This is very American centric. Whites in Europe are lucky to earn half that on architect positions (please don’t come up with „standard of living” and „social services and benefits”).
You can't just hand-wave away "standard of living" and "social services and benefits".
These may be things you take for granted but a large majority of the population has to have a large emergency refund in case they get severed from their company without any notice for any reason (Compare that with job security in France or Germany).
Consider you need to save a ton of money yourself in government sponsored accounts such as HSA or FSAs for future healthcare expenses that you can't possibly estimate when you're 20 years old. (Compare that with the NHS in England).
Consider you need to sock away a ton of money in 401ks and IRAs so that when you're 50 with no job prospects, you don't end up on the street and can actually have a decent retirement. Nobody is paying serious pensions and hardly anyone can survive on social security. (Compare that with the savings pillars in Switzerland).
Now considering all this, you still think his salary is HUGE compared to a Western European one? I highly doubt it, I have already run the numbers myself.
The broader point of the new replacing the old is generally true (your marketability will decline by age 50), but I still see many baby boomers holding onto well paying positions for the foreseeable future. I save to hedge the risk, but I’m not too worried, since I believe the risk is over-stated.
This seems like somewhat of an idealistic view point when over half of Americans have less than 1k in their bank account.
Compared to the EU, one would have to fund a larger emergency fund to avoid surprises.
HSA’s are good investments, but FSAs don’t roll over I believe, so they’re actually quite terrible for 20 year olds
Your analysis is a little idealistic though. I wouldn’t feel certain about social security nets 50 years out. I would take the cash any day.
The first year might be 5 or 10 days. After 10 or 15 years, you might get 20 to 40 days.
If you want better, you'll have to pay out of pocket, possibly including travel to some other country.
If we are to compare US vs EU salaries, we must take into account healthcare cost, retirement, welfare, parental leave, PTO and so on. Otherwise the whole purpose of the exercise is pointless and it may embellish on side of the argument vis-a-vis the other.
How do you call that sort of tactics already? Propaganda, right? The POTUS would respond "Fake News!" (although I'm not fond of him).
Ignorance and complacency run amok on HN these days.
I'm certainly not saying that a comparison is equal, but it feels like for anyone except the highly paid, the gap isn't that wide all things considered.
Also: a B2C service startup in the US has a bigger potential market than the same one in Europe (assuming they’re targeting what they know—the local market).
End result: no gigantic piles of cash looking for investment opportunities going to VCs to funnel into 100x success maybe startups, no companies minting money like crazy, no salary inflation
There is a footnote in the first paragraph that mentions white people and privilege. The purpose of the footnote was for the author to explain that even though he’s providing this information, it may not help non-white people.
Either way, neither the tweet nor the footnote say what you’re saying.
It's a really taboo subject to talk about to begin with; and there are really two extremes that you'll hear:
1. It's a meritocracy and anyone can do this! (It isn't, and they can't)
2. Yea, this will work for you but not in general. (You're probably right on this one, as my salary and my progression are very personal things).
To thread the needle, I'm trying to point out that I acknowledge #2, and explicitly reject #1 as empirically false; and I hope that by sharing my salary, I bring light to the fact that #1 is false, and that if more people who are similarly advantaged as I am talk about it, we can make #2 no longer be the case.