This is a danger of American TV shows and movie studios remaking shows for the American audiences. They don't get to see that Europe is mostly a developed place.
Salaries for professionals are markedly lower, we live in much smaller houses etc. I get the feeling that when you're winning at life in America, you're really winning. But when you're losing you're really losing. In Europe the ups and downs of life are more smoothed out.
I'm a high school drop out and we each make less than the median nation income and I feel we are better off than if we lived in the UK. Though I admit life from 18 - 25 would have probably been less of a struggle there.
Really curious because if the next smaller house in size is a trailer then the UK sizes must be weirdly small.
US @ 77 sq meters per capita vs UK @ 33 sq meters per capita.
We're a crowded island, we have small houses.
The UK has a lower population density the than both Belgium and Holland, both of which have larger average houses than the UK. So there has to be more to it than simply being 'crowded'.
I've also lived in enough places with various levels of health-care and insurance (and lack of insurance) to see this as a potential problem.
So, instead of reading imperiousness, how about worry?
The problem with the housing crisis was people had variable rate mortgages that made their payments quickly balloon up under them. We have a fixed rate so that can't happen.
This was before the ACA though, I don't know how it works now.
Sure, you prioritizing having a big house over not worrying about having to cough up $5k in even of an illness. Or worrying about losing your health insurance. Medical expenses are covered somewhat by insurance but you're still getting a huge bill if you're significantly ill.
I was damn lucky I could afford it but if I go sick a few years earlier I'd be totally and completely fucked. Of course, if you can't imagine it you can't appreciate it.
We got here by saving together and living in a one room apartment for 5 years. We don't have new cars or iPhones and we go out to eat about once a year (that we pay for her mother offers to take us out from time to time). I just upgraded my 30 inch CRT TV to a 50 inch 4K after a decade of loyal service. Its not for everyone but its certainly not impossible. I make about 43k a year pretax and she makes 37k for reference. Median income nationally is 55k or so and about 75k in my county so I suspect a great many people have the opportunity to do just as we have done.
Inequality is the result of people earning different amounts, such being compensated in proportion to the value they generate - rather than everyone earning the same irrespective of that.
Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it?
If an author writes a really good book, then it will sell and they'll make a lot of money. They earn a lot more than the author who writes bad, unpopular books. That's an example of income inequality.
A great comedian will draw large crowds and his shows will fetch a high price. That's an example of inequality too. What's wrong with that? How will anything work if it were otherwise?
Inequality is arguably not the right economic easure to care about for social issues. Imagine every human in year 7000 is rich enough to own entire planets, but the super wealthy own 100 planets. Who cares? Why is that a problem? If your concern is about a particular class, then you should look at their standard of living and progress in it over time, not compare against how much someone else has.
Few people object to higher rewards for those more talented or harder working.
Let us make an experiment and drop Paul Graham in a rainforest to see how much value he manages to extract.
Then, once he has starved to death or died from some random infection, let's think again what makes IT jobs more valuable than garbage collector jobs.
The point he and Mr Graham are trying to make is simple. People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
The fact is that this inequality manifests itself in far more different ways before it appears as income/wealth inequality.
Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything for that matter. Wealth inequality comes far later.
You attribute far too much of a person's wealth accumulation with skill. Is Bill Gates the best programmer of all time?
>People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
Because in "modern" society it's not politically correct to recognize, let alone discuss, any differences whatsoever between age, race, sex, education, skill, etc. If you have the gall to try, you'll immediately be torn apart by the howling "progressive" masses.
Bill Gates is good at a lot of other things including programming.
And I'm not talking about skill. Its also work, persistence and variety of other things that add up.
>>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
People are only equal by rights. They are definitely not equal with regards to hard work, persistence and range of other skills.
Isaac Newton being better than me in Physics, isn't exactly racism.
According to the metrics our society uses to reward him, he's quite litterally the 85.000.000.000x dev.
And here's us thinking 10x devs don't exist...
If you are poor enough, chances are fairly good you will never get to touch a piano to even find out if you can be good or bad at it.
So no, it does not come far before someone is rich and poor. If you are poor, a whole lot of avenues close off to you early regardless of skill, and the odds of you remaining poor is overwhelmingly higher than that you will be able to overcome it, irrespective of how hard you work or how smart you are.
What I'm questioning is not whether people's merits are unequal, but the tool used to measure them. My point is that a measure is inherently relative.
The thought experiment I offer is another way of measuring someone's utility. It is inherenthy flawed and unfit to the needs of our society. But again, the person I responded to didn't establish that his measuring tool is an optimization function for our society either.
Also this is not related to whether two people are compared on their job, but to whether two people good at different jobs are compared.
More recently I’ve come around to embracing the notion that peoples’ emotional state regarding their relative place in society and their future prospects is as important as their absolute standard of living.
Sure, as it's been argued by PG and many others, in material terms even the poorest in modern western societies are far better off than wealthy people of hundreds of years ago.
But everyone still has some degree of need to better themselves, improve their circumstances, and aspire to live more comfortably and prosperously. And crucially, the ability of young people to find a partner and have a family is strongly influenced by their prospects for upward mobility.
So if societal inequality is such that a young person trying to make their way in the world sees no opportunity for meaningful improvement of their circumstances, and therefore no real prospects for finding a good partner, raising a healthy family and achieving a good level of status in society, then the motivation to remain part of mainstream, productive society can easily be lost. This is what leads to people "dropping out" and ending up in a life of unemployment, depression, substance abuse, crime, violence, etc.
So, sure, some level of inequality is inevitable and healthy, to the extent that it rewards people for effort and ingenuity and gives people something to aspire to. But too much inequality becomes more of a de-motivator and a source of resentment, and can cause societal breakdown, and I think this is what is happening to some degree across the western world.
The reality is that if you were born somewhere poor, odds are overwhelmingly that you would earn a tiny fraction of what someone born somewhere where they are provided proper education and an environment where better alternatives are available.
So maybe you are compensated in proportion to the value you generate, but the problem with this is that this is only superficially connected to the effort you put in and how effective you are.
Some people who do well do so in part because they put in exceptional effort, but the biggest predictor of your earnings and success in life is how where you live and how wealthy your parents are.
This is the problem we have with inequality: It has very little to do with effort or skills, and a lot to do with pure chance.
This is one of those things that is worse in Europe than in the US. Inequality is perhaps less in absolute value, but it's more sticky. The upper class of the US has plenty of immigrants and people who were born poor. Yes, being born rich still provides advantage, but it's clearly not impossible.
In the EU, the upper class has
zero immigrants
very few people born poor (upper middle class minimum) (out of the top10 riches Frenchmen, one was born to a family with less than 100 million francs at the time they were born. One. And he wasn't poor by a reasonable definition at all)
My uncle became a surgeon, and my parents become engineers, through the means of a free public university, which propelled them to upper middle class.
There is still much to achieve in French social mobility, but these kind of stories are plenty. Having spent some time in the US now, and seeing the stories of people who go on to go to engineering/medical/etc schools, I can't say that I see comparable things happening. Everyone I know who went to med school comes from upper middle class family AND had to take on tons of debt.
You shouldn't be looking at the top 0.001%, but the top 10%, perhaps even 20-30%, and how they live/what kind of social protections they benefit from.
Of all OECD countries, only in Slovenia, Chile, Italy and the UK are the intergenerational correlations between the earnings of fathers and sons stronger, for example.
The rest of the OECD, including most of Europe, does far better in that respect.
Representation of immigrants is something I haven't looked at, and it may very well be that the US does well there, but there are a number of confounding factors, and it in any case doesn't change the fact that social mobility is poor in the US.
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...
That's not true, and exactly the kind of misleading statement that leads to people voting against their own interests.
You'd just prefer if the Democrats were even more towards your preference on fiscal matters. I can agree with that, whether it would fly with the American voters sufficiently to overcome the rural/republican tilt is another matter entirely.
Maybe occasional rewrites could be a solution, but if they happen without the customary devastating violence, I'm afraid that the rewrite would only further entrench existing corruption (and even devastating violence is far from a guarantee that this won't happen, quite the opposite actually).
Maybe have a dozen or so mixed teams create separate drafts in isolation, vote out the worst half and then select one of the remaining by chance? Something along these lines might greatly help rewriters to forget about their own personal or group interests for a while and focus on what would be good for society as a whole. It's most likely just a theoretical design, right?
People aren't voting 'against their own interests' in the sense that they're stupid. They're voting for their own interests in a party which also has interests they're against because it's the only practical option. For example, someone who wanted less immigration and pro globalism rules (aka US protectionism) but then also thought things like equal rights for trans people and gay marriage and allowing abortion were the right would be up a creek without a paddle. Either option (with a decent chance of getting elected) is against their interests in some way.
Similarly do they want Obamacare repealed because it's a "disaster" and they've been promised better cheaper insurance by someone who doesn't actually have any kind of plan to deliver on that promise?
Is there only a debate about gay marriage at all because it's been turned into "an attack on traditional marriage"?
Are the liberals intentionally ruining the economy because they've joined the global warming religion that is basically an excuse for communism?
Some of this is ignorance and being conned, but some of it is stupidity as well. It's probably not wise to ignore that reality.
This is not the paradox that people think it is.
If you're a coastal, progressive elite, you've already gone "all in" on an urban, socialized, statist (for good or for bad) social arrangement. You've shifted towards a pole and you might as well keep doubling down on those strategies/policies.
But if you're rural (or, as is the case with most of red-state US, sort-of-semi-rural), you're not down that path at all.
There are costs as well as benefits to social benefits and welfare programs. Many of those costs may be intangible, but they are costs nonetheless. Consider: what if a very large portion of your self esteem and "face" was tied to being self-sufficient in certain realms ?
And so therefore, if you're not already at the urban-progressive-socialized pole of attraction, it makes sense that people resist the costs (and the benefits) of going down that road.
First, inequality is needed so that there is a reward for working harder, doing more. The one who coasts through their education doing only the minimal needed before getting a job doing the same should be rewarded less than the one who gives it their best. BUT, inequality should never be so great that the kid who coasts can come from such a privileged position that they are forever in a better position than someone who works hard. For a lot of American's, working hard doesn't really get rewards, so you could say we have exceeded the optimal amount of inequality and thus need more equality. But if we envision a fully equal system where everyone is equally rewarded, there is far less incentive to do more than the bare minimum. Even supporters of basic income think that those who go above and beyond should be rewarded with extra income above the level of basic income. I've never heard of anyone supporting a basic income plan where all income beyond the basic income level is taxed at a 100% rate. Even a 50% or 75% tax rate indicates those who do more should have more, with the difference being how much more.
For this, we need to make sure the inequality is high enough that effort is rewarded, but keep it low enough that birth does not convey special privileges.
Second, equality will never exist in all areas of life. Even if we had total financial equality, some people are more sociable, better looking, etc. As such, what people have access to in our society is still unequal. In a financially equal society, the one with vastly superior social skills, or who is attractive (look up the Halo Effect), has access to more resources and thus inequality still exists. Allowing some level of financial inequality allows people a way to do better when they lack the above skills.
Consider some modern day developer who is slightly autistic but highly functioning enough to hold a good job. Their ability to earn more can, to some extent, help offset the lowered levels of social skills in the extent it allows them to achieve their life goals.
The only way to have full equality beyond just financial equality would be to implement a tax on anything that can be considered a good or service in the most abstract of methods, and I think we would find that even the most ardent communist are all out libertarians in regards to these social goods and services.
That said, I still feel that the system is better than the US system, there's less inequalities, less worry of disasters because you know that you'll be protected by the system and brilliant kids have a chance of getting a good education even if their parents are poor.
If having more money and a bigger house is winning that's true, but many people don't see life that way. Being happy, having time to enjoy life with your friends, doing worthwhile and interesting things, raising your kids well, etc are also ways to win. In general if you talk to an older, wealthy person, they say those are things that should have done instead of working so much.
Try enjoying your time with friends and long vacations when you work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week! Ah, you can't! See!
There's a balance to be struck. Having no money isn't fun, but having no time isn't fun either. If you talk to people about their regrets, it's much more common to hear people lament working longer hours than not having had enough money.
This is an age old debate, and it's very hard to compare one vast continent to another. Regional differences between US cities and European cities are at least as large or larger than the difference between the avereages of US and European salaries/living standards etc. The difference between central manhattan and rural Apalachia is just like the difference between the fancy parts of Stockholm and rural eastern Europe. There is just no comparison in Salaries, Life expectancy etc.
When it comes to those of us that are "winning", the difference is there, especially for some professions like doctors who can basically make a killing in the US but not in Europe. That is probably to do with that it's an economic risk/investment to get the MD in the US, whereas in Europe it's normally free. When you are a finished doctor you aren't entitled to a fancy car - we just paid your MD so you better get to work and be thankful ;)
To make a fair comparison between me (a software dev) and a comparable person in the US (in a similar metro area of ~1M people) you'd have to make a pretty tricky calculation involving costs of healthcare, childcare, money saved for retirement, pensions etc. On the bottom line I think the US person would make a bit more money, but on the other hand would have a worse work/life balance.
While we're correcting misconceptions, in the UK it's most definitely not free.
But I believe it's still a lot cheaper than the US. The universities are capped on the fees they can charge, and your student loan is regulated by the government (you only start paying back when you're earning over a threshold).
Wage inequality, parental leaves, employment security, higher education etc.are decidedly "non-european" in the UK.
So yes when I talk about "Europe" in the context of "Europe vs US" I think the UK needs to be considered separately.
(to the Americans: In many European countries "US conditions" is commonly used in political discourse as a way of scaring voters with the image of chaos and suffering)
Relative to the US, absolutely. Relative to Scandinavia, not really.
No. No you don't. :)
What is the political situation now in the UK wrt. free higher education? It seems like one of the biggest social justice/social mobility issues a society can have. Is that not a top issue for Labour?
In Scotland at least, student loans are only used for living expenses, similar to your experience. Tuition fees are paid by the Scottish Government, as education is a devolved power [1].
In England, tuition fees are paid by the student, usually through a student loan, and are capped at £9k/year.
[Warning: political] I couldn't answer on Labour's priorities. They're becoming increasingly irrelevant north of the border, and increasingly impotent south of the border.
Personally I'm surprised that there isn't a lot more anger from English taxpayers about this. It would be very interesting to see whether an independent Scotland could continue this policy.
Stats here paint are more nuanced picture: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/are-the-s...
An experienced engineer at google or facebook make 200k with a sizable signup bonus. As far as I know, theres no comparison between what a soft dev makes in the us and what he makes in europe.
This is from someone that lives in south america, and is considering moving to either europe, NZ or America, and hands down america pays so much more than anything else.
Not to mention that people criticizing work-life balance of engineers in the us havent visited google offices.
Office are part of work, not part of life
Your priorities, of course, may be different.
Getting new hires up to speed is expensive enough that they'd be pretty stupid to actually do this. Sure a few do, but it isn't common.
Also, a couple minutes with google turns up this: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVD_DUR . If it says what I think it says, getting a new job really is easier in the US (like it should be, because as any economist will tell you this is what has to happen when a bad hire is less of a disaster for the employer).
I think it boils down to whether you want to take care of yourself, or if you let the state do it for you.
In part, yes.
But also, there are two approaches to reducing downtime. You can increase MTBF (make things more reliable, make it harder to get fired); or you can reduce MTTR (make things easier to fix, make it easier to get hired somewhere new). Europe goes with the first approach, the US goes with the second (which I very much prefer, because it doesn't gum things up).
Separately, there's also making downtime less of a problem (failover systems, all the various other social safety net things). The US is generally known to kinda suck at this.
I believe the point they were making is simply that they can. You're not protected (aside from the small handful of reason that actually are protected).
I live in a country where you have to pay insurmountable amounts of money to fire employees. The salaries that us pays are about 8x. Gimme at will employment.
> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.
I had plenty of free time in SF to do whatever i wanted when I worked there. Maybe i was lucky, but i did not find work-life balance to be particularly out of whack. Europe is more relaxed, but also less ambitious in terms of culture. That can be frustrating as well.
> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.
You are paying for all those things, its not like they are free in europe. You can also pay for them in the US on software engineer salaries. Google has ample pto, facebook has parental rights, etc. You can always take unpaid time off, something easier to do in the US than in other countries.
Adding restrictions on employer's ability to fire makes employers far less likely to hire. It enriches the already employed at the expense of the unemployed. If anything it makes more sense to have at-will employment in countries with strong social safety nets because unemployment is less disruptive there.
I'm in the Boston market and median salary for devs is around 80-90k when you include all skill levels, but every single dev I know has roommates or an hour+ commute into the city and higher healthcare costs than Germany.
I'd believe that you would make more overall money in the US once you got to the higher end of the market, but it's not as simple as a calculation as you are making it out to be
They should probably look for housing near a commuter rail then
If nothing else it's much more pleasant, anyway.
There are many perks to Berlin over SF, but salaries and net income are not it.
Im just emphasizing that the fact that europe has benefits, it does not necessarily (or likely) outweigh the difference in salary from one to the other. You are certainly taxed more by a lower wage and by a higher tax rate that could compensate ubering every day and private schooling.
Higher costs, lower stability, and no safety net... I think that I would prefer that Berlin salary (and I'm a US resident).
That said, speaking as a New Zealander: don't come here. There are no jobs, and if you find one, you will be underpaid. If you're looking for the weather and standard-of-living combination offered by the southern hemisphere, consider Melbourne or Sydney instead. Very few of my graduating class at the University of Auckland will end up remaining in the city, I suspect.
I just heard NZ was doing a state sponsored world-wide call for workers. Is it because people are leaving? Where are they leaving to?
If people leave, normally they leave for Australia (because it's very easy to do so).
I think Silicon Valley megacorps are exceptional outliers. Obviously people can make silly money at Google, but so do athletes in the largest leagues. It's just not a useful comparison between continents with millions of employees. Exclude the top 10% and bottom 10% makes for a more reasonable comparison.
[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Housing is the main difference: you can get a fairly large place in berlin, and you can have a family there. But SF is one city, there are pleny of other cities in the us more family friendly (if not any other city).
I remember recently a map showing the purchasing power by salary per state, and the biggest purchasing power was nebraska.
Google and other tech companies in the U.S having nice offices doesn't mean the work life balance of Googlers is something to envy. Probably the opposite actually (three meals a day makes you stay there for dinner, nap rooms to let you stay even later). Not a great work life balance.
Source: know Googlers, have been to Google offices
While Berlin is a great city, it is very far from being a top-pay city in Europe.
Moving back to Berlin, I went part time because it was sufficient.
Arguably that's due to constrained Supply - http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/03/the_high_price.h...
There are plenty of tasks doctors are commanded with that do not require mastery level of expertise, and that enormously raises the cost of medicine. You dont need to study 10 years to read an EKG, someone could learn all the EKG patterns in a much shorter time.
A funny story about this in argentina: anesthesiologists earn more money than surgeons. Surgeons are not unionized, but anesthesiologists are.
Where are you getting this information from?
It's really not - in the EU the difference between median net income in say Norway 41 483€ or Denmark 28 364€ and Romania 2 315€ and Bulgaria 3 332€ - that is over 10x differences between poorest and richest countries. US doesn't have that level of disparity between states even if you count Puerto Rico.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gdp-and-beyond/quality-of-l...
If you're working as a professional in the US it's pretty rare that your health insurance isn't at least mostly paid for by your employer, if not completely paid for by them.
But like you said, that's why it's a tricky calculation. All of which varies if you're single or married with children.
I'd imagine that for the young and healthy people without children, it isn't hard to sock away more in the US.
When a substantial portion of "success" (especially monetary) can be attributed to luck, isn't this the sort of environment you want?
Depends on what you mean by winning.
If by winning you mean having lots of money to buy your family a bunch of stuff, then yeah.
However, if by winning you mean having the time to build a strong relationship with your family and maintaining your own physical and mental health, then you might have a more difficult time with that.
When people spend most of their wake hours in a cubicle smaller than the bedroom where they sleep in something is very wrong.
Or that it would collapse into Greek-levels of poverty.
What is your implication, that the government should require all businesses to be closed on Christmas Day? Does that happen where you're from?
>Would the religious right not support that?
Perhaps you have a bit of a boogeyman image of the 'religious right'. Regardless, the question is moot because just about everyone celebrates Christmas in the US, religious or not. A better place to examine the question would be Easter weekend, where only 26% of businesses offer PTO for Good Friday and 6% offer it for Easter Monday. I try to follow religious and political news, and I've never heard of anyone try to make a push to make Good Friday a federal holiday. I'm sure some politically active religious folk would support it if asked though (and it can be achieved by secularizing the name, making it "spring holiday" or something like that[1]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_the_United_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#United_States
No. But if the government requires employers to offer a day or two of paid leave, employees could get Christmas or a nearby day off.
As you point out though, this may be moot as most employers offer this anyway. But other holidays might be a good target.
> Perhaps you have a bit of a boogeyman image of the 'religious right'.
Huh? I was appealing to why they might support something, not oppose it.
I might not have read it in the tone you intended, and boogeyman might not have been the right word I was looking for. I'm used to the discussion of religion on this forum having a suspicious or negative tone, so I apologize if I projected that onto you incorrectly.
It seemed strange to me that out of any number of political forces in the US you chose to mention religious right, as though they're this monolithic group that are preventing mandatory holidays and could get it done if they wanted to.
I don't know if it's really even as partisan of an issue in a liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican sense; it's just not part of the culture here, at least not on the federal level. I'm thinking about blue laws here, because religious influence did translate to mandatory days off for a lot of businesses in times past. But as far as I know, most of that was state-by-state. I'm not aware of federal blue laws, or any kind of federal mandate on holidays.
So, you'll typically get 8-10 PTO days, independent from vacation policy. That'll be different in the service industry - it's lucrative for some restaurants, gas stations, hotels, etc. to be open - but a lot of times hourly workers will get time-and-a-half for their troubles.
[0]: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/snow-dismissal-pro...
It depends on the company.