you'll be fine. The best way to tell if an area is high crime is to look for Starbucks. The more comfortable the seating in the Starbucks, the less crime there is. High crime areas have no Starbucks or they have Starbucks without seating or bathrooms. These are known as "Problem" Starbucks and they progressively remove things like outlets, seating, toilets, operating hours until problems stop. If things don't improve, they just close.
So you felt like living in Canada gave you a clear understanding of the high cost of living and low wages in the US (we'll ignore how wrong you are about this for the moment), and your example of a more affordable place to live is... Tokyo?
Thanks for making it clear I should treat your posts as a regurgitation of terminally online zoomer talking points from here on out.
I'd agree Tokyo or East Asian Cities certainly has a much better quality of life than the dump that is the Bay Area, but if take everything bad about the US labour market that's pretty much amped to 100 in Asian societies and for lower pay and longer hours. You won't have the time to enjoy much of that comfort in the same way as you might in a vacation.
Anybody ambitious would agree it's still far more optimal to work in a USA and build a career there first before moving to Asia as an expat to better negotiate terms. And even then, the supply of interesting jobs there is going be much less.
That’s not really true anymore! Japan works on average less hours than the US does at this point, especially if you’re in tech like me. I’ve never worked more than 40 hours per week here.
And Japan actually has more time off for people to enjoy the fruits of their labor too!
As far as moving goes, I wouldn’t be so sure. Plenty of people start off their career in their home country before moving to HK or Singapore or Tokyo, skipping the US entirely.
Anecdotally, a relative of mine worked at a firm in Hong Kong as an Architect, and the firm literally refused to do anything about nearby construction that there was dust blowing into the office ever day. That's the kind of labour standards you may see in Asia :)
She's working in London right now and alot more happier, tbh having grown up there in HK most of my cohort have moved to US or Europe.
Tech as an expat is a bit of bubble, most of the "hard work" in building a career is achieved in the less competitive environment. Growing up there in those cities is another matter, the academic pressure and job market can be soul-crushing. If you don't get into a top university many large firms won't hire you. That's not to say similar things happen in USA, but it's relatively easier to get into Ivy League, and outside of Banking or Law most other careers are willing to give you a chance to prove yourself.
What you read online can definitely sway your opinion, especially if you’ve never traveled to or lived in that country for an extended period of time. It can give you a misleading perspective.
I’ve lived in both EU and US, and EU definitely has the better quality of life for the average person. I 100% agree.
However if you are at all an ambitious youngster with huge dreams, the EU is where dreams go to die lol. EU living is what i’d call “coasting in life”. It’s a safe, sheltered life, the government is very functional and “takes care” of you which i’m sure is comforting for many. It’s not for everyone though.
In other words, I would recommend the typical person moves to the EU if they have the opportunity. Their quality of life would improve and they would be happier. For anyone that’s very ambitious or very talented at something, your efforts will pay off 10x in the US, and you’ll have a better quality of life than your EU counterparts.
That doesn't explain the astronomical wages for tech workers at all. Tech workers are paid highly because their employers are generating huge revenues per employee and the cost of living in these coastal hubs is exceptional [even before the most recent tech boom]. Tech workers not in Seattle, Bay Area, LA/Irvine, Boston, NYC and DC/NoVA are not getting paid nearly the same as tech workers in those places. Even in Chicago, Miami, Houston, Austin, Denver, Boulder, Raleigh, Charlotte, Philly -- they're all 20% or more lower comp. And what I'm not sure most folks on the outside looking in realize is just how much better tech companies pay for tech roles than non-tech companies pay for the same roles (usually in "IT" organizations). A SWE with 5yr experience at Google might be making $325k/yr total comp, but a SWE with 5yr experience at a F500 manufacturing company might be making $100k (and possibly working on harder problems).
The Google engineer is probably working directly on a product (or at least in a job function that is paid as if their members are working on the high-margin part of the business). The F500 manufacturing SWE is treated as part of the costs (and probably as NRE or overhead rather than as part of the product or even part of COGS).
>Tech workers are paid highly because their employers are generating huge revenues per employee and the cost of living in these coastal hubs is exceptional
These are factors common to all (e.g.) Google employees. But the folks cleaning the toilets aren't getting paid as much as the software engineers. So there must be a bit more to it than that. I'm not saying that the factors you listed aren't factors, but they aren't the whole story by any means.
it’s funny because most of the US has the perception that canada is a mess and a horrible place to live too. Awful job prospects, migrant problems, horrible weather, and a housing market that makes the US look cheap. Just to name a few.
Not sure if that’s true at all, i’ve never been to canada! So take those opinions with a huge grain of salt lol.
What’s my point? I guess that perceptions can be very different.
Anyway since you left canada, I hope you found someplace where you are happier. :-)
Over half of Canadians live within 70 miles of the US border and up to 90% (methodologies vary) live with 100 miles of the border. The converse isn't even close to being true.
Depends what quality of life means to you right? My parents were average income but I never had money stress; worst that happens is the state pays for them or me etc. I have many millions now because selling some businesses; my life is the same; high quality. So what do you mean? I can only read 'more cars' or something in your post.
> Depends what quality of life means to you right?
I recently got laid off for the 2nd time in 4 years (probably better off than most, to be honest). I'm done with shooting for the moon. I am now strongly considering a "boring" job - the kind that keeps the basics of society running and has government contracts. I can bootstrap my own moonshots over the weekend (I'm probably going to make split keyboards with Rust firmware FWIW).
So, yeah totally, it can even change for an individual pretty drastically.
your last comment made me chuckle because I actually hate driving. :-) I agree with you, quality of life is very personal!
I’ll share what a quality life means to me. For context, I grew up middle class, my father was a city employee, and my mother was a stay at home mom for a number of years.
• large emergency fund (zero stress about paying mortgage or losing job).
• I don’t have to look at prices when buying groceries or eating out.
• Time and money for 1-2 vacations per year. At least 1 international. My spouse and I love to visit new places.
• I can work remotely outside the US for 4 weeks internationally per year. I typically stay with my dad’s side of the family (in europe) for 3 weeks each year, while working remotely. Great way to spend lots of family time and not burn vacation time.
• No stress about medical care or costs.
• Ability to start a family without money stress.
• Good work life balance, no more than 40yrs on average. Minimum 3 weeks vacation per year.
• Ability to retire earlier, to pursue hobbies, if i wish.
• Easy access (45 min or less) to quality outdoor recreation on the weekends. Things like hiking, kayaking, etc.
A lot of those are luxuries, but certainly feel like a quality life for me. Yes, I realize how lucky I am. MOST people in the US are not so fortunate. I’m just explaining what quality of life might mean to someone… It’s not about buying pointless junk for me.
>>>>large emergency fund (zero stress about paying mortgage or losing job).
I don't know about the EU, but in the UK I know their mortgages are usually fixed for only like 5 years. In the US they are typically 30 year fixed. That can cause a lot of instability when interest rates go up.
Your quality points are similar to mine, but then I don't get the US part? Many of these are basically guaranteed here. And the others are similar; for me it was never hard (because I am programmer since I was a kid) to make stupid money, but stupid money doesn't mean billions. The only reason I can see the US for is to make billions instead of millions. But the point is; if either of that fails, at least I always knew I am never living in a trailer park or on in my car or under a bridge here. Whatever risk (well outside dope) I take, it won't be that bad.
I cannot see how the US helps here positively unless you are don't mess up; I have got all you listen with very little effort and no risk (if it failed, I would live very much exactly the same) except maybe the family starting part as I never wanted kids. But the rest I have. I don't have a mortgage to care for either; I don't care for goods (like you), so I have a simple abode with a lot of (hiking and kayaking) land, which happens to cost next to nothing here.
Your quality of life points boil down to being rich. If you’re saying that you’re more likely to end up rich in the US then sure, but most people don’t end up rich.
Certainly food and cars is not more expensive than most European countries. Health insurance is also not that much expensive, it is only the way you pay it which in Europe is by tax. There is the issue of not being covered if you don't have a job but that's has nothing to do with price. The US is one of the cheapest countries in the world with pretty decent salaries and endless variation in house prices, there also always cheaper cities or alternative states. Try that in Europe or Australia or Canada, good luck.
Out of pocket health care expenditure as a share of GDP per capita is fairly low in comparison with other wealthy nations. Of European nations, only Monaco, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France are lower (and not by much!).
Transportation spending is indeed higher in the US than most of the developed world, but it doesn't eat away much at the increased disposable income per capita -- proportionate to household income we're talking about a few thousand dollars higher, and most of that is a very recent development as costs went way up over the last few years.
>The (average) income is therefore calculated according to the Atlas method from the quotient of the gross national income and the population of the country.
Ah yeah, surely that doesn't get insanely screwed up by America's near top of the list inequality?
The average salary for 9 homeless people and 1 CEO is $100k! Americans are definitely better off than Europe!
I mean, the same is true of median income as well. People overestimate how much inequality affects the actual end numbers in the US. The median incomes in the poorest US states are still higher than most of the world.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Keep in mind median income is 37K, 50K in cities. If you think you can live a fulfilling life on that income then I’d be impressed.
For you, the question is theoretical. For me, I've lived it.
Before I transitioned into software, I had a very a fulfilling life being paid a mediocre salary as a graphic designer, supporting my family for years and investing plenty of time and money into my hobbies.
I don't know how to convince you of the very real experience I and many others here are having, and I don't really feel like it's a good use of my time. Feel free to keep holding onto your theories.
You are a member of a household, even if your household size is only 1. So yes, you are a household.
Imagine a household of two parents and one 17-year-old dependent. One parent works in this household and the 17-year-old has a part time job working 15 hours a week at $9/hr.
The parent who works has an income of $90,000. The 17-year-old makes ~$6,480 for working 48 weeks in the year. The other parent's income is $0. The median pre-tax personal income of this household is ~$6,480. Is this the right statistic to understand the wealth of this population?
Let's then add a household of one making $38k. Then another with one person making $22k and another making $110k. $0, $6.4k, $22k, $38k, $90k, $110k. So now our median personal income is $22k, but a median household income of $96.4k. Does the individual income really reflect the actual average purchasing power of the people in this community?
Going by the median personal income, you're including people who choose not to work or choose to only work few hours or a non-high-paying job potentially because they've got access to other forms of wealth. You're also including retirees who essentially just get by with a small pension or using their savings because they already own their home or live with family or whatever. Going by household income gives a much better understanding of wealth and purchasing power of inter-related people (even people not officially related).
>> Are you saying that for people making median level of income, the US is a horrible place to live compared to the rest of the world?
> Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
I just came back from Chad. I've also spent time in Mozambique, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and South Africa. I'm pretty sure that the quality of life for those at median income is quite a bit worse in all of those places than in the US. So perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic to make a statement such as that, comparing the US to the rest of the world.
This thread is a bit reminiscent of the old days when the East German government used to claim - with a straight face - that the Berlin Wall was there in order to keep the westerners from overrunning the Workers' Paradise of the east.
Revealed preference shows that way, way, way, more people are trying to move into the US for economic reasons than are trying to leave.
That's why Bill G, Larry E, Jeff B, Mark Z, and Warren B have all left, because the US is a shithole (your word) and they can afford to go anywhere they want.
Every international median income ranking I've seen, which attempts to compare median income on an apples-to-apples basis, puts the US very near the top. Here's one example:
Are you on the outside looking in, and this is what the US looks like to you?
My commentary as someone on the inside who has also been on the outside looking in:
> Incredibly expensive, low wages
Pick one. Wages trend higher where it’s expensive. Wages trend lower where it’s not.
There are also tough-to-see subsidies like prop 13 and rent control in CA (as an example).
Currently the US appears expensive from the outside due to a strong dollar.
From the inside, it’s more nuanced — specifically, the distribution of wealth across the capital class and the worker class is skewing much more towards the capital class than at any time in our lives, but is trending towards a common state if looking at a longer time scale.
> no safety net,
No European-style safety net.
Japan doesn’t have a safety net either. Is it “horrible”?
The US has a substantial safety net via charity. Most of the people seen in the news who need it (e.g., homeless folks) choose not to use it, since it comes with restrictions like not being on drugs.
> car and health insurance are mandatory,
Yay?
Fwiw, health insurance is federally subsidized for low income folks.
Car insurance is a good thing, imho.
> homelessness everywhere,
In many cities, yes. Outside of those… not really. If you don’t live or work in a city, this is only something you see on TV.
> gun violence is rampant,
None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my entire life have been a victim of gun violence. I know of three people who committed suicide with their own guns (which is counted in “gun violence numbers”), but I don’t think that’s what you’re referring to.
I realize that’s a class issue, and that there is more gun violence in the US than in Europe, but it’s just not part of the day-to-day reality for most people.
> and the government is a dictatorship disguised as a democracy
Objectively not true, at least for now.
The system of checks and balances baked into the US system is failing tragically at the moment, but we are not at the level of a dictatorship yet.
> No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn’t for high salaries in certain fields.
I don’t think that this is universally true.
I know plenty of immigrants who make their money, retire, and choose to stay in the US. Some people go back, but a lot stay, and with purpose.
> Are you on the outside looking in, and this is what the US looks like to you?
No, I lived in Canada for 12 years, my family lived in the US for 6 years, and I regularly visited for work and pleasure. My first hand experience is that the US is a shithole.
> Pick one. Wages trend higher where it’s expensive. Wages trend lower where it’s not.
No. Slightly higher wages do not offset the incredible cost of living in cities. And likewise, if you live in a cheap area you still have to compete with everyone else for certain goods.
> Japan doesn’t have a safety net either. Is it “horrible”?
Japan does have a safety net.
> The US has a substantial safety net via charity
lol. Guess I'll die unless Jeff Bezos decides to give me money.
> Fwiw, health insurance is federally subsidized for low income folks.
It should be federally covered for everyone in the country.
> None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my entire life have been a victim of gun violence
Yes, that's statistics for you. I'm Brazilian but I haven't been murdered even though lots of people are murdered in Brazil.
> I know of three people who committed suicide with their own guns
This is gun violence.
> it’s just not part of the day-to-day reality for most people.
It literally is. A ton of people own guns for "protection", because what if the other person has a gun. There are areas of cities you avoid because they're dangerous. If you get stopped in your car by a cop, there's a non-zero chance you will get shot. Kids literally have active shooter drills in school. It literally is part of day-to-day reality for most people. You're just in it so you don't realize it.
> The system of checks and balances baked into the US system is failing tragically at the moment, but we are not at the level of a dictatorship yet.
Yes you are. You get a choice between two parties who are basically the same. 70% of the country's vote is thrown away in federal elections. A vote in Wyoming counts for 4x more than a vote in California. Counties are gerrymandered so badly your vote doesn't matter even in local elections. Voter suppression is table stakes. That's not a democracy.
>> I know of three people who committed suicide with their own guns
> This is gun violence.
Huh? Do you count people who hang themselves as victims of "rope violence"? Are people who kill themselves by sucking on the vehicle's tailpipe victims of car accidents? People who jump off of buildings are counted as construction accidents?
People choose guns because they’re very lethal. If a gun wasn’t around they might not choose that route, and eventually get out of the dark place they’re in.
Realistically I think the guy is centering on the experience of the poor only and using that as the quality of life index.
In another comment he talks about car insurance and food costs as if those are even major expenditures?
For a European moving to the US the only actual difference is health insurance, and even then, at low income you probably end up paying about the same or slightly more as European taxes, at a higher income you come out significantly ahead.
I also don't know a single person in the entirety of Europe/UK who doesn't own a car outside of the megacities like London, Paris etc, so it seems like a daft comparison given that car insurance rates are fairly similar in UK and US.
>Cars are seen as a burden, so only people that need one buy one.
I don't know where exactly you are located but it sounds like a delusional place. Can't name one first-world country where getting a car is seen as 'a burden' and not 'a massive improvement of one's life'
>None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my entire life have been a victim of gun violence. ... I realize that’s a class issue, and that there is more gun violence in the US than in Europe, but it’s just not part of the day-to-day reality for most people.
I'm curious roughly how old you are. I grew up in a fairly well off suburb of Seattle and am in my mid 30s. At some point around 2020 I realized that among my friends, parents/kids of friends, and coworkers there had been 8 or 9 incidents of newsworthy gun violence in my fairly close contacts. In a way I would consider myself as having grown up fairly sheltered and so it was a surprising realization.
Newsworthy used to avoid digression about mass shootings vs shootings, as you did about suicide. I think most were reported as mass shootings but I'm not certain now.
*posted from a new account while traveling, I'm not meaning to come off as a troll jumping in to focus on guns as a topic. It just stood out to me as I was reading.
Note that I grew up around guns, and most areas I have lived in while in the US are gun friendly.
In my family and peer group, gun safety was taught at a very young age, and it was taught strictly — guns weren’t to be treated like toys, don’t even appear to mishandle a gun (e.g., by flagging someone, even if obviously unloaded), and don’t wield a weapon unless you’re willing to pull the trigger and neutralize/kill them (n.b., avoiding the situation or running away is often the best option).
That said, I know of three people (not close to me, but in my wide circle of acquaintances) who have had their guns confiscated by LEOs, each time by a spurned spouse who alleged that they were in danger or the gun owner was a danger to themselves, and each time was a generous interpretation of the circumstances, imho.
> there had been 8 or 9 incidents of newsworthy gun violence in my fairly close contacts.
If you don’t mind me asking, was there a common theme to the incidents, or was it just random stuff?
> I'm not meaning to come off as a troll jumping in to focus on guns as a topic.
I've mostly lived in places that you might consider gun unfriendly. I don't own a gun and am not always comfortable in places where they are too present. I know enough about safety from friends that I've avoided shooting with certain people in my greater friend circle. That said, living in the mountain west friends of mine own guns, hunt, and one set of friends owned a gun related business for several years.
For the incidents 3 were school/university shootings, 3 were in malls or similar public locations, and 1 was a house party. I don't know of any real common theme beyond gatherings of people. One I included in the earlier post was a domestic incident with several deaths and so it might not belong with the others.
I've noticed my 50-60 year old friends and their children in high school are more concerned about school shootings than I ever was. That may just be excessive concern due to increased news coverage, but I think there is also something about the availability of guns and teenage brains that is a real concern for them.
My personal experience has only been hearing gunshots nearby, although one incident involved a death. I don't think of myself as being in dangerous places but it has happened more than a few times. Guns and gun violence aren't something I think about much at all, but when I do it's surprising by how much it touches my life and my friend's lives.
All that said, one thing I do appreciate about this country is the variety of it. A friend who grew up sheep ranching told me they were allowed knives up to a certain length and guns at his school. Meanwhile mine would have had a lock down if students did the same thing.
Your comment is interesting to me as a comment further up sates that: "People move from China to India despite the higher prices in America precisely because the increase in wages is more than enough to offset the higher prices." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321211
So while expensive holds, the low wages does not.
> no safety net
There are safety nets in the US, just not one singular one nor is it always easy to apply or get benefits.
> car and health insurance are mandatory
What countries don't have mandatory car insurance?
Which ones don't have mandatory health insurance?(Universal health care doesn't count, as that is mandatory and taken from taxes.)
Further, you can eschew health insurance in the US. Many people do(for various reasons, cost being one of them), it is just not that wise of a move as healthcare here is very expensive.
> gun violence is rampant
We have pockets of areas where violence, not just gun, is rampant. I think a fairer analysis shows that it is the intersection of poverty and also drugs but I can not speak fully to this topic.
>the government is a dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
Is this talking about the current government(Joe Biden?), the future administration(Donald Trump) or the administrative government(deep state?)?
I would agree that our government is not functioning as well as it could, I am also not sure if I have seen any other governments do any better.
Japan: Due process with police holding suspects and trying to force confessions.
South Korea: Recent Martial Law issue
France: Numerous protests occurring
Great Britain: Prime Minister just told all farmers "If you don't like the changes we have implemented, you can leave." Protests and counter protests with violence on both sides but police seem more focused on arresting people for social media posts.
I can't think of any recent issues from the Scandinavian countries but that is more likely due to my lack of exposure to media than lack of issues.
Please let me know which countries you find to be great.
Yeah, every country has its problems, but that doesn’t mean they’re all as bad as each other.
Yes, Japan has a problem with allowing police to hold suspects for 3 weeks with no outside contact. But the reality is that very few people are ever arrested, to the point that nobody is afraid of police.
The same can’t be said for the US, where black parents have to tell their kids to not trust cops.
In my experience Japan is pretty great, so that’s where I live.
Other places I consider top tier are Holland and Scandinavia. Western Europe and developed Asia is tier 2, some of Eastern Europe and Canada are tier 3, USA and most of South America are tier 4, and any other countries I wouldn’t live in.
I have an objectively higher QoL than almost anyone in the EU or Japan who wasn't born rich.
After many years as a SWE without a college degree, I was able to buy a large 5 new 5 bedroom house within ~25 minutes of my employer in a beautiful city, I have a full time nanny for my children, a luxury car, padded retirement, and plenty of other money to buy what I want.
Where else can a smart, hardworking person achieve that who didn't come from generational wealth?
I'm not so unique either, I have some friends I've known who similarly didn't come from money and have been able to build up careers that support a wonderful lifestyle.
Europeans have a bottomless admiration for generational wealth (old money), and equivalently despise individual success (nouveau riche). Centuries of monarchy does that to the spirit of a people.
I can’t retire and continue my current lifestyle, I would need some sort of job. Therefore, I don’t consider myself rich.
More importantly though, I have this lifestyle due to a job, one that is quite common (software engineer). I didn’t luck into some unique position or business opportunity.
> The USA is a horrible country to anyone looking in from the outside.
When I was at a multinational corporation we had people from our EU and Asia offices fly out to the United States for a couple weeks at a time (their choice).
We'd go out to lunch every day and some of us would have them over for dinner at our houses to get to know them.
Many of them were young and had developed their idea of the US from Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. They'd show up thinking they were walking into a hellscape of a country because that's what they saw on Reddit.
It was a rite of passage for all of them to slowly realize that the US in person is different than the US according to Reddit or TikTok.
One example that came up frequently was minimum wage. Reddit talks about the federal minimum wage all the time as if Americans everywhere are making minimum wage. We'd have to explain that our state minimum wage was significantly higher than the federal minimum wage. We'd also explain that it's basically impossible to find a job paying that minimum wage right now because even the post office and local fast food places were hiring at higher wages.
The list went on and on. I remember several coworkers who went from thinking the US was a horrible country to asking us to sponsor their moves to the US.
> No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn’t for high salaries in certain fields.
That's a chronically online take, but it's completely wrong. Immigration demand to the United States is extremely high, even for jobs that don't pay high salaries.
I have literally lived in the US before. I spent 12 years in Canada, right next to the US as well. Awful place to live.
And of course your multinational coworkers want to move there. They’d make a lot of money to insulate them from the awfulness. Not to mention a huge raise compared to working in their home country.
> I have literally lived in the US before. I spent 12 years in Canada, right next to the US as well. Awful place to live.
How long did you live in the US? And what part of Canada did you live in to be near the US?
Most of the Canadian border is sparsely populated on the US side. So I can't see how being in Canada would give you much of a feel for median/mean U.S. life.
And Canada is relevant because I visited the US multiple times per year for both work and pleasure and got to see what living in different cities would be like. And it was awful.
>Anectodotally back when I was studying in USA the local Panera was hiring for like 20 bucks n hour. Which is more than the mean wage where I live now.
> That's a chronically online take, but it's completely wrong. Immigration demand to the United States is extremely high, even for jobs that don't pay high salaries.
I would complement that it's completely wrong as long as you're unaware of the hidden health hazards the US poses (which are a consequence of low regulation). These won't affect your day to day life and thus are easily overseen, and are invisible - unless they start affecting you years down the line. Most people are uneducated in terms of en
Examples are the superfund sites in California, the high sugar added to most foods, etc.
Even if you live in the top 1% it's hard to escape these - if your company office is near a superfund site (eg Nvidia HQ) then good luck, your money won't help with that. Yeah you can buy organic foods but if you're going to a restaurant with friends you'll still have to deal with bad quality ingredients.
I'm often amazed how nad the internet it is too when I talk to friends in Silicon Valley.
Bottom line: your high earning salary can only get you so far to offset and insulate you from the health hazards living in a low regulation society impose
A society that bans the sale incandescent light bulbs and washing machines that can be set to rinse clothes with warm or hot water is not a low regulation society.
Yeah sure, the US is better than India and it has a large scale immigration program, doesn’t mean people would choose to move there if they had other choices.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Nationalistic flamebait in particular is not welcome here (regardless of nation).
> The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin of error.
Having lived in the EU (Netherlands) and the US (California), I would say the inequality in the US is much worse. Especially in larger cities. To the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm living in a "developed" country.
I'm British. When I visit the US I would agree that inequality is significantly higher, but it also seems quite clear that overall wealth is significantly higher too. Second and third tier cities in the US are clearly still fairly well off in a way that just isn't the case across Europe.
The thing I tend to always fall back on is the last part of my comment. You don't want to be poor in the US; there is no bottom. Whereas if you're poor in Europe usually there's a minimum standard that you'll fall to.
For most people the relevant factor I think is what the QoL in their cohort is like. I say it's a bit of a wash, because basically, if we limit the discussion to EU and US, if you're well off the US is probably better, if you're poor Europe is probably better, if you're in the middle then there are trade offs.
Do I want to live in a country where it’s comfortable to be poor? That implies everything from people defending poor as a lifestyle, such as classmates insistently you that working in class is a stupid lifestyle choice, to people joining the country on the basis that they don’t like producing much, and living in a general country that is second at everything (or falls down to Chile level in terms of studying math in school).
If I had a passport for the US, I’d move yesterday.
There is more to life than "producing much" and "getting rich". There is no single answer and it depends on preferences and tradeoffs. But, labeling an ideology that takes care of the unfortunate, and lets the people live life without "if you dont produce much or work every minute of your life towards getting rich" as lazy or incentivising to be poor is just naive and ignorant.
I'm saying as someone from Asia having lived equal number of years in both US and EU.
> You don't want to be poor in the US; there is no bottom.
How do you figure? US has SNAP, Medicaid, UI, TANF (for families with children), Section 8 housing, SSD, SSI, Childcare Assistance amongst other programs.
There is also a lot of impact from immigration that the US has that Europe has not. Immigrants tend not to be at the high end. The US has had a large influx of immigrants (around 14% of the whole population right now) vs just 6% for Europe. (from quick Google checks.) I'm not saying that is good or bad, but if you keep adding at the lowest end of income you increase the inequality if the most wealthy are experiencing gains.
> The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin of error.
Ahem... Have you seen the standards in the UK get diluted year after year post-Brexit?
There's more to the story than the listed examples.
Environmental standards dictate your risk of developing various diseases later in life so are a big difference in quality of life. E.g., if you drink tap water from UK vs other countries, with high PFAS levels, where it essentially comes from a spring in the mountains - that's a huge difference.
Another difference is job security which again has a huge impact. Consider France: If you get an unlimited contract at a company you're essentially set for life (unless the company goes busy, or you mess up in a very bad way). Compare that to the scare many US dev employees hat to ensure in spring 2023 when all the big tech companies were doing layoffs. Also, France had a much shorter work week.
So, no, quality of life doesn't even compare remotely between these countries. Only perhaps for the upper 3% it is similar - if you're an average tech dev, your life will be much much nicer in Paris than in a random SF/LA suburb.
I guess I have a physicist mindset but basically I feel that these things are within margin of error. We're talking 20%, 40%, whatever. And because the lifestyle is so different it's hard to compare directly, it depends on your personal vision of what you want in life, as I mentioned some people want Paris, some people want the mountains.
I do think that if you're going to live in a Big City(tm) then the old world just does cities better. Then again I haven't visited SF, just NYC.
Job security isn't something I've ever cared about in my life. Starting from zero (no parental wealth), beyond about age 20-22 I've always had a minimum of six months savings, who cares, just find another job. It's business, you're not married. If you're an actual adult and you need a job continuously to get by you've fucked up somewhere.
It kind of just feels like a leverage decision, anyone middle class or above has a net worth in the x00k's, it's just about whether you have anything liquid vs locked up in home value etc.
If you have 0 in the bank then unless you're in North Korea or something you have bigger issues than "which country has better QoL" in my opinion, you need to work on yourself first.
Not every adult plays the game of life on easy mode, to get most rewarding experience one has to invest some serious time and energy into matters.
Also, for most folks here its trivial to be independent and successful financially if alone, past decades have been good in ways mankind has not experienced ever before. Get 2 or more kids into the equation of life with everything that they bring and challenge goes up tremendously. But as said, there are rewards, and most of them can't be achieved in any other way (that is coming from somebody doing fair amount of extreme sports, mostly in mountains).
Also, these matters are not within margin of error. Quality of life is way more important than cashflow once one is not poor. Also in Europe extremely expensive matters like universities for kids or more intense healthcare are simply non-topic when it comes to finances, you simply need less money to have similar quality of life and peace of mind. You are always just 1 error, often not even yours, to have quality and quantity of your remaining life massively dependent on quality of the healthcare, or just bad luck with genetic lottery. If you feel invincible now, give it a decade or two and you will reconsider.
Its also really uneven. It contained in 2016 6 of the lowest GDP per captia regions of the entire EU.
However we should of course treat GDP as a suspect measure of living standards. Whilst those people living in those areas will tend to have curtail life chances, they did at the time have access to _good_ healthcare and housing (in certain circumstances)
The higher quality-of-life was likely true at one time but I think it is quite arguable now in much of Europe. There is a palpable sense of decline that weighs too heavily on everything. How "quality" is a life without meaningful optimism for the future? It is the quality-of-life of a pensioner waiting for the graveyard.
An underrated benefit of the markedly higher standard of living in the US is that people can choose to trade standard of living for quality of life if they wish. American culture seems to preference maxing standard of living but that is optional, and there are plenty of people that make other choices.
Even within EU there is a clear correlation between economy and quality of life between countries. While yes more social policy improves quality of life, it can't compensate if the economy difference is too high.
This quality of life can disappear in a matter of seconds. EU is still not actively working on protecting itself from the Russian threat. The moment Russia attacks which is going to happen since this is what the fascist Russian dictatorship wants, we could kiss our quality of life goodbye.
The EU could be a powerful neutral third block, focused on providing the best for its citizens, but for that they would have to keep up economically. The EU is currently a massive laggard, worse than China in a lot of metrics, yet having dalliances with some levels of Chinese authoritarianism. Not to mention the current unsustainable state of its welfare state.
You forgot to mention that this quality of life is bought with debt and deficits that have been running for the last 30 years.
Look at what's happening in France for proof that this is just not sustainable. The US has a massive advantage tough,their currency is the global currency accepted and needed everywhere that is backed by the US army. Much less so the Euro.
The cost of all these social programs has to come from somewhere and currently the majority of these costs are shouldered by the middle class that is being squeezed to the max and speaking as someone from the middle class, I can assure you that having a couple of extra weeks of holiday and more job safety (if you are into that sort of thing) is not worth 55% to 65% of my gross income.
Even universal healthcare is crumbling now.
At some point the EU will need to get it's productivity up and become competitive once again or all this quality of life will have to go as it won't be financially possible to continue on this path.
I feel like this is only the case for a very narrow demographic - the young, bicycle-riding, sex-having mid-20s college grad still trying to figure out their calling in life while living frugally without a care.
It really sucks being 40 and still earning like 57k EUR or whatever.
Without challenging the veracity of your statements (which sound implausible if you narrow it down to working age population not in education and working a full-time permanent job), so what?
There is no rule that life should only suck for a minority of people and that most people are happy. It may well be that the 90% of people earning <60k EUR live generally miserable lives, and for the top 10%, "the EU is number one" and they post about it on Hacker News.
Given European demographics and the changing political landscape, it's hard to imagine that the quality of life in Europe can remain as it was through the 1990-2010's. Additionally, many European cities are essentially museums, riding on what was built centuries ago, with little innovation. If you don't believe this, just go to a German city that was completely destroyed during the war.
I'd imagine that Europe is at or near the peak in terms of its quality of life.
At least some of the European lifestyle has been due to peace on the Continent. Up until now peace in Europe has been funded by US taxpayers. The situation in Georgia and in Ukraine is what you get when European affairs are left to Europeans. Without the US providing military aid to Ukraine, Ukraine would have fallen and you'd have Putin banging on your back door.
Additionally, the EU's inability to supply Ukraine with basic military equipment such as artillery shells is indicative of how Europe is devoid of industrial capacity and couldn't rally in its own defense if it had to.
>The situation in Georgia and in Ukraine is what you get when European affairs are left to Europeans.
What are you smoking?
>Additionally, the EU's inability to supply Ukraine with basic military equipment such as artillery shells is indicative of how Europe is devoid of industrial capacity and couldn't rally in its own defense if it had to.
To your country's credit Poland is punching above its weight relative to the rest of the deadbeats but I wasn't talking about tanks. However, you've sent 240 T-72 Soviet era tanks to Ukraine and ~12 Leopard tanks.
I was talking basic equipment like: 155mm artillery shells. In that case, unfortunately, the facts are not on your side.
The majority of 155mm shells that are sent to Ukraine come from the US. The US has increased production of 155mm shells 6x this year alone. The same is true for body armor and small arms.
Europe cannot ramp production in almost any category.
The reason for that is that we have offloaded defense to americans and have century of accumulated capital (legacy of colonialism) to spend. How long do you think it's going to last? Even Brussels is getting concerned and that's telling.
PPP is an increasingly irrelevant notion in a globalized, digital, and immigration-friendly world. An iPhone or a Toyota Corolla costs the same in the US as it does in China. There is no remarkable arbitrage with real estate either - you're paying for the location and everything that comes with it. There is no secret city where the rent is low, there are plenty of well-paying jobs, you enjoy freedom of speech and can be reasonably sure the milk isn't tainted with melamine (tangent: due to strict US immigration policies and corporate RTO, the Bay Area comes close).
PPP suffers from the same problem that "basket of goods" CPI suffers from in that it doesn't account for differences in quality:
- of course a car costs more today than it did in 1980, it's a far better car
- of course a loaf of bread costs more in California than it does in India - I have certain guarantees about the pesticide levels in the wheat, the accuracy of the labeling, and my ability to seek damages from the legal system in case I chip my tooth on a stone, that I don't have in India
At best, PPP tells you something about the differences in cost of labor. But labor isn't everything you buy.
> An iPhone or a Toyota Corolla costs the same in the US as it does in China.
A maxed out iPhone costs RMB 13999 in China, which is about USD 1925. The same iPhone costs USD 1599 in the US. In Brazil it costs the equivalent of USD 2565. PPP is still very much relevant.
That's the opposite of how PPP usually works. Purchasing Power Parity means that although you earn much less in China, things also cost less, so your cost of living and relative wealth are the same.
So PPP usually is a boost to the poorer countries. The post you're responding to claims that this is less and less relevant because the things they want to buy are global in nature. The fact that these things cost more actually reinforces that point.
You often are better off in poorer countries anyway even if some goods cost more. My coworkers in India have servants that clean their house every day - I make more $$ than them by a bit but I could not afford that and so I personally have to spend a few hours in cleaning every week and my house isn't as clean (because I'm spending less time cleaning)
Better off than no job. But it will be interesting seeing culture shock of a few generations in some countries that seem to be improving fast and thus the servants kids can get better jobs. I hope it works out that way anyway.
How often are you buying iPhones and Toyota Corollas? PPP conversion rates are based on what people actually spend their money on. Easily tradeable goods, like iPhones and cars, make up only one component of GDP.
Sure, but my contention is that even the small things are of worse quality in the so-called "high purchasing power" countries, which is the main reason why they are cheaper. There is no actual arbitrage or difference in "purchasing power", just that the market is optimized to serve a different price-quality point.
The main reason they are cheaper is that labor costs are lower. The barista at your local cafe is making 50x what a barista who does the exact same thing would make in Nairobi. That doesn't mean your coffee tastes better.
"Losing 30 trillion" is a very entitled view on decreasing real estate prices. Those 600 million people making 1000 CNY/month or less (and probaly another 300 million making a bit more) will be happy for a respite in being priced out of everywhere. This literally increases their purchasing power.
> Those 600 million people making 1000 CNY/month or less (and probaly another 300 million making a bit more) will be happy for a respite in being priced out of everywhere
Those 600 million cannot afford to buy real estate even at the crashed price.
The going rate for a 2bhk in a tier 2/3 is still $100-300k, which is still unaffordable given that median urban household income is $6k and median rural household income is $3k.
And this is the crux of the problem in China - all this "overproduction" isn't necessarily due to some grand strategy, it's due to a lack of consumers because salaries are too low.
When I hear "America’s economy is soaring," I can’t help but think it probably just means the rich are getting richer.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not a communist. But it’s clear to me, especially when you look at how the middle class is struggling worldwide, that capitalism in its current form isn’t sustainable.
What we need is some kind of “Capitalism 2.0” or “Capitalism++”.
It makes no sense that someone with 300 billion dollars pays less (or even nothing) than a person that makes 100k per year. And this happens on ALL countries.
Covid and the subsequent recovery was and is definitely K shaped. Someone with a house and assets has crushed it. Those without have only fallen further behind.
Exactly. And I'll brag and be frank at the same time. I couldn't afford to buy my house today in the US. I have no idea how new people afford to move into my neighborhood. But since I bought it at the end of the GFC and refied to 3% at some point, I have that house and now a house in Europe that I paid cash for that I'm in the process of renovating. That one bit of leverage I was able to grab onto in 2011 led to big changes over 10-15 years. I don't see that same opportunity for a lot of young people now, and that's a problem.
GDP PPP is based on assumptions that - 1) People indifferent countries have the same basket of goods - probably not true for someone living in US vs Chine vs India 2) Accurate pricing data is available (which is not true for big categories like real estate in India and China - a large part of the price is under the table and unaccounted)
PPP is only useful for measuring regional purchasing power within a country. As a metric for comparing the relative strength of global economies it is irrelevant.
Just the opposite. PPP is less useful when comparing intra-country than inter-country. It's only relevant because there are barriers to trade, especially in services.
PPP matters on an individual level, but not at all on a national level. GDP at market exchange rates is what actually matters in terms of what a country can accomplish on the world stage.
And even on an individual level, PPP struggles with accuracy, because things are only ever roughly equivalent. There's a reason why so many individual people are trying to move from China and India to the US and EU, despite all the personal financial disadvantages of doing so.
Wrong. People move from China to India despite the higher prices in America precisely because the increase in wages is more than enough to offset the higher prices.
True, my comment was ignoring the fact that America's per-capita GDP is higher even after controlling for PPP. People can move for a lot of reasons. Having a much more transparent and predictable justice system is also one of them. For instance, my money would go a lot further in Russia, but then I'd have to live in Russia.
But the point stands that market-exchange GDP matters more when it comes to comparing the relative strength of countries, rather than individuals, since it endows the government with greater purchasing strength. An era of trade wars might test this theory, but the ramifications of absolute isolationism would be far more complex than that.
>For instance, my money would go a lot further in Russia, but then I'd have to live in Russia.
It's important to point that if you were moving into Russia as an expat, you've already avoided much of the opportunity costs of building your career there first and instead going in having "made it" in another country.
If you are starting out in China or Russia, it's much harder relatively to climb to a similar position within those countries than in USA. Alot of expats might like how much their money goes in China with good CoL, but I'd be suprised if they were to send their children through the conventional route of the Gaokao and ultracompetitive Chinaese University Admissions and labour market. Getting into the Ivy or Berekely or a State Flagship and then FAANG is cakewalk in contrast.
> PPP matters on an individual level, but not at all on a national level. GDP at market exchange rates is what actually matters in terms of what a country can accomplish on the world stage.
That's demonstrably false cause the global super-powers (i.e. the US, Russia and China, maybe India, too) mostly depend on their internal markets only when it comes to their war industry and to paying their soldiers. When it comes to that PPP is a lot closer to the truth on the ground.
If we're talking military only, then you have to look at defense budgets, not GDP. The US defense budget is still much bigger than China's and Russia's combined, even after controlling for PPP.
By "what a country can accomplish on the world stage", I meant a more holistic view of what a country can do, such as investing, R&D, exploration, etc. (and also military).
> because things are only ever roughly equivalent.
This is what people seem to misunderstand about PPP. PPP applies for daily/internal market goods. The cost of milk, eggs, clothing, etc. Which is definitely important. On a more macro scale it also compares a VW Vento in Mexico with a VW Jetta in the US...two particularly different cars with ~6000usd gap in price.
In other words, it compares basic goods for living; fudges some basic "luxury" goods, and pretends that that's representative of lifestyles. It ignores (in Mexico, for example) the fact that consumer electronics are ~20-40% more expensive (if available at all), access to truly equivalent basic luxuries (a VW Jetta for a VW Jetta) is still slightly more expensive, access to equivalent security/infrastructure/business guarantees nigh impossible to receive, and just the vast gulf of wealth inequality that exists, etc.
A lot of macro economic statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, or more literally: approximations with a measurement error.
PPP GDP is useful to compare, particularly politically because if the cost of goods in a country is lower people are more likely to be healthy / comfortable with less income. I think it is a little dubious when you use PPP to compare th3e size of two economies because 1) you are taking two approximate measurements and multiplying them 2) countries with lower GDP / person typically have higher relative purchasing power.
In "rich country" (high GDP /person) you can charge a lot for a cup of coffee. In "poorer country" you are likely to charge less. Therefore you can say that person in the poorer country is not as badly off as the absolute numbers suggest. However, if "poorer country" got to the same GDP / person purchasing parity might end up being almost the same. Or, countries with lots of poor regions will have a better PPP, but the cost of living in the places where people have high income may have similar costs.
And in general the most valuable purchasing power differences don't happen for the most valuable and traded goods. An equivalent airplane is going to cost as much in India as the USA, on average. At some point the absolute number is also important.
gdp is really bad, countries don't even use the same counting methods.
I think in the Netherlands they started using criminal activity to pad up gdp growth. Also money printing and inflation is a good way to up gdp.
I like energy production and consumption a lot more, modern economies pretty much come down to using energy to either transfer or modify goods, services or data.
This is actually my preferred measure too. I was happy to use GDP PPP figures because they tell a similar story to the energy statistics on ourworldindata.org. Asia miles ahead, China the most dominant, then the US and then EU. India looking to overtake the EU fairly rapidly if they follow China's footsteps.
Of course the per-capita numbers favour the US still. But by absolute figures, the crown goes to Asia. And per capita the Europeans can realistically be said to be behind China for policy making purposes, the trends are clear.
Except for when it doesn't. E.g. lightbulbs are now 20x more efficient than in my childhoos. But I certainly don't use >20x more light(bulbs). In fact, I'm quite sure it's 1x.
Europe is willingly self sabotaging their industry and energy production, in the name of some completely irrational environmentalist ideology that states that saving the planet is achieved by making Europe poorer while allowing China, India and a few others to pollute without any restrictions.
So yeah, we are getting poorer by the day and on the brink of a major economic crisis. Just look at what is happening in Germany.
European auto makers are failing because they can't make EVs that the market wants. And the market doesn't want their ICE vehicles either. They over-focused on very expensive high end EV vehicles. That's why they are hurting, it's not because it's EVs.
European ICE vehicles are losing out in China because people there don't want to buy any more gas vehicles, at least most people are getting there. VWAG is losing marketshare in every segment that I see. It's not green power that is killing them, it's not many good cheap vehicles that are killing them - gas or EV.
making a cheap EV (like the trabant/VW beetle for EV's) would be great.
Gas prices in europe are no joke, and considering we are basically in a hybrid war with one of the biggest oil producers for europe, getting rid of energy dependence would be great for europe, and having cheap EV's would be key to that.
So we are in agreement that cheap EVS would make sense for invigorating car sales in Europe. So why don't they do it? I think it's because they conclude they can't make any money if they make cheap EVS cuz the labor, batteries, components are too expensive or something for the lower profit per car world of cheaper vehicles.
American car companies have gotten addicted to selling huge more expensive cars as a way to keep profits up.
On a per capita and historic basis the emissions of developing countries are dwarfed orders of magnitude by Europe and Western countries. Not to talk about all the land conquered by the same countries.
I still think the real goal is achieving energy indepedence, so that Europe does not have to import fosil fules from some very questionable and problematic countries.
Currently this also simulatenously gives those contries more money, so they can be even bigger pain in the ass in the future.
What's this conspiracy of the US and Europe to destroy developing large economies world wide? If your plan is take over your neighbors, say you'll wipe out democracies and kill people and it's your destiny to win, then eventually the US & Europe will do something.
Russia literally talks about taking over the countries around them, bites off pieces and then subverts the countries that are left. That was all before the first piece of Ukraine was taken, Crimea.
NK - goal to destroy SK, has a big army and nukes. Worth trying to stop them.
China - Chains says the mere existence of Taiwan is worth destroying them. Also taking over the south china sea on the stupid dashed line that says they own the ocean down there. Dictatorships can't stand a functional democracy right next door.
India - if they don't plan to destroy the countries around them and take them over, then good on them. The US has been basically ignoring the fact that India is on a slow road to make their Muslim and other non-hindi citizens fail in every way in their society.
India said FU to the world and has been happy buying a lot of Russian oil that's under embargo. No one attacked them. The world isn't so simple as "western countries destroy all large growing competitors".
Two if not three of these examples are very much related to civil wars or civil-war-like dynamics. If anything, yes, I agree that the world usually isn't so simple to unconditionally take any single side.
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 is closer in some ways, but it's not the best... It tends to be biased against strong currencies. The USD has been extremely strong since the pandemic.
There has certainly been huge GDP growth in China but their specific claims about GDP can't be attempted to be believed. Their numbers have never been independently verified and most of the raw data is treated as a state secret. There is reason to suspect that some of what they're reporting is just made up. Party officials are evaluated based on meeting certain economic targets so there's a lot of incentive at the lower levels to falsify data. The same thing happened in the USSR before it collapsed (I'm not suggesting that China will collapse any time soon, just pointing out that this is a common pattern in single-party authoritarian governments). External estimates based on resource utilization indicate that real GDP might be significantly lower.
I think generic metric metrics like GDP PPP have to be put into context. When I was in China I was shocked by how much stuff there was. Not even nice things, but stuff to the point most westerners would consider cluttered.
Rent was also super cheap.
On the other hand iPhones were pretty expensive. Enchiladas were super expensive too.
These aggregated stats have to guess what you’ll buy and base their estimate off of that. Your actual financial situation will be very dependent on what you need to buy.
>And I expect that Asia is going to start developing some serious military muscle on the back of that because they have access to the history books and have a pretty good view into how Western leadership thinks.
The history books say Western countries abandoned conquest many decades ago. The leaders who initiated colonialism are long dead. Nowadays all we have are handwavey analogies to colonialism when someone wants to be provocative.
I'm never able to get to the "so what?" with these. Productivity growth sounds nice, but then it mentions that there's more inequality, higher cost of living, and more workers struggle in the US than other developed countries. How do I reconcile this?
They make a point that eventually the other countries' economies would shrink and won't be able to afford those benefits, but also the US doesn't have those benefits even now.
Not sure I understand how you're reconciliating it? Maybe I'm missing the link you are making with caring or not about other people being richer than oneself, how is that relevant here?
What I'm asking is more, what conclusion should I take from the article?
The issue is when others money means high costs for you, such as in healthcare or education or construction. A lot of stuff is really expensive in USA due to the high wages/profits and those workers not being any more productive, that directly hurts your quality of life unless you got an equivalent raise.
You mentioned healthcare, education, and construction. Those three all have very heavy government interference and regulation. It's unrealistic to blame those high prices on the free market.
Consider, on the other hand, the software industry. Essentially zero regulation. Yet the software, very high quality software, tends to be free!!!
Why is it that the most regulated, subsidized, and interfered with industries are the most expensive, while the least regulated, unsubsidized, free market industries are the most productive with the lowest prices?
> It's unrealistic to blame those high prices on the free market.
I didn't blame the free market, we talked about inequality nobody mentioned free market. That inequality is partially fueled by the unfree regulatory capture, things would be more equal if some regulations were removed.
No, it mean complaining about people having too much and people having too little. It might sound strange for you, but lots of people discuss economics/politics for a greater social good, not their own personal interest.
I think you got hung up on that specific. The bigger issue is that the US has a higher cost of living, and more workers struggle compared to other developed countries.
This is why I find the article confusing. At first, it paints a picture of the US as incredibly productive, which should mean that the average citizen's quality of life, and maybe even up to the 99th percentile, would be better than in other developed countries. But then it claims that the average quality of life in the US is actually worse (as in struggling workers and high cost of living).
So, I’m left wondering... Why do we care so much about the country’s productivity if it doesn’t improve the average person’s life? In fact, if it’s making things worse for the majority, what’s the point?
The only way I can make sense of this is by looking at the distribution of gains. The graph that would explain this would have extreme outliers at the very top, where all the productivity gains are concentrated. This isn’t just inequality in the typical sense of some people having more than others. It’s an extreme form of inequality where almost all the benefits go to the tail end, leaving the majority worse off despite the country’s overall productivity.
At least, that’s the only explanation that makes sense to me. But at the same time, I don't just believe this, that's why I'm failing to reconcile the contradiction in the article. What's the conclusion you take from the article?
P.S.: I don’t mind other people being richer than me as long as it’s mutually beneficial, or if their wealth has no impact on me, good or bad. Most people likely feel the same. The problem arises when someone’s wealth comes at the expense of others. For example, Kings and Emperors in the past were resented because their wealth and power actively held others back and were built off the labor of the masses. On the other hand, I don’t mind someone like Bill Gates being wealthy because his success indirectly benefited me, I have a comfortable job in part because of the industry he helped create.
I thought the question was "why should I care about productivity if it doesn't necessarily make my life better?". The article didn't really make the case that average workers were benefiting from this.
Would you say that construction is way more productive today in USA than 40 years ago? It seems like stuff are more expensive and less productive at the same time today.
If you've ever tried to build a house in the US, you'll find out where the money goes. I have, and there's good reason why I am not in the construction business.
So you agree USA has problems? That is the point, the source of that inequality doesn't matter the inequality is still hurting you. There are seemingly less such problems in Europe.
Of course the USA has problems. I've pointed out several.
But inequality is not a problem. People wanting to make it big come to the USA. That's why the USA has the biggest, most successful, companies that drive the US gdp forward.
Inequality is only a problem for people who are envious.
Healthcare using regulations to block competition and line their pockets is a big source to that inequality, being forced to pay into that isn't envy.
But I get your point, inequality isn't a problem in itself, but seeing your money go to rich people for no good reason does feel very bad even if the problem is the corruption and not the inequality.
Healthcare problems are nearly all caused by heavy government involvement in every facet of it.
> seeing your money go to rich people for no good reason
Anyone can buy stocks and get their share. For example, NVDA. If you'd bought some, you'd have made quite a lot of bank, and made your friends unhappy with you because of the money you unfairly made for no good reason.
I know many ordinary schlubs who became multimillionaires by simply buying NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, AAPL, etc.
> Inequality is only a problem for people who are envious.
Or when you have to pass by homeless tent cities in your downtown. Or when you are the victim of crime because the kid pulling a gun on you is envious because their family is poor and you're rich.
Extreme inequality brings social strife in multiple layers, if you're individualistic you might not care for it but for a society it fosters resentment and erosion of social cohesion.
> Extreme inequality brings social strife in multiple layers
This is the conventional wisdom, but I can't think of a revolt in a free market country.
> But I don't think you care about that in general.
My reading of history is that free markets bring the greatest prosperity to the greatest number of people. No other economic system comes close.
Cutting other people down to size because you're envious just makes things worse. It produces economic stagnation, and the demand for "equity" is endless and endlessly makes things worse.
It doesn't end well.
Be careful what you wish for.
Keep in mind that the most prosperous companies are in America and bring that prosperity to Americans and are the envy of the world.
Inequality is big problem. If you have a certain percentage of people with way more money than others, they skew markets to cater to them. You see this in real estate where new builds are mostly towards the higher end. You see this with cars where manufacturers are cutting the lower end models. You see it in health care where the only available options are the expensive ones.
This works well for companies because they can get higher margins. This works well for the people with money but other people are being left out. And with increasing inequality the number of people left out goes up.
Basically we are creating a world designed for the top x percent of people. And they are creating laws that favor themselves.
You cannot make it big in the auto business by targeting the 1%. Ferrari has never been a big company, and often teetered on bankruptcy.
The big money is targeting where the customers are - the middle class. That's why VW got so big. Why Ford and GM and Chrysler made so much money. Selling cars to the middle class. Tesla has also moved down market for the same reason.
How's Rolls Royce, Bentley, and Jaguar doing? Case closed.
Yet, if you look at real wages over time, they're stagnating in pretty much every developed country. Productivity has gone up consistently while wages lag far behind. Where is all that value going to? Because it isn't certainly being left on the table.
> if you look at real wages over time, they're stagnating in pretty much every developed country.
If you look at real incomes over time, they've been stagnant since the dawn of time; or at least as far back as we have kept track.
There was once wage growth because wages started from zero. It wasn't that many years ago that people didn't sell labor, only things. As we have transitioned into a labor economy, wages started to become a larger portion of one's income. To the point that nowadays more or less 100% of the average person's income is from wages.
So, with incomes and wages now being effectively equivalent, there is no room for wages to grow further. To do that now, incomes would also need to rise, and that has never happened.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Wages have steadily raised at the same rate of productivity between the end of WWII and the 1970s. People started selling their labor centuries before that.
It started to some degree centuries before, but it was a slow road to see people fully embrace the new world of selling time. Selling things remained the norm for a long time after the first worker started working for wages. However, by the 1970s, nearly everyone was working for wages. The rate of self-employment has remained effectively stagnant since then. This period marks, for all intents and purposes, the limit of human labor productivity.
Productivity has continued to rise since, but on the back of automation, not as a result of humans becoming even more productive laborers.
> Productivity has gone up consistently while wages lag far behind.
This isn't true for the US. The chart that purports to show this is misleading. Essentially, there are problems with the usual chart: the two lines are indexed to different inflation measures, and the wages line excludes certain highly compensated occupations which have been experiencing significant earnings growth (probably because these occupations are where the productivity growth is happening).
The LoS&D is always in play. In this case, entrepreneurs are always looking for a higher margin business. The effect of this is to lower those margins.
Nothing "crazy" about it.
The "unintended side effects" of government policies are nearly always the result of ignoring the LoS&D or pretending it doesn't exist.
The US economy is much more dynamic than Europe's and the US government is actually more willing to intervene (and can afford it because of US dollar).
In Europe it is austerity and general less support for economy-boosting policies.
Sweden is an outlier. US debt to GDP is 110%. France and the UK 99%. Italy 138%. Greece 203%. Japan 263%. China depends on who you believe, but probably somewhere around 100%.
No that is not how money works, it is one way money can work but it isn't how money works. Many economies are debt free, because there is no reason to go into debt to have money.
There are also downsides to it. One of the benefits of debt is to have more liquidity. If nobody owed anybody anything, but at the same time it was very difficult to trade with anybody, you would have a very inflexible situation that might not really be preferable.
Like if I'm sitting with goods you want, and you sit with goods I want, but we have no way to swap them, then we are both worse off.
The gold standard is not perfect but it's definitely better than what we have now.
My ideal pick would be using the price of a basket of common commodities (wood, iron, wheat); pay the bank for storing your goods and don't let state actors & friends steal your money with inflation.
I don't think BTC is the solution (it's unbacked) but wtfhappenedin1971.com has some good reading material.
Isn't it better to have an economy based on debt than something people actually want or need? E.g. if we had a currency based on land, housing prices would soar even more than they already are at.
Money is debt. Green (or whatever color) slips of paper aren't intrinsically valuable. They're a promise to redeem them for things that are, same as an IOU.
I take your point that not every economy is run by a government that owes 110% of GDP. But Japan and China are, and France and the UK are at 99%, so that doesn't seem to be the whole secret of America's success.
Money is debt. Even gold-backed money. Possessing money is the same as lending your time, labor, or assets to everyone else. To be repaid this debt you issued, you can in turn demand time, labor, or assets from someone else.
@ Jensson: As the others have said.. You might mean something else with your statement, but you cannot escape that the very definition of money is owed debt: A bank note is in essence an IOU: "This represents value you can redeem later".
You may have some idea you want to communicate about avoiding 'having a lot of debt' or owing more than you are worth, but money in human history has always been a mechanism of debt in its very nature. It represents being owed something else of value.
There are a lot of perspectives. Eg. that the US due to it geopolitical situation hasn't seen any real adverse events in the past century. Ie. privileged on the risk side.
As other people also mention: The US' growth seems to be debt driven, which will also have to halt at some point.
However, it would not seem like it is US dynanisism that is the reason for the current success of the country - especially taken into account that it is a small subset (eg. the magnificent 7) and very high valuations that drive the current success.
All in all, my personal view is that there is significant risk in the US market currently - thus also high returns. But I do think that it is safer to harbour some money outside of the US.
Personally, I am happy to have US stocks in my portfolio, I am also happy not to live there.
That's an excellent summary of the economic state of the world. This excerpt is depressing...
The challenge for other advanced economies is not just replicating America’s dynamism. It is to do so while retaining their cherished social safeguards.
For all its economic power, the US has the largest income inequality in the G7, coupled with the lowest life expectancy and the highest housing costs, according to the OECD. Market competition is limited and millions of workers endure unstable employment conditions.
The pessimistic take is that American FA*NG 'enshittification' and cheap Chinese plastic junk will continue to eat the world, while other nations abandon consumer- and labor-friendly policies.
It's also correspondingly easier to get another job. In Europe, making it hard to fire people means it becomes equivalently harder to get a job in the first place.
Yep, and crucially, getting a first job from which you can build a career is relatively (to the US) hard in places like Germany because companies are super risk averse.
Having read literature on it, I still struggle to understand how most of the problems attributed to income inequality aren't really problems of poverty.
An example is that inequality usually materializes in higher asset prices: people with proportionately more money tends to buy assets, driving up the price.
Now, the less well of people cannot afford housing anymore and are priced out.
Ingerently this not because housing is expensive, but solely because of income inequality.
You can insist it is because of poverty. But making both groups 10 times as well off would make no difference. The less we'll off people would still struggle to access housing.
You can also say that poverty is a total consequence of income inequality.
Now come and tell me again how inequality makes the world a better place.
Edit: I take, as you have read the literature, that you perfectly know that the same is the case of capital and produce from that capital in general. And so you are perfectly enlightened now to understand that poverty is inequality.
People with substantial multiples of wealth largely do not buy the same class of assets that those with a fraction of theirs do.
Someone who earns $1000/month and someone who earns $10 million/month are not competing for the same housing. Their effect on each other is minimal compared to those with very similar incomes who are competing for the same housing.
The only exception to this would be if there isn't enough housing for everyone, but the outcome would be identical (someone not getting housing) regardless of the level of inequality.
The idea that poverty is inequality makes little sense. Poverty is lacking a basic standard of living. If everyone has everyone they could want and their neighbor discovers an antimatter reserve under them catapulting them to unheard of levels of wealth, nothing materially changes for everyone else.
Similarly if everyone has perfectly equal income and wealth and still doesn't have enough to eat, they're all in poverty, regardless of the lack of inequality.
Seems like you didn't read that literature after all.
You definitely would Understand that ownership also comes in the form of owning rentals, mortgages, and not just owner occupied housing. That ownership is stock and shares with increasing valuations where you require increasing yields - requirements that makes the produce of the companies more expensive to support these valuations - inflation without a basis for salary inflation (as that would make the incomes more equal, which you explicitly forbade).
If half the population (your naighbor in you analogy) amassed significant wealth, it most certainly would materially change your wealth and make you poor - their money would gravitate to equity, yours and your kids equity. Literally making your poor.
It sounds like what I missed it isn't worth reading.
Arguing poverty is essentially a relative measure of wealth or somehow other's wealth, even unexploited or unused wealth, somehow makes everyone poor with the sudden knowledge that it exists?
I am interested in economics here, not philosophy.
> it most certainly would materially change your wealth and make you poor - their money would gravitate to equity, yours and your kids equity. Literally making your poor.
That sounds like the "wealth is a fixed pie" theory, where for one person to have more, another must have less.
The proof that is false comes from the history of the US. In the 19th century, it was populated by poor immigrants with nothing more than a suitcase. The US turned into a global superpower. How do you explain that with the fixed pie theory?
> I say that equality is a way to make the pie bigger.
Your idea has been tried, literally tens of thousands of times. The pie got smaller.
Just in the US alone, 20,000 communes have been formed (they're not illegal). They all failed. Even the diehard communists can't stand living in a commune and sharing equally.
Presumably this means 'attempts to eradicate income inequality' because otherwise the paragraph sounds like nonsense from some libertarian think tank. Every nation on earth makes some attempt to lessen inequality. But pick any ill that exists in society - crime, prejudice, traffic accidents, noise pollution - and try to completely eradicate it, and chances are it will cause misery.
> American FA*NG 'enshittification' and cheap Chinese plastic junk
Another POV is that the services and software that does the design, marketing, logistics, testing, certification and etc of the plastic junk is more valuable than the plastic junk, and all that stuff is made in the US. It’s still labor, sometimes it’s even bespoke one off software labor which might as well be manufacturing, the thing that it is not is factories. I don’t know why factories above all else are glorified. There is lots of labor in services.
What I was driving at there is that we have seen a general shift (probably due to market consolidation, monopolisation, etc) away from quality and customer satisfaction. The plastic goods are just one tangible artefact.
> cheap Chinese plastic junk will continue to eat the world
That's a thing of the past. Check the consumer electronics produced today in China. Mobile devices, EVs, infrastructure, newer products are simply incredible, and I'd argue ahead of western technology on many fronts.
Cheap plastic stuff now gets produced in other less developed countries.
This is a fact that most in the US refuse to confront.
China has mastered making high quality goods at scale.
It does not matter how they got there, the fact is they did, and there are some pretty staggering military implications that are not really being discussed.
If you look at most of the “Europoor! Americans have so much more money!” articles, you’ll notice two things coming out of them — most understate the importance of quality of life and avoiding rapid Chinese growth of the past decade despite its own problems. It’s like a weird “no, no, ignore everything around you, we are literally the best despite everything!”.
I genuinely don’t know how I feel about this. I love parts of America. Half of my family lives there. But also, I have no inclination to move. Although I could make about 30% more, I have no idea how it would improve my life other than just more money in the bank. Unless I wanted to start a company, then yeah, probably bigger market and lax laws is advantageous… but other than that, it would be a huge downgrade from life perspective.
The difference between today and a half century ago is that today you either win first prize, or wind up dead. That stinks.
It stinks because companies that come in first are seldom worse at extracting value from customers than they are at providing value to customers, and therefore tend to be mediocrities.
And it stinks because such companies are seldom worse at extracting value from rank-and-file employees than they are at providing value to employees.
The world is better when there are societies that can afford to sacrifice a little competitiveness for a good quality of life. If that's over, it's a shame.
I expressed myself poorly. I implied that the plastic goods would be okay if they weren't cheaply made. I grew up in an era where stores sold furniture made of wood and steel. That was like... less than one human generation ago. So what I actually meant is: the plastic goods inherently are cheap garbage.
Very much this. One of the best accounts of this progression I’ve read is the “AI Superpowers..” book by Kai-Fu Lee. China held the “Knock-off/cheap copycat” moniker in the 90s, 00s, and early 1Xs, but the tides are shifting in terms of the quality of goods they produced. They’ve also taken a page from American business and begun outsourcing “cheap labor” to other third-world nations, in addition to playing loan-shark to the likes of Africa… You have to hand it to the way the Chinese have gained their footing in “capitalism” since the 1980s.
It's thanks to innovative business models, of course!
Increasing you investment efficiency with FTX. Reducing farmer idle time with Deere. Sharing your otherwise unused car with Uber. Revolutionising office productivity with technology, like those beer taps that WeWork had. Spending less time on your savings with Yotta. Not reading long emails with AI.
I wonder how high productivity actually turns out if you remove every scam that inflated GDP or earnings numbers.
Yes, I agree. However the "economy bad" thing was blamed on Biden for signing another stimulus bill which created worse inflation. In reality both Biden and Trump are to blame, but the thinking among the lower class is that Biden made inflation worse.
It is clear why they voted for Trump. They didn't like the way things were going and Kamala said she wouldn't change anything from Biden. Why would you vote for the status quo if you don't like the status quo?
Is America's economy soaring ahead of it's rivals as this article is about or does something need to be drastically changed by voting a bull into a China shop?
As I said before, if you look at charts of public sentiment on the economy by political party, democratic leaning voters will see a slightly better economy when a democrat is in the oval office, but republican voters swing wildly from one extreme to the other completely matching election day, not even inauguration. They can complain about "the statistics aren't showing the truth" all they want but the data objectively shows that what they mean by "the economy isn't good" is "my team isn't in the oval office"
Germany suffers from bad leadership in industry and government above all else. The lack of investment is downstream of that. And I guess upstream is their conservative mindset on how and who to appoint as leaders. Lots of nepotism and corruption and not a lot of competence.
One thing this article doesn't touch on is the soaring government debt, which is now really quite big: 120%, and IIRC if you add municipal debt, it's more like 140%. That is high. It also seems like much of the recent growth has been fueled by this debt.
It's unclear how this is going to unwind. America can afford, apparently, to run their deficit hot, but not forever and without limit. So at some point they have to start cutting expenditure and paying that debt off. What happens then? Or will they somehow default on it? Or, will they manage to deflate it via growth. But it is a bit of a sword of Damocles hanging over the economy, like ZIRP over VC successes of the 2010s.
The crazy thing is just how much the debt increases in living memory. Under Clinton, it was as low as 60%, which is considered a really low level.
My theory is that other countries' trade is so closely tied to the US Dollar that when the Federal Reserve prints money it's not just diluting the US Dollar but all currencies. The US is effectively taxing the world, to pay for its own spending.
> My theory is that other countries' trade is so closely tied to the US Dollar that when the Federal Reserve prints money it's not just diluting the US Dollar but all currencies. The US is effectively taxing the world, to pay for its own spending.
Yes.
The BRICs economic group has been trying to launch their own currency for a while now. This is one of the reasons for it. Trump has threatened to impose 100% tax on them and on anyone else who ever tries.
Brazil's president Lula certainly wants this. He's been pushing for it for years now. I see it in the news every other day. I suppose it's possible that he's just the fall guy for the machinations of China and Russia. Who knows.
I'm ambivalent about it. Having our own currency is good, even better if it's not backed by USD, best of all if it's backed by precious metals like gold. On the other hand, I hate Lula and everything he represents so much I actually want him to piss Trump off to the point he sanctions the entire Latin American continent until Lula and his fellow communist dictator friends drop to their knees and beg for mercy.
We had currencies backed by gold for hundreds of years before the great depression without anything equivalent happening. The great depression happened soon after US momentary creation was handed over to the private Federal Reserve.
> The great depression happened soon after US momentary creation was handed over to the private Federal Reserve
Correlation =/= Causation.
The Great Depression was caused by American overproduction and a lack of domestic buyers who could afford to purchase American goods (sound familiar?). This was back when America was still functionally a developing country.
The Panic of 1837 (followed by a five year depression) would like a word. And the panic of 1873 (four year depression), the depression of 1882, the panic of 1893, and the panic of 1907.
We had metal standards way after the great depression, till 1971. Bretton Woods system made USD an international reserve currency, but its convertibility to gold was guaranteed. In 1971 US gov decided to not guarantee that anymore, because it gave a ridiculous advantage to US. Germany was rhe first county to left Bretton Woods, France sent a battleship to collect gold in exchange for US dollar reserves etc.. and the system collapsed. It's called Nixon shock I think.
So, leaving the international system helped the European economies greatly then. It makes sense some other countries are having the same idea now.
The USD to gold exchange guarantee ended in the early 70s, long after the great depression. And there have been many economic meltdowns since then. The two are not related.
When the economy is backed by something real, credit generally keeps up with the broader economy. It can't expand beyond reserves of real resources. Now that the money is not backed by anything, credit can expand infinitely. Credit generates most of the inflation which is a direct and ever increasing tax on the poor. It has been going on for half a century and shows no sign of stopping. The best part is even the mere attempt to stop it will cause a meltdown since the economy is addicted to credit.
BRICS will never introduce their own currency anyway, so any threats by Trump are moot. Can you imagine India and China actually agreeing on a new currency structure? Lol, it's a total fantasy.
I can certainly imagine China creating their own and making the others use it. I can also imagine Brazil trying, though I can't imagine it succeeding.
Brazil has gone through numerous currencies. They have all gone to zero due to hyperinflation. One of the top Brazil stories on HN is about the way the government conned the population into believing that this time it was going to be different. We are also about to launch our very own central bank digital currency.
It's a little more complicated than that. US inflation is actually good for emerging economies which borrow in dollars, because it eases their debt burden.
US inflation is even better for the US economy which borrow in todays dollars and repays in future diluted dollars which it earns in dollars.
Foreign entites tend to earn in foreign currency, although not always and which is why China for example recyles a lot of the US dollars they recieve back into US government bonds. However the whole thing opens foreign governments and entities up to the risk that the relative inflation rates will affect the currencies (which it does).
the largest expediture of the US government now is fake interest payments on fake debt then? or we pay that with fake money fake Americans pay with fake taxes? :)
Yes, it’s literally fake. Japan issues government bonds and instructs the central bank to purchase them and uses that to fund its spending. It has been doing that for decades. Any other country could do the same thing.
> So at some point they have to start cutting expenditure and paying that debt off.
They don't have to cut expenditures at all. Since the Fed controls rates, they can manage the debt by adjusting interest rates. There's nothing preventing them from driving interest rates below 0% and being paid to accept money. And the Fed can buy T-Bonds at below market rates and slowly destroy excess money in the economy in a controlled fashion.
Something to keep in mind is that US government debt is integral to the economy. It's a stable way for entities hold US dollars as cash, and it's the only mechanism for them to hold large sums of US dollars in cash.
It's fine (and expected) for US government debt to continue to increase forever, it's just a number in a spreadsheet. The only real risk is the potential for a default. But even then, if you have $4 trillion dollars, what are you going to do with it instead of buying t-bonds? Exchange it for Euros and risk the impacts of currency fluctuation? And what will the buyers do with those dollars? At some point, someone is going to want to bank those dollars in savings, and that means buying t-bonds (directly, or indirectly), and the risk of default merely becomes a factor in an equation for the holder.
You can do all this at an accounting level. But ultimately US government is buying things with debt, ie paying for goods and services from third parties with an IOU, and can only do it if people think they are getting a good deal.
The way you get shafted with debt is inflation. Barely a few years ago bond yields were around 0. If you lent money to the government then, you're already very behind because of inflation - you're not getting any interest, and by the time you are repaid, the money is worth far less than before.
Furthermore, the Fed can't really let interest rates diverge too much from inflation, since the mismatch drives inflation further. That's why the rates are around 4% now, even as the economy is slowing. They have to be up to contain inflation.
So then, as the election was playing out, you could see bond yields fluctuating in line with inflation expectation. Whenever Trump said something that sounded inflationary, like tarrifs, bond yields jumped up. That's not the Fed doing it, that's lenders demanding more interest from the US govt.
Now I agree the US can get away with this more than other places. They aren't far off Italian levels now, and that would be considered teetering around crisis levels. But it's fantasy to conclude the US can keep magicking money every year with no consequence.
You lend someone money based on whether you think they can pay you back. People still buy US debt because the US is good with its promises.
It’s the same reason the US dollar is the reserve currency… the US govt knows how to keep it reasonably stable and has decades of success at it.
Does the US use this to their advantage? Sure. But it doesn’t matter… you just need to be better than the next guy. Just observe the 100 year history of many countries: their institutions 100 years ago are much different from today. No one likes uncertainty.
the last time debt was this high was WW2, after it millions of working age men came back contributing to the economy. today the opposite is true, millions of people are exiting the workforce to retire, draining resources like Social Security. It's not sustainable, but US can tap into immigration policy to kick the ball down the road for decades
As long has the US has military supremacy it won’t unwind because the military backs the dollar. As soon as that is gone then it’s all one big free fall.
US will unwind like all declining empires in history have. The rich will move their wealth out of the currency while the currency is debased via inflation (the debt will be "monetized" in contemptory econspeak). It's already happening.
The US administration of the next four years has no intention of making a principal payment on the debt. They borrowed $7 trillion before, they can do it again. If a country dumps their US treasury bonds, the administration will impose tariffs on them.
I think it's interesting to compare other countries. 120 years ago the UK was the most powerful empire in history. Now 36% of UK children live in poverty, and 43% of single parent families and families with three or more children live in poverty. Over 40% of UK families from Asia/Caribbean live in deep, persistent poverty.
Many in the US are really close to that, and describe it as a "poor economy". They may have an iPhone, but they can't afford it.
I find this part funny to because in Canada we want to have it both ways. We endlessly compare ourselves to the USA and wring our hands about whether our taxes are too high or our productivity isn't good enough, because we can't match what the USA has, but at the same time we also wring our hands about deficit and debt and are incredibly hawkish compared to everyone else.
You can't have it both ways!
Somehow it is never raised that the USA is doing absolutely incredible amounts of deficit spending that Canada dares not match, not even under this relatively more inclined to deficit spend current government.
Never raised that maybe some of their good metrics stems from the incredible amounts of deficit spending that is verboten.
Look at France, its electricity cost per KWh, and its carbon intensity per KWh generated. In recent years, all are much, much better than Germany's. (And their carbon intensity numbers have probably been consistently better since like the 1990s.)
It's almost as if making your economy that requires a lot of electricity dependent on electricity generation methods that require fuels supplied by potentially-hostile foreign countries is a bad, bad idea.
to be fair, this energy dependence was created in a time when the soviet block collapsed, and has worked for many many countries that where part of that block except for russia and belarus.
Economic integration has finally put the lid on the enourmous destruction of nationalism for the past 60 years.
The mistake which was made by (mostly) american and european economists was convincing everyone that applying shock therapy to the socialist economy and liberalising it in that way was the best way forward.
This resulted in the rise of putin and the aversion of the russian goverment to the "west".
This energy dependency was happening during a time when Russia was invading both Georgia(2008) and Ukraine(2014), right after murdering countless Chechens.
In my personal experience, the general sentiment of Germans has been shockingly anti fission-power. Fukushima stoked the fears that power that sentiment, and helped lead them to their current totally predictable economic plummet.
What happens when you shut down all your fission power plants, but don't have solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal power ready, and have no way of building enough storage to handle the intermittency of solar and wind? Well, you import petrochemicals from potentially-hostile foreign countries and burn them.
I am under no “illusion” that prematurely phasing out a large percentage of a nations power generation , will reduce the amount of power generation available…
And to forestall the "No, I believe that Germany's failure was to not build enough renewables" reply...
It's my understanding that even if one were to direct the entire world's energy storage production capacity solely to producing energy storage for the nation of Germany, it would be insufficient to produce enough energy storage to meet the needs of Germany's energy requirements, given any even vaguely-plausible buildout of "renewable" power generation facilities.
Germany doesn't have enough of the geology and geography required to have much "always on" "renewable" power, so it MUST primarily rely on intermittent sources... which means that they in order to make up the shortfalls, they need to have enough storage (which I understand to be currently impossible), reliable rampable power (like nuclear or petrochemical), or some combination of the two. There's just no real alternative.
Well, I guess there IS something of an alternative. Industry that requires reasonably-priced electricity can flee the country, reducing Germany's overall energy requirements. (Though, surely nowhere near enough to make much of a dent in the electricity costs.)
Today's global battery production capacity is something like 2.6 TWh/year.
Germany uses an average of 58 GW of electricity (averaged over a year). So this capacity would be enough to store 45 hours of their electricity use.
This would not, by itself, be enough to level Germany's demand. But using batteries alone would be foolish. They are not suited for long term storage. The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen to complement the batteries. In that case, this amount of batteries would be more than enough to get to 100% renewables for their grid. Germany has huge salt formations that can store hydrogen extremely cheaply. Electrolyser production would have had to have been stepped up, I will admit.
But 100% is overkill, since even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels -- nowhere close. Nor would any plausible nuclear buildout. Judging by how that went elsewhere in Europe it would have been an utter fiasco. The alternative to compare against would have been a continued buildout of renewables at a higher rate. Fossil fuels would still have been used, but at a lower rate, and the shock from Russia would have been proportionally less.
> This would not, by itself, be enough to level Germany's demand.
This is exactly what I said. There's not enough industrial-grade energy storage capacity in the world to even out the intermittency of "renewable" energy. You currently must supplement it with "always on" power generation.
> The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen...
> Today, 95% of the hydrogen produced in the United States is made by natural gas reforming in large central plants.
While it is true that we can work with hydrogen and can burn it for power, hydrogen will not save us. It's notoriously difficult to contain, meaning that it leaks out of containers and piping at the drop of a hat. It is the second least dense known substance in the universe, meaning that its energy density per cubic meter is dreadfully low. It's also energy-intensive to produce and store. The way all industrial-scale hydrogen production works means that the process to produce hydrogen produces more CO2 than if we just burned the petrochemicals used to feed the process. [0][1]
The energy consumption of electrolysis doesn't matter at all if we have more electricity available than we know what to do with... but that's very definitely not the world we live in right now.
> ...even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels...
Right. The thing to do is to build more fission plants and "renewable" generators in tandem. Fission plants are ultimately a stopgap until we have enough storage and solar/wind/hydro/etc. to meet our current and future energy demands. But, like, even if we start honestly and eagerly working on this in earnest... today, we're absolutely not going to get there globally within our lifetimes. We're sure as hell never going to get there if we shut down existing fission plants and backfill by burning coal and natural gas.
[0] Search this <https://www.aiche-cep.com/cepmagazine/march_2021/MobilePaged...> for the phrase "Natural gas is currently the main feedstock for hydrogen processes, accounting for 75% of annual global production", and read the next couple of paragraphs.
The issue is not only the nuclear, but that Germany made "all-in" on cheap Russian gas despite all the signals that it was a move with several risks:
you shouldn't voluntarily put yourself at the mercy of an autocratic nation militarly stronger than you.
The fact that the politicians responsible for this are now in a way or another on the payroll of Russia tells me that this was the plan all along.
- Easy to do business
- Great economy, high salaries, and funding
- English native speaker, so you can speak with everyone and everyone can speak with you
The EU is in a deep hole, with socialism and green communism next.
I swear, I’ve been hearing that since 2010. That and big Chinese collapse. It’s like the US just wants everyone else to fail just because they don’t share the same attitude towards life. It’s been almost 15 years. That’s a lot of time!
I’m mostly annoyed by the recent “Canada should just become an American state” talks, otherwise I would ignore such takes. Apologies for that.
Canada is a really interesting take that I ctrl-f'd hoping I'd find a discussion on. It was doing a great job keeping pace with the US but seems to have really stagnated since the last 8 years or so.
I actually don't think much would've changed. Our core problems - low birthrate, and extreme dependence on RE wouldn't be affected one way or another. Things will probably get worse before it gets better, and it looks like we have to be more strategic when it comes to partnerships. Being a service industry with very low manufacturing doesn't help either. Decent amount of natural resources, but not enough people, nor cultural (yes, it's hard to find workers for the mines for good reasons, despite its high pays, and I'm very familiar with the issue due to relationships with people who are in the industry) and political willingness to go full-China style on them either.
We could try to push for innovation, but brain drain is real, because if you want money, it's really not that hard to find a job across the border especially if you're talented. And 10x market down there, so what's the point.
I think one of the bigger issues is in ‘08, when the government protected real estate mostly from the crash, real estate has siphoned too much investment from productive ventures
My two cents: the U.S. owes much of its economic strength to its robust legal framework. It provides a system where complex business disputes can be handled and enforced effectively, creating trust and predictability for investors and entrepreneurs. This institutional strength is often overlooked but is critical for fostering innovation and long-term economic growth. Incidentally, recent Nobel laureates in economic sciences have focused on the role of institutions in shaping economic outcomes, underscoring how pivotal they are to success.
The US owes its "economic strength" to the ability to print $2T/yr in perpetuity and buy stuff with that money. Once that tap ceases to function (which eventually it will, though not anytime soon), the US is going to be fucked beyond any recognition.
That's irrational and alarmist. Any time I hear someone talk about "printing money" I figure I am hearing from someone who doesn't have a great grasp of finance. For those that are interested, the supply of US currency or purchasing power of the government is not controlled by printing.
A steelman of this argument is the USA has too much debt and can't keep issuing this much. Maybe true. But the world holds that debt and it's denominated in USD. Also, just the simple wealth of US households grows a lot faster than the debt so its still pretty clear that if the US wanted to pay all its debts it easily could. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q) We could be heading for inflation like in the late 70's early 80's. Not good but you don't have to doomsday prep.
I would have thought so. But on the other hand, it seems to me like there is a lot more appreciation on the part of EU for laws to be enforced more in spirit than in letter. That might not be a good legal environment for businesses.
There is EU law, which is enacted across all EU members. But there is no such thing as a EU legal framework, neither is there a fiscal one if we are focusing on business.
A debt dispute could be resolved in less than 4 months or dragged for close to a decade depending on which EU state you have a business.
Same goes for fiscal law. Some countries have had pretty much the same rates and taxation arrangements for decades. Some countries change their fiscal load on businesses as much as twice in one year. Both cases are technically 'the EU'.
Yes, and it is generally hostile towards wealth generators. And then they wonder why nearly every economic metric has been stagnant for decades at this point...
Pointing to EU law/regilations is just platitudes people keep repeating online.
Biggest barriers to business in the EU is risk averse Investors and Banking sector, lack of significant VC funding players, and Government spending strangled by Austerity policies.
The US spends a lot of money to make even more money.
> Pointing to EU law/regilations is just platitudes people keep repeating online.
I disagree, for the reason mentioned below.
> Biggest barriers to business in the EU is risk averse Investors and Banking sector, lack of significant VC funding players, and Government spending strangled by Austerity policies.
Some of it is cultural I'm sure, but when your reward is capped it's logical to limit risk. Your list of issues are indicators of a risk-averse mindset.
Regarding the comment above: If most of the return from your risky venture is going to be taken from you by the government, why take the risk?
> The US spends a lot of money to make even more money.
Yep. It's like the stock market vs. bonds. The ride is bumpy but more lucrative over the long run.
> If most of the return from your risky venture is going to be taken from you by the government, why take the risk?
Again, not true. High taxation is mostly (unfairly so) on payroll salaries not profits or capital gains.
Most investors are conservative, risk averse, and remain vastly concentrated on Real Estate, which yields very high profits on an inflated market.
Most businesses get very poor credit conditions from the Banking Sector and most Business are SMEs focusing mostly on traditional B2B B2C services with low margins.
One thing that I believe is overlooked is that two party system helps in the sense that both party knows they are here in the long run, and while both party talks extreme economic plans, they just don't go forward with anything, just some tariff here and there. In lot of other countries you don't know how extreme the ruling party would be in next few decades.
The Economist is a British magazine, originally marketed at devotees of classical liberalism, which was also called economism at the time. Its readership is largely British, and therefore seeks comparisons between the British economy, European economies and the US economies, because they are seen as peers of the UK.
> Globally, the top R&D spenders are increasingly concentrated in software and computer services
I always find these sorts of statements strange because most software is not intended to be software but rather something else. For example, Adobe's suite should be classified under 'art supplies' or 'video production'. While true that it's software, in my mind, it's like classifying a car builder as a metal fabricator.
The truth is software and computers are pervasive today. There's rarely any software (other than development tools) that are truly aimed at computers themselves. Almost all software today is used for other industries and ought to be classified under that.
Under this taxonomy, I think things would seem much more diverse.
Most people who shop at Blick don't make their own canvas, clay. Many of them wouldn't know how. They could learn and some do, but many never will. Likewise they could learn to write software but most won't.
> Anecdote of shitty AI company raising a fuckton of money
> Mention of GDP with no other metrics
> No mention of inflation
> No mention of QE
> No mention of interest rates
This is propaganda. When your central banks control the world's reserve currency it's pretty easy to make sure that the line goes up every year. The British Empire didn't have their wealth because of their superior system, they got it from imperialism.
Before you downvote please just reflect on what I'm saying a little bit. Do the changes you see on the ground reflect this narrative of economic growth? I see a little bit locally, mostly from the CHIPS act and infrastructure acts, but it doesn't correlate with an improvement in QOL and certainly infrastructure projects are not unique to American capitalism.
Thomas Sowell says that equality of opportunity leads to inequality of outcome. And this is the main difference between America and the rest of the world. The articles cites innovation-growth v cost-cutting as sources of increased productivity, and this parallels this dichotomy.
People interested in equality of outcome and a level playing field have to compete on cost. There's a social stigma against sticking out and achieving more, lest you become unequal, and the governments are well aware of that.
Meanwhile, innovation literally desires to reward disproportionately he who comes up with the new product. The entire purpose of the American economic system is to produce inequality.
This, combined with America's relative freedom from prejudice, is an unstoppable juggernaut. It is absolutely insane how easy it is in the United States to be handed money with limited liability to go and do whatever you want with it. This is a true blessing, and we see it not just in venture capital, but in the plethora of small businesses, as well as the plethora of credit (for better or worse).
Yes, there are problems, but I think history will show that this model is ultimately more sustainable. While true that America's productivity growth has only really taken off over the last century or so, even before then, it represented a formidable economic player.
>This, combined with America's relative freedom from prejudice, is an unstoppable juggernaut. It is absolutely insane how easy it is in the United States to be handed money with limited liability to go and do whatever you want with it. This is a true blessing, and we see it not just in venture capital, but in the plethora of small businesses, as well as the plethora of credit (for better or worse).
I was with you until then. America was build on prejudice and inequality as much as any other country has been and suffers from it today. That translates to how the last half of that paragraph doesn't apply to a significant amount of American's who struggle to access the resources they need to survive let alone innovate and thrive..
As the child of non-white immigrants to this country... I simply disagree. We faced more discrimination in the country my parents left than we did here. My father was unable to be employed due to his skin color and social status in his native country, and became successful mid-level exec here in America, was given a mortgage, etc.
Capital is available for people here without reference to social standing.
Is it perfect? Of course not. I literally said that.
However, if you want capital and aren't whatever platonic ideal your country has decided you ought to be to access that, America is literally your best bet.
> That translates to how the last half of that paragraph doesn't apply to a significant amount of American's who struggle to access the resources they need to survive let alone innovate and thrive..
I'm not going to claim every american is able to thrive, because obviously that's not the case. But even the poor American is able to access credit, which is what my entire post was about. You are changing the goal posts a lot.
>We faced more discrimination in the country my parents left than we did here.
Correct.
In most of the non-immigrant parts of the world there is discrimination that pales in comparison to what is supposed to be there in America. Most native born Americans have no clue how good they have it, despite things being as bad as it is.
I was actually talking about class differences not race.
>Capital is available for people here without reference to social standing.
Social standing relative to color of skin sure, but not economic class.
You are coming from a place of economic privilege and are ignoring how many suffer to access things like capital, housing, healthcare and other needs based on their economic starting point.
The American view you can raise yourself from lower to middle class with hard work and effort is less true today than ever.
Not a single word about shale oil and gas revolution, that started around 15 years ago? The US now has the one of the cheapest energy on earth, and probably the cheapest among the countries that matter. Pour all that cheap gas and oil onto an economy that was already a leader and you get lots of impressive growth.
That's the gist of it, especially since the "IT revoluion" (for lack of a better word) seems to have cooled off in the early 2010-ish, i.e. exactly when the shale revolution started doing its thing (and, no, I don't count the recent AI hype as being worthy of getting called as "revolutionary"). That shale revolution has also come with big opportunity costs reductions, because the US didn't have to geo-strategically care about the Middle East and the oil there all that much, at least not as much as to send real feet on the ground there, with all the associated costs.
With that said, there's also the danger of the US following on Britain's steps from the 1980s up until the 2000s, i.e. to rely on this shale/oil bonanza and not care about (internal) structural reforms that are in dire need of being enacted. At some point the shale money will not be there anymore (the shale gas will have run out, the world's car-fleet turns to electric en masse etc), and if the Americans don't carry out the necessary reforms sooner rather than later then that future "no more shale-gas money" moment will come at a very, very bad time for them. I said it's similar to Britain's situation because things started going downhill there as soon as the North Sea oil&gas money started thinning out.
It's not brought up because this is not the source of the growth whatsoever. It has only served to keep our gasoline and methane costs low compared to the rest of the world. That's nice for people but does not create massive economic growth in the 21st century of the kind being discussed. That is all coming from the tech sector. If you want to talk energy to power the server farms, the growth in energy is happening with renewables which are and far cheaper than any fossil fuels.
> That's nice for people but does not create massive economic growth in the 21st century of the kind being discussed. That is all coming from the tech sector.
The price of a kilowatt hour of electricity is not determined by the cheapest power plant operating when you buy it, but by the most expensive. You buy the marginal kilowatt. And solar+wind continues to be a relatively small fraction of the US energy market. The DoE did a report when Biden took office in 2021 and the progressive wave was in full swing:
>Eliminating [fracking]... a ripple effect of severe consequences to the Nation's economy, environment, and geopolitical standing.
Making energy cheaper and the dollar stronger helps all businesses which depend on energy or imports, particularly manufacturing, and US manufacturing output currently exceeds the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. And all over the thread you'll find people arguing over nominal GDP versus PPP, but what's not in doubt is that the balance of nominal GDP versus PPP is related to the strength of the dollar. Imports are vital to US industry — we thrive on buying less processed inputs from cheaper countries and producing high-value outputs. All of this is affected by the US oil and gas industry.
All industrial sectors requires energy, and the prices here in the EU are obscene compared to the USA.
Renewables are actually making it worse. We now have the "problem" that renewables cause spikes and saturation of the grid, and instead of causing low prices, the energy companies penalizes their customers. Claims it's due to renewables driving up grid maintenance costs because it was not built to handle the amount.
After all, energy produced _must_ be used or it will inevitably cause damage somewhere. For instance, you can't leave solar panels in the sun while they are not connected. If you don't use the energy, it will be turned into heat.
It's getting to the point where you actually are penalized for having rooftop solar. Most solar installations in the EU doesn't have a home battery, so either you have to give back surplus energy (electricity providers in some countries will actually charge you for this), or you can disconnect your solar if you overproduce but that will slowly damage your installation. Even if you don't plan to give back any energy, you still have to notify your provider that you have rooftop solar, if you don't it's a breach of contract, and if you do, they will charge you an extra maintenance cost.
It's funny because the government are pushing rooftop solar, but the energy providers are quietly telling their customers to fuck off with it.
But still even though the grid is absolutely full of cheap energy, and you should in theory pay very little, you still have to pay double or triple what those in the USA would ever pay.
Renewables are great, but also a shitshow because while we're building solar and wind installations, we're not building nearly enough grid storage.
Tech is the problem. The internet is global (or perhaps two or three regions), and winner takes all - so global value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetised in the US stock market.
Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par with EU, and China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.
I guess I still don't understand though. Is the claim that tech innovation in the rest of the world is being turned into money in the US only? If so, why is that happening?
The claim here is that the tech innovation is occurring in the US. It adds value globally, but most of the profits from that value are being realized in the US b/c the innovation is by US companies.
There’s no natural law that says technical innovation must occur in NA, but due to contingent historical conditions, it is occurring here. Thus, the gains are being realized in the US stock market b/c it’s the one capitalizing the winners.
>It adds value globally, but most of the profits from that value are being realized in the US
this is contradictory. profits are added value. if value is added globally, there are extra profits (likely as cost savings by other industries adopting tech)
They’re generalising to say the world uses Apple, Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, Tesla, and so on… US tech stocks. We use them and they gain revenue and profit.
Of course there are many successful tech co’s outside the US but (and I haven’t looked) I imagine the US tech stocks must overshadow every other countries tech sector.
US cultural dominance for one thing, then success begets success - lots of VC money in the US because the US is rich which gets invested which returns even more and makes it richer.
US businesses more likely to work with US suppliers, US customers more likely to buy from US businesses, then those dominant domestic positions can be used to expand globally far easier than say a Spanish firm can expand into the US.
I second that. In addition, most of those companies use a portion of their revenue to buy back their shares, pushing their price up. So, the value created worldwide ends up growing the US stock market.
And then even more specifically - at least in terms of local problems - that pushes up the value of compensation for a lot of people in the SF Bay Area which inflates the cost of land there.
Staying out of whether or not the concentration is a problem at the national/international level, is there any realistic alternative short of massive protectionism a la China to force home-grown tech companies in other parts of the world?
The US has a massive advantage of being the largest economy, having a vast single market, issuing the world's reserve currency, and having unique hubs like the Bay Area attracting the best and brightest. It would be hard to replicate its success elsewhere without having some of the above prerequisites.
>being the largest economy, having a vast single market
America is NOT the largest market the EU is MUCH BIGGER. And it is not "America" that commercialises technology, but a small portion of California called The Valley.
Ths stock market is not considered in GDP. So by that measure it does not directly impact "economic growth." I can see an indirect relation that says that US investors (primarily through pensions and 401Ks) are the primary benefactors of a growing US stock market which then translates to more investment and opportunity of US citizens, but that is a pretty long trail to account for our economic path right now.
From a stock market perspective, if you look at a graph of Vanguard FTSE All World ex US ETF (ticker VEU), it looks like normal growth, but looks vastly different from say Vanguard Total Stock market (ticket VTI) which shows phenomenal growth. This is because VTI includes US tech stocks and VEU doesn't. Take out the tech stocks and maybe VTI would look like VEU.
To be clear VTI is only US stocks and VEU is everything else. It is confusing because "Vanguard Total Stock Market" contains only United States equities.
How is that a "problem"? What is preventing other countries from building tech winners? The USA isn't launching missiles to destroy the next foreign Nvidia or Meta competitor.
I don't think it's a problem. What's preventing other countries from building something similar to the US tech companies is a combination of regulation and culture.
Toys? Not a priority. RCAT is the best American drone company. I won't disagree communists can produce efficiently, but that comes with a culture that guns down their own like the protesters in Tiananmen square.
What is preventing every other state in the US from building tech winners? The majority of large tech companies are headquartered in CA and there are a few others in WA, TX, NY, and ID. There used to be quite a few in MA and even FL was in the running for a while. What caused them to fall behind within a few decades, while other states never really got started? Some are hopelessly handicapped by horrible geography or low population density but others like CT or IL would appear to have all the necessary ingredients.
That doesn't really explain anything. CA is also a high tax state. CT has similar climate and geography to MA, which was once a technology leader but later fell behind. There must be other, more important differentiating factors.
California has a Mediterranean climate with world class outdoor features and the freshest foods. They also ban all non competes, and have a solid history of pumping out valuable tech companies. They can afford to have taxes others can’t.
Connecticut also lacks a big city with a big airport.
Nothing, but having the world’s largest free trade and migrations zone means that it’s not economically efficient. Centralising industries produces large benefits in efficiency and hiring. We only don’t see it as much on a global scale because of trade and migration restrictions.
And what's preventing China from building their own EUV lithography? They can do whatever they want internally regardless of US sanctions. It seems like they're not trying very hard, or are wasting resources on unproductive initiatives.
Sure, I'm aware of that but so what? US sanctions can't prevent China from building their own EUV lithography independent of ASML. Why are they still so backwards?
Of course they are also investing in their lithography equipment, but still, it's an insanely complex set of tools and know-how required that's backed by countless patents and well kept secrets.
Only because China is threatening to take over the country producing those chips and seizing territory in the South China Sea in violation of international law.
If China played nice with America.. there's no problem.
Tech is not a 'problem'. It has replaced Finance in the pecking order of power relationships. Since US controls it , it can exert control everywhere where its tech goes. China shielded itself from it early on.
Follow the money. Which companies are better at vacuuming money from all over the world into their countries of origin and exporting the rules, norms and regulations that everyone else -including domestic competition - has to play by. Is HSBC/JP Morgan more effective at this than Google/Apple?
As far as I see, tech has destroyed the “legacy media” almost completely. Only the older generation pays any attention to it: all the young people get their news from TikTok and podcasts; even the older generation has gotten brain rot from falling into Facebook/Youtube attention algorithm hell. And that is just one part of it.
Look all around you and tech is everywhere, from apps to hail cabs to get groceries. Our lives are now so fully immersed and our decisions dictated by tech companies its fucking insane. That is a lot of power.
Finance people used to run the world economies, but nowadays finance and banks are heavily dependent on the tech ecosystem to function. Tech can even do finance without much capital (hence fintech) but not vice versa. That's why tech companies can command huge margins from finance institutions
> Tech is the problem. The internet is global (or perhaps two or three regions), and winner takes all - so global value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetised in the US stock market.
I don't really understand what you mean. While their reach is global, it's largely American companies that are creating the tech value, no?
They're creating "value" the same way the British Empire did for China around 1800. It's almost 1:1 the same dynamic. Bad decision-making of individuals is exploited to make them act against the best interests of their country and ultimately themselves, causing money to flow outwards in exchange for virtually nothing, which is then used to import things of actual value from the hapless victims. A modern twist on this is also using that money to buy up anything of value in the victim country and renting it back to its citizens, taking the exploitation to a whole other level.
China was wise to this trick already, which is why they've shielded themselves from the very beginning. Most countries haven't learned the lesson yet, but slowly the EU is waking up as well and pushing back.
By this logic, US should wisen up and go protectionist/isolationist against China (ban TikTok, tariffs on cheap products to make them on par with US goods with better environmental and labor regulations) and EU (no more subsidizing their GDP by defending global trade).
No it doesn't follow. I have absolutely no clue where you're getting that from.
The point was that exporting low-margin high-labor goods and importing high-margin low-labor goods with addictive properties and possibly even negative value is a bad deal for your economy. Especially if the latter could be trivially provided domestically, but isn't due to existing network effects, or shouldn't exist at all (in the case of addictive substances).
You're arguing against the import of very low margin labor-intensive physical goods. How did you get there? I have no idea.
If you go to a poor country, you'll find poor/slave workers and a few rich elites. The workers will slave for something like $10/day for the benefit of the rich boss. The rich boss will then collect the profit and go buy an LV bag for $10,000. Essentially worth 3 years of slave labor. Ironically, for most of the part, made by the same slave labor. The transfer of real value is complete.
But, uusshh, don't disturb the free market. That is until you start making high tech and quality vehicles and then we need to invent new words for such a free market.
This argument falls apart when it comes to explaining the $1.4Trn market which is just IT/tech services, the providers of most of which are offshore even when the tech developed is American. By your logic the massive IT Services/Consulting industry that is driving India's economy is actually bad for the country and that it should go back to being a cluster of low-tech poor third-world villages.
Please do explain how any of that follows from what I said. It's perfectly fine to export a limited resource like labor as long as you're trading for something of equal value.
Besides, you think India is doing great? China - now boasting an economy more than twice that of India's - absolutely lapped them despite India having a head-start in the 1950s. So if I was to respond to your bad-faith argument, that response would be that India should've adopted the Chinese model, not go back to "being a cluster of low-tech poor third-world villages". But all this is only weakly related to the point I was making with many other factors at play, so I don't even want to put that forward as a rebuke. We're completely off the rails here.
Do you not know that the Chinese model came at a massive cost of human rights abuses, and that it was only possible in a well-endowed and homogeneous society like China?
India has more ethnic, cultural and societal diversity within itself than the entirety of Europe, full with as much sectionalism and conflicts as one can imagine. It has only managed to remain a single nation with a lot, a LOT of compromises. Study deeper into the dynamics and you'll find the notion of "why don't they just emulate China?" to be as ridiculous as it gets.
P.S. I'm sorry for that unnecessary last sentence in my previous comment that (understandably) gave you the image that I'm being bad-faith or abrasive.
This is non-mainstream marxist-influenced economics we are talking about here, only certain activities are regarded as having "value" alongside with a zero-sum view of the economy.
Both are being empowered. Check out the concepts of "consumer surplus" and "producer surplus". If there's no surplus for either the producer or the consumer, typically there is just no transaction.
>Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par with EU
Disagree. It's not just the nature of the technology itself but the whole ecosystem -- including VC and education -- in Sillicon Valley that develops cutting edge computer tech, plus generally looser business regulation in the US and a culture of greater optimism nationally, especially relative to EU.
Certainly having a unified market (not just in regulation, government, and currency but also linguistically) has helped too especially given the network/winner-take-all effects of tech you mention. Yes the nature of technology is part of it. But it's not everything. It's a whole gestalt.
I mean, consider where we are right now, who set it up, who hangs out there, etc.
For all the workers are living paycheck to paycheck, they are sitting on a gigantic monetizable pile of money.
Consider this: the most popular languages in YouTube videos are English and Spanish. And did you ever notice how most videos, when they talk about units, talk about Dollars, Miles, Inches, Pounds and Degrees Fahrenheit? That is why...
To be a wealthy YouTuber seems to mean catering to people in North America (the US specifically).
Part of the causality is the other way around: The largest language communities attract the most monetization. Europe being compartmented into 24+ languages is one reason that it’s harder to monetize.
I don’t know. For example, I see a lot of US citizens complaining that the price of the Apple Vision Pro is ridiculous and unaffordable for what it is, or similar about the Mac memory and storage upgrade pricing. Or even for streaming subscription prices. If you were right, those prices shouldn’t be a big deal.
As for the currency unit, everyone knows what a USD is worth, much less than AUD or CAD or GBP or whatever. The reasons to use USD are the same as for language choice.
You jumped the shark on the Apple pricing argument. People will always complain about prices no matter how rich they are. That is a character trait for many.
I am amenable to your second talking point. I still think my perspective is a useful model to consider. Not "right" in any absolute sense.
Disposable income is the money people have after taxes.
You can have 10000 dollars of monthly disposable income and be well above the global average. You can have 9999 dollar rent with only a single dollar left. A single basic peanut butter and jelly sandwich could cost 100 dollars. Your disposable income is still massively above the average. Your discretionary income would be very low, though.
>China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.
The actual effect of this is far less than you think. While it's true there's some amount of "exporting" of emissions from rich countries to china/india, the effect is small. Consumption based emissions (ie. accounting for imports) for US is only 11% higher than territorial emissions. Meanwhile the difference for China is also 11% (in the opposite direction, of course).
If you remove non-industrial and financial activity from US GDP, the economic picture is bleak. US and G7 have been steadily deindustrializing while BRICS have been doing the opposite.
US GDP is misleading in the sense that it increasingly includes a large portion of economic activity that isn't actually producing tangible wealth.
Comparative advantage only works without trade barriers, and when the USA has something people want to import cheaper than elsewhere. The USA doesn’t have competitive exports. The USA is the largest net importer. By an order of magnitude. The USA is deeply in debt in both nominal financial terms and in real trade terms.
What's the USA's comparative advantage? Nukes and dollars. Demand for dollars and rent seeking via the post WWII global financial system. But G7 is no longer the only game in town. They have become the consumers while the rest of the world has become the producers.
Moreover, the leadership in China is fully aware of the macroeconomic situation and USA leadership doesn’t even appear to know how tariffs work.
You have just described the US top comparative advantage. There is no economy in the world that allows you to create a company, open a bank account and start trading. The UK come close but doesn't completely match the US.
The US is the global engine of the world because it has accepted to be very negative on NIIP. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...) China or the BRICS or Russia do not offer an alternative and not because of lack of technical capabilities; they just don't want to do it.
China can replace the US dollar "hegemony" in a few years. They keyword is can because they don't want to do it.
It seems to me that NIIP is very related to high US stock prices. Everyone, including Americans, wants to invest in the US. Americans own American assets, and so do foreigners, but Americans don't want to buy foreign assets. Hence the high prices of American stocks, and the NIIP thing.
The article discusses this and disagrees. Even in the same sectors and with the top 7 companies removed, sectors in the US have higher P/E ratios due to higher projected growth rates.
The article quotes Draghi as saying “If we exclude the tech sector, EU productivity growth over the past 20 years would be broadly at par with the US,” so I think it agrees.
>The internet is global (or perhaps two or three regions), and winner takes all - so global value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetised in the US stock market.
This argument could be made for many industries. E.g. Boeing and Airbus together control almost 100% of the global passenger jet market. "Passenger jet value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetized in the US and EU stock market."
I think it was in the book "Cypherpunks" (the one with Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann) where one of them said something about the last few decades with the move to total dependence on digital technologies in so many ways, and it being the largest transfer of power in the history of the species.
If someone has the exact quote, I'd welcome it...
Anyway, the idea stuck with me. Anyone who wants to reject the point will have an easy time as it's such a broad claim, but I think it's worthy of reflecting on, and perilous to ignore.
There's a lot of ink splattered about technology these days, of course, but it's still rare enough that the larger picture of what's going on historically in terms of power structures is seriously reflected on.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 462 ms ] threadMost of the improvement was in Germany, which received far less MP money than Britain and France.
Postwar prosperity correlates with the level of free markets. Germany embraced free markets up until 1970, Britain and France did not.
The US did not want to create competition, but to break monopolies and to create a unified market for its industrial complex
The remnants of that goal are visible today with Big Tech
The bases were there to protect Germany against the Soviets.
I remember once on the autobahn around 1970, and a fighter came by hedgehopping at high speed. He was a few feet off the ground, and looked like just under Mach 1. The citizens didn't particularly like the noise and disruption, but they understood the need for the Air Force to train hard.
I also remember touring East Berlin (yes, East Berlin) in 1969. Going through Checkpoint Charlie and seeing the Wall is plenty convincing of the need for the US military being there.
France, on the other hand, didn't much care for the US military bases and wound up pushing them out.
BTW, the US Military was pretty thorough in making sure US personnel and military families behaved like guests in Germany, as they were invited guests. Ever since the Berlin Airlift, the US was friends with Germany.
The Americanization of Germany came later. I recall visiting a shopping mall in Germany in the 2000's, and you could not tell you were in Germany rather than in any suburb in America. Shopping malls did not exist there in 1970.
All the more sad that the chief component of Japanese animosity towards Japan-stationed US forces are sexual crimes, particularly in Okinawa where the Marines especially don't seem to know how to keep their dicks in their pants. There have been at least two incidents just this year if I recall, and that's just of the ones we know.
I really can't blame the locals wanting Americans to get the fuck out, security be damned.
I found out many years later that if I had committed a crime like shoplifting in Germany, my father would have been cashiered. The military took their guest status very seriously. An officer who could not control his family was not fit to be an officer.
I don't blame locals for feeling however they feel. It's their country.
Just so we're clear, I'm talking about cold hard data and the rate is "too many".
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/09/10/okinawa-gover...
https://theintercept.com/2021/10/03/okinawa-sexual-crimes-us...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/sexual-assault...
Protecting Germany's sovereignty also protected America's interests. They were aligned.
Germany (like France could and did) could have expelled the US military any time they wanted to.
France made sure to avoid an US occupation government and rebuilt its own independent military. It could make a choice.
"Sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany was granted on May 5, 1955, by the formal end of the military occupation of its territory"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany
When I lived near Luke AFB in the early 70's, Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots to fly F-104 Starfighters. I used to ride my bike onto the base and go to the flight line, and watch those lawn darts take off. They'd get halfway down the runway and light the afterburners! Freakin' awesome. Oh I wanted to be a pilot soo bad.
An F-104 was little more than a pilot strapped to a monster of a jet engine.
Edit: Public opinion can also be shaped, not least after the trauma of the Nazi period and in the midst of the Cold War. Actual influence behind the scene is usually not made known to public, and the influence of the US over Germany has been overwhelming.
Not once living there did I ever get the impression that the Germans felt the US presence was forced on them. They appreciated that the US was there to keep the Red Army at bay.
Of course, sometimes they'd complain about the Americans having bad manners, usually justifiably, and sometimes they'd envy the wealth of the Americans. I even attended a German elementary school for a while, and nobody bullied me because I was an American. I was even invited by other students to their homes to play.
The US bases were of mutual benefit to the Germans and the Americans.
P.S. my father went from:
1. bombing Germany in WW2
2. being part of the military occupation in the early 1950s.
3. being part of NATO planning headquarters in Wiesbaden in 68-71. This was not an occupying force
But that in the end has nothing to do with my original response, which was "the US sets up its bases out of its own self interest". Even if those interests align, it doesn't mean it's there to honor German wishes. If those interests had not aligned, the US would've still stayed there, this is as clear as the header of this page being orange.
Recall I've lived through that, and my father was pretty involved in it in the military bases there. I've had German friends, and been in their homes, and interacted with them.
They were not "occupied" against their will.
You haven't presented any evidence whatsoever for your conclusion. I've presented first hand, second hand, and documentary evidence for my case.
P.S. My dad also spent time stationed in France. He said the French made it very clear they wanted the USAF out. He said it was quite a contrast with Germany.
I can only repeat, I wrote "The US places its military worldwide out of its own interest, not to protect anyone". Whatever Germany wanted there does not make any difference.
Also again, the best I can do is respectfully disagree about the idea Germany asking the US to leave, and the US respecting its sovereignty. That West Germany was sovereign since 1955 is only part of the story, East Germany became sovereign in 1954, but it would be difficult to argue it meant anything of value (because it didn't).
No, not legally. (And also not in reality)
1955 were the treaties, conventions, protocols and schedules of the Bonn-Paris Conventions, the Pariser Verträge in German. The treaty terminating the occupation of (West) Germany was the revised “Convention on Relations between the Three Powers and the Federal Republic of Germany”, in German often short „Deutschlandvertrag“. The three powers in article 2 of that convention explicitly reserved the rights for Berlin and Germany as a whole and relevant for this the right to station armed forces in Germany (article 2, articles 4 and 5).
https://www.bgbl.de/xaver/bgbl/start.xav#__bgbl__%2F%2F*%5B%... (PDF)
The 1955 conventions were a package deal. Part of it was the “Convention on the Presence of Foreign Forces in the Federal Republic of Germany”, which further assured the Three Allied Powers right to station forces in Germany, although limited to what was already there.
https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/resource/blob/248488/1f12562...
Both conventions were only to be terminated by all signatory states or by a future German reunification agreement and peace treaty. That was in effect the “Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany“ of 1990, the 2+4-treaty, in which the allied powers, including the Soviet Union, terminated their rights. Hence final settlement.
The situation back then was decidedly _not_ what the term "free market" (of the libertarian variety) would imply today.
People love to point at policy, because it's a thing we can control, but the most important factors are often cultural issues we both don't control, and don't entirely understand.
It's just that "normal" housing in the US is what's only attainable to the very rich and only because they inherited it, in most of Europe let's say: even 1% won't be able to buy an equivalent of median new US single family house, in EU - that 1% probably owns a similar or somewhat better house but simply because they bought or built it generations before.
But if you compare the price of the SAME sized house to the average income, the situation is opposite. U.S. is the 3rd best after Oman and Saudi Arabia. It's just that Americans are not satisfied with houses even twice the size of what people in many rich countries are happy with.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
Price per square foot is not a very useful metric, because neither utility nor construction costs scale directly with the size of a house. A 3000 square foot house is not 2x as good as a 1500 square foot house, and it should not cost 2x as much to build. Roughly speaking, walls are expensive, while making the rooms larger is cheap. And bedrooms are cheap, while bathrooms are expensive.
Well, in Germany health care is affordable in terms of cost. However, while 20 years ago you just went to a doctor when you were sick, these days you will wait hours and hours even at your family physician's crowded waiting room. You need a specialist? 6 months if it's something serious like a cardiologist. If you're on private health insurance, alright, only 3 months.
I don't know if this is specific to Germany, or similar in all of Europe.
But that is a change many people notice that I speak with.
They are then finding out that for profit businesses have no interest in re-hiring all the workers they had before the pandemic, because they didn't lose as much business as they saved money in salary, so everyone is just running a skeleton crew that they overwork.
Meanwhile the data I find for emergency room visits are that there's barely been any increase in percentage of the population that visited an emergency room since 1997.
Companies are spending less on services and letting us just suffer because we don't have better options and YET AGAIN dumb Americans for some reason blame the government for completely independent companies making self serving choices?!
Shortly before Obamacare I went to the same variety of specialist in that closer city. I called on a Monday and was in to see him on Thursday morning. Now, the three closest clinics to me have no doctors at all between them, just nurse practitioners and physician assistants. If your condition isn't on their short script you get an appointment in six months with a different nurse, or directions to the emergency room. I'm not claiming this is the general experience, but my experience has vastly enshittified.
The specialist nurse that took me six months to see? He ordered a test and scheduled me to come back and discuss it with him in another six months. Maybe I'll get another five minutes of his time then.
Basically, if you want really good healthcare, you need to live in or near a very large city. (Albuquerque is not a very large city.)
Another thing that's probably changed in the US is larger healthcare companies taking over doctors' practices and enshittifying them to increase profits. Doctors are happy to sell because they're getting close to retirement, and/or tired of dealing with all the administrative hassle on top of actually being a doctor and caring for patients. I've read about this type of thing greatly affecting veterinary care in the US too.
As another commenter said, there’s been an exodus of specialists from rural areas. This is a global phenomenon, not limited to the US.
In the U.S. I can see a midlevel the same day by paying $200 for an annual membership in a mass-affluent pseudoconcierge practice plus $800ish for the appointment+labs, the $800 may be partly or entirely covered by insurance depending on how the conversation goes with the "provider". I have to wait several months if I want to see a real doctor outside of an emergency room. 6 months is about right for seeing a specialist with a preexisting relationship, might need a little more lead time for an initial consultation.
Much easier in Europe, go work in Switzerland or some high paying country then go retire in a low cost area with healthcare.
Could it be that moving to a place with high salaries means that job market is more competitive with higher bar to entry, with more stress, and CoL and housing is proportionally higher so once you factor in housing, healthcare, childcare expenses etc you realize that unless you scored some FANG job that pays orders of magnitude more than the local median, you're more or less at the same wealth point as in the lower CoL locations?
Feels like the solution is to find the place when you can earn more than the median there and not just blindly move to the most expensive places in the world hoping that will make you rich.
Language barriers, mostly. USA doesn't have those, that is the biggest difference I'd say, language barriers is such a massive hindrance to movement even if you are legally allowed to.
Even if the work language is English you still have to live with all the signs etc being in a language you don't understand, and learning a new language is a massive undertaking.
However if you don't care about that then it is really simple. And lots of people are doing just that, people spending a few years working in a high wage place isn't uncommon at all.
Not to mention people tend to not move asmuch in europe compared to the US, and people like to stay close to their community and families in my experience.
Welfare and social programs did not make them successful. Opportunity did.
Even Elon Musk arrived with just a suitcase. He stayed in hostels because of lack of money.
It's instructive to see what's happening in Britain right now where many people dare not take jobs or even join training schemes to improve their prospects - because they will lose their benefits. To quote from the Spectator: "A Channel 4 (TV) program Britain’s Benefits Scandal hears from some of those affected – people who are often missing from the debate. We have 3.2 million trapped in a system in which they are given a decent payout – some I spoke to said about £1,300 a month, some significantly more – but who want to get back to work."
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sickness-benefit-tra...
So we have accountants and scientists who need back surgery intentionally working part-time barista hours.
As a programmer I’m all for gaming the system by knowing and navigating the rules, but the situation is comical.
[0] https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine
[1] https://www.the-sun.com/news/7911051/elon-musks-dad-errol-em...
I invite you to read them again in case you missed/forgot: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As you noticed by your flagged comment, it doesn't matter what you think of me (I really don't care) but it matters how you behave here. It's ironic because this pathetic behaviour seems much more enticing to ridicule than someone sharing opinions :) don't be pathetic.
If you live in the USA already, why didn't you start SpaceX? Millions of immigrants come to the USA. Why didn't anyone else start SpaceX?
With that being said, I'm not sure personal bankruptcy is a particularly meaningful risk when the individual in question can enjoy substantial riches by sheepishly(?) returning home to the care of their parent(s).
Granted, neither you nor I know if this is an option for Musk, but given that his mother speaks quite fondly of her son in public, it seems reasonable enough to me to believe that it is.
What I'm trying to say here is: Musk's risks are not mine. Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Celebrating someone for having taken a risk while omitting what exactly was on the line for them is a debate tactic built on a false equivalency which can be used as a cudgel to beat opponents down in arguments if its foundational trick goes unnoticed.
>> He jumped from the building and survived! Why can't you jump from the building too?
> The fire department erected a life net for him beforehand. All I have is sidewalk.
> Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Musk did spend time in the US with no money. He got a job. It was a dirty job cleaning industrial machinery. A job anyone with a willingness to work could get.
Instead of doing all this guessing and assuming and making up things about Musk, why not read an actual biography of him? The one I read is by Vance:
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
It costs $1.32. No excuses!
It took $100M to start SpaceX. The argument works better if you start with one of the more modest earlier efforts.
I don't live in the USA.
Because very few people has US$100 million of initial capital investment.
Why didn't you start SpaceX? As far as I know you're an aeronautical engineer, so why didn't you do something bigger than the D languge?
The same answer might apply to anyone else who you ask that question.
If you know you can always go live with your rich family, then the cost of failure is pretty close to 0, so you can repeatedly take big risks until one of them pays off.
Worst case? You end up a trust-fund brat.
It's really expensive to support homeless population since they use up critical important resources such as emergency care, compared to just giving them a home. They may recover faster and become a productive member of society again.
For sure, it costs real dollars in a national budget, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing for the economy.
But then who's gonna be the delivery man who delivers your post/packages? Who's gonna be your teachers in school? Who's gonna be the baker making your food? Who's gonna be the builder and plumber building the shelter you live in? Who's gonna be the doctor healing you? If nobody needs to work.
Communist nations force people to work, there is no need for that in capitalist nations, people work for the extra rewards.
Yeah they do. I live in a socialist European country and if you refuse to work you'll end up on the streets and only live off charity of others or starve/freeze to death.
You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get sent to you by the unemployment agency, like for example working in a warehouse or in an Amazon fulfilment center. Nobody would willfully take those shit jobs if they wouldn't have to work.
Yeah, there's some people who made a lifestyle out of gaming the system who choose not to work and still get welfare but that's a minority.
That depends on the country, but in the USA you get food stamps regardless of anything else so you wont starve. Then you can live on public lands in a tent or so, many do that in California.
Virtually no one wants to live on the bare minimum, no idea why you tend to create this rather absurd straw man...
Many people prefer that to working.
The Seattle Times wrote an article decades ago where they interviewed a woman on welfare. They asked her what she'd do if her welfare was taken away. She replied "get a job".
They asked a couple of guys in a car with fishing equipment why they lived on welfare instead of getting a job. They replied that on welfare, they get to fish all day and enjoyed it.
I also knew a fellow for years who was on and off unemployment. He said he'd work at a job long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he'd f'up and get laid off. He'd then live off of unemployment, and would fail the requierd job interviews (amazing!). When that ran out, he'd have no trouble finding a job.
A friend of mine ran a nursery. He tried to hire a couple people who said they wanted the job, but would wait until their unemployment ran out before taking it. They were quite open about it.
Not that "absurd" at all.
Hence why I said "virtually", having a few anecdotes from interviews or from someone you knew doesn't cover it. Of course there will be people who choose to live on welfare, the vast majority would rather not. It's a small price to pay to have welfare programs saving countless lives from falling deeper into the hole of abject poverty... We just view this very differently, you prefer the "stick" approach, punish people who you deem unworthy because of their lack of motivation to work; while me on the other hand prefer the "carrot" where I think it's an okay price to pay to have some people choosing to not to work while society can protect people caught in bad times from falling away from the margins.
It's still absurd the straw man you created, please provide me data covering the whole population and we can discuss it, while it's based on these anecdotes you just being guided by your feelings and ideology.
> punish people
It's not about punishing people or whacking them with a stick. It's about paying people to fail.
There's also nothing wrong with you, me, or anybody else freely helping those who you, me, or others deem to be in need.
In reality, most US states are insanely generous.
I recall once my mom had to help a friend's dad who was uninsured and dying of prostate cancer simply apply for benefits. He didn't think the state would pay for it and had just resigned himself to death. My goodness, how silly... Instead, he applied and it was paid for.
I myself have fallen into this trap. When I was laid off, I was going to pay COBRA, instead of just biting the bullet and applying for medicaid. There's almost always a free government provided option if you need it. Literally people don't even bother.
With a vastly higher percentage of its citizens in jail than any other developed country, much higher crime and violence than developed countries and many other very bad indicators it is, however, not a good country. It does not provide for or look after its citizens in the ways other developed countries do, and does not appear to be a healthy society.
That's my point the US's federal government would be handling free healthcare directly or indirectly thru the states. As well the amount of money Americans would have in their pockets would be a lot less and that's not after over 300 years are what we are use to. Recent election shows the majority does not want change in many regards.
It's worth asking why.
> NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US. Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging populations. As a result, much of Europe’s military has become, in the view of some US defense experts, a “Potemkin army” that is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-nato-armed-forces/
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/article/307805...
(This only covers the running costs; even an unfair assumption that the US would need less F-35s and troops if they weren't deployed in Europe, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the $916 billion yearly budget).
Which the US is doing only to protect European country and wouldn't have done it if it were anywhere else? Strongly doubt it. Also it's important to clarify, the US isn't sending "hundreds of billions" to e.g. Ukraine. It's sending material worth that much, which them it replaces (and sometimes it would have had to anyways, in the care of expiring ordinance or obsolete stuff) by paying American companies.
Because taking care of people is not profitable. Why are people still looking for the answer when it's obvious?
If the US is benchmarked against Europe then all is well. The problem is that Europe is now a distant 3rd in terms of economic power - it can't face up to China. Arguably, if we put China in its own category and India into "Asia" then the EU might be pushing towards 4th. Everyone is still ahead of Africa I suppose.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-wb?tab=chart...
Without innovations and highly profitable industries generating well paying working class jobs, with what will you pay for that welfare and quality of life? Billionaires and corporations certainly aren't gonna pay for it out if their profits, so the working class has to. But if the working class has no more high paying wages anymore due to stagnating growth , then your welfare budget also goes bye-bye.
You can't just vote yourself more welfare and higher public sector salaries and pensions out of thin air without an economic growth to back that up. I mean, you technically can, but it doesn't end well as was proven every single time this was tried.
Innovation is important sure, but also efficient use of resources, including cramping down on negative externalities. That increases welfare and quality of life, ideally with no need to spend an extra dollar.
Yeah it's ineficient but it's the one we got right now. You're not gonna change it with your comments and beliefs. Meanwhile rent is due next month and you need to pay up by using these "ineficient" mechanisms set in place by powers higher than you.
You are welcome to point out flaws in my thinking.
So the thing about jobs is, we really need jobs that actually produce stuff. We don't just need jobs, we need somebody to create the wealth. First it has to exist, then we can worry about how it gets distributed.
So if you have a bunch of people who are not necessary, then the best thing to do is not to let them starve (which is also immoral), nor to give them pointless jobs (which is soul-destroying), but to find something useful for them to do.
This isn’t a production problem, it is a social problem.
Its because the person making the car doesn't want to make one for someone who isn't making something of equal value in return. It makes them a sucker for being the one to make the car.
You cannot legislate, policy change, indoctrinate, or force your way around this. It's why all attempts to do so always have failed. Every single time. Always.
The only way to create actual value is to put in actual work.
I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that there is no innovation whatsoever in the EU. Falling behind the US doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing. I think a lot of people in the EU would be fine with being 3rd on "productivity" if it was enough to maintain a high standard of living and decent competitiveness.
I never said that. Please follow HN rules and reply to the strongest interpretation of one's argument, not the weakest.
The EU economy was at the same level as the US economy 15-20 years ago., now it's only half the US. The EU missed out on all the major technological innovations in that time and therefore missed out on a lot of income for welfare while welfare expenses only grew due to ageing population and increasing cost of living.
>Falling behind the US doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing.
No, it means less money for welfare. Especially with an ever increasing ageing population. If you want to take care of all of those people at a high quality of life, it's gonna cost you, and we don't have that kind of money anymore.
So you either get Europeans to accept slowly sliding into poverty due to declining welfare and rising CoL, OR, you need to bring in more money to the state somehow. Previously it was done in Europe via slavery and theft through colonialism, but since that conveyor belt of free money is gone and what's left to bring in more money is innovation in highly profitable high-growth industries where EU is almost absent. No, ASML, Airbus and some struggling German mittlestand companies can't support a whole continent like they did in the 1980's.
>I think a lot of people in the EU would be fine with being 3rd on "productivity" if it was enough to maintain a high standard of living and decent competitiveness.
They would be fine, if those losses would come out of the pockets of tax dodging corporations, but they're not, they're being eaten up by the working class and the taxpayer who still expects the same welfare quality like in the good ol' days when the EU economy was as strong as the US.
Do you you see how this level of welfare is unsustainable without matching economic growth?
> Without innovations and highly profitable industries generating well paying working class jobs, with what will you pay for that welfare and quality of life
Without presumes with none, and you're saying it like it's true.
> The EU economy was at the same level as the US economy 15-20 years ago., now it's only half the US. The EU missed out on all the major technological innovations in that time
Really, all major technological innovations? Why is the leading music streaming provider Swedish (Spotify)? Leading and most advanced airplane manufacturer European (Airbus)? Why are there so many fintechs which are a decade ahead of US counterparts (Revolut, Monzo, MyPOS, SumUp, Bunq, Qonto) and why is finance-related tech so much ahead - you can pay contactless pretty much anywhere in most of the EU and UK, you can accept card payments with your phone and just an app, all banks have to have an API with Oauth to be able to aggregate accounts and whatever? Also I'd like to add advancements in nuclear fusion. Also I haven't experienced healthcare in the US, but from what I've seen it doesn't look like there's anything even close to the seamlessness of Doctolib in France.
The EU is indeed falling behind, IMO mostly due to lack of capital, risk/gambling averseness, and the much smaller individual markets. But to say it has missed all innovations, or that it has no innovation is simply untrue. We need more of them, we need to invest into more of them, because there's a lot of potential that needs to be nurtured and grow.
Only if you want to be a sticker and take things literally while deliberately ignoring the context to score a cheap shot gothca, then sure, it then means without.
> Leading and most advanced airplane manufacturer European (Airbus)?
Because of government intervention, and moat of a highly regulated and expensive to enter industry that keeps new players out. Why is SpaceX ahead of EU aerospace companies?
>Why is the leading music streaming provider Swedish (Spotify)?
Spotify wasn't even profitable until recently and only made it where it is today, due to to massive capital investments form the US, not from EU investors.
>Why are there so many fintechs which are a decade ahead of US counterparts
Are they also ahead in earnings/profits too? Because you fund welfare with taxes on profits and on wages. You can't tax innovations that bring you no money.
That's where While you keep blabbering on about Airbus, Monzo and Spotify , have a look at the top 100 companies in the world by market cap and see how many are from the EU and how many from the US and that's case closed. AIrbus, Spotify, etc are the rare exceptions, not the norm for Europe.
“A system of non-competition clauses enforced by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) workforce suppliers is allegedly trapping aerospace professionals who work at ESA’s facilities across Europe in a professional dead-end street” [1].
Europe is absolutely riddled with this crap, and it tends to come top down from the EU.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/12/esa-workers-face-a-maz...
Here is the data: https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/-US-vs-European-Stock-Mar...
If Europe is so innovative, why is US to EU stock market cap ratio is on a consistent upward swing by since mid 2000's?
Why do so many people, especially on HN, confuse market cap or GDP growth for innovation? Surely, especially here, people can realise that innovation can come in different forms, and some do not move the needle of a stock market or won't show up in GDP graphs. Is CERN not innovative because it's not a public company whose stock is growing?
It's not confusion. It's rather an acknowledgement to the reality that to fund a generous welfare state, one needs taxes. To tax, you first need a dynamic private sector economy. Taxing public sector is like shifting money from the left pocket to the right pocket.
GDP or stock market caps are just a proxy for the size of the private economy. Europe has lagged on both. Maybe there is something else which would indicate that European private sector is growing fine and dandy. I am not aware of it. Are you?
CERN innovation is awesome but it will need to be translated into private sector economic activity in order for the society to benefit from it; either directly via products and services, or indirectly via taxation and welfare programs based on that.
I gave concrete examples of European companies being significantly better than American ones.
Arguably, Japan has been doing this for two or three generations now. Despite a crazy debt, quality of life in Japan is still pretty great.
"There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Argentina, and Japan."
One must be very careful drawing conclusions for other societies based on Japan as a sole example. I somewhat agree that Japan illustrates that massive infrastructure investment, combined with diligence in maintaining functioning societal systems, does in fact yield a high quality of life that appears sustainable even if the metrics of economic growth look terrible. That's because GDP as a measure of "quality of life" is a shitty indicator IMO, but that's a whole 'nother rabbit hole to go down...
If the US took the entire medicare/medicaid budget and split it evenly per person it would be left with more money than the UK spends on healthcare.
Its not just how much you spend, its how much you waste.
Road infrastructure in the United States might as well be a form of digging holes and then refilling it back up again. Grossly inefficient when we could invest the infrastructure money into world class public transit.
As I recall, after the Chicago suburbs you hit Rockford, Janesville, Madison, Baraboo, Tomah, Eau Claire, Menominee, and Hudson before you get to the St Paul collar communities.
So 9 stops on on a single track running between two major cities, with only 1600 more miles to Seattle. And while the distance between stops increase, the population greatly decreases as you head west.
Now road construction could be better. Because while Illinois has 300k lane-miles of road, it seems like they only have 200k of asphalt and 100k under construction at any given point in time.
Why do people trot this out every time? Driving or traveling across the US isn't particularly relevant to most people's life experience. Ok, I'll bite.
Yes, the United States is big, but some areas are more dense than other and would need good heavy investment in public transit infrastructure. For example, the north eastern corridor would in particular benefit from investment in true high speed rail.
There's also the need for investment in freight infrastructure, especially if we want to take off more trucks off the road. This is a safety benefit too. Less vehicles on the roads just mean less people risking their neck.
Now let's talk more local public transit.
Atlanta for example, really need to expand heavy rail. Traffic there is one of the worst in the country. MARTA at time outpaces cars, even with all the stops they have to make. Rather, a lot of time is eaten up just waiting for the train. A more frequent schedule would help here, but Georgia would need to actually contribute funding to make this possible. If they extend it more into the surburb, I would have less of an incentive to move. As now, I am considering moving because of how frequent I commute into Atlanta.
With the suburb architecture of many US cities, local rail is nearly irrelevant outside the city center
In a typical vehicle that's about 50kg of CO2. 100kg if it doesn't include the return leg.
Not having a dig at you, but this is a big part of our problem. We believe that because we can do something, we are entitled to do it. Not only that, but we've structured our society in such a way that it's actually necessary for people to do these harmful things just to get by like commuting distances that would have been considered absurd 100 years ago. They are still absurd.
Edit: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
It may not have seemed that way in the 1950s, but it hasn't scaled well.
Also, having a walkable city has massive health and societal benefits.
This is not some pearl clutching moralistic argument, but a practical observation based on:
- Transfer of ownership is not necessarily possible. You can't buy a technologically sensitive company because of regulations. Even if you can buy a foreign firm, transferring the talent, operational base etc. might not be possible. A CEO can't sell off his share of stocks even if they're worth billions because the loss of investor confidence.
- Physical limitations on quantities of goods. There is a finite supply of real estate. If everybody in the world wanted a new car suddenly (and had money for it), car prices would go through the roof, and only a small fraction would actually get it.
Imo capitalism is not flawed in the way that it is incapable of handling these situations, but it is very flawed in that money is an increasingly poor proxy for the abstract concept of value.
This flawed nature of capitalism has been long since endemic (and dare I say integral) to the system, much more value has existed on paper than in reality (see banks), but I think there might be a breaking point at which the system might collapse and hyperinflation would set in.
So the fact that you think money is divorced from reality is a very normal, mundane misconception.
- I never wanted to contrast 'capitalism' and 'communism' or whatever. I merely wanted to point out that the fundamental absurdity of capitalism requiring infinite growth in a finite system has been resolved by having the growth of wealth coming from speculation on future unrealized value. Since I (or anyone else) can't predict the future, it might happen that things do not come to pass as they were expected and that future value might not be realized. Money is divorced from reality, it derives its value from the collective trust and belief by the people participating in the system that it can be exchanged for goods and services. In a system of rational and impartial actors, that belief is backed by chiefly existence of said goods (which is the real size of the economic pie) and less by the speculation of future potential that might or or might not happen. So in summary my argument is not between communism or capitalism, but a captialism that is backed by real world value and one that is backed by future speculation. Even if the former can create less economic growth, we can be certain that growth is real.
- Central planning works. Great public works certainly are dreamt up and funded by governments yet they contribute enormously to the wealth of nations and enable a lot of value to be created. The moon landing was centrally planned and executed by a country whose per capita wealth was on par with modern day Poland, yet is considered the greatest achivement in history.
- There are no real 'centrally planned' or 'free market' economies, as all countries employ both concepts to some degree. But if we were to make a argument, we could say that the US belongs to the 'free market' camp and China belongs the 'centrally planned' camp. Both countries are doing extremely well, this very discussion is about finding which one is actually doing better.
A bottle of water might be the same price as a litre of petrol, but the value is vastly different.
We don't pay for the value. We pay for the cost of acquisition (e.g. pumping the oil out of the ground).
This is happening now. Senegal are following Chad in cutting ties with French military.
[1] https://theconversation.com/cfa-franc-conditions-are-ripe-fo...
(1) Travle posted here on hn months ago, but unfortunately a Webapp that downloads so I can't give you a url
Most parts of the global economy are. If you're selling cars for example, there's a fixed amount of drivers on the road you can sell cars to, so if you're VW, you're now competing with cheaper cars from Asia for those same drivers.
You can't create new drivers out of thin air to expand the market demand for cars. Once the market is saturated, without having any moat, you enter in a race to the bottom.
And that's what Germany's economy is discovering right now and why Europe's share of global GDP has been declining for the past 20 years.
Also, we shouldn't care about Europe's share of global GDP. We should care about how the poor people in our countries are doing. Like I said, we should maintain or improve our quality of life. Producing cars is just a means to an end.
Head to any country without a domestic auto industry to protect and see what new cars people are importing. Sure there will be some rich people buying the brands you recognize, but call an UberX and they're going to show up in a Chinese brand you've never heard of. Or some zombie brand like MG.
Edit: as an exercise, consider the land value of a typical office, and compare to the annual income of the part of the company based there, and the personal income of the employees who work there.
As others allude to, natural resources are zero sum, they are a finite resource, once they are gone, they are gone.
So if an imperial power is mining resources from a 'colony', that 'colony' is being stripped of economic potential with very little to show for it.
They do not both gain economically, like some allude to when maybe it is two countries sharing manufactured goods.
Having completely optimised and global logistics and value chains isn’t necessarily good for wages. We can tax the wealthy and fortunes more than we do, and we probably should, but within the current systems it wouldn’t change that much.
So in some sense many European countries are better prepared for economic downturns than the US even though European countries don’t have a lot of major corporations which don’t produce anything locally.
Obviously it’s even more complex than this. Part of what is bringing down the economies in France and Italy is workers rights. Being able to retire at 60 is great, but it was also something that was obtained when people didn’t live as long and have as few children. Though Greece seems to have managed ok without having new public management plunder their country.
Short aside this reminds me of:
In the US, my Boss's neighbor is an 85 year old woman who retired 42 years ago. And still gets a paycheck twice a month (with CoL increases) and full health insurance. She became a municipal clerk when she turned 18, worked 25 years to get a full pension, then retired at 43. The optimism (maybe pessimism?) people had back in the day was wild. I nearly fell out of my chair when he told me this.
But at the same time the state somehow has money to house feed and medically care of millions of illegal immigrants
Do you honestly think the government is literally simply "housing" all the authorized immigrants? As in, literally writing checks to their landlords? And literally paying their grocery bills, each and every week? Do you actually think that's what's happening?
Remember, the rant wasn't referring simply to new arrivals, but literally to all the "millions" who have been here for decades. With the tacit approval of US society at large, for the simple reason that (authorized or not) the vast majority form an indispensible part of its workforce, doing the hard work that most Americans refuse to do.
I'm not saying the migrant crisis isn't a huge, costly mess. But for whatever is happening, I just don't get these weird, distorted and emotionally manipulative narratives.
Actual estimates for the total number if illegal migrants (including children) in the UK top out at around 800,000. Yet the commenter above said that your government was paying to house and feed "millions" of them. Last we checked, "milions" means >= 2,000,000.
Do you still think that what the commenter is saying "actually tends to be the case" in the UK?
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house vs getting emotional and changing the goalposts. I suspect the number is not millions, but this does not include medical care or other humanitarian care.
The GBP/EURO/USD spent is in the billions and the cost was the premise, not necessarily the number of people. If OP exaggerated, correct it and move on to the substance of the argument. It doesn’t make their entire post insipid (your words)
I meant "unauthorized". It was just a typo, honest.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house
It was the conflation of "refugees" with "illegal immigrants" in the commenter's post that I took issue with. The two categories might sound the same but are entirely different.
In particular the latter category definitely do not receive subsidized subsidized housing or benefits the way actual legally recognized asylum seekers, aka "refugees" do.
This exact attitude is what gets the right wing growing.
> As in, literally writing checks to their landlords?
In some EU countries (where I'm from), yes. A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
But thank you for your valuable contribution to this conversation.
And are they there ... illegally? Or legally?
Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
I know you said "illegal immigrants and refugees", so I misquoted you slghtly. But the bigger point is -- why conflate the two, when the numbers and overall situations are obviously entirely different? (In particular - while legally recognized asylum seekers might be eligible to obtain housing subsidies, illegal migrants quite definitely cannot).
To be charitable, one can assume there was no manipulative intent, and you were just being careless. But if so, then you'll have to acknowledge that that's why your missive appeared, at first glance, to be well, a rant.
The solution is to listen to their worries and take action to fix them instead of ignoring them and calling them stupid
It isn't the concerns of the voters, but the relentless cognitive distortions we keep hearing about push-button topics such as this one (generally promoted by ideologues and pundits, rather than the voters themselves) that are, for want of a better term, stupid.
(And on the subject of stupid, my initial response contained a horrible typo -- should have said "unauthorized", rather than "authorized").
Not relevant to the political question. The point is there is anger at the number of migrants European politicians let in.
Which in turn further drives and exploits the anger.
That’s a concern. The working poor’s concern is the labor competition from one side and welfare competition from the other.
The immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe. It is the failure of our societies to help the countries like Syria, Afghanistan, etc to be liveable. We are paying the price for this failure.
There were absolutely pro-migration politicians, e.g. Merkel.
> immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe
Europe continues to have generous refugee obligations, protections and benefits. There also isn’t a robust deportation regime, in part because there isn’t anywhere to legally deport them to. That’s probably what these voters take offence to. (I unfortunately don’t see any non-radical solutions.)
Of course Russia and China aren’t innocent when it comes to Syria and large parts of Africa
Yet, the government gave 100% free treatment to 48k immigrants that had no information. Many of then pregnant women from Asian countries with complicated situations that coat lots of money. Some illegal immigrants even got right to have treatments with medicines that cost millions.
There is North of 700 000 illegal residents in France alone. So yes, millions in the UE. Here, they have free health care (CMU) costing more than a billion euros per year while the government wanted reduced refunds on medical acts and medicine for people paying for it. How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off? It's exactly why people as voting for the so-called "far"-right party, with are still quite leftist in comparison to the ruling parties of countries like Japan, Thailand, etc.
[1] https://www.iledefrance-mobilites.fr/titres-et-tarifs/detail...
So that was my concern -- what purpose is served by promoting a grossly exaggerated characterization of the actual cost of having these people around?
How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off?
If it were up to me, I'd stick it incrementally to you-know-who have you also getting a Solidarité reduction. But that's obviously not kind thing the voting public wants to hear these days.
In France, if you are illegal, you get free healthcare.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aide_m%C3%A9dicale_d%27%C3%8...
I'm not, and it's difficult to see what you think you might gain from this conversation style.
I think you misread me there. It wasn't a denial at all.
It was simply saying: whatever the state of the mess -- weird, distorted narratives about the mess don't help us out of the mess. And in fact are a huge part of the mess.
Exactly as you put it.
This is one of those moments I wish people had a way (I guess you could just add it in the notes) to mark their HN account with a region. Are you in the UK, maybe?
The immigration issue sounds very different in the EU vs US, even if many of the sound bites rhyme.
In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
I don't know what the solution is, as an immigrant to the UK myself I find it difficult to judge or comment, but you need to keep in mind that Europe has a welfare model quite different from your US. We typically pay more taxes and have a higher expectation of public services. When those services are deteriorating, people look for someone to blame.
Immigrants are an easy target.
In reality, it is much more to do with the aging population and fewer in the workforce, but that doesn't mean that we're also not paying a lot of money for asylum seekers.
We’re generally only talking about 50,000 people a year coming in via these routes
Of course Brexit didn’t help with the policing of it all either
That number sounds big, but for some perspective my city (Seattle) is spending more than that to build light rail tracks to one particular (not that very dense!) neighborhood.
0.42% of the UK budget is spent on helping people who have had everything in their lives ripped away. People who have watched family members get shot, had their houses destroyed by bombs, and for some, their entire homeland turned into rubble.
The UK populace spent decades electing corrupt leaders who purposefully destroyed civic institutions. Of course things are falling apart. Immigrants don't have much to do with that...
That should have read "unauthorized", and without the negating particle the rest makes very little sense.
In this case it seems that the author is pointing out that the incumbents do not in fact have any inferred or conferred ownership of these public spaces.
I decided to treat it as a minor typo and read it as 'people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of "foreigners" on their streets' instead. Ie, the foreigners aren't really foreigners, just citizens of non-aboriginal ethnicity.
By putting the word their in quotes the poster is implying the unstated assumption that states aren't legitimate.
I don't think that the economy in general is key, though high immigration does dampen wages and that is mostly felt at the lower end of incomes. I think what we're seeing are the social and cultural consequences of very high immigration from countries of completely alien cultures and whose people do not assimilate in Europe. This has been going on for decades now but completely ignored by successive governments and that only hardens people's reaction against it. This is compounded by the apparent powerlessness to act "because whatever treaty/law" that we seem to have shackled ourselves with...
I don't fully know what's going on in Europe, but in the US we have several TV news networks dedicated to making you upset about the increased prevalence of foreigners. And they've been doing it for 30+ years, so it's working, no matter how good the age is or isn't.
I.e. people voting for Farage are not the ones living next door to asylum seekers.
Maybe it's different in the EU and US.
People see problems (mainly caused by the cost of housing) and hear people like Farage blaming it on the "small boats", and people on the other end of the spectrum blaming it on millionaire landlords.
The reality is it's not caused by the 3 asylum seekers per 10,000 people increasing demand, but instead by essential legal immigration (to perform jobs as the native workforce reduces in number) and crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone.
This thus pushes up price thanks to the age old supply/demand curve. How else would we ration housing? Nepotism? Sexual favours? Lottery?
Sure, but if you have an inability to produce more housing, how is importing more foreigners helping with the situation of the locals who are already struggling with the housing market?
I'm not defending Farage or his voters, but don't people have a right to be pissed about this situation?
We're having some similar problems in the US, but not at the same scale. It used to be MS-13 was the big foreign crime boogeyman, now it's the Venezuelan gang "Tren de Aragua": https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/its-spreading-americas...
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/migrant-population-charl...
I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
> I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
Go touch grass ffs! Your reply is infuriating to any victim of terrorism. A single death or wounded from islamic terrorism (the only that really exist) is too much already. If that's not enough for you, please line up with your family and friends and sign to be the next victims and we'll see if "not even 100 deaths" is a good thing or not.
What about pollution? Kills thousands upon thousands of people too! Why are we wasting our time and attention with 24/7 news reports about terrorism every time some nutter stabs someone in the street, when we could be directing our efforts towards eradicating coal, diesel engines, etc?
See where I'm going with this?
Many already are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
I can however name a hundred other things that affect most of their lives daily like inflation, racism, corruption of both the media and political organs by corporate interests, degrading of public infrastructure and institutions that are not aimed at churning out a profit, declining quality of the education system to systemic stress imposed on teachers, etc.
As a society we must focus our attention to those things which really matter. Terrorism is just trying to get our attention.
I also live in a town of 4m which was impacted in the last 10 years by a single terror attack. Should it affect my life? Should I be suspicious of every member of the ethnic group from which the terrorist comes? I couldn't even identify them.
However, I often think about that drawing where three people are at a table. A blue-collar worker (mine worker or construction worker), a black sad looking black person (immigrant), and a rich guy in suit.
The blue collar worker has a single cookie on his plate, the immigrant no cookies at all, and the rich guy a plate full of cookies. The rich guy with his plate full of cookies, looking at the worker, points to the immigrant. “He wants your cookie”.
It's a very difficult sociopolitical problem, and it has as much to do with psychology as it does headline statistics. Contemporary media dynamics has much to do with the psychological aspect, but it's also corrupting the way people think about these issues across the ideological spectrum.
Labour's share of wealth produced (vs capital's share) has been declining in the developed world since the 1970s, and is now well past Gilded Age levels and still getting worse.
So yes, it's both about better jobs and about distributing away from the rich and towards the working class: these are the same thing.
1) Income share is complicated: https://equitablegrowth.org/labors-share-lost/ There are structural issues, like automation and immigration, underlying those trends. Immigration isn't, per se, irrelevant, especially when you consider dynamics like volatility and displacement. (But, again, it's complicated.)
2) Throughout history vilifying the rich has not worked out well for the poor and working classes, neither in absolute nor relative terms. Where sustainable improvements have been seen, they're the result of a flattening of the social hierarchy (not necessarily in monetary terms!), but in a way that shifts norms to the type of long-term, group management that you see in the upper middle classes, not the winner-take-all, rat race rules of the poor (at least, that they see as governing inter-class conflict, not necessarily among themselves). The cookie metaphor, both in the model it presents and the devious motivations it insinuates, is rat race rules, and rat race rules favor the rich much more than cooperative, inclusive norms. What you want is for the wealthier to identify with the poorer, but that can only happen (if at all) to the extent the poorer identify with the wealthier. If some wealthy person perceives themselves as having been wholly self-made, despite what's obvious to everybody below him, good! That implies he at least values agency and work ethic, norms that in the United States can be and are shared with people below him on the ladder, and therefore a way to sell political concessions as being in his self-interest (psychologically).
3) Wealth (as opposed to income) doesn't work as implied in the cookie metaphor. Elon Musk is a trillionaire, but there's no bank vault with a trillion in gold bullion that he can go to at will. At any point in time--hour by hour, even--his nominal wealth is primarily a function of the future expectations of others, including expectations of social contentment and economic growth. You can't take half of Musk's cookies and redistribute to everyone; it's entirely non-sensical to think that way. Our intuition breaks down at scale; certainly from a process perspective (as opposed to a static context). Just like running a $30 trillion national economy isn't the same as running a small business (for one thing, nobody runs it), the cookie metaphor leads to horribly misguided ideas about the nature of our problems and the viability of remedies.
Yes, inequality of outcomes matters (at least at the margins), it just doesn't provide much if any insight into causes and solutions. Imbibing in zero sum cookie narratives is counterproductive. Like other forms of social injustice, e.g. racism, it's paradoxical--how can you fix something without identifying the effects with an intention to address them; yet, such a fixation has a tendency to solidify (reify?) the divisions undergirding them. If you look at critical theory, especially critical race theory, you can see an admission of this paradox at the core of the literature. People like Frantz Fanon and Derrick Bell came to the conclusion that it's impossible to completely overcome racism--systemic and otherwise. Their perspective is understandable given the seeming intractability of these sorts of problem, I just don't share the fundamental pessimism at the heart of how these issues are framed by contemporary social justice thinking. And it's that framing that I saw in the cookie metaphor. I don't have the right answers, but history h...
The metaphor is not zero sum, and not about handouts.
It's about deliberate diversion of attention, obfuscating the source of inequality to those that experience it. This is something that absolutely happens, both overtly (by endlessly misrepresenting causes of poverty) and covertly (by cultural suppression of socialist ideas).
Kind of like your post.
Money is power. Elon Musk would be a cringe lord if he wasn’t rich. But because he’s rich he gets to play government.
That’s the point of taxation. It’s not to fund anything. The government doesn’t need your money to fund anything.
Or being paid more for the same jobs. Fairer than wealth distribution via taxation but has the same effect.
And those people don't have to be foreign or a different race: just see the anti-tech waves that have rolled through the Bay Area in the past, directed more based on attire and mode of transport than race. And a lot of people here would agree those new workers are to blame for a lot of Bay Area problems, but it's easier to dismiss others as bigoted than wrestle with the reality of winners and losers behind each statistic.
Did you know on GBP PPP Warsaw and Budapest are now better places to live than Madrid, Lisbon and many other Mediterranean cities?
It’s crazy. Perhaps Berlin and Copenhagen are still ok, but even France is on a completely unsustainable path that will explode in the next 10-20 years.
> Many Europeans cannot even afford proper AC in summer and heating in winter.
Basically nobody lacks heating in winter, that one is made up. The thing people lack is AC and its just because people aren't used to it so they don't see it as a need.
Edit: Saying this is like saying people can't afford shelter in USA, it is true and there are many homeless but it describes a tiny fraction.
I suspect it's just that Europe is mostly north of the US and AC is more luxury than necessity. Places in the US like Seattle, which is still south of much of Europe, only recently rose above 50% AC prevalence. It's become much more popular as the climate as grown warmer.
A lot of people don't need AC, and heating is a non-issue almost everywhere.
Besides: I'd rather put sedum/green stuff on our flat roof, which also helps insulate a little bit in winter but really really helps in summer.
But relateedly, US household energy expenditure is enormous compared to other countries and a lot of it is burning fossil fuels to run AC. There's a big money vs ethics tradeoff going the wrong way for emissions, more so from being a huge oil producer.
I'm interested in the numbers behind this. The location and timing of most air conditioning needs correlates strongly with the availability of PV. At this point I would have guessed that heating is strongly reliant on fossil fuels (and will be for many years to come) and air conditioning will be much greener.
If the economy falls behind then quality of life will follow at some point. In fact quality of life is already not so great and decreasing.
If only Europeans would accept this truth and wake up that something has to change yesterday.
What's happening to Greece is just the mining canary for what's gonna happen in much of the rest of EU later, if there's no preventive change of course.
Noone claims that people in the third world enjoy great quality of life, for instance. You can't benefit from the advancements of others if you cannot afford them...
> I'm not even sure how this could happen.
It can always happen but it is gradual and takes time. Places like India or China were once the richest areas of the world, only to fall behind and become among the poorest later on because they stagnated while others progressed.
Human Quality of life seems to flip the natural "evolutionary script" wrt to population growth. Shrinking population = shrinking landlords/bankers/labor/traders/military/scientists etc
In nature, where there is environmental instability/resource scarcity you see a Quantity over Quality reproductive survival strategy (which is similar to what we see poorer regions of the world) that fuels population growth.
On the flip side, where there is resource abundance and stability there is growth in population. But we don't see that happening in the richer/higher developed regions with humans.
Its like advanced human society/culture has worked out how to override biology.
We currently work around falling population(and the shrinking factors of production) with tech/automation, financial/military arm twisting and immigration which gives rise its own social and cultural instability.
Nature has found other population models though. Ants(Eusocial insects) have solved their population/survival issues by have a single Baby factory. There are theories that the Haplodiploidy it produces makes ant societies function smoother. While Meerkats have collective breeding model which is similar to what certain Feminists talk about when they say Make Kin not Babies.
It will take a couple generations of futzing about in unnecessary directions before we solve these issues. So patience with the people who don't know what they are doing is key.
Or you see no way out, feel defeated and see that positive change is impossible or futile. It cuts both ways. Inaction doesn't always mean a rosy life.
The CNCF approach basically says, instead of just running your software in a traditional way, you run it in containers which run in the cloud, mostly managed by k8s which is the most popular even though not the simplest container orchestration platform. So what makes them truly "cloud native" vs "AWS/GCP/Azure-native" is that you can run them on any cloud, even private.
And please make sure to visit some of the Eastern European countries, like Romania or Bulgaria too. They are part of the EU as well.
I’m older with bit more freedom than when I just started out, but this is exactly what I’m doing. My plan is to eventually quasi retire to the house I’m currently renovating.
Probably it is time for you to learn the plight of fellow Europeans then. The society is stewing for quite some time now, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
The symbol has become "a unifying thread and call to arms" as yellow vests are common and inexpensive, easy to wear over any clothing, are associated with working-class industries, highly noticeable, and widely understood as a distress signal.
Rise of far right parties across Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, France and many other countries is another clear signal that EU's quality of life may not be great for everyone there.
Also, here in The Netherlands the yellow vests were mostly conspiracy theorists who would pull something to protest against out of thin air. That movement died down pretty quickly.
Protests here are almost always against (perceived) government overreach. In most countries even being able to protest is considered a luxury. That's why you don't see that many in the US.
But there are a lot of other factors in the problem and making it an economic issue really obscures some of the more important factors.
Intellectual laziness, idle brains, idle hands, toxic memes and bad actors making bad use of them.
When we look at magical thinking as one of those light schizotypical behaviors large portions of the population exhibit these symptoms.
They drink from the cup of nonsense to excess.
There should always be room for drinking from the cup of nonsense but too much and its difficult to be useful to yourself and your family.
As for the other party that fits this description they're their own worst enemy, as they're an amalgamation of groups which don't really have common interests aside from a few talking points.
All it takes is another term of pain, and they'll be back.
Case in point, America. A former president who by all counts should have lost the election a year ago, was literally begging on Truth Social for donations, facing numerous criminal trials and convictions, just retook the hot seat.
I've met their voter base. The young, educated, city-dwelling part.
Of course they'll be back, but like every political movement based on cult of personality, they have no coherent plan what to do should Kaczyński die/retire, aside from infighting. Arguably the vultures started circling already. The MAGA party will face the same predicament once their leader inevitably leaves the stage.
My take is that since both Kaczyński and Trump haven't appointed a successor, their political projects will die with them. Their opponents need only to survive until that happens.
I so wish that you are right. I am afraid you are not though. Trump is a symptom of the growing discontent in the society. If not Trump, it would be Bernie or someone else. But the tinderbox is there. Someone just needs to take a match to that.
I may not leave her a lot of inherited wealth, but she may also not really need any to have options.
(That said, my personal frame of reference for why this is better and wonderfully stress-free is years lived in South Korea--that ultra-low fertility rate has reasons--, not so much the US.)
Folks here expect and trust the state to provide for the future, private provisions are easily dismissed as unnecessary. As a result of this the median household wealth of the area I live in is 5x lower than my home country of Australia, despite incomes (adjusted for purchasing power) not being drastically different.
Whether that trust is wisely placed we'll have to wait and see[1]. However I do need to narrow that down a bit, it's not the whole EU, mostly France/Germany. There are other nations moving ahead with private pension schemes etc and much higher household wealth (Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands).
1. My main concern is government investment is inherently slow, politically charged, and pathologically risk averse vs the private sector. This means in the aggregate, over the long term, private household investments will out perform.
Probably explains a good chunk of Germany's and the EUs anemic growth. Simply put, that's 127B EUR that can't be spent investing in the future and growing the economy.
What is a decent pension and where it will come from? I'm projected to get a decent SSA pension (bigger than a median income in top tier EU countries), but I am not counting on it. What gives you confidence that government will be able to support you through retirement?
Laws that obligate the country to do so
If Americans give up on home ownership and luxury items, they too can enjoy a European quality of life; living in an 800sqft rental and enjoying a rich social life.
Like personally I'm doing great, and so are a lot of people I know, and I'm sure you as well. But I think a lot of Americans are struggling badly with their social lives.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250/
The largest contributor according the book's surveys and studies (and I love saying this) is television outcompeting in-person fun. Car dependency is a factor, but IIRC was factor #2 or #3. While this ranking was true at the time of publication, I would wager that time spent on "screens" is likely factor #1, #2, and #3 now.
Please read the version with the 20 year update: https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu...
I would wager that many people are fleeing their hometowns to socialize in cities not because they're walkable, but because the density of people increases, allowing you to have better odds meeting real humans who haven't been lost to the allure of the indoors.
I don't think you can have a realistic conversation about American physical or mental health without centering this fact
Americans are much lonelier than their European counterparts.
In addition, lifespans in the U.S. are declining even post COVID relative to their European counterparts, largely due to increases in “deaths of despair” (drugs, suicides, etc).
The idea that Americans have a “rich social life” is not true relative to Europeans. Even the church going etc. is for most people forced upon them as opposed to something they want to do, as evidenced by the increasing number of people saying they’re faithless but onto church anyways.
That doesn’t mean that people with rich social lives don’t exist or even that the lack of such a rich social life is a problem for a majority of people.
What it means is that the U.S. broadly isn’t doing as well as Europeans and further things are getting worse.
It's easy to make a study that shows that the US has more X than some number of European countries—you just compare the entire US to all European countries and then cherry pick the ones where we do worse. But the US is a big place with a lot of variety in living conditions—even if you just broke down the results by broad geographic region rather than state, you would get dramatically different results than taking the US as a whole. What happens if you compare loneliness in the South with loneliness in Denmark? Or what about loneliness across the entire US with loneliness across the entire EU?
This is the cultural aspect.
I have a lot of friends who went the opposite direction of you, and chose a cheaper but more fulfilling life in Europe.
Instead of making 200k a year in the us, they make modest salaries and rent 100-year-old farmhouse flats that Americans would call a slum. They drive economy cars and spend their ample time socializing or outdoors.
My personal opinion is that Europeans simply place a higher priority on social interaction and incorporate it into their daily lives. Many of them have more modest financial aspirations, and don't expect to ever own a house, vacation property, or boat.
I basically explain this by comparing my life (US of A) to my sisters (EU). My sister makes great money - my sister spends ALL of this great money. she lives paycheck-to-paycheck which in US would mean she is poor, in EU she is living large (just came back from UAE, heading to Kenya in a couple of weeks, January Macedonia and Austria…). I make 789x what she does and put away 60+% - been doing this for 25 years now, almost done with working though
My take is that Americans like to make infrastructure an excuse for everything when it really boils down to priorities and preferences.
10 km is a 20 minute bike ride if you're not too obese to fit on one. 10 minutes if you pick a coffee shop, pup, or Park that is halfway. Unfortunately, most people prefer Netflix and the fridge which is even closer
e-bike ? otherwise you have to be riding race type bike with really good dedicated bike lane
However, this kind of whataboutism illustrates my point. There's a near infinite number of places humans can congregate to enjoy each other's company. It can be a park or a coffee shop or a pub or your kitchen table for tea.
The fact that none of these are suitable demonstrates that the desire to get together is not there.
downtown Denver can house minuscule part of the population of the Denver metro area - only those affluent enough to afford it. America (again) is not downtown Denver or downtown SF or downtown anything...
Also, a lot of american homes seem to need space for luxuries which are simply weird for many europeans.
A bathroom per bedroom for instance? Why not share a bathroom with the entire household,and have a seperate small toilet instead?
American kitchens also seem really large compared to most european one's i have seen, but they also seem to have a more social function then what kitchens are used for normally. (preparing food)
Why would you if you don't have to? It's great to have space.
We start with 19 + 7 days and get 1 extra day per year of service until 5 years. (We also get a 4 week contiguous block once every 5 years.)
Therefore that's 5 less weeks with the kids each year — or about 1.6 years total by the time they leave home for college.
I have 4 weeks of vacation plus 11 federal holidays, which is close to the norm in nearly every professional job I'm aware of.
I use it and make a very healthy wage when I'm at work.
I could consider going to the US to earn some money while young but never to start a family.
Raising your kids to be able to stand on their own and deal with the harshness of the world is far more important in my opinion.
The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy, which was doing economically terrible when I visited, didn’t even have a fraction of the homelessness problem as in the U.S.
Italy is much lower at 8/100k.
45/100k would be an incredible improvement.
Though looking up Paris, it is ~200/100k, which is still half of Seattle's rate!
The definition of who is homeless and how they are counted varies dramatically between countries to the point where comparing headline numbers is largely useless.
This is such a bias tinted view of reality. There are homeless in all parts of the country including suburban and rural areas. You find the majority of homeless in cities because that is just where people in generally are so if by most of the country is extremely clean you mean most of the country is extremely empty and void of life then yeah.
Let's just ignore the rural areas and suburbs. Let's even ignore party (since most big cities are democrat run at this point).
Even with all of those things held the same, the West Coast cities are still uniquely bad not just in the people without permanent housing but also their lack of ability to do anything.
This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
The west coast was a great place to live, people moved there, they didn’t build enough housing, people lose their jobs and can’t afford rent, they go homeless.
These are the fastest growing regions of the country. Texas and Florida are going to take several West Coast electoral votes if trends continue.
They’re growing now because people can’t afford the west coast anymore.
As far as they lack the ability to do anything, you're right. Cities are NIMBY trapped and unless they fix that they won't be able to make any real progress on the problem.
That isn't a democrat problem, indeed the unwillingness to build new things is, by definition, a conservative tendency to "leave neighborhoods as they are".
Historically Seattle's city council was full of "conservative democrats" who didn't rock the boat much and who worked well with local businesses. The city council may be willing to build bathrooms for any gender, but no way in hell are they willing to rezone "historic" neighborhoods. However they've had no qualms about building large amounts of shelters in minority neighborhoods, devastating many of them. Likewise the police don't bother shutting down open air drug markets in Chinatown, but I'm pretty sure if a few dozen dealers and several hundred customers congregated on Queen Anne the crowd wouldn't last long.
Show me a republican candidate who is willing to run on the platform of "extreme property rights, get rid of all zoning except for heavy industry, do whatever you want on your land." The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
> The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
I mean... you're ignoring the largest Republican state for what reason exactly?
But anyway, I think a lot of zoning policy is set by the state.
For example (and this is frankly why efforts like DOGE are necessary), it is simply true that politicians of both parties will seek to maximize their power. State codes typically grant cities zoning powers. They don't have to. But most do. Thus, one can expect that any politician will wield that power.
I've never met a politician who didn't fully exercise their power. Those who do become folk heroes like Cincinnatus -- so rare is the accomplishment.
At the end of the day, we the people simply need to remove the power from the state, one way or another. If DOGE works, it would provide a good model for how this could happen.
From my perspective, I think that every decade, the citizens should elect a 'deregulation' committee whose only power is to remove regulation. Or, randomly pick a group of 12 people to sit on a grand jury to eliminate laws periodically. That's their only power, and they'd be anonymous. Maybe that'd work.
Up until a year or two ago Kirkland had a long standing (and well respected) republican on its city council. Small r republicans used to hold multiple positions in the PNW, but after the party purge post 2016 the Republican party in Washington State has done nothing but run absolutely unelectable candidates. They used to run candidates who ran on a fiscally conservative platform and who didn't engage in culture war stuff.
But aside from that, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are two different axis, and historically Democrats in Washington have been rather fiscally conservative.
The Seattle city council worked very well with the local businesses communities and they were adverse to adding new taxes.
While the council's behavior has changed in recent years, the history is that up until less than a decade ago, Washington was rather purple when it came to actual policies.
Hell the super liberal local independent newspaper used to put some small r republicans on their voter guide now and then.
They don't care. Meanwhile, 100s of millions were spent on tents.
Again, this is a simple problem where we fix it by funding homeless shelters and getting people off the streets. For a while, due to Oregon's incorporation of Martin v Boise into state law, police weren't even able to force people into a shelter. It's honestly insane.
Except Finland and Danemark[0]
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
Interestingly, these are not unrelated. Italy's housing prices are very low because of how badly it's doing economically.
And also... no -- homelessness is one bad problem, but there are other problems. Bad economies cause a myriad, including declining healthcare availability and reductions in life expectancy.
Older kids will only have virtual needs. They'll have a job and health insurance.
Did a charity work for my money? No. They just supposedly will (but possibly not) use some of it for something aligned with my interests. Just like giving my money to my children.
If parent’s work beyond what they can spend in their lifetime is not given to the children, who would continue to choose to work? Already in Canada you can exceed 50% tax rate and many adults who could see more patients, write more books, take more cases, do more work, choose not to as the marginal benefit decreases.
If your kids appreciate your money more than your time is when you know you screwed up.
he should spend every penny he’s got to spend every minute he can with his kids - especially while they are young. and his kids will say the same.
not noble at all - naive, dangerous and downright stupid thinking
Not if you do the slightest bit of planning.
If you will have under $7M in your estate, the slightest is literally nothing. You will not owe a penny of federal estate tax.
If you have over $7M in your estate, it's worth consulting an estate planner, but the basics look like gifting and establishing trusts while you are alive (and ideally while the exclusion amounts are high).
The current exclusion is $13.61M per person, or 2x that per couple and set to drop down to $5.6M in 2017 dollars on January 1, 2026.
If there's a chance that you'll have over $7M and die in 2026, the slightest is gift some of it now [directly and/or via trusts or 529 plans] while the estate tax exclusion is still $13.61M and file form 709.
I understand why you would want higher net income to enjoy a wealthy life, but for "investing in the stock market"? I also understand why you would want to earn more so that your kids can have a better life, but why "after you die"?
If anything, the latter can be turned into an argument for the EU way. Your kids don't need you dead, they need you to be alive and caring. So you have vacations so you can spend time with them, public education so that they have the skills to help themselves, so they don't need your inheritance, and healthcare to keep you alive even if your "stock market investments" are at a low point.
The city just dismantled its gifted program for schools, so if your kid is a high achiever plan on another 40k a year for schooling.
Even swim classes have a huge waitlist and are expensive. Any type of children's activity is absurdly expensive due to the high cost of living.
Housing is absurd, if you have a couple kids plan on spending 4k a month on rent for a place in a nice neighborhood.
Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings and that is it. Americans are, by and large, not even able to save up for retirement, with zero hope of leaving anything to their kids.
Tech worker salaries are a small bubble in all of this.
Per the US government's own BLS, the median household has >$1,000 leftover each month after all ordinary expenses. Americans may not save much but it isn't for lack of available income.
America is full of people who are working a job and a half (with a good chance both are 30hr a week jobs that offer no benefits, and may have "flexible" scheduling where the employee is called in to work different computed selected shifts each week), and people who are working in offices earning good money.
In the middle you have some people working trades still.
We switched over from a manufacturing economy that made things and gave people stability and enough money to raise a family to a "service" economy, and then we started telling everyone working service jobs that "those jobs aren't real careers, so of course you are being treated and paid poorly!"
I would suggest, though, that if you didn't grow up in the bay area and have family property here, as a relocation target it should be considered similar to gold mining. You're moving here for work because of the amount you can save [as a result of ludicrous tech compensation] and then use elsewhere, not because it makes sense financially to actually be living here.
I'm third generation here. Although I'm remote, my wife's job is tied to a location here. We both want to live someplace with a strong international community, access to an airport with lots of overseas flights, and that is a reasonably large population center. (IMHO Seattle is still small, and we are lacking many things for it, although that has gotten better over the last decade or so.)
The only other locations that meet our criteria have either garbage politics or garbage weather. (not that I'm happy with Seattle's politics, but at least our city council is mostly incompetent and a little bit malicious, as opposed to mostly malicious and a little bit incompetent!)
Best of luck to you on your endeavor.
I don't want a super low CoL, but I realize that housing prices have gone up in excess of what they should have due to restrictive housing policies.
Seattle used to be 1/2 the price of the Bay Area, or less! Engineers here earned less than in the SF, but we were OK with it because the QoL was great at a much lower cost.
But the city and surrounding areas refused to upzone, to such a degree that the state legislature finally had to force the issue, but even then the laws passed are too little too late.
The reason for the high CoL is lack of construction, plain and simple. Getting simple residential permits can take half a year or more, environmental regulations have limited what even homeowners can do with their own houses, and the majority of the city is still zoned for only single family homes.
The high price of building means that daycares can't open (too expensive to justify), and workers in all fields demand ever higher pay just so they can afford rent, which drives up the cost of everything.
For the last decade we've built 1/2 as many houses as we've had people moving to the city, and a large percent of new dense construction is rental only, which means money leaving the city and residents not building up any equity (or long term stake) in the city.
Bad policies lead to bad outcomes.
Then, your family will have a choice as to whether to spend that money on you/your spouse or to not spend it on you and to rely on Medicaid.
No one actually pays $50k out of pocket for surgery. Most of it is covered by insurance.
I've watched both my parents go through this, with significant chronic health issues. They had good private insurance on top of Medicare, they routinely had $10-30K annual itemized deductions for health related expenses that were not covered by their insurance. And that was with a daughter who is an MD who invested a massive amount of time and effort to get insurance to cover as much as possible.
There's a special "retirement plan by actions" (PEA) with lower capital gains tax, and the reason why most French people don't invest in the stock market is mostly lack of education around it. For most, real estate is the main way of investing/saving money. The stock market is dangerous and you can lose everything, and many have personal references (their parents/themselves bought stock from efforts such as the Eurotunnel that failed, financially) to that effect.
What's the point of inheriting a life in a corporate hellscape (presuming you live in a tech city).
A fun quote for the europeans here:
"Our land is so wealthy and prosperous that we possess all things. Therefore, there is no need to exchange the produce of foreign barbarians for our own." - The emperor at the height of Qing China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
You just need the right drugs, in this case, Psychedelics.
India is not even close to replacing the huge European middle class and even if it were it has proven to be a highly unreliable partner. And so far the US exports to India are not even 15% of what is exported to the EU (2022).
The EU middle class comprises around 280 million people. Almost as many as the whole US population. And it is culturally and politically aligned with the US to a large extent. It‘s a huge market to loose.
Nobody would drop 15-20% of their exports to try to save 5% of their defense budget all while loosing influence and power.
To reverse roles in your argument: Imagine if the US put sanctions on EU companies because EU militaries aren't doing enough to help the US fight cartels in Mexico. Seem reasonable?
The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin of error. I've travelled a fair amount and everywhere is basically the same.
For an individual it's really going to come down to lifestyle and what you prefer. Some people like urban living and walkability, if that's you then you probably want Japan or old world metropolitan European cities. Some people want a house on a few acres and national parks the size of countries, if that's you then you probably want the US.
Working cultures are different but then there is no average on that either. People on HN tend to assume everyone is an office worker or something which is actually a fairly narrow slice of the middle of the spectrum.
Equally though, online (you can see it in this thread) there's sometimes a weird focus on the absolute worst outcomes which I've always found baffling. If you're planning to become a poor fentanyl addict then yeah, don't go to the US, find a country with a safety net, it'll be more fun.
Of course there's also a certain amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that inflate our costs.
https://peterattiamd.com/saumsutaria/
And there are no long queues for healthcare where I live. Service is cheap and insurance is nationalized.
It literally does. The costs of producing drugs are mostly borne by the US market, allowing drug manufacturers to charge less elsewhere while still investing the billions of dollars necessary to develop the drugs.
In fact, there are European-HQ'd pharma companies that also make the lion's share of their profits in the US - so that's certainly not benefiting the US.
If your government wants to give even more profits to big pharma then go ahead, just don’t claim everyone else should be thankful.
They did not claim that.
>> it’s good to let people die because they’re poor
They didn't say that either.
What dishonest responses...
- Why doesn’t this happen in other fields? Why don’t we pay 10x more for iPhones?
- When did the american public chose to engage in this magnanimous largesse?
More likely it’s a scam and regulatory capture
I think it's a mix of pharma lobbying and also altruism. Pharma lobbies Congress to do the altruistic thing, and many Congresspeople agree, because they believe in markets and understand incentives.
For example the prohibition on importing drugs from other countries, or the rules that prevent medicare from negotiating price for drugs
There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And greed is good, right?
> the problems are fixable
Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and even judicial capture by financial interests. Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only seems to get worse.
I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal companies take all the money.
Then these folks can contribute to the economy constructively, somewhere else instead of being a giant helksink of cost. A win-win for everyone
I tried to find a health care CEO to comment, but they're all busy hiding from assassins.
[1] https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
Thanks for making it clear I should treat your posts as a regurgitation of terminally online zoomer talking points from here on out.
And I lived in Connecticut too btw, but Canada was longer and more relevant since I visited a lot more of the US while living in canada.
Anybody ambitious would agree it's still far more optimal to work in a USA and build a career there first before moving to Asia as an expat to better negotiate terms. And even then, the supply of interesting jobs there is going be much less.
And Japan actually has more time off for people to enjoy the fruits of their labor too!
As far as moving goes, I wouldn’t be so sure. Plenty of people start off their career in their home country before moving to HK or Singapore or Tokyo, skipping the US entirely.
She's working in London right now and alot more happier, tbh having grown up there in HK most of my cohort have moved to US or Europe.
Tech as an expat is a bit of bubble, most of the "hard work" in building a career is achieved in the less competitive environment. Growing up there in those cities is another matter, the academic pressure and job market can be soul-crushing. If you don't get into a top university many large firms won't hire you. That's not to say similar things happen in USA, but it's relatively easier to get into Ivy League, and outside of Banking or Law most other careers are willing to give you a chance to prove yourself.
This is like saying you almost got murdered in El Salvador and that’s why you don’t go out alone in Nashville.
I’ve lived in both EU and US, and EU definitely has the better quality of life for the average person. I 100% agree.
However if you are at all an ambitious youngster with huge dreams, the EU is where dreams go to die lol. EU living is what i’d call “coasting in life”. It’s a safe, sheltered life, the government is very functional and “takes care” of you which i’m sure is comforting for many. It’s not for everyone though.
In other words, I would recommend the typical person moves to the EU if they have the opportunity. Their quality of life would improve and they would be happier. For anyone that’s very ambitious or very talented at something, your efforts will pay off 10x in the US, and you’ll have a better quality of life than your EU counterparts.
You would have to pay me a lot to live there, which explains the astronomical wages for tech workers.
And I disagree about your efforts paying off more in the US. In a couple areas like tech sure, but most people would be better off somewhere else.
These are factors common to all (e.g.) Google employees. But the folks cleaning the toilets aren't getting paid as much as the software engineers. So there must be a bit more to it than that. I'm not saying that the factors you listed aren't factors, but they aren't the whole story by any means.
Not sure if that’s true at all, i’ve never been to canada! So take those opinions with a huge grain of salt lol.
What’s my point? I guess that perceptions can be very different.
Anyway since you left canada, I hope you found someplace where you are happier. :-)
I lived in Connecticut for 6 months too for what it’s worth. Awful place.
Canada is much better, but has its problem. These days I live in Tokyo and love it.
The point is that Canadians understand the US far better than USians understand Canada.
maybe i should actually visit canada one day, see it with my own eyes.
I recently got laid off for the 2nd time in 4 years (probably better off than most, to be honest). I'm done with shooting for the moon. I am now strongly considering a "boring" job - the kind that keeps the basics of society running and has government contracts. I can bootstrap my own moonshots over the weekend (I'm probably going to make split keyboards with Rust firmware FWIW).
So, yeah totally, it can even change for an individual pretty drastically.
I’ll share what a quality life means to me. For context, I grew up middle class, my father was a city employee, and my mother was a stay at home mom for a number of years.
• large emergency fund (zero stress about paying mortgage or losing job).
• I don’t have to look at prices when buying groceries or eating out.
• Time and money for 1-2 vacations per year. At least 1 international. My spouse and I love to visit new places.
• I can work remotely outside the US for 4 weeks internationally per year. I typically stay with my dad’s side of the family (in europe) for 3 weeks each year, while working remotely. Great way to spend lots of family time and not burn vacation time.
• No stress about medical care or costs.
• Ability to start a family without money stress.
• Good work life balance, no more than 40yrs on average. Minimum 3 weeks vacation per year.
• Ability to retire earlier, to pursue hobbies, if i wish.
• Easy access (45 min or less) to quality outdoor recreation on the weekends. Things like hiking, kayaking, etc.
A lot of those are luxuries, but certainly feel like a quality life for me. Yes, I realize how lucky I am. MOST people in the US are not so fortunate. I’m just explaining what quality of life might mean to someone… It’s not about buying pointless junk for me.
I don't know about the EU, but in the UK I know their mortgages are usually fixed for only like 5 years. In the US they are typically 30 year fixed. That can cause a lot of instability when interest rates go up.
I cannot see how the US helps here positively unless you are don't mess up; I have got all you listen with very little effort and no risk (if it failed, I would live very much exactly the same) except maybe the family starting part as I never wanted kids. But the rest I have. I don't have a mortgage to care for either; I don't care for goods (like you), so I have a simple abode with a lot of (hiking and kayaking) land, which happens to cost next to nothing here.
PPP-adjusted disposable income per capita (meaning, after all the necessary expenses) is by far the highest in the world: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di...
Food spending as a portion of total expenditure is the lowest in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...
Out of pocket health care expenditure as a share of GDP per capita is fairly low in comparison with other wealthy nations. Of European nations, only Monaco, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France are lower (and not by much!).
Transportation spending is indeed higher in the US than most of the developed world, but it doesn't eat away much at the increased disposable income per capita -- proportionate to household income we're talking about a few thousand dollars higher, and most of that is a very recent development as costs went way up over the last few years.
Ah yeah, surely that doesn't get insanely screwed up by America's near top of the list inequality?
The average salary for 9 homeless people and 1 CEO is $100k! Americans are definitely better off than Europe!
As someone who was able to experience both perspectives (immigrated to the US and became a citizen) I cannot agree at all with this statement.
Before I transitioned into software, I had a very a fulfilling life being paid a mediocre salary as a graphic designer, supporting my family for years and investing plenty of time and money into my hobbies.
I don't know how to convince you of the very real experience I and many others here are having, and I don't really feel like it's a good use of my time. Feel free to keep holding onto your theories.
I’m glad your experience was good, but I don’t think that holds true for most people.
Imagine a household of two parents and one 17-year-old dependent. One parent works in this household and the 17-year-old has a part time job working 15 hours a week at $9/hr.
The parent who works has an income of $90,000. The 17-year-old makes ~$6,480 for working 48 weeks in the year. The other parent's income is $0. The median pre-tax personal income of this household is ~$6,480. Is this the right statistic to understand the wealth of this population?
Let's then add a household of one making $38k. Then another with one person making $22k and another making $110k. $0, $6.4k, $22k, $38k, $90k, $110k. So now our median personal income is $22k, but a median household income of $96.4k. Does the individual income really reflect the actual average purchasing power of the people in this community?
Going by the median personal income, you're including people who choose not to work or choose to only work few hours or a non-high-paying job potentially because they've got access to other forms of wealth. You're also including retirees who essentially just get by with a small pension or using their savings because they already own their home or live with family or whatever. Going by household income gives a much better understanding of wealth and purchasing power of inter-related people (even people not officially related).
> Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
I just came back from Chad. I've also spent time in Mozambique, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and South Africa. I'm pretty sure that the quality of life for those at median income is quite a bit worse in all of those places than in the US. So perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic to make a statement such as that, comparing the US to the rest of the world.
This thread is a bit reminiscent of the old days when the East German government used to claim - with a straight face - that the Berlin Wall was there in order to keep the westerners from overrunning the Workers' Paradise of the east.
Revealed preference shows that way, way, way, more people are trying to move into the US for economic reasons than are trying to leave.
That's why Bill G, Larry E, Jeff B, Mark Z, and Warren B have all left, because the US is a shithole (your word) and they can afford to go anywhere they want.
*Eritrea being the other...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalis...
My commentary as someone on the inside who has also been on the outside looking in:
> Incredibly expensive, low wages
Pick one. Wages trend higher where it’s expensive. Wages trend lower where it’s not.
There are also tough-to-see subsidies like prop 13 and rent control in CA (as an example).
Currently the US appears expensive from the outside due to a strong dollar.
From the inside, it’s more nuanced — specifically, the distribution of wealth across the capital class and the worker class is skewing much more towards the capital class than at any time in our lives, but is trending towards a common state if looking at a longer time scale.
> no safety net,
No European-style safety net.
Japan doesn’t have a safety net either. Is it “horrible”?
The US has a substantial safety net via charity. Most of the people seen in the news who need it (e.g., homeless folks) choose not to use it, since it comes with restrictions like not being on drugs.
> car and health insurance are mandatory,
Yay?
Fwiw, health insurance is federally subsidized for low income folks.
Car insurance is a good thing, imho.
> homelessness everywhere,
In many cities, yes. Outside of those… not really. If you don’t live or work in a city, this is only something you see on TV.
> gun violence is rampant,
None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my entire life have been a victim of gun violence. I know of three people who committed suicide with their own guns (which is counted in “gun violence numbers”), but I don’t think that’s what you’re referring to.
I realize that’s a class issue, and that there is more gun violence in the US than in Europe, but it’s just not part of the day-to-day reality for most people.
> and the government is a dictatorship disguised as a democracy
Objectively not true, at least for now.
The system of checks and balances baked into the US system is failing tragically at the moment, but we are not at the level of a dictatorship yet.
> No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn’t for high salaries in certain fields.
I don’t think that this is universally true.
I know plenty of immigrants who make their money, retire, and choose to stay in the US. Some people go back, but a lot stay, and with purpose.
No, I lived in Canada for 12 years, my family lived in the US for 6 years, and I regularly visited for work and pleasure. My first hand experience is that the US is a shithole.
> Pick one. Wages trend higher where it’s expensive. Wages trend lower where it’s not.
No. Slightly higher wages do not offset the incredible cost of living in cities. And likewise, if you live in a cheap area you still have to compete with everyone else for certain goods.
> Japan doesn’t have a safety net either. Is it “horrible”?
Japan does have a safety net.
> The US has a substantial safety net via charity
lol. Guess I'll die unless Jeff Bezos decides to give me money.
> Fwiw, health insurance is federally subsidized for low income folks.
It should be federally covered for everyone in the country.
> None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my entire life have been a victim of gun violence
Yes, that's statistics for you. I'm Brazilian but I haven't been murdered even though lots of people are murdered in Brazil.
> I know of three people who committed suicide with their own guns
This is gun violence.
> it’s just not part of the day-to-day reality for most people.
It literally is. A ton of people own guns for "protection", because what if the other person has a gun. There are areas of cities you avoid because they're dangerous. If you get stopped in your car by a cop, there's a non-zero chance you will get shot. Kids literally have active shooter drills in school. It literally is part of day-to-day reality for most people. You're just in it so you don't realize it.
> The system of checks and balances baked into the US system is failing tragically at the moment, but we are not at the level of a dictatorship yet.
Yes you are. You get a choice between two parties who are basically the same. 70% of the country's vote is thrown away in federal elections. A vote in Wyoming counts for 4x more than a vote in California. Counties are gerrymandered so badly your vote doesn't matter even in local elections. Voter suppression is table stakes. That's not a democracy.
> This is gun violence.
Huh? Do you count people who hang themselves as victims of "rope violence"? Are people who kill themselves by sucking on the vehicle's tailpipe victims of car accidents? People who jump off of buildings are counted as construction accidents?
In another comment he talks about car insurance and food costs as if those are even major expenditures?
For a European moving to the US the only actual difference is health insurance, and even then, at low income you probably end up paying about the same or slightly more as European taxes, at a higher income you come out significantly ahead.
I also don't know a single person in the entirety of Europe/UK who doesn't own a car outside of the megacities like London, Paris etc, so it seems like a daft comparison given that car insurance rates are fairly similar in UK and US.
I don't know where exactly you are located but it sounds like a delusional place. Can't name one first-world country where getting a car is seen as 'a burden' and not 'a massive improvement of one's life'
I'm curious roughly how old you are. I grew up in a fairly well off suburb of Seattle and am in my mid 30s. At some point around 2020 I realized that among my friends, parents/kids of friends, and coworkers there had been 8 or 9 incidents of newsworthy gun violence in my fairly close contacts. In a way I would consider myself as having grown up fairly sheltered and so it was a surprising realization.
Newsworthy used to avoid digression about mass shootings vs shootings, as you did about suicide. I think most were reported as mass shootings but I'm not certain now.
*posted from a new account while traveling, I'm not meaning to come off as a troll jumping in to focus on guns as a topic. It just stood out to me as I was reading.
50s.
Note that I grew up around guns, and most areas I have lived in while in the US are gun friendly.
In my family and peer group, gun safety was taught at a very young age, and it was taught strictly — guns weren’t to be treated like toys, don’t even appear to mishandle a gun (e.g., by flagging someone, even if obviously unloaded), and don’t wield a weapon unless you’re willing to pull the trigger and neutralize/kill them (n.b., avoiding the situation or running away is often the best option).
That said, I know of three people (not close to me, but in my wide circle of acquaintances) who have had their guns confiscated by LEOs, each time by a spurned spouse who alleged that they were in danger or the gun owner was a danger to themselves, and each time was a generous interpretation of the circumstances, imho.
> there had been 8 or 9 incidents of newsworthy gun violence in my fairly close contacts.
If you don’t mind me asking, was there a common theme to the incidents, or was it just random stuff?
> I'm not meaning to come off as a troll jumping in to focus on guns as a topic.
Quality comment. Not troll at all, imho.
For the incidents 3 were school/university shootings, 3 were in malls or similar public locations, and 1 was a house party. I don't know of any real common theme beyond gatherings of people. One I included in the earlier post was a domestic incident with several deaths and so it might not belong with the others.
I've noticed my 50-60 year old friends and their children in high school are more concerned about school shootings than I ever was. That may just be excessive concern due to increased news coverage, but I think there is also something about the availability of guns and teenage brains that is a real concern for them.
My personal experience has only been hearing gunshots nearby, although one incident involved a death. I don't think of myself as being in dangerous places but it has happened more than a few times. Guns and gun violence aren't something I think about much at all, but when I do it's surprising by how much it touches my life and my friend's lives.
All that said, one thing I do appreciate about this country is the variety of it. A friend who grew up sheep ranching told me they were allowed knives up to a certain length and guns at his school. Meanwhile mine would have had a lock down if students did the same thing.
So while expensive holds, the low wages does not.
> no safety net There are safety nets in the US, just not one singular one nor is it always easy to apply or get benefits.
> car and health insurance are mandatory What countries don't have mandatory car insurance? Which ones don't have mandatory health insurance?(Universal health care doesn't count, as that is mandatory and taken from taxes.) Further, you can eschew health insurance in the US. Many people do(for various reasons, cost being one of them), it is just not that wise of a move as healthcare here is very expensive.
> gun violence is rampant We have pockets of areas where violence, not just gun, is rampant. I think a fairer analysis shows that it is the intersection of poverty and also drugs but I can not speak fully to this topic.
>the government is a dictatorship disguised as a democracy. Is this talking about the current government(Joe Biden?), the future administration(Donald Trump) or the administrative government(deep state?)?
I would agree that our government is not functioning as well as it could, I am also not sure if I have seen any other governments do any better.
Japan: Due process with police holding suspects and trying to force confessions.
South Korea: Recent Martial Law issue
France: Numerous protests occurring
Great Britain: Prime Minister just told all farmers "If you don't like the changes we have implemented, you can leave." Protests and counter protests with violence on both sides but police seem more focused on arresting people for social media posts.
I can't think of any recent issues from the Scandinavian countries but that is more likely due to my lack of exposure to media than lack of issues.
Please let me know which countries you find to be great.
Yes, Japan has a problem with allowing police to hold suspects for 3 weeks with no outside contact. But the reality is that very few people are ever arrested, to the point that nobody is afraid of police.
The same can’t be said for the US, where black parents have to tell their kids to not trust cops.
In my experience Japan is pretty great, so that’s where I live.
Other places I consider top tier are Holland and Scandinavia. Western Europe and developed Asia is tier 2, some of Eastern Europe and Canada are tier 3, USA and most of South America are tier 4, and any other countries I wouldn’t live in.
After many years as a SWE without a college degree, I was able to buy a large 5 new 5 bedroom house within ~25 minutes of my employer in a beautiful city, I have a full time nanny for my children, a luxury car, padded retirement, and plenty of other money to buy what I want.
Where else can a smart, hardworking person achieve that who didn't come from generational wealth?
I'm not so unique either, I have some friends I've known who similarly didn't come from money and have been able to build up careers that support a wonderful lifestyle.
More importantly though, I have this lifestyle due to a job, one that is quite common (software engineer). I didn’t luck into some unique position or business opportunity.
And yes, software engineers stand to profit from moving to the US. There’s very few other jobs like it though.
When I was at a multinational corporation we had people from our EU and Asia offices fly out to the United States for a couple weeks at a time (their choice).
We'd go out to lunch every day and some of us would have them over for dinner at our houses to get to know them.
Many of them were young and had developed their idea of the US from Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. They'd show up thinking they were walking into a hellscape of a country because that's what they saw on Reddit.
It was a rite of passage for all of them to slowly realize that the US in person is different than the US according to Reddit or TikTok.
One example that came up frequently was minimum wage. Reddit talks about the federal minimum wage all the time as if Americans everywhere are making minimum wage. We'd have to explain that our state minimum wage was significantly higher than the federal minimum wage. We'd also explain that it's basically impossible to find a job paying that minimum wage right now because even the post office and local fast food places were hiring at higher wages.
The list went on and on. I remember several coworkers who went from thinking the US was a horrible country to asking us to sponsor their moves to the US.
> No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn’t for high salaries in certain fields.
That's a chronically online take, but it's completely wrong. Immigration demand to the United States is extremely high, even for jobs that don't pay high salaries.
And of course your multinational coworkers want to move there. They’d make a lot of money to insulate them from the awfulness. Not to mention a huge raise compared to working in their home country.
How long did you live in the US? And what part of Canada did you live in to be near the US?
Most of the Canadian border is sparsely populated on the US side. So I can't see how being in Canada would give you much of a feel for median/mean U.S. life.
And Canada is relevant because I visited the US multiple times per year for both work and pleasure and got to see what living in different cities would be like. And it was awful.
I would complement that it's completely wrong as long as you're unaware of the hidden health hazards the US poses (which are a consequence of low regulation). These won't affect your day to day life and thus are easily overseen, and are invisible - unless they start affecting you years down the line. Most people are uneducated in terms of en
Examples are the superfund sites in California, the high sugar added to most foods, etc.
Even if you live in the top 1% it's hard to escape these - if your company office is near a superfund site (eg Nvidia HQ) then good luck, your money won't help with that. Yeah you can buy organic foods but if you're going to a restaurant with friends you'll still have to deal with bad quality ingredients.
I'm often amazed how nad the internet it is too when I talk to friends in Silicon Valley.
Bottom line: your high earning salary can only get you so far to offset and insulate you from the health hazards living in a low regulation society impose
https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...
Nationalistic flamebait in particular is not welcome here (regardless of nation).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Having lived in the EU (Netherlands) and the US (California), I would say the inequality in the US is much worse. Especially in larger cities. To the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm living in a "developed" country.
The thing I tend to always fall back on is the last part of my comment. You don't want to be poor in the US; there is no bottom. Whereas if you're poor in Europe usually there's a minimum standard that you'll fall to.
For most people the relevant factor I think is what the QoL in their cohort is like. I say it's a bit of a wash, because basically, if we limit the discussion to EU and US, if you're well off the US is probably better, if you're poor Europe is probably better, if you're in the middle then there are trade offs.
If I had a passport for the US, I’d move yesterday.
I'm saying as someone from Asia having lived equal number of years in both US and EU.
How do you figure? US has SNAP, Medicaid, UI, TANF (for families with children), Section 8 housing, SSD, SSI, Childcare Assistance amongst other programs.
These aren’t much of course but are something.
Ahem... Have you seen the standards in the UK get diluted year after year post-Brexit?
There's more to the story than the listed examples.
Environmental standards dictate your risk of developing various diseases later in life so are a big difference in quality of life. E.g., if you drink tap water from UK vs other countries, with high PFAS levels, where it essentially comes from a spring in the mountains - that's a huge difference.
Another difference is job security which again has a huge impact. Consider France: If you get an unlimited contract at a company you're essentially set for life (unless the company goes busy, or you mess up in a very bad way). Compare that to the scare many US dev employees hat to ensure in spring 2023 when all the big tech companies were doing layoffs. Also, France had a much shorter work week.
So, no, quality of life doesn't even compare remotely between these countries. Only perhaps for the upper 3% it is similar - if you're an average tech dev, your life will be much much nicer in Paris than in a random SF/LA suburb.
I do think that if you're going to live in a Big City(tm) then the old world just does cities better. Then again I haven't visited SF, just NYC.
Job security isn't something I've ever cared about in my life. Starting from zero (no parental wealth), beyond about age 20-22 I've always had a minimum of six months savings, who cares, just find another job. It's business, you're not married. If you're an actual adult and you need a job continuously to get by you've fucked up somewhere.
It kind of just feels like a leverage decision, anyone middle class or above has a net worth in the x00k's, it's just about whether you have anything liquid vs locked up in home value etc.
If you have 0 in the bank then unless you're in North Korea or something you have bigger issues than "which country has better QoL" in my opinion, you need to work on yourself first.
Also, for most folks here its trivial to be independent and successful financially if alone, past decades have been good in ways mankind has not experienced ever before. Get 2 or more kids into the equation of life with everything that they bring and challenge goes up tremendously. But as said, there are rewards, and most of them can't be achieved in any other way (that is coming from somebody doing fair amount of extreme sports, mostly in mountains).
Also, these matters are not within margin of error. Quality of life is way more important than cashflow once one is not poor. Also in Europe extremely expensive matters like universities for kids or more intense healthcare are simply non-topic when it comes to finances, you simply need less money to have similar quality of life and peace of mind. You are always just 1 error, often not even yours, to have quality and quantity of your remaining life massively dependent on quality of the healthcare, or just bad luck with genetic lottery. If you feel invincible now, give it a decade or two and you will reconsider.
Its also really uneven. It contained in 2016 6 of the lowest GDP per captia regions of the entire EU.
However we should of course treat GDP as a suspect measure of living standards. Whilst those people living in those areas will tend to have curtail life chances, they did at the time have access to _good_ healthcare and housing (in certain circumstances)
An underrated benefit of the markedly higher standard of living in the US is that people can choose to trade standard of living for quality of life if they wish. American culture seems to preference maxing standard of living but that is optional, and there are plenty of people that make other choices.
The US is an incredible place to live if you have valuable skills, and a below average place to live if you don't.
Look at what's happening in France for proof that this is just not sustainable. The US has a massive advantage tough,their currency is the global currency accepted and needed everywhere that is backed by the US army. Much less so the Euro.
The cost of all these social programs has to come from somewhere and currently the majority of these costs are shouldered by the middle class that is being squeezed to the max and speaking as someone from the middle class, I can assure you that having a couple of extra weeks of holiday and more job safety (if you are into that sort of thing) is not worth 55% to 65% of my gross income.
Even universal healthcare is crumbling now.
At some point the EU will need to get it's productivity up and become competitive once again or all this quality of life will have to go as it won't be financially possible to continue on this path.
I feel like this is only the case for a very narrow demographic - the young, bicycle-riding, sex-having mid-20s college grad still trying to figure out their calling in life while living frugally without a care.
It really sucks being 40 and still earning like 57k EUR or whatever.
Is this a joke?
60k in France means you earn more than 92% of the population.
60k in Italy means you earn more than 96% of the population.
60k in Germany means you earn more than 80% of the population.
There is no rule that life should only suck for a minority of people and that most people are happy. It may well be that the 90% of people earning <60k EUR live generally miserable lives, and for the top 10%, "the EU is number one" and they post about it on Hacker News.
Why? If that's enough money for the quality of life you want for the cost of living you have, what does the number matter?
I'd imagine that Europe is at or near the peak in terms of its quality of life.
At least some of the European lifestyle has been due to peace on the Continent. Up until now peace in Europe has been funded by US taxpayers. The situation in Georgia and in Ukraine is what you get when European affairs are left to Europeans. Without the US providing military aid to Ukraine, Ukraine would have fallen and you'd have Putin banging on your back door.
Additionally, the EU's inability to supply Ukraine with basic military equipment such as artillery shells is indicative of how Europe is devoid of industrial capacity and couldn't rally in its own defense if it had to.
What are you smoking?
>Additionally, the EU's inability to supply Ukraine with basic military equipment such as artillery shells is indicative of how Europe is devoid of industrial capacity and couldn't rally in its own defense if it had to.
https://www.president.pl/storage/image/core_files/2024/11/12...
I was talking basic equipment like: 155mm artillery shells. In that case, unfortunately, the facts are not on your side.
The majority of 155mm shells that are sent to Ukraine come from the US. The US has increased production of 155mm shells 6x this year alone. The same is true for body armor and small arms. Europe cannot ramp production in almost any category.
Then there's this. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1364467/ukraine-weapon-d...
PPP suffers from the same problem that "basket of goods" CPI suffers from in that it doesn't account for differences in quality:
- of course a car costs more today than it did in 1980, it's a far better car
- of course a loaf of bread costs more in California than it does in India - I have certain guarantees about the pesticide levels in the wheat, the accuracy of the labeling, and my ability to seek damages from the legal system in case I chip my tooth on a stone, that I don't have in India
At best, PPP tells you something about the differences in cost of labor. But labor isn't everything you buy.
A maxed out iPhone costs RMB 13999 in China, which is about USD 1925. The same iPhone costs USD 1599 in the US. In Brazil it costs the equivalent of USD 2565. PPP is still very much relevant.
PPP is useless misleading nonsense.
So PPP usually is a boost to the poorer countries. The post you're responding to claims that this is less and less relevant because the things they want to buy are global in nature. The fact that these things cost more actually reinforces that point.
Those 600 million cannot afford to buy real estate even at the crashed price.
The going rate for a 2bhk in a tier 2/3 is still $100-300k, which is still unaffordable given that median urban household income is $6k and median rural household income is $3k.
And this is the crux of the problem in China - all this "overproduction" isn't necessarily due to some grand strategy, it's due to a lack of consumers because salaries are too low.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not a communist. But it’s clear to me, especially when you look at how the middle class is struggling worldwide, that capitalism in its current form isn’t sustainable.
What we need is some kind of “Capitalism 2.0” or “Capitalism++”.
It makes no sense that someone with 300 billion dollars pays less (or even nothing) than a person that makes 100k per year. And this happens on ALL countries.
EDIT for those downvoting: just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM and then tell me why I am wrong.
You did especially well if you had assets bought with borrowed money since your gains were leveraged and your loan principal inflated away.
They are models.
And even on an individual level, PPP struggles with accuracy, because things are only ever roughly equivalent. There's a reason why so many individual people are trying to move from China and India to the US and EU, despite all the personal financial disadvantages of doing so.
But the point stands that market-exchange GDP matters more when it comes to comparing the relative strength of countries, rather than individuals, since it endows the government with greater purchasing strength. An era of trade wars might test this theory, but the ramifications of absolute isolationism would be far more complex than that.
It's important to point that if you were moving into Russia as an expat, you've already avoided much of the opportunity costs of building your career there first and instead going in having "made it" in another country.
If you are starting out in China or Russia, it's much harder relatively to climb to a similar position within those countries than in USA. Alot of expats might like how much their money goes in China with good CoL, but I'd be suprised if they were to send their children through the conventional route of the Gaokao and ultracompetitive Chinaese University Admissions and labour market. Getting into the Ivy or Berekely or a State Flagship and then FAANG is cakewalk in contrast.
?
That's demonstrably false cause the global super-powers (i.e. the US, Russia and China, maybe India, too) mostly depend on their internal markets only when it comes to their war industry and to paying their soldiers. When it comes to that PPP is a lot closer to the truth on the ground.
By "what a country can accomplish on the world stage", I meant a more holistic view of what a country can do, such as investing, R&D, exploration, etc. (and also military).
This is what people seem to misunderstand about PPP. PPP applies for daily/internal market goods. The cost of milk, eggs, clothing, etc. Which is definitely important. On a more macro scale it also compares a VW Vento in Mexico with a VW Jetta in the US...two particularly different cars with ~6000usd gap in price.
In other words, it compares basic goods for living; fudges some basic "luxury" goods, and pretends that that's representative of lifestyles. It ignores (in Mexico, for example) the fact that consumer electronics are ~20-40% more expensive (if available at all), access to truly equivalent basic luxuries (a VW Jetta for a VW Jetta) is still slightly more expensive, access to equivalent security/infrastructure/business guarantees nigh impossible to receive, and just the vast gulf of wealth inequality that exists, etc.
PPP GDP is useful to compare, particularly politically because if the cost of goods in a country is lower people are more likely to be healthy / comfortable with less income. I think it is a little dubious when you use PPP to compare th3e size of two economies because 1) you are taking two approximate measurements and multiplying them 2) countries with lower GDP / person typically have higher relative purchasing power.
In "rich country" (high GDP /person) you can charge a lot for a cup of coffee. In "poorer country" you are likely to charge less. Therefore you can say that person in the poorer country is not as badly off as the absolute numbers suggest. However, if "poorer country" got to the same GDP / person purchasing parity might end up being almost the same. Or, countries with lots of poor regions will have a better PPP, but the cost of living in the places where people have high income may have similar costs.
And in general the most valuable purchasing power differences don't happen for the most valuable and traded goods. An equivalent airplane is going to cost as much in India as the USA, on average. At some point the absolute number is also important.
I like energy production and consumption a lot more, modern economies pretty much come down to using energy to either transfer or modify goods, services or data.
Of course the per-capita numbers favour the US still. But by absolute figures, the crown goes to Asia. And per capita the Europeans can realistically be said to be behind China for policy making purposes, the trends are clear.
which is all well and good, except when you have increases in efficiencies in energy consumption, which would show up as a drop.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
So yeah, we are getting poorer by the day and on the brink of a major economic crisis. Just look at what is happening in Germany.
European ICE vehicles are losing out in China because people there don't want to buy any more gas vehicles, at least most people are getting there. VWAG is losing marketshare in every segment that I see. It's not green power that is killing them, it's not many good cheap vehicles that are killing them - gas or EV.
Gas prices in europe are no joke, and considering we are basically in a hybrid war with one of the biggest oil producers for europe, getting rid of energy dependence would be great for europe, and having cheap EV's would be key to that.
American car companies have gotten addicted to selling huge more expensive cars as a way to keep profits up.
Currently this also simulatenously gives those contries more money, so they can be even bigger pain in the ass in the future.
The sooner this flow can stop, the better.
PPP is cope.
Russia literally talks about taking over the countries around them, bites off pieces and then subverts the countries that are left. That was all before the first piece of Ukraine was taken, Crimea.
NK - goal to destroy SK, has a big army and nukes. Worth trying to stop them.
China - Chains says the mere existence of Taiwan is worth destroying them. Also taking over the south china sea on the stupid dashed line that says they own the ocean down there. Dictatorships can't stand a functional democracy right next door.
India - if they don't plan to destroy the countries around them and take them over, then good on them. The US has been basically ignoring the fact that India is on a slow road to make their Muslim and other non-hindi citizens fail in every way in their society.
India said FU to the world and has been happy buying a lot of Russian oil that's under embargo. No one attacked them. The world isn't so simple as "western countries destroy all large growing competitors".
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.
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.
GDP PPP is meaningless for both geopolitical power and what it means for the average citizen.
The average citizen in EU is much better than the one in China/India despite what the PPP numbers suggest as GDP per captaincy matters more.
China and Russia resort to bartering due to US sanctions because GDP matters, and not GDP PPP [1].
PPP should be used to compare only similar countries like USA/Canada/UK or those in EU. Or countries in SEA.
[1] https://www.intellinews.com/china-russia-to-reintroduce-bart...
I mean, the PPP numbers say the average citizen in the EU is way better off thant he average in India or China, so eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
Rent was also super cheap.
On the other hand iPhones were pretty expensive. Enchiladas were super expensive too.
These aggregated stats have to guess what you’ll buy and base their estimate off of that. Your actual financial situation will be very dependent on what you need to buy.
The history books say Western countries abandoned conquest many decades ago. The leaders who initiated colonialism are long dead. Nowadays all we have are handwavey analogies to colonialism when someone wants to be provocative.
Countries aren't people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXz0kbMKPu0
They make a point that eventually the other countries' economies would shrink and won't be able to afford those benefits, but also the US doesn't have those benefits even now.
Anyone can elucidate me?
I'm curious why you care that some people have more money than you do? If you want mo' moolah:
1. upgrade your job skills
2. minimize spending (like get a roommate, eschew restaurant food, buy a used car)
3. invest the money you save
If you really want to make big money:
1. start your own business
What I'm asking is more, what conclusion should I take from the article?
Consider, on the other hand, the software industry. Essentially zero regulation. Yet the software, very high quality software, tends to be free!!!
Why is it that the most regulated, subsidized, and interfered with industries are the most expensive, while the least regulated, unsubsidized, free market industries are the most productive with the lowest prices?
I didn't blame the free market, we talked about inequality nobody mentioned free market. That inequality is partially fueled by the unfree regulatory capture, things would be more equal if some regulations were removed.
Wow, you sure misunderstand me. Free markets result in the greater good. Socialism does not. Hence, I prefer free markets.
This is why I find the article confusing. At first, it paints a picture of the US as incredibly productive, which should mean that the average citizen's quality of life, and maybe even up to the 99th percentile, would be better than in other developed countries. But then it claims that the average quality of life in the US is actually worse (as in struggling workers and high cost of living).
So, I’m left wondering... Why do we care so much about the country’s productivity if it doesn’t improve the average person’s life? In fact, if it’s making things worse for the majority, what’s the point?
The only way I can make sense of this is by looking at the distribution of gains. The graph that would explain this would have extreme outliers at the very top, where all the productivity gains are concentrated. This isn’t just inequality in the typical sense of some people having more than others. It’s an extreme form of inequality where almost all the benefits go to the tail end, leaving the majority worse off despite the country’s overall productivity.
At least, that’s the only explanation that makes sense to me. But at the same time, I don't just believe this, that's why I'm failing to reconcile the contradiction in the article. What's the conclusion you take from the article?
P.S.: I don’t mind other people being richer than me as long as it’s mutually beneficial, or if their wealth has no impact on me, good or bad. Most people likely feel the same. The problem arises when someone’s wealth comes at the expense of others. For example, Kings and Emperors in the past were resented because their wealth and power actively held others back and were built off the labor of the masses. On the other hand, I don’t mind someone like Bill Gates being wealthy because his success indirectly benefited me, I have a comfortable job in part because of the industry he helped create.
Oh, and check this out:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/developer-martin-selig...
That's gotta hurt!
But inequality is not a problem. People wanting to make it big come to the USA. That's why the USA has the biggest, most successful, companies that drive the US gdp forward.
Inequality is only a problem for people who are envious.
But I get your point, inequality isn't a problem in itself, but seeing your money go to rich people for no good reason does feel very bad even if the problem is the corruption and not the inequality.
> seeing your money go to rich people for no good reason
Anyone can buy stocks and get their share. For example, NVDA. If you'd bought some, you'd have made quite a lot of bank, and made your friends unhappy with you because of the money you unfairly made for no good reason.
I know many ordinary schlubs who became multimillionaires by simply buying NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, AAPL, etc.
Or when you have to pass by homeless tent cities in your downtown. Or when you are the victim of crime because the kid pulling a gun on you is envious because their family is poor and you're rich.
Extreme inequality brings social strife in multiple layers, if you're individualistic you might not care for it but for a society it fosters resentment and erosion of social cohesion.
But I don't think you care about that in general.
This is the conventional wisdom, but I can't think of a revolt in a free market country.
> But I don't think you care about that in general.
My reading of history is that free markets bring the greatest prosperity to the greatest number of people. No other economic system comes close.
Cutting other people down to size because you're envious just makes things worse. It produces economic stagnation, and the demand for "equity" is endless and endlessly makes things worse.
It doesn't end well.
Be careful what you wish for.
Keep in mind that the most prosperous companies are in America and bring that prosperity to Americans and are the envy of the world.
Lmao
This works well for companies because they can get higher margins. This works well for the people with money but other people are being left out. And with increasing inequality the number of people left out goes up.
Basically we are creating a world designed for the top x percent of people. And they are creating laws that favor themselves.
The big money is targeting where the customers are - the middle class. That's why VW got so big. Why Ford and GM and Chrysler made so much money. Selling cars to the middle class. Tesla has also moved down market for the same reason.
How's Rolls Royce, Bentley, and Jaguar doing? Case closed.
Take a look at the size of government over time. Where do you think the money comes from to pay for that?
If you look at real incomes over time, they've been stagnant since the dawn of time; or at least as far back as we have kept track.
There was once wage growth because wages started from zero. It wasn't that many years ago that people didn't sell labor, only things. As we have transitioned into a labor economy, wages started to become a larger portion of one's income. To the point that nowadays more or less 100% of the average person's income is from wages.
So, with incomes and wages now being effectively equivalent, there is no room for wages to grow further. To do that now, incomes would also need to rise, and that has never happened.
Productivity has continued to rise since, but on the back of automation, not as a result of humans becoming even more productive laborers.
This isn't true for the US. The chart that purports to show this is misleading. Essentially, there are problems with the usual chart: the two lines are indexed to different inflation measures, and the wages line excludes certain highly compensated occupations which have been experiencing significant earnings growth (probably because these occupations are where the productivity growth is happening).
Edit: Actually, even more issues. https://x.com/AwayBerk/status/1483564925213683719
Nothing "crazy" about it.
The "unintended side effects" of government policies are nearly always the result of ignoring the LoS&D or pretending it doesn't exist.
Supply and demand is a framework you can use to write your hypothesis in. It's not a law that predicts things.
You ask why I care about income inequality? It's because I want more happiness in my community.
There are also cultural differences to what "happiness" even means.
Any study about happiness is likely to be bogus.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
I'm pretty sure that in my case that would be a fast way to lose a lot of money, but YYMV, I guess.
80% of people who start a business lose money on it. Hence, making a lot of money on a business is quite unusual, not the norm.
The US economy is much more dynamic than Europe's and the US government is actually more willing to intervene (and can afford it because of US dollar).
In Europe it is austerity and general less support for economy-boosting policies.
Edit:
Average government debt-to-GDP ratio in the EU was around 60% from 2000 to 2008. It is 88% now and worse in many major countries. No lie here...
This is a lie, take Sweden's debt for example it has been going down the past 20 years. Most of Europe doesn't see increasing debt, USA is an outlier.
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-debt-to-gdp#:...
Is this intentionally facetious? There is NO reason to go into debt? Should we just return to the gold standard then?
I don't think BTC is the solution (it's unbacked) but wtfhappenedin1971.com has some good reading material.
I take your point that not every economy is run by a government that owes 110% of GDP. But Japan and China are, and France and the UK are at 99%, so that doesn't seem to be the whole secret of America's success.
As other people also mention: The US' growth seems to be debt driven, which will also have to halt at some point.
However, it would not seem like it is US dynanisism that is the reason for the current success of the country - especially taken into account that it is a small subset (eg. the magnificent 7) and very high valuations that drive the current success.
All in all, my personal view is that there is significant risk in the US market currently - thus also high returns. But I do think that it is safer to harbour some money outside of the US.
Personally, I am happy to have US stocks in my portfolio, I am also happy not to live there.
It's also correspondingly easier to get another job. In Europe, making it hard to fire people means it becomes equivalently harder to get a job in the first place.
> For all its economic power, the US has the largest income inequality in the G7.
Had the job market been a zero-sum game like you propose, then the income inequality would not have been so dire in the US.
Europe "solved" inequality by effectively limiting the upper range. Meanwhile the lower tier is just as low (or lower) than in the US.
People would still rather emigrate to the poorest state of the USA than Bulgaria or Romania.
Reducing this to employment mobility displays a lack of knowledge of history.
BTW, all attempts at income equality have ended in miserable failure, some of them with millions of dead people.
Now, the less well of people cannot afford housing anymore and are priced out.
Ingerently this not because housing is expensive, but solely because of income inequality.
You can insist it is because of poverty. But making both groups 10 times as well off would make no difference. The less we'll off people would still struggle to access housing.
You can also say that poverty is a total consequence of income inequality.
Now come and tell me again how inequality makes the world a better place.
Edit: I take, as you have read the literature, that you perfectly know that the same is the case of capital and produce from that capital in general. And so you are perfectly enlightened now to understand that poverty is inequality.
Someone who earns $1000/month and someone who earns $10 million/month are not competing for the same housing. Their effect on each other is minimal compared to those with very similar incomes who are competing for the same housing.
The only exception to this would be if there isn't enough housing for everyone, but the outcome would be identical (someone not getting housing) regardless of the level of inequality.
The idea that poverty is inequality makes little sense. Poverty is lacking a basic standard of living. If everyone has everyone they could want and their neighbor discovers an antimatter reserve under them catapulting them to unheard of levels of wealth, nothing materially changes for everyone else.
Similarly if everyone has perfectly equal income and wealth and still doesn't have enough to eat, they're all in poverty, regardless of the lack of inequality.
You definitely would Understand that ownership also comes in the form of owning rentals, mortgages, and not just owner occupied housing. That ownership is stock and shares with increasing valuations where you require increasing yields - requirements that makes the produce of the companies more expensive to support these valuations - inflation without a basis for salary inflation (as that would make the incomes more equal, which you explicitly forbade).
If half the population (your naighbor in you analogy) amassed significant wealth, it most certainly would materially change your wealth and make you poor - their money would gravitate to equity, yours and your kids equity. Literally making your poor.
Arguing poverty is essentially a relative measure of wealth or somehow other's wealth, even unexploited or unused wealth, somehow makes everyone poor with the sudden knowledge that it exists?
I am interested in economics here, not philosophy.
* "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Thomas Piketty
* "The Spirit Level" - Wilkinson & Pickett
* "The Price of Inequality" - Joseph Stiglitz
However, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if none of these authors ring a bell.
But is seems like you are perfectly able to articulate the ideas - just not to internalize them. Yet.
Maybe read: "Free To Choose" - Milton Friedman ?
Even Friedman also agrees with the ideas that I propose: Friedman believes in a basic safety net that ensures that you have basic necessities.
The key as that your secured income is big enough that you can pay for a roof, food and clothes.
My point is that this alone puts a upper bound to the amount of inequality you can have.
That sounds like the "wealth is a fixed pie" theory, where for one person to have more, another must have less.
The proof that is false comes from the history of the US. In the 19th century, it was populated by poor immigrants with nothing more than a suitcase. The US turned into a global superpower. How do you explain that with the fixed pie theory?
Dare to elaborate?
And absolutely not. If anything, on the contrary, I say that equality is a way to make the pie bigger.
Your idea has been tried, literally tens of thousands of times. The pie got smaller.
Just in the US alone, 20,000 communes have been formed (they're not illegal). They all failed. Even the diehard communists can't stand living in a commune and sharing equally.
I never proposed any system to obtain equality, merely pointed out that equality as a quality in itself is worth striving for.
A lot of people would argue that the American-style capitalism way is the way to obtain equality and I would not oppose that
Another POV is that the services and software that does the design, marketing, logistics, testing, certification and etc of the plastic junk is more valuable than the plastic junk, and all that stuff is made in the US. It’s still labor, sometimes it’s even bespoke one off software labor which might as well be manufacturing, the thing that it is not is factories. I don’t know why factories above all else are glorified. There is lots of labor in services.
That's a thing of the past. Check the consumer electronics produced today in China. Mobile devices, EVs, infrastructure, newer products are simply incredible, and I'd argue ahead of western technology on many fronts. Cheap plastic stuff now gets produced in other less developed countries.
Do they produce quality goods now? Sure. But it's also still where most of your just barely above garbage quality goods come from.
China has mastered making high quality goods at scale.
It does not matter how they got there, the fact is they did, and there are some pretty staggering military implications that are not really being discussed.
I genuinely don’t know how I feel about this. I love parts of America. Half of my family lives there. But also, I have no inclination to move. Although I could make about 30% more, I have no idea how it would improve my life other than just more money in the bank. Unless I wanted to start a company, then yeah, probably bigger market and lax laws is advantageous… but other than that, it would be a huge downgrade from life perspective.
The difference between today and a half century ago is that today you either win first prize, or wind up dead. That stinks.
It stinks because companies that come in first are seldom worse at extracting value from customers than they are at providing value to customers, and therefore tend to be mediocrities.
And it stinks because such companies are seldom worse at extracting value from rank-and-file employees than they are at providing value to employees.
The world is better when there are societies that can afford to sacrifice a little competitiveness for a good quality of life. If that's over, it's a shame.
Increasing you investment efficiency with FTX. Reducing farmer idle time with Deere. Sharing your otherwise unused car with Uber. Revolutionising office productivity with technology, like those beer taps that WeWork had. Spending less time on your savings with Yotta. Not reading long emails with AI.
I wonder how high productivity actually turns out if you remove every scam that inflated GDP or earnings numbers.
As I said before, if you look at charts of public sentiment on the economy by political party, democratic leaning voters will see a slightly better economy when a democrat is in the oval office, but republican voters swing wildly from one extreme to the other completely matching election day, not even inauguration. They can complain about "the statistics aren't showing the truth" all they want but the data objectively shows that what they mean by "the economy isn't good" is "my team isn't in the oval office"
It's unclear how this is going to unwind. America can afford, apparently, to run their deficit hot, but not forever and without limit. So at some point they have to start cutting expenditure and paying that debt off. What happens then? Or will they somehow default on it? Or, will they manage to deflate it via growth. But it is a bit of a sword of Damocles hanging over the economy, like ZIRP over VC successes of the 2010s.
The crazy thing is just how much the debt increases in living memory. Under Clinton, it was as low as 60%, which is considered a really low level.
As evidence that the US Dollar plays a large enough role for this to be the case, half of the banks bailed out in the TARP program were foreign to the US (https://www.europeaninstitute.org/index.php/ei-blog/106-augu...) and trading is US Dollars.
I also think that the USD is currently under attack as the reserve currency and running these deficits is a way to protect its position.
We will see in a couple of years how things play out.
Yes.
The BRICs economic group has been trying to launch their own currency for a while now. This is one of the reasons for it. Trump has threatened to impose 100% tax on them and on anyone else who ever tries.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-threatens-100-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/south-afr...
It's only been Russia (and to a certain extent China).
India and Brazil have both vetoed any attempt at a "BRICS Currency".
I'm ambivalent about it. Having our own currency is good, even better if it's not backed by USD, best of all if it's backed by precious metals like gold. On the other hand, I hate Lula and everything he represents so much I actually want him to piss Trump off to the point he sanctions the entire Latin American continent until Lula and his fellow communist dictator friends drop to their knees and beg for mercy.
Correlation =/= Causation.
The Great Depression was caused by American overproduction and a lack of domestic buyers who could afford to purchase American goods (sound familiar?). This was back when America was still functionally a developing country.
So, leaving the international system helped the European economies greatly then. It makes sense some other countries are having the same idea now.
When the economy is backed by something real, credit generally keeps up with the broader economy. It can't expand beyond reserves of real resources. Now that the money is not backed by anything, credit can expand infinitely. Credit generates most of the inflation which is a direct and ever increasing tax on the poor. It has been going on for half a century and shows no sign of stopping. The best part is even the mere attempt to stop it will cause a meltdown since the economy is addicted to credit.
Brazil has gone through numerous currencies. They have all gone to zero due to hyperinflation. One of the top Brazil stories on HN is about the way the government conned the population into believing that this time it was going to be different. We are also about to launch our very own central bank digital currency.
Foreign entites tend to earn in foreign currency, although not always and which is why China for example recyles a lot of the US dollars they recieve back into US government bonds. However the whole thing opens foreign governments and entities up to the risk that the relative inflation rates will affect the currencies (which it does).
They don't have to cut expenditures at all. Since the Fed controls rates, they can manage the debt by adjusting interest rates. There's nothing preventing them from driving interest rates below 0% and being paid to accept money. And the Fed can buy T-Bonds at below market rates and slowly destroy excess money in the economy in a controlled fashion.
Something to keep in mind is that US government debt is integral to the economy. It's a stable way for entities hold US dollars as cash, and it's the only mechanism for them to hold large sums of US dollars in cash.
It's fine (and expected) for US government debt to continue to increase forever, it's just a number in a spreadsheet. The only real risk is the potential for a default. But even then, if you have $4 trillion dollars, what are you going to do with it instead of buying t-bonds? Exchange it for Euros and risk the impacts of currency fluctuation? And what will the buyers do with those dollars? At some point, someone is going to want to bank those dollars in savings, and that means buying t-bonds (directly, or indirectly), and the risk of default merely becomes a factor in an equation for the holder.
The way you get shafted with debt is inflation. Barely a few years ago bond yields were around 0. If you lent money to the government then, you're already very behind because of inflation - you're not getting any interest, and by the time you are repaid, the money is worth far less than before.
Furthermore, the Fed can't really let interest rates diverge too much from inflation, since the mismatch drives inflation further. That's why the rates are around 4% now, even as the economy is slowing. They have to be up to contain inflation.
So then, as the election was playing out, you could see bond yields fluctuating in line with inflation expectation. Whenever Trump said something that sounded inflationary, like tarrifs, bond yields jumped up. That's not the Fed doing it, that's lenders demanding more interest from the US govt.
Now I agree the US can get away with this more than other places. They aren't far off Italian levels now, and that would be considered teetering around crisis levels. But it's fantasy to conclude the US can keep magicking money every year with no consequence.
You lend someone money based on whether you think they can pay you back. People still buy US debt because the US is good with its promises.
It’s the same reason the US dollar is the reserve currency… the US govt knows how to keep it reasonably stable and has decades of success at it.
Does the US use this to their advantage? Sure. But it doesn’t matter… you just need to be better than the next guy. Just observe the 100 year history of many countries: their institutions 100 years ago are much different from today. No one likes uncertainty.
I think it's interesting to compare other countries. 120 years ago the UK was the most powerful empire in history. Now 36% of UK children live in poverty, and 43% of single parent families and families with three or more children live in poverty. Over 40% of UK families from Asia/Caribbean live in deep, persistent poverty.
Many in the US are really close to that, and describe it as a "poor economy". They may have an iPhone, but they can't afford it.
You can't have it both ways!
Somehow it is never raised that the USA is doing absolutely incredible amounts of deficit spending that Canada dares not match, not even under this relatively more inclined to deficit spend current government.
Never raised that maybe some of their good metrics stems from the incredible amounts of deficit spending that is verboten.
And the Germans destroyed their energy sector themselves.
I am.
Look at France, its electricity cost per KWh, and its carbon intensity per KWh generated. In recent years, all are much, much better than Germany's. (And their carbon intensity numbers have probably been consistently better since like the 1990s.)
It's almost as if making your economy that requires a lot of electricity dependent on electricity generation methods that require fuels supplied by potentially-hostile foreign countries is a bad, bad idea.
Economic integration has finally put the lid on the enourmous destruction of nationalism for the past 60 years.
The mistake which was made by (mostly) american and european economists was convincing everyone that applying shock therapy to the socialist economy and liberalising it in that way was the best way forward. This resulted in the rise of putin and the aversion of the russian goverment to the "west".
In my personal experience, the general sentiment of Germans has been shockingly anti fission-power. Fukushima stoked the fears that power that sentiment, and helped lead them to their current totally predictable economic plummet.
What happens when you shut down all your fission power plants, but don't have solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal power ready, and have no way of building enough storage to handle the intermittency of solar and wind? Well, you import petrochemicals from potentially-hostile foreign countries and burn them.
It's my understanding that even if one were to direct the entire world's energy storage production capacity solely to producing energy storage for the nation of Germany, it would be insufficient to produce enough energy storage to meet the needs of Germany's energy requirements, given any even vaguely-plausible buildout of "renewable" power generation facilities.
Germany doesn't have enough of the geology and geography required to have much "always on" "renewable" power, so it MUST primarily rely on intermittent sources... which means that they in order to make up the shortfalls, they need to have enough storage (which I understand to be currently impossible), reliable rampable power (like nuclear or petrochemical), or some combination of the two. There's just no real alternative.
Well, I guess there IS something of an alternative. Industry that requires reasonably-priced electricity can flee the country, reducing Germany's overall energy requirements. (Though, surely nowhere near enough to make much of a dent in the electricity costs.)
Today's global battery production capacity is something like 2.6 TWh/year.
Germany uses an average of 58 GW of electricity (averaged over a year). So this capacity would be enough to store 45 hours of their electricity use.
This would not, by itself, be enough to level Germany's demand. But using batteries alone would be foolish. They are not suited for long term storage. The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen to complement the batteries. In that case, this amount of batteries would be more than enough to get to 100% renewables for their grid. Germany has huge salt formations that can store hydrogen extremely cheaply. Electrolyser production would have had to have been stepped up, I will admit.
But 100% is overkill, since even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels -- nowhere close. Nor would any plausible nuclear buildout. Judging by how that went elsewhere in Europe it would have been an utter fiasco. The alternative to compare against would have been a continued buildout of renewables at a higher rate. Fossil fuels would still have been used, but at a lower rate, and the shock from Russia would have been proportionally less.
This is exactly what I said. There's not enough industrial-grade energy storage capacity in the world to even out the intermittency of "renewable" energy. You currently must supplement it with "always on" power generation.
> The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen...
It's my understanding that roughly zero of the industrial-scale hydrogen production operations use electrolysis. They process _natural gas_, and _coal_ to get hydrogen. From <https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...>:
> Today, 95% of the hydrogen produced in the United States is made by natural gas reforming in large central plants.
While it is true that we can work with hydrogen and can burn it for power, hydrogen will not save us. It's notoriously difficult to contain, meaning that it leaks out of containers and piping at the drop of a hat. It is the second least dense known substance in the universe, meaning that its energy density per cubic meter is dreadfully low. It's also energy-intensive to produce and store. The way all industrial-scale hydrogen production works means that the process to produce hydrogen produces more CO2 than if we just burned the petrochemicals used to feed the process. [0][1]
The energy consumption of electrolysis doesn't matter at all if we have more electricity available than we know what to do with... but that's very definitely not the world we live in right now.
> ...even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels...
Right. The thing to do is to build more fission plants and "renewable" generators in tandem. Fission plants are ultimately a stopgap until we have enough storage and solar/wind/hydro/etc. to meet our current and future energy demands. But, like, even if we start honestly and eagerly working on this in earnest... today, we're absolutely not going to get there globally within our lifetimes. We're sure as hell never going to get there if we shut down existing fission plants and backfill by burning coal and natural gas.
[0] Search this <https://www.aiche-cep.com/cepmagazine/march_2021/MobilePaged...> for the phrase "Natural gas is currently the main feedstock for hydrogen processes, accounting for 75% of annual global production", and read the next couple of paragraphs.
[1] And search this <https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00416-0> for the phrase "More than 95% of global hydrogen production is currently based on fossil gas and coal with no carbon abatement."
The fact that the politicians responsible for this are now in a way or another on the payroll of Russia tells me that this was the plan all along.
- Easy to do business - Great economy, high salaries, and funding - English native speaker, so you can speak with everyone and everyone can speak with you
The EU is in a deep hole, with socialism and green communism next.
I’m mostly annoyed by the recent “Canada should just become an American state” talks, otherwise I would ignore such takes. Apologies for that.
Canada is a really interesting take that I ctrl-f'd hoping I'd find a discussion on. It was doing a great job keeping pace with the US but seems to have really stagnated since the last 8 years or so.
We could try to push for innovation, but brain drain is real, because if you want money, it's really not that hard to find a job across the border especially if you're talented. And 10x market down there, so what's the point.
Pretty much. This is the mainstream institutionalist view which won AJR a Nobel Prize.
This is also the reason why China began the Guiding Case Project with Stanford Law before it got shut down due to Xi 2's crackdown.
A steelman of this argument is the USA has too much debt and can't keep issuing this much. Maybe true. But the world holds that debt and it's denominated in USD. Also, just the simple wealth of US households grows a lot faster than the debt so its still pretty clear that if the US wanted to pay all its debts it easily could. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q) We could be heading for inflation like in the late 70's early 80's. Not good but you don't have to doomsday prep.
A debt dispute could be resolved in less than 4 months or dragged for close to a decade depending on which EU state you have a business.
Same goes for fiscal law. Some countries have had pretty much the same rates and taxation arrangements for decades. Some countries change their fiscal load on businesses as much as twice in one year. Both cases are technically 'the EU'.
Biggest barriers to business in the EU is risk averse Investors and Banking sector, lack of significant VC funding players, and Government spending strangled by Austerity policies.
The US spends a lot of money to make even more money.
I disagree, for the reason mentioned below.
> Biggest barriers to business in the EU is risk averse Investors and Banking sector, lack of significant VC funding players, and Government spending strangled by Austerity policies.
Some of it is cultural I'm sure, but when your reward is capped it's logical to limit risk. Your list of issues are indicators of a risk-averse mindset.
Regarding the comment above: If most of the return from your risky venture is going to be taken from you by the government, why take the risk?
> The US spends a lot of money to make even more money.
Yep. It's like the stock market vs. bonds. The ride is bumpy but more lucrative over the long run.
Again, not true. High taxation is mostly (unfairly so) on payroll salaries not profits or capital gains.
Most investors are conservative, risk averse, and remain vastly concentrated on Real Estate, which yields very high profits on an inflated market.
Most businesses get very poor credit conditions from the Banking Sector and most Business are SMEs focusing mostly on traditional B2B B2C services with low margins.
Do Americans consider Europeans their rivals? Occasional competitors sure, but rivals?
you'll always be the tallest of them all
I always find these sorts of statements strange because most software is not intended to be software but rather something else. For example, Adobe's suite should be classified under 'art supplies' or 'video production'. While true that it's software, in my mind, it's like classifying a car builder as a metal fabricator.
The truth is software and computers are pervasive today. There's rarely any software (other than development tools) that are truly aimed at computers themselves. Almost all software today is used for other industries and ought to be classified under that.
Under this taxonomy, I think things would seem much more diverse.
Will someone who has shopped at Blick for 20 years be able to develop a Photoshop plugin? It would be a stretch.
> Mention of GDP with no other metrics
> No mention of inflation
> No mention of QE
> No mention of interest rates
This is propaganda. When your central banks control the world's reserve currency it's pretty easy to make sure that the line goes up every year. The British Empire didn't have their wealth because of their superior system, they got it from imperialism.
Before you downvote please just reflect on what I'm saying a little bit. Do the changes you see on the ground reflect this narrative of economic growth? I see a little bit locally, mostly from the CHIPS act and infrastructure acts, but it doesn't correlate with an improvement in QOL and certainly infrastructure projects are not unique to American capitalism.
People interested in equality of outcome and a level playing field have to compete on cost. There's a social stigma against sticking out and achieving more, lest you become unequal, and the governments are well aware of that.
Meanwhile, innovation literally desires to reward disproportionately he who comes up with the new product. The entire purpose of the American economic system is to produce inequality.
This, combined with America's relative freedom from prejudice, is an unstoppable juggernaut. It is absolutely insane how easy it is in the United States to be handed money with limited liability to go and do whatever you want with it. This is a true blessing, and we see it not just in venture capital, but in the plethora of small businesses, as well as the plethora of credit (for better or worse).
Yes, there are problems, but I think history will show that this model is ultimately more sustainable. While true that America's productivity growth has only really taken off over the last century or so, even before then, it represented a formidable economic player.
I was with you until then. America was build on prejudice and inequality as much as any other country has been and suffers from it today. That translates to how the last half of that paragraph doesn't apply to a significant amount of American's who struggle to access the resources they need to survive let alone innovate and thrive..
Capital is available for people here without reference to social standing.
Is it perfect? Of course not. I literally said that.
However, if you want capital and aren't whatever platonic ideal your country has decided you ought to be to access that, America is literally your best bet.
> That translates to how the last half of that paragraph doesn't apply to a significant amount of American's who struggle to access the resources they need to survive let alone innovate and thrive..
I'm not going to claim every american is able to thrive, because obviously that's not the case. But even the poor American is able to access credit, which is what my entire post was about. You are changing the goal posts a lot.
Correct.
In most of the non-immigrant parts of the world there is discrimination that pales in comparison to what is supposed to be there in America. Most native born Americans have no clue how good they have it, despite things being as bad as it is.
>Capital is available for people here without reference to social standing.
Social standing relative to color of skin sure, but not economic class.
You are coming from a place of economic privilege and are ignoring how many suffer to access things like capital, housing, healthcare and other needs based on their economic starting point.
The American view you can raise yourself from lower to middle class with hard work and effort is less true today than ever.
With that said, there's also the danger of the US following on Britain's steps from the 1980s up until the 2000s, i.e. to rely on this shale/oil bonanza and not care about (internal) structural reforms that are in dire need of being enacted. At some point the shale money will not be there anymore (the shale gas will have run out, the world's car-fleet turns to electric en masse etc), and if the Americans don't carry out the necessary reforms sooner rather than later then that future "no more shale-gas money" moment will come at a very, very bad time for them. I said it's similar to Britain's situation because things started going downhill there as soon as the North Sea oil&gas money started thinning out.
Do you have the stats that back that up?
https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/economic-and-national-s...
>Eliminating [fracking]... a ripple effect of severe consequences to the Nation's economy, environment, and geopolitical standing.
Making energy cheaper and the dollar stronger helps all businesses which depend on energy or imports, particularly manufacturing, and US manufacturing output currently exceeds the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. And all over the thread you'll find people arguing over nominal GDP versus PPP, but what's not in doubt is that the balance of nominal GDP versus PPP is related to the strength of the dollar. Imports are vital to US industry — we thrive on buying less processed inputs from cheaper countries and producing high-value outputs. All of this is affected by the US oil and gas industry.
Renewables are actually making it worse. We now have the "problem" that renewables cause spikes and saturation of the grid, and instead of causing low prices, the energy companies penalizes their customers. Claims it's due to renewables driving up grid maintenance costs because it was not built to handle the amount.
After all, energy produced _must_ be used or it will inevitably cause damage somewhere. For instance, you can't leave solar panels in the sun while they are not connected. If you don't use the energy, it will be turned into heat.
It's getting to the point where you actually are penalized for having rooftop solar. Most solar installations in the EU doesn't have a home battery, so either you have to give back surplus energy (electricity providers in some countries will actually charge you for this), or you can disconnect your solar if you overproduce but that will slowly damage your installation. Even if you don't plan to give back any energy, you still have to notify your provider that you have rooftop solar, if you don't it's a breach of contract, and if you do, they will charge you an extra maintenance cost.
It's funny because the government are pushing rooftop solar, but the energy providers are quietly telling their customers to fuck off with it.
But still even though the grid is absolutely full of cheap energy, and you should in theory pay very little, you still have to pay double or triple what those in the USA would ever pay.
Renewables are great, but also a shitshow because while we're building solar and wind installations, we're not building nearly enough grid storage.
Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par with EU, and China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.
There’s no natural law that says technical innovation must occur in NA, but due to contingent historical conditions, it is occurring here. Thus, the gains are being realized in the US stock market b/c it’s the one capitalizing the winners.
this is contradictory. profits are added value. if value is added globally, there are extra profits (likely as cost savings by other industries adopting tech)
Of course there are many successful tech co’s outside the US but (and I haven’t looked) I imagine the US tech stocks must overshadow every other countries tech sector.
US businesses more likely to work with US suppliers, US customers more likely to buy from US businesses, then those dominant domestic positions can be used to expand globally far easier than say a Spanish firm can expand into the US.
Staying out of whether or not the concentration is a problem at the national/international level, is there any realistic alternative short of massive protectionism a la China to force home-grown tech companies in other parts of the world?
America is NOT the largest market the EU is MUCH BIGGER. And it is not "America" that commercialises technology, but a small portion of California called The Valley.
https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-econ...
Connecticut also lacks a big city with a big airport.
Of course they are also investing in their lithography equipment, but still, it's an insanely complex set of tools and know-how required that's backed by countless patents and well kept secrets.
If China played nice with America.. there's no problem.
Not at all obvious to me. Is there any particular measurable thing you're referring to, or is this just your personal feeling?
Look all around you and tech is everywhere, from apps to hail cabs to get groceries. Our lives are now so fully immersed and our decisions dictated by tech companies its fucking insane. That is a lot of power.
I don't really understand what you mean. While their reach is global, it's largely American companies that are creating the tech value, no?
China was wise to this trick already, which is why they've shielded themselves from the very beginning. Most countries haven't learned the lesson yet, but slowly the EU is waking up as well and pushing back.
The point was that exporting low-margin high-labor goods and importing high-margin low-labor goods with addictive properties and possibly even negative value is a bad deal for your economy. Especially if the latter could be trivially provided domestically, but isn't due to existing network effects, or shouldn't exist at all (in the case of addictive substances).
You're arguing against the import of very low margin labor-intensive physical goods. How did you get there? I have no idea.
No. I am arguing against the import of low margin labor-intensive physical using forced labor and resulting in actual harms
1. Actually harmful products being let in ([1, 2])
2. Decimation of local labor through unfair practices [3]
3. Actual slavery (forced labor) [4]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/temu-children-clothes-contai...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/08/14/s...
[3] https://itif.org/publications/2022/11/21/how-to-mitigate-the...
[4] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicat...
But, uusshh, don't disturb the free market. That is until you start making high tech and quality vehicles and then we need to invent new words for such a free market.
Besides, you think India is doing great? China - now boasting an economy more than twice that of India's - absolutely lapped them despite India having a head-start in the 1950s. So if I was to respond to your bad-faith argument, that response would be that India should've adopted the Chinese model, not go back to "being a cluster of low-tech poor third-world villages". But all this is only weakly related to the point I was making with many other factors at play, so I don't even want to put that forward as a rebuke. We're completely off the rails here.
India has more ethnic, cultural and societal diversity within itself than the entirety of Europe, full with as much sectionalism and conflicts as one can imagine. It has only managed to remain a single nation with a lot, a LOT of compromises. Study deeper into the dynamics and you'll find the notion of "why don't they just emulate China?" to be as ridiculous as it gets.
P.S. I'm sorry for that unnecessary last sentence in my previous comment that (understandably) gave you the image that I'm being bad-faith or abrasive.
The companies it empowers or Microsoft's (global at the end of the day) shareholders?
Disagree. It's not just the nature of the technology itself but the whole ecosystem -- including VC and education -- in Sillicon Valley that develops cutting edge computer tech, plus generally looser business regulation in the US and a culture of greater optimism nationally, especially relative to EU.
Certainly having a unified market (not just in regulation, government, and currency but also linguistically) has helped too especially given the network/winner-take-all effects of tech you mention. Yes the nature of technology is part of it. But it's not everything. It's a whole gestalt.
I mean, consider where we are right now, who set it up, who hangs out there, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
For all the workers are living paycheck to paycheck, they are sitting on a gigantic monetizable pile of money.
Consider this: the most popular languages in YouTube videos are English and Spanish. And did you ever notice how most videos, when they talk about units, talk about Dollars, Miles, Inches, Pounds and Degrees Fahrenheit? That is why...
To be a wealthy YouTuber seems to mean catering to people in North America (the US specifically).
Part of the causality is the other way around: The largest language communities attract the most monetization. Europe being compartmented into 24+ languages is one reason that it’s harder to monetize.
Most of the English speaking world runs partly or fully on Metric.
...and there are many Australian YouTubers who talk about prices in US Dollars.
Once you notice this, it is hard to ignore the per capita disposable income argument. The disparity is wild when you run the numbers.
As for the currency unit, everyone knows what a USD is worth, much less than AUD or CAD or GBP or whatever. The reasons to use USD are the same as for language choice.
I am amenable to your second talking point. I still think my perspective is a useful model to consider. Not "right" in any absolute sense.
You can have 10000 dollars of monthly disposable income and be well above the global average. You can have 9999 dollar rent with only a single dollar left. A single basic peanut butter and jelly sandwich could cost 100 dollars. Your disposable income is still massively above the average. Your discretionary income would be very low, though.
The actual effect of this is far less than you think. While it's true there's some amount of "exporting" of emissions from rich countries to china/india, the effect is small. Consumption based emissions (ie. accounting for imports) for US is only 11% higher than territorial emissions. Meanwhile the difference for China is also 11% (in the opposite direction, of course).
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
US GDP is misleading in the sense that it increasingly includes a large portion of economic activity that isn't actually producing tangible wealth.
An analogy would be that if you remove employment activity from my household finances then our economic picture is bleak.
What's the USA's comparative advantage? Nukes and dollars. Demand for dollars and rent seeking via the post WWII global financial system. But G7 is no longer the only game in town. They have become the consumers while the rest of the world has become the producers.
Moreover, the leadership in China is fully aware of the macroeconomic situation and USA leadership doesn’t even appear to know how tariffs work.
The US is the global engine of the world because it has accepted to be very negative on NIIP. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...) China or the BRICS or Russia do not offer an alternative and not because of lack of technical capabilities; they just don't want to do it.
China can replace the US dollar "hegemony" in a few years. They keyword is can because they don't want to do it.
The US exports almost as much as China: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/exports/country...
India has 19 nuclear reactors it is planning to complete by 2030. 7 under construction now to be completed by 2026.
Most of the rest are in China so the statement I was responding to is doubly meaningless.
Google should be reclassified under the equivalent of Dewey Decimal system publishers and magazine printers.
Netflix is a movie producer.
Adobe is an art supplies producer
Few companies today: apple, microsoft, etc qualify as tech.
This argument could be made for many industries. E.g. Boeing and Airbus together control almost 100% of the global passenger jet market. "Passenger jet value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetized in the US and EU stock market."
If someone has the exact quote, I'd welcome it...
Anyway, the idea stuck with me. Anyone who wants to reject the point will have an easy time as it's such a broad claim, but I think it's worthy of reflecting on, and perilous to ignore.
There's a lot of ink splattered about technology these days, of course, but it's still rare enough that the larger picture of what's going on historically in terms of power structures is seriously reflected on.