I mean, salaries there are not like in the US, 40k€/y (net) is already a good salary, even for a developer. So you have to take a 5 years loan to buy a new car? 10 years if you have a low salary?
Most people with good to high salaries just lease their cars anyway, at least that's been my experience in Germany. People on low salary don't buy new cars or don't own cars at all, dense country with a decent public transit system, no need for everybody to own one.
Peer-to-peer carsharing also has been rather successful with Drivy, which is an option low-income people make use of if they should ever actually need a car for something.
When you considering the very low fertility rates of Europe, I would consider this whole system to be unsustainable.
The one thing that the rest of the Western world has right though is healthcare - basic services should be available at low cost to every citizen, and basic healthcare should not be a commercial or profit-driven exercise. I think its reasonable though if you want a hyper-expensive cancer treatment or surgery, you have to pay for that as part of private health insurance.
And then you have Sweden with 70%
I also don't think besides what I have mentioned above that you factor in the tax breaks that Swedes get for having kids. It's probably not as much as the 20% number you are quoting for germany but a dual-income household (Nordic countries and Denmark and Sweden in particular really favor both parents working in taxes for some reason) with kids probably does not approach the 70% number you quoted, even in the upper echelon (and to hit that 70% number you really do have to make upwards of $100k equivalent in Sweden, which is quite a high salary by Swedish standards).
To put it into perspective, at a good paying software dev company the junior devs make between $35-50k equivalent, and the most senior 10-year-or-more experience devs in Sweden are making about $90-100k equivalent.
Even though stuff in Sweden is expensive, the social net is pretty strong, so plenty of people can easily survive on $40-50k before taxes because of the free education, healthcare, etc. mentioned before.
http://www.uhy.com/employers-now-pay-average-employment-cost...
Right, exactly. Paying $5000 more in taxes to get $5000 more in benefits is net of zero.
It's really even worse than that, because when you say you make $60,000 in the US vs. $40,000 in Europe, the $60,000 doesn't include employee benefits like employer-provided health insurance, whereas the $40,000 doesn't include the taxes you have to pay for the equivalent government services.
> I think its reasonable though if you want a hyper-expensive cancer treatment or surgery, you have to pay for that as part of private health insurance.
But that's the only part you would actually need social assistance for. In any kind of non-corrupt healthcare system, the actual cost of going to the doctor and coming home with a bottle of allergy medicine shouldn't be beyond the ability of anyone at the 10th percentile income to afford.
That's really the advantage Europe has. It's not the government services, it's that US institutions are corrupt and so prices are higher. Regulatory capture and overhead makes the market for routine medicine uncompetitive and therefore unaffordable.
And it's the same across the board -- look at housing costs in Germany vs. California. Europe's cost advantage isn't that their government is especially good, it's that governments in the US are especially bad.
We're not as extreme, but already we see the same symptoms: low-wage employees are getting priced out of the cities. Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin are hellholes.
And the 40'000€ also doesn’t include your employer’s contributions to public social security (approx. half of health insurance, half of unemployment insurance etc.).
Low fertility rates are a feature and not a bug, and in these times they are actually a very desired feature [0].
The only way one could consider that "unsustainable" is to assume there's literally zero immigration, with a globally stagnating or shrinking population. But all of these are objectively false. On a global scale, humanity is a far cry from dying out due to infertility, quite the opposite. So let's not pretend that low fertility rates are a bad thing, okay?
Btw: By HDI the US ranks 13, down from 12. Want to take an educated guess where most of the countries above it on the ranking are located? [1]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
The world-wide net immigration is inherently zero. If what we're looking for is approximately the population replacement rate globally, what sense does it make to have something different nationally? Doing so creates all sorts of problems for the population source countries in terms of brain drain and so on (they pay to educate someone for decades and then anyone above the 90th percentile moves out), and for the destination country in terms of preserving the local culture and history as long-term net immigration results in the culture of the donor population subsuming the existing one.
Good thing I didn't talk about "world-wide net immigration" but rather about "worldwide net population growth".
The two are related, but not the same. Low birthrates are very much a localized "problem", fixed by global migration due to the fact that globally we do not have a fertility problem, globally we have the exact opposite of that problem.
The fertility rate has been declining world wide, from ~5 per woman in 1950 to ~2.5 now. The cause appears to be something like industrialization and urbanization, so it happens to some countries sooner, but it is decidedly a world phenomenon and there is not a lot more decline required before 2.5 becomes <2.
But why should that be considered bad? A major factor to this development is decreasing child mortality rates in less developed countries, having to birth fewer children is a natural outcome of that and that's good.
The other version of that would be them still just getting as many children as before, but with all of them surviving into adulthood, and as such contributing to the global population issue, which also happens.
> but it is decidedly a world phenomenon and there is not a lot more decline required before 2.5 becomes <2.
Sorry but I heavily disagree. There's a lot more to decline before 2.5 becomes <2 and even if we get there: Why should that be bad? Perpetual population growth is a completely insane and unsustainable concept, why are we insisting on making it a thing?
A reduced global population would be one of the most efficient ways to fight climate change and the environmental impact humanity is having on the planet as a whole. Going around and killing people, to reduce the population, is not compatible with our moral framework, so we need to look at other, less drastic, ways of reducing the population or at least keeping its growth in check.
That's exactly where easy access to contraception and the right to abortion come in. These are not just "social issues", in the long term they will become very real economic and environmental issues. Particularly once automation will fully take off, we'll be sitting on a crowded planet with more people than we know what to do with, with conservative politicians still demanding "full employment".
The lower fertility rate is not caused by the lower mortality rate, it's just a happy coincidence which is saving us from rapid decline. In particular there is no guarantee that they exactly balance -- and there is no level of infant mortality reduction that can prevent a population decline at a fertility rate below 2, which is where industrialized countries already are and developing countries are headed. It's already below 2 in Brazil and China.
> There's a lot more to decline before 2.5 becomes <2
No, there isn't, especially when Africa is significantly bringing up that average but they also still have a high infant mortality rate. Every other continent is either already below 2 or is only slightly above it and declining over time. The biggest contributor to population growth isn't fertility rate, it's people living longer.
> and even if we get there: Why should that be bad? Perpetual population growth is a completely insane and unsustainable concept, why are we insisting on making it a thing?
Population growth isn't necessary. What we need is population stability, because population decline is a catastrophe. Somebody has to pay for the people who retire at 65 and live to 100, collecting social security the whole time. The fewer people there are the more burden there is on each one, and that cost comes out of everything else -- education and research, quality of life, everything.
> A reduced global population would be one of the most efficient ways to fight climate change and the environmental impact humanity is having on the planet as a whole.
The most efficient way to fight climate change is to stop burning carbon. That means solar panels and wind turbines and nuclear power and electric cars. The per-capita cost of doing that is slightly negatively correlated with population due to economies of scale. Moreover, the timescale of needing to fight climate change is right now, whereas the effect of birthrates is multiple decades down the road. We need to stamp out fossil fuels ASAP, not 30-50 years from now. And once we do that there is not any significant relationship between population and climate change.
> Particularly once automation will fully take off, we'll be sitting on a crowded planet with more people than we know what to do with, with conservative politicians still demanding "full employment".
Automation destroying jobs on net has never happened. Every time a job is automated, it lowers cost of living, which increases the number of remaining jobs that a person can take and still make ends meat. There will never be a lack of jobs. What may actually happen eventually is that it becomes possible to make ends meat by working four hours a week and some people choose to do that, or work for ten years and then retire, but how is that a problem?
But the brains still exist. If a doctor in Mexico cures cancer, it's still cured. The difference is that the money doesn't go to a company in the US rather than one in Mexico, which contributes to wealth inequality. It other words, it hurts people in Mexico more than it helps people in the US -- who, again, still get the cure, they just have to pay the country that raised the person who created it.
It's not even clear that this is a net loss for the US, because other countries will be more inclined to invest in education and research when they expect to internalize more of the financial benefits -- which increases the positive externalities (like the existence of a cure).
Of course it's a feature for these poor people who now can get a chance to live a better life. But is that ideal for a developed host country?
As a native German, I can assure you that no native German people are being "displaced". This is just a semi-ancient right-wing trope about "Them foreigners stealing our jobs", with the occasional "and women" attached to it.
In the 90's these same people were railing against eastern Europeans, and how their culture and values are supposedly not "compatible with Western Values". Now, over a decade after the EU eastward expansion, rarely anybody seems to remember that part of history and the formerly marginalized are now so "assimilated" that they are part of the very same mobs which used to marginalize them.
Nothing about this whole topic is new, even the surrounding social unrests ain't new and are comparably civil compared to what went on not too long ago [0]. The only thing that's changed is the color of the people that are being scapegoated as the source of all problems and controversy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots
Since your German I'd urge you to read the book Strange Death of Europe. Assimilation isn't an easy process and mass migration in this scale is indeed a new thing.
It isn't really and most certainly not for central Europe or Germany. People too often ignore that the 20th century has seen constant and massive population movements [0].
In Germany particularly with Turkish guest workers [1], fall of the Iron Curtain triggering mass migration from eastern Europe, later refugees from the Yugoslav wars mixed in. More migration after the 2004 enlargement of the EU eastwards.
Now you could argue "All these people have the same culture, they are not weird Muslims", which is a moot point because these same "their culture is too different" claims were made about eastern Europeans for many many years before they became part of the club themselves.
It should also be noted that nobody ever talks about the reasons why these refugee streams exist in the first place: US foreign policy.
Even back in 2002 Afghani people made their way to Germany, followed by Iraqis and people from many other MENA countries, fully escalating with Syria.
This isn't some sudden new thing, one could literally watch this happening over a timespan of nearly 2 decades, yet nothing was done. It's so painfully obvious that some people consider this as part of US strategy [2].
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/refugees_01.sht...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-guest-workers-transformed-germ...
Edit: I found figures for 2013, with 7.1 million used cars sold. The number of new passenger cars sold was 3.0 million. What I find surprising is that most new cars are indeed bought by businesses (I can find figures for 2013, but last year private cars represented 37% of new registrations). So around 1 in 7 private car sales are new cars. I don’t know if it qualifies as “almost no one”, but it’s lower than I expected.
If a car costs a lot to begin with it will cycle through more owners before being exported or scrapped. It's perfectly possible to have fewer new cars sold and have the same or larger used car market. Those new cars just have to be expensive enough that they cycle through many owners.
I can't speak for all of Europe but in my country we don't take loans for cars.
“financial leasing (including hire purchase) is the dominant type of point-of-sale finance contract taken out by consumers in Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and the UK, while loans (usually with no option to return the car) are preferred elsewhere”
But I don’t know how meaningful that is, given that some buyers will get loans elsewhere and some will not need financing at all.