I'm an American who has been living in Norway for 8.5 years now. I am never moving back, unless there are some serious system changes which will realistically not happen in my lifetime.
My ideal societal contract would be something like this: I want to be free to focus my energy on my work, relationship, and interests. I want the state to focus on programs that reduce the need for individuals like me to have to focus their energy on anything else.
In practice, this is stuff like equal access to healthcare, education, childcare, social security, time-off...
In the US, access to these things is not a given, and they often end up as rewards, distributed very unevenly. ...Even worse, this leads to anxiety/worry/focus by individuals like me to try and fix or mitigate those problems.
As you mention, the scale of change in the way the US operates seems unlikely anytime soon; at least for me, removing myself (my skills/labor/knowledge) seems like as good a way as any to try and coerce change.
I just see more benefit personally when a basic level of these things is offered to everyone. I don’t need the extra anxiety that my friend, bandmate, barista, or bartender is one crisis away from ruin.
Also do you have similar levels of job opportunities as NY or SF?
> Curious, what’s better?
Parental leaves, more vacations, less working hours per week, better life/work balance, free health and education, &c.
People who never experienced both systems can't understand the impact it has on your life, I'm not talking going in vacation in EU/US, I'm talking working/living for extended period of times. You can't escape the matrix if you don't know you're in the matrix. The US is like Disneyland or Vegas, if you can afford the top level shit you'll have a good time, some would argue even a better time than anywhere else, if you're on a budget be prepared to be treated like cattle.
This makes working hard/smartly in order to be able to do this incentivizing. Rather than just sitting back and enjoying the life/work balance and less working hours
> Rather than just sitting back and enjoying the life/work balance and less working hours
What's wrong with enjoying life once your needs are met ? If I'm happy working 35 hours a week why would I work 42 hours a week ? If I don't want to buy the next new shinny toy why would I bust my ass for extra money that I won't need ?
- Parental Leave: When I got my first child it's hard to understate how much being able to be off work for 8 months with ~80% of my full pay. I'm now going off for 6 months with my second child in February. And I can save up parental leave for a long time meaning I can take longer vacations to spend summers with them as well.
- Healthcare: Again once you have experienced the true value of universal healthcare you will not want to go back. My second son go a bad infection and had to spend 2 weeks in the hospital with his mother. Cost (excluding what we paid in taxes of course...): 20-30 bucks for buying candy (i.e it could have been 0 ;)).
- Education: All higher education is of course free for all EU citizens. It used to be free for everyone in the world but the unfortunately removed that a few years ago.
- The everymans right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden
There's of course a lot more one could point out (like for example high speed internet access pretty much everywhere, good mobile connection speed pretty much everywhere).
Of course this comes with a cost of paying more in taxes (happy to do it!). I'm not the biggest fan of snow as well.