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Comment by 238475235243 | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once).

Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or whatever where opening for business more than one day a week is seen as aggressive. (again, I exaggerate slightly).

If anyone disagrees with this article who's in the US, I dare you to go and try and start something in the EU and report back. Not the UK, the EU.

Glory to the US, and the ability to move States with little friction. Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice (I'm looking at you, Belgium). Glory to sales tax below 20%. Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.

One day I hope the EU lives up to the dream of being a genuine federation of EU states, with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US), defends its borders instead of giving up on them, allows free and fair competition and puts its citizens above the bizarre EU commission and its bonkers methods and plans.

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On the other hand the people in EU are happier, have better social protection, better benefits, better health systems, better consumer protection, better application of rules and laws, they make for more productive employees. Do the shareholders get as rich as fast as in the hyperactive US economy? Not, but the society functions better. I very much prefer the EU.

In the end, one may talk about all the startups (when the BPI pumps billions into it, I sure hope there are some startups and medium companies), but EU has proven unable to build an Apple. It would be dismantled here, and CEO beaten up before reaching any interesting level. DailyMotion (French) was as big as Youtube. Many others like this. We always end up #2, and the Silicon Valley still decides what is ok to say on our smartphones in EU, which is a lot of soft power, and means we live under foreign cultural domination.

This is the price of being #2. Loss of leadership of our own country.

There have been companies like Nokia, SAP, Spotify, ARM, ASML all showing it's not impossible to be #1. This is not even considering the auto sector where Europe dominates by a huge margin. I don't think there is something inherently lacking about Europe to enable business growth. The US obviously enjoys a first mover advantage in the software industry and as a result continues to receive much more VC funding than anyone else.

> EU has proven unable to build an Apple

and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes

The stock market thinks it's building one right now, however.

The US has Tesla, with almost 6x the market cap as Mercedes-Daimler.

Mercedes cars also destroy the planet with fossil fuel exhausts.

> and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes

And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes

> > and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes

> And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes

Or an Apple product :))

The problem with the Apple product is that it can't be repaired (try to swap in a new battery for an AirPod). The Mercedes can very much be repaired by any automotive shop. (And as a Mercedes owner, I can't understand what Americans are complaining about repair costs with Mercedes-Benz.)

Europeans buy new cars - Americans buy 15 year old 5th hand German cars that their previous owners mistreated harshly and expect them to be as reliable as brand new cars from the factory that are serviced at the recommended intervals. Mercedes is expensive, though - that's why rich people like them.

I'm European and I drive a 10-year-old Mercedes-Benz so I don't understand where this data is coming from.

United States unlike EU is one big market, with one unified language and standards, and I believe this difference is a huge reason (the reason?) why US has so many large startups and corporations. Also one might think that the existance of large companies like Apple points to a deficit in executive/governmental branches.

The big reason is US prioritizes big business and makes conditions most favorable to it, even at the expense of the society.

The EU doesn't build Googles or Amazons, because those companies are inherently unhealthy monopolies. But it has built numerous tech successes, including Nokia, Spotify, Wise, Airbus, and others.

In reality the EU has curbed the imperial pretensions of aggressive US corporates numerous times - including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and (soon) Facebook.

Nokia blew up. Spotify was funded by the Danish government. Wise I've never heard of and Airbus is a pan-EU jobs program sponsored primarily by the UK, French and German governments to make sure there's jobs for random people to make wings in Wales or welding in Toulouse or whatever.

5 of the 6 most valuable companies on the planet by market cap. Not doing a great job at curbing them.

“Because those companies are inherently unhealthy monopolies.”

Yeah, I’m not a billionaire because that much money brings problems. I choose not to be one...but I definitely could be.

It is easy to argue that a well functioning economy should never produce an Apple.

Do it then. Explain why we shouldn’t have Apple.

Huge companies concentrate power and distort the market. They can then extract rent from the economy by forcing others to play by their rules.

Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).

Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]

If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.

EU built a Nokia. Until MS infiltrated and dismantled it, that is.

How much help did Nokia have from the EU?? Sure it was very Finnish, but not clear the EU helped. And it wasn't MS, it was Nokia itself in the face of Apple. I worked at Nokia and saw it first hand.

Finland's economy opened up significantly when we joined EU. It's no coincidence that Nokia's success followed soon after.

Europe gave us GSM[0]. At a time when everyone in Europe had a GSM phone penetration in the US was embarassingly low.

It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

I can’t let this go. You are viewing Nokia as a consumer company. That’s wrong. Like Ericsson and Nortel they were huge in service provider. By the time MS rolled around Nokia had already flubbed the consumer market but had more importantly completely lost in the high tech arena around service providers. I competed directly with Nokia in the early 2000s and we produced a solution in the mobile backhaul space that was not only 10x more performant but also denser and more reliable. We did this with ease and crushed them. Nokia still does work on the space (notably building the dissident tracking system for Iran) but it was killed outright as soon as the Valley tech companies (the actual tech companies, not the consumer web crap) went after them. Now theyre replaying that by clinging to a product (deepfield) that is already past its expiration date.

Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.

I haven’t seen anyone discussing Rim/BlackBerry - who were Canadian, made great smart phones, but lost out because of the crucial mistake of concentrating on corporate IT as the customers, and by the time they pivoted to consumers with thins like BBM they were too late.

Nokia dismantled itself. Just one trivial example. Nokia backup software. It was 10x worse than anything Microsoft ever produced. They did bot care about the feedback.

How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.

Until apple and Android made it irrelevant

Chances are Nokia would have been a great competitor. Have you seen Nokia N9? It was in my opinion ahead of both iOS and Android at the time. But it was killed and replaced with Windows Phone.

Apple and Android didn't make Nokia irrelevant. Nokia made bad decisions and chose the losing player. After which said losing player gutted it.

Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.

Talk about moving the goalposts

I suspect that the NSA has a role in preventing any European Apple to become too successful.

Uh I think only the consumer protection, benefits, and social protection are clearly true (taken out of direct pay).

Rule of law and happier are debatable.

Productivity seems false if you define productivity as economic output versus just a redefinition of self-rated relaxation on the job.

At a certain point it gets incredibly subjective like which country's citizens are more awesome.

And honestly good on you for being in the EU and liking the EU more. I'm sure a lot of people in the USA feel the same about the USA. The entire point of democracies is that people should change their government to their liking.

My kneejerk reaction was to say you're wrong and of course EU citizens are happier, but thinking deeply about it that's nonsense. North Europe yes, happier by a lot. But if you consider the EU in its entirety, the South (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) and the East (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria) bring down the average by a lot. When the economy is down and corrupt no amount of safety nets will help you be happy, you simply won't have a job. So on average I would say happiness levels are about the same, both blocks have very vast regions which are poorer/neglected and where resentment is growing. The state of the economy is one of the most important factors in determining happiness, other things are perceived corruption, equality, freedom and safety. That's why North Europe scores so high but the struggling South despite it's awesome weather and views is not happy at all.

Are you seriously saying people in the north of Europe are happier than in the south? I beg to disagree.

Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.

You'd have to argue why suicide rates that are measured to be higher trumps scientific attempts at directly measuring happiness. The latter does indeed rank Southern Europe lower than both Northern Europe and the United States.

https://countryeconomy.com/demography/world-happiness-index

I think unemployment will usually translate to unhappiness. If you are unemployed 30-40 year what do you do? Start a family? Can't. Travel the world? Can't. Find consolation in religion? Very few people in Europe do that. Jobs are very very important for self esteem and mental well being.

If we don't even agree on what happiness means, how can we decide whether people in the US or EU are happier?

But how much of this social happiness is a result of riding on the coattails of the past? As the article points out: the past in Europe was great. Today's happiness is heavily influenced by yesterday. Today Europe is not as great. Will the Europe of tomorrow be as happy when the decisions made today carry the day?

> they make for more productive employees.

Source? This has not been my experience at all in the tech industry.

> On the other hand the people in EU are happier

Are they though? And maybe happiness is overrated?

The first large scale study on overwork deaths says US has less deaths than many countries in Europe.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...

  In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to

long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America.

have you tried to start a company there?

Why should society optimize for how easy it is to start a business?

Why wouldn't you? The number of EU professionals I've worked with here in the uk over the years is surprising to me, they all left their home countries because their prospects where limited by their governments with over zealous interference in business. Living in a business friendly country has obvious benefits: jobs and money

Because societies that promote innovation have higher quality of life and bless the entire world with technological advancement, while their own population benefits from lower prices, more goods, productivity growth, more jobs, more opportunity, and more fairness.

It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a social good, how do you think competition happens other than by starting businesses?

> societies that promote innovation have higher quality of life

Does the US have a higher quality of life than Germany, France or the Netherlands?

I agree that innovation is important and societies should promote it, but -imho- not at the cost of consumer & employee protection.

I would like to see US answers to this but in the US your quality of life is fantastic if you are rich and then it degrades fast: in NL it is good to great for all. So I can pick bleeding hard work in a lottery to maybe be someone or I can do whatever I like and have most of those same perks. Where is the choice here?

Depends on the demographics. Algerians in France or Turks in Germany don't have such a great quality of life, but neither do El Salvadorans in the US. The U.S. is 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa, 5% Asia, and has pretty good quality of life for these demographics. As demographics in Europe change, the EU will see more of the issues it likes to criticize the US for, but the demographic-adjusted quality of life in the U.S. is pretty good.

According to the World Happiness Report for 2020 (which is a well-regarded and well-researched report as far as I know), 9 of the top 10 countries in the world for people's quality of life and well-being are all in the EU. The USA comes in 18th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_re...

Devil's advocate here. They almost all have small populations: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Netherlands combined have less people than Spain which isn't that happy. On average I'd gamble the whole EU is about as happy as the U.S

Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand most definitely are not in the EU.

Because if you don't you'll end up with fewer businesses, which will concentrate wealth, which has documented negative effects on society.

You'll end up with fewer businesses, but the ones that won't get started are the ones people aren't really willing to put effort in to starting. You'll only really lose the easy "fill in a form and off you go" businesses. I don't imagine that's much of a loss. If someone has an idea, and a real drive to start, then they can start pretty much anywhere, even if it isn't super simple to register a company. So, really, making it easy to start a business just filters out the people who aren't especially passionate. The rest will battle through (and complain about the red tape while they do.)

And let's face it - the sort of businesses that HN readers want to start up are rarely that simple. Most people here are dealing with equity, vesting, cliffs, angel investors, VC money, cross-state and international taxation etc. We're not put off by something being a bit harder. Why should other people be?

So, while you're right that there might be fewer businesses, the EU doesn't actually stop people starting if they really want to.

It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low. There are going to be much harder challenges ahead even where company formation is complicated.

It's also worth noting that some parts of the EU make it a lot easier to start even than the US. Estonia's e-residency programme makes it incredibly easy to register for limited citizenship and start a digital business based there.

The major problem in EU is not really starting the companies. Most countries have ways to incorporate by filing a form and sending an email or two.

The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed.

France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies together, providing facilities and so on. But it always fails because there is no VC money pool.

If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.

This is the core: enough smart folk, enough ideas etc but people here sit on their money. EU investors invest in sure things and sure things are just not FAANGS when they start out. The appetite for risk is close to 0. You can see this when getting into EU incubators who try to mimic HN: they are absolutely waiting for that thing to happen where they are sure they will have ROI at which moment you can just walk to a bank or to a much better investor. This slows things down but mostly kills them entirely.

> EU investors invest in sure things

Which is mostly real-estate

> French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed

Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.

As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...

It has problems. If you have an idea that will take you a year to develop with 10 people, you need one million up front (simplifying a lot). But if the investors only give you 250k, they you need to spend time working on getting that missing 750k which will dilute your focus from the product you actually want to build. But the initial investor will still want that product.

I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.

If they stingy French investors have invested then into Docker, which now you say is posed for "a buyout at ridiculous valuation"? Yes sounds like they missed out big.

> If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.

How is this a bad thing? Compare this requirement to, say, Uber, who has been losing billions, and has used investor money to engage in price dumping to corner the market.

There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money" startups. Uber is the latter and imo the role of the investor is to be able to distinguish which one is which.

However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing contract work to hopefully fund your idea one day. It will slow you down and also quite possibly tangle you in support contracts in products you don't actually want to maintain.

> There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money"

My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.

> However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds

This has always been the case. Until unlimited US money perverted the incentives to become "waste billions to corner the market by barely legal means" or "wasted billions until someone buys you".

Every cost causes a difference at the margin. Businesses are fragile when small. And most of these costs are just economic dead weight, ridiculous paper proof of work schemes where all you're really proving is that you've wasted a certain amount of time and money.

If I were to identify one big flaw, it would be that EU governments don't recognize that small businesses can't do regulatory compliance as much, so they should be exempted. Or you get no small business formation that can turn into large businesses.

There's usually a certain amount of exemptions already. Things like not requiring audits for companies below certain turnover etc.

The cost/effort of running a tiny deadbeat company in Europe can be very marginal (I run one). That's how all plumbers and carpenters and car mechanics run their businesses: if they can you can too.

Don't they recognize that, with somewhat perverse consequences? I remember reading there is a cliff in compliance in France where if you hit 50 employees additional regulations kick in, so companies are motivated to stay at 49.

This is a really damaging take. In any area imaginable, a low barrier to entry has been proven to breed more people on the high end of skill and commitment. There's nothing wrong with folks who don't want to deal with dehumanizing red tape.

> only really lose the easy "fill in a form and off you go" businesses. I don't imagine that's much of a loss

Sounds like you could easily justify soviet bureaucracy with that logic.

> It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low

You're not wrong about this specifically. But why would I open in a difficult country if I can open in an easy country?

The article, most people here, and the reality disagrees with that. The point is that all the giants are elsewhere.

Case in point as mentioned elsewhere: we actually have ISP competition here.

In reality there is some lag until effects are seen. Europe's economy has been huge very recently, and it's still significant, but the trend is that it's significance is shrinking as it can't keep up with American and Asian growth

I agree but this isn't a done deal. The potential is there and there is no reason why it shouldn't be able to compete.

and as a result of this, you're more innovative how...?

So in ISP world, EU has better offerings than most of US, though US had a good 2020 when it comes to download speeds: https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-intern...

However, upload speeds are still a joke in the US - I can’t buy more than 35mbps up, period. That comes with 1gbps down (in reality that’s never stable, so more like 800-900mbps). At previous home I had options of two providers with one offering symmetrical 1gbps fiber - that’s fairly rare in US.

Costs are another issue - US ~$61 per month, OECD average is ~$37: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared...

Now this is mostly services innovation, not telecom tech itself, but still has very tangible benefits to consumers and barriers to operating a business.

I’m not claiming we are more innovative as a result.

As a result we have much better mobile plans for example. Every time I see a Ting ad I marvel at how expensive their plans are, and then they compare that to the likes of Verizon…

Most millionaires aren't from/based in the US? I feel like European red tape mediates the concentration of wealth somewhat compared to the US

> concentrate wealth

Kind of like AT&T, Alphabet, Comcast and Disney?

Not to invoke whataboutism, but wealth concentration is as much of an issue in the US, if not more.

Because 60% of European GDP is government spending, and the place where government gets most of that money is by taxing private businesses (profits & cap gains), their products when sold (VAT and import duties), and their employees when they are paid by said businesses (income tax).

No businesses means no wealth to redistribute which means no safety net.

They are literally the bedrock of the entire system. So yes, society should place massive importance on making it easy for them to operate.

1. Because new companies create jobs.

2. People with jobs pay taxes. As do the companies themselves.

3. Taxes pay for social safety net?

You make it sound like having ease to start companies leads to a better social security net. Easier to start companies -> more companies -> more taxes -> safety net.

Sounds credible in theory, but the reality is that despite it being harder in the EU than the US to start a company, the safety net is much stronger in the EU. So there must be something wrong in that theory.

I never made that claim at all.

What I claimed is without jobs and companies (economic activity) you cant collect taxes which pay for social safety nets.

Am I wrong? Or is there magic fairy dust to pay for a social safety net I don’t know about?

Yeah, took a few hours of work and 1 week for correspondence to clear. Your point?

Having started 3 companies in Belgium, and one in Spain. My experience differs. Opening an branch in the US was a pain in comparison.

I love our continent, for its project, its diversity, and trying to find the right balance between work and social welfare. Life can be more than GDP or market cap.

I stopped my The Economist subscription long time ago, per their constant anti-European bashing.

Also the measure of market cap could be debated. One could question if it is the right measurement and if market cap is a good approximate of economical prosperity. Or of a fair share of this prosperity being distributed to society.

There are many ways to measure and argue what the author is trying to convey. They choose one that fit their argument.

As a counter point one could look at the writings of authors like Varoufakis for example and see a different world view.

Because imho the article is based on the authors world view. With cherry picked metrics and stats to support.

It isn't empirical but using data to appear as such.

There is much to critique in Europe. But the article sadly fails to tackle the interesting things.

It just opens up the field for an argumentative pissing match EU vs. US (pardon my French).

ps: I also started a company. It was as easy as filling out a form. Even taxes are doable on my own. So nothing too much of a hurdle there.

There's a case to be made that Europe is playing the smart game here.

At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - most of the others do not wire a single cent there.

Yes, the overall money flow in IT is from EU to US, but expressed as ROI, it's unlikely to be very impressive.

(1) - apart from Microsoft. Imho they're the true crown jewel of the US software sector. Most of the world's economy runs on Microsoft Office in one way or another

> most of the others do not wire a single cent there

That's a bit exaggerated. I'm sure EU businesses rely on Facebook for advertising or on Google/Microsoft/Amazon for software.

Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!

Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.

Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.

Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.

> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!

Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.

The lack of VC funding is a real problem.

On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard.

There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone.

In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault.

Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.

I totally agree with you that the EU's efforts to replicate a SV style startup ecosystem are misguided and ineffective.

The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.

There is absolutely a thriving tech scene in Europe. Here is for example a list gaming companies in Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_companies_o...

That’s not “a thriving tech scene” then.

If VCs making money is your definition of a successful tech scene you sir or ma’am are utterly lost. You think Jobs or Gates were sweating over VC returns instead of drooling over the innovation and egregious wealth and cultural change they conceived?

This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you have a EU grant base company, you are a meme.

Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.

If the benefits of companies touted elsewhere in the thread is providing employment, why don't you hire two people to work 8 hour days and get more done?

If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.

16 hours a day of work is crazy and you don’t have to work that much to have decent money.

No offense, but that stuff's pocket change to the actual economies of the EU. It's a redistribution of wealth without having to admit that's what it really is, and if it scores a success, great.

It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP.

Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.

>working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic

As they should.

I don't think op is gonna admit to being a lunatic, even if they do engage in such behaviors like thinking that working 16h per day isn't insanity

I'd prefer Dolce Vita over 16h/day anytime! :-)

Also wages in tech in the EU are laughably bad compared to USA. I'm in the UK, same problem. Yet everyone seems to think that a couple weeks more holiday makes up for it.

What is the overall cost of living associated with the respective salary. Amd of people proposing a free market, why is it a problem that suddenly the same job is paid more for in a more competitive job market?

As others pointed out, CoL is also way lower in most parts were there are relevant jobs to be had.

I am working a job that would pay at least double in SF. I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week, 6 weeks of holiday, paid overtime, really good health care covered by insurance.

I live in one of the four largest cities in Germany. So I benefit from the infrastructure like theater, Medical stuff and so on as well.

And also the ability to start a business on the side with filling out a single form.

And I am able to generate FU money from my main salary, go on trips, give to charity and such.

Reading about insane prices for living in SF or other tech regions puts a damper on the high salaries IMHO.

But I also define my life not by the amount on my pay check.

> I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week

How is that possible? When I look at typical wages in Germany (50k - 80k Euros) vs cost of houses that size in Germany's four biggest cities (800k to over 1 Million Euros), something does not add up. Either your pay is way above market rates or you got your property way below market rate.

Either way, to me at least, your situation is extremely fortunate but you're an outlier and no developer moving to Germany could replicate it in the current market conditions.

I worked with contractors based in Denver, their salaries were 3 times mine. I don't think cost of living in Denver is insane? Property prices were I am are insane

Wages in tech are laughably bad anywhere in the world, when compared to US. Tech landscape in Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea or Taiwan looks much more like Europe than like US. US is the outlier here, not Europe

Isn’t university for your children free in Germany? That’s like a 100-200 thousand dollar savings if you have two kids you want to put through college vs the USA.

The average college graduate in the US has $35,000 in debt. There are plenty of excellent, cheap public universities. If you don’t want to work in journalism, academia, management consulting or one of the other bastions of privilege and pedigree there’s little reason to pay the premium necessary to go to a top tier private university. And every single person who pays sticker price to go to a no name private college is wasting their money.

Or the healthcare, saner rent prices, better traffic because of public transit?

I believe you have to pay 500 EUR/year, it may have changed though.

It's strange but true. I live in the UK and I think I could get paid 3-5x more in the US. But even though I'm annoyed by that pay gap, I will never work without healthcare and only two weeks of PTO.

At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.

I don't get this part - 2 weeks PTO - OK - tech companies are flexible in looking for good talent - if you're getting paid 2x you can work 6months a year to break even. Now taking off 6 months unpaid isn't realistic - but a month off isn't that unusual.

And the healthcare part what are you even talking about - what employer doesn't provide healthcare in tech ? You'll likely have a good plan an better coverage than NHS (eg. decent dental)

Your understanding of tech work in the US is basically wrong in every way, and sounds like you're parroting BBC propaganda on why everywhere is terrible but the UK.

I suggest living in the US for a year or two to see if it's the dystopian hellscape you think it is - you can always fly home to the glorious NHS if you stub your toe.

2 weeks of PTO is the customary minimum in the US, and there is no legal minimum at all. Nonetheless, many people at good jobs receive more like 4-5 weeks of PTO. It really depends on where you work. I've never had less than 4 weeks of PTO at any vaguely tech-oriented company.

I believe in some US states there is exactly zero legal pto

Yes but you get so much more for your taxes here that it evens out, in fact I think someone ran the numbers with Denmark and US as examples and actually the Denmark example had more disposable income after tax because the US person had to pay so much more for so much extra stuff that's included here.

Silicon Valley is top, we all know that. But in terms of startup funding, after the SFBA and Beijing comes London. In terms of startup-friendliness, London typically beats every US hub except the SFBA, and occasionally ties with NYC.

I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states

> in terms of startup funding, after the SFBA and Beijing comes London

Do not believe this is correct. In 2016, London was No. 7, after 6 American cities; it was ahead of Beijing and Shanghai individually, though not collectively [1]. The next European city is Paris, in No. 16, after Chicago, Austin and Mumbai.

[1[] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/globa...

https://technation.io/report2021/#key-statistics

I was slightly off, London comes 4th after the Bay Area, Beijing and New York, but handily wins out over Boston, Seattle, or any EU city.

London is definitely better than the continent for startups, and you can reasonably build a successful startup there (I have). However, in my experience any of the major US tech hubs still have significant competitive advantages versus London for starting a company.

The business and culture of tech startups is just a really mature and highly developed industry in the US. It started in Silicon Valley but these days it is spread across several cities, and there is more domain specialization by city including Silicon Valley.

London is not EU, even when they were a member they were a separate story.

This is entirely accurate from my experience. It's cargo cult "tech scene".

Firing isn't 'harder', it just has to be done correctly.

Giving two written warnings two weeks apart for one of the five objective reasons that are grounds for firing, then firing with a three month notice period is by definition harder than saying "you're fired, please leave the building immediately".

I don't know what country you are talking about but if it was about Germany then what you just said is a lot of bullshit.

What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.

This was an approximation of Norway's rules and was not a load of bullshit. Briefly, firing someone is only allowed if their position is no longer necessary and no alternative position exists, the company needs to reduce its headcount or if the employee has significantly derelicted their duties. There are significant judicial details that usually count in the employee's favor.

Standard terms in employment agreements is three months' notice, although as little as one month may be agreed upon when employment starts. The agreed notice period can only rarely be deviated from without mutual agreement.

So employ people on fixed 3 month contracts, or even by day. You’ll have to pay more of course.

This was actually illegal in Norway until recently. It is legal now, though, and you're right that this is an option. For in-demand professions like software engineers, such a scheme actually requires salaries that are comparable to those of moderately high cost-of-living areas in the US.

A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.

I wish there were thriving tech scene in Europe.

>There is a thriving tech scene in Europe

please explain

Hard to know where to start!

Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.

This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58...

There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.

On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.

I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.

... Just Eat Takaway. Booking.com are from the Netherlands too.

Spotify is Swedish. As is Klarna and Mojang. SoundCloud is German. Mixcloud British.

Several of the covid vaccines were develeoped in europe (albeit under the umbrella of US companies such as J&J).

Volkwagen and Volvo are beating Tesla in sales numbers and in getting self driving to market hands down.

There is lots of high tech in Europe.

Just Because there are no redicoulous overvalued tech corps, does not mean we aren't creating solid, profitable tech here.

The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was AFAIK developed entirely in Germany by BioNTech. Pfizer helped with regulatory affairs, logistics and mass production.

It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV. Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultural capital of Berlin - from what I hear, Sweden is a good place for software businesses.

mRNA vaccine was originated in the US in the 1980s [1]. BioNTech got in the mRNA game thanks to Katalin Kariko, who was a professor at UPenn [2].

Moderna started working at mRNA based approach in the similar timeframe, and get similar results. Also what does it tell you that Moderna can do trial and manufacturing on its own, as opposed to BioNTech who has to rely on Pfizer? Trial was absolutely vital in order to bring the vaccine to the mass that quickly, and Pfizer's role was essential.

Of course Katalin is also Hungarian, so again, it goes to prove that things are complicated than it appears.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

It is not possible to argue that Volvo is European anymore unfortunately.

It was sold by the american company Ford to the chinese company Geely.

Volvo cars was sold, volvo trucks and heavy machinery for construction are still independent

Volvo's R&D is in Sweden.

> Booking.com are from the Netherlands too.

Booking has been owned by a US company since 2005.

That’s the US M.O. any innovation gets bought out by successful companies.

Nothing you mentioned is high tech. Car companies haven't innovated anything in decades. Spotify is a perfect example of a company with lots of revenue that doesn't do anything interesting with it.

> Spotify is a perfect example of a company with lots of revenue that doesn't do anything interesting with it.

As an investor, I'm very reluctant of those typical SV companies who use debt to finance growth. Not for nothing that the investing world is jitterish lately, with an interest-rate increase looming: it's very bad for tech stocks.

I see those as unhealthy or at least very risky (though I have one or two of those in my portfolio: spread)

Spotify is still growing at mad pace; even compared to the COVID/lockdown boom, they are doing well. Spending loads of cash to landgrab the podcast market. Spending loads of cash to move into the audiobook market.

I can understand the grudge some US people feel over a company like Spotify: why not a US-company? Why are they attacking our tech-pride AAPL? Why are they taking hold of our US-media (podcasts) and our entertainment (music)? But Spotify really is what it is: a tech success. Albeit a more typical European one: less debt, slower, more organic growth and less horn-tooting.

(this is not investment advise)

Ramp up of electric car production isn't innovation?

You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe. But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

> You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe.

There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.

> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.

I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.

your anecdotal evidence is quite entertaining. please continue.

Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account because we're trying for a different kind of site here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.

will do. you are correct.

Work for a tech company in Europe. GDPR compliance is costing us massive manpower hours and money spent on compliance consultants. Most of my salary gets obliterated before it reaches me and I make significantly less than tech workers in the US.

There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.

> I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.

It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work.

You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life

What country, how much do you pay, why are you so concerned about personal information when you could simply not collect it?

Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest

What a completely ignorant line of questioning. You have no idea what product I work on or if I have anything to do with compliance. And you appear to assume that the use of personal data is a binary switch you can just flip on or off, regardless of the product.

Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?

Your attitude to other people’s data is exactly why the GDPR and similar rules like HIPA exist.

Who said anything about my attitude toward other people's data? You don't know anything about me. Stop turning me into your vehicle to rail against what you see as an industry abuse of personal data.

What I said was that GDPR compliance is expensive and uses manpower that US companies don't need to spend like EU companies, which may help to explain the challenges that EU tech companies face when competing with US tech companies. The degree of regulatory compliance EU companies must satisfy might also explain why I'm getting paid peanuts when I could be earning more in the US.

Not a fan of GDPR either.

I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.

And child care costs and college savings.

I've looked into this, and moving to the US has absolutely zero appeal.

The US corporate tax code is incomprehensible, healthcare is an expensive and high-risk potentially deadly nightmare, small businesses in tech are permanently at risk from litigation by patent trolls, scam artists, and other white collar thuggery, if you're reliant on a big corporate provider for payments or market access or promotion - and you usually are - they can shut you down without notice on a whim.

But - best of all - I don't need to worry about being murdered by some rando on my way to work.

Good luck being allowed to move to the US unless you're already a high net worth individual or have a high public profile. An EB-x series visa isn't going to get you far unless you're already a household name or you have an unusually in-demand skill. Most startups don't count.

While you can game the system in various ways, or at least try to, the reality is that your immigration status is likely to be precarious for a good long time.

Lack of national healthcare really puts a damper on free labor movement in the US. You want to start a company but also have health insurance for your family? That'll be $12,000 with a massive deductible... Gets in the way of a lot of would be entrepreneurs

The EU is no different with regards to movement. Just consider public health care in say Norway and in Bulgaria. Yeah it's financed indirectly by public funding but the quality can be terrible. In Croatia (where I'm from) you will regularly wait for 6+ months on life altering procedures and tests. And the public health system is in a constant crisis because of underfunding and overuse - just a few months ago drug suppliers cut off a few big public hospitals because the debt was insane (and the entire system is operating with billions of debt rolling over for years).

The upside is because of such huge disparities in standard of living, if you can work remotely you can afford to use all private healthcare that's actually decent and affordable by western standards (it's built for medical tourism for western countries).

>In Croatia (where I'm from) you will regularly wait for 6+ months on life altering procedures and tests.

Anecdote meet anecdote: I had to wait over a year for life altering surgery. My first test after becoming a candidate was over 6 months out.

I'm in the US.

That sounds like a donor list thing ? I'm talking about more day to day stuff. Like recently my friend had a seizure while driving, thankfully he was at a red light, but lost his licence etc. He had to wait 2 and a half months for diagnostic scans. He went private and got it done in a week. Other friend had herniated disk, 6 months till his appointment with a specialist. Also went private and got surgery done in a month or so.

Not a donor list thing. Had to wait months for scans, referrals and tests.

All private.

Sorry didn't understand candidate part. Anyway - yeah I have no doubt private systems can get overloaded too, here if you have the money you have access to really good private system and low wait times, going public is guaranteed waiting list.

Norway's public healthcare isn't terrible at all. There are some painful cases where a well-insured US individual would get better treatment, and there are frequently waiting lines of a few months, but for the vast majority it works quite well.

There are private-sector providers for taking up the slack if you can pay and the public sector drags its feet. The cost generally matches what the treatment costs to produce.

I recently had the choice between paying $3000 to get a novel treatment procedure done in Belgium on short notice, or pay $400 for two private consultations, leading to a referral to the public system with 6 months of waiting to get it done through the public system here. Went for the latter.

It‘s a little bit unfair to use Croatia and compare it to the US. Health care is still national in the EU. It makes sense for a way poorer country to have a worse system. Let’s see how the Croatian system will be, once the overall standard of living has caught up.

But that's the part people don't often realise. They talk about the richest countries in EU while ingoring the poor, reality is EU has way more inequality and variability between countries. And it's not just poor countries that have problem with overloaded public healthcare, it's a gradient.

It’s not about moving country, it’s about loving jobs. Does your healthcare rely on your job in Croatia?

For those who never experienced state run healthcare it sounds like an amazing idea.

It is free! It is for all! Amazing.

I usually ask my friends from the US how much do they like the service at DMV. Usually they hate it.

So you want your healthcare to be run as DMV?

Healthcare is great when you have a choice. The private healthcare industry is booming in Easter Europe now because there are people who can afford it. The state run hospitals are the last thing that are a monopoly, so it remains very badly managed, inefficient and extremely dangerous. I have lost many relatives in such institutions, because of infections due to lack of cleaning or hospital staff ignoring basic things.

I think based on statistics the best option is private healthcare with state sponsored minimum insurance, something similar to the Dutch way.

The NHS is one of the most efficient health systems in the world.

Although it's been underfunded for decades now. But even the private healthcare in UK is waaay more affordable than in US. The free healthcare creates a price anchor (because if you can't afford it you can have the less shiny but free version, and still not die)

The NHS is probably the worst health care system in the developed world.

Hahahahahaha! It really really isn’t, it’s a national treasure and it’s amazing how well it runs given how numerous governments have underfunded it. Every study on international healthcare shows the NHS is near the top in every category and once you factor in the cost per person it’s the top in the world.

If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US, EXCEPT it won’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you’ll get the same treatment and it will work out at a literal fraction of the cost to the tax payer - insurance based and tax payer based are basically the same (cost is distributed over everyone contributing) except the government don’t arbitrarily say pay xxx thousand and the stress of “how to pay for this” is removed meaning people can focus on recovery and not on making ends meet.

And? What is your point?

The Dutch is also one of the best. Singapore too. You can bring examples pro contra for both types.

I think the regulation that makes a healthcare good or bad, not that it is private or public. Many public healthcares are in Eastern Europe are bad. Some private healthcares are also bad. I still think that a combination of private and public offering is probably the best with regulation being the QA.

My previous comment was to point out that public healthcares can be bad, if it was not clear. Many of my friends do not want to have any nuanced discussion just, public good, private bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands

> The Dutch is also one of the best.

Sure, once you get passed the useless home doctor (huisarts).

Holland spends 20% more on health per capita than the Uk

As much as I'd like to agree (I am pro-national healthcare for the US) - if you don't have $20,000 (let's say that covers your annual premiums & deductible) - you sure as heck don't have the funds to quit your job and become a full-time entrepreneur.

You can start a software business in Austria with just a laptop and get health insurance for 32€/month (total social security payments if you don't make profits are about 150€/month). Fees for registering a company are waived/reduced for founders. I had nowhere near $20000 when I started.

Sure, if you want to open a capital intensive business like a restaurant, you'll need more money. But that's the same everywhere.

It's somewhat more difficult for founding a limited liability company there, where the capital requirements are much higher than in most other countries (Eur 35K).

Yeah, that's why most founders don't actually register a GmbH. Many small businesses are sole proprietors, even businesses with a few employees.

Isn't it possible to fund a "mini" GmbH with only 10.000€ and build up to the 35.000€ over a span of a couple of years or something? I think I remember something like that being the case.

If you aren’t raking it in personally you can just get a cheap option from the exchange - if you are raking it in you can afford it

I keep hearing this but just to the North in Canada the entrepreneurship is much weaker but nobody worries about healthcare.

> general negative attitudes, poor work ethic

Citations needed as to how they’re significantly worse in Europe than the US. Perhaps they’re simply smart enough not to work hard for someone else’s benefit.

> freedom of movement

The only negative (at least in a strictly US context between the states) is that it forces issues that the Constitution says are the domain of the states into problems that only the Federal government can solve. No city can unilaterally decided to end homelessness with its borders if the homeless from the next state over are free to move in.

Speaking of frictionless employment labor movement… In the USA I once called in sick on a Monday & was retroactively fired the previous Friday.

It depends, were you hired the previous Thursday?

So what if they were? If you're ill, you're ill and should not have to go in to work. Sometimes ill-timed shit happens. Only in the US you can get fired for it. My mind boggles at the concept of "retroactive" firing... wtf is that even?

I suppose the upside is you can quit at anytime with no notice. That’s great from an employee perspective, in a feeling of freedom sense.

Nope. I’d been there for 6 months.

You are of course entitled to your personal opinion, and sharing it is OK, but this:

> ... the low work ethic .. (I exaggerate, slightly).

is a very wide-sweeping generalization which insults many of us.

Why is it that, every time someone complains about "low work ethics", the underlying context is always "my employees don't want to spend mad hours working on my idea for the compensation I think should be fair for them"?

Work ethics goes both ways BTW, and your "glory to firing someone with less than six months notice" doesn't sit square with me. "firing" is terminating for serious misconduct, notice is not due. I assume you meant laying off for economical reasons. So you want exemplary work ethics from the employees, and then quickly get rid of them when you think you don't need them anymore, did I get that right?

I am not a European but I have spent some time there. I agree with you totally. I always find it bizarre that Americans complain about European work ethic as if people there are just slacking off. I look back at my experience there and I can say I have only respect for my ex-colleagues’ work ethics. There are slackers everywhere and the US is no different. It’s just that for many people in the US answering your emails on the weekends and staying late in the office equate to stronger work ethics. Btw, this same culture exists at many companies in Singapore too. But I don’t recall Singaporeans calling Europeans lazy because of that.

Your comment would be more interesting without hyperbole.

I'm surprised by the low work ethics remark. In my (little) experience I didn't find americans so high on work ethics. It's more like your career is more important to self esteem. This can correlate with being good at work or at posturing.

Americans are willing to work longer hours which is used as proxy for hard work. Which is then coupled with collegues being whole your social network and meetings socialization. Afaik, by all studies, working 10 hours a day wont make you produce more, but it feels like it does.

Oddly enough I've struggled to find any data showing that the US is actually better for entrepreneurs. It's all anecdotal. I have a small business but it will stay small because I need my day job for health care.

Granted, this is but one article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-w...

Gdp is not anecdotal.

Nor productivity:

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b2774f97-en/1/2/1/index....

That only shows the evolution, what are the actual numbers?

Let's just say...that the data doesn't exactly support the thesis that the lack of venture funding is a drag on Europe's productivity

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

Very strange to see UK and South Korea so low.

"Oddly enough I've struggled to find any data showing that the US is actually better for entrepreneurs"

That literally was what the article was about. Tons of figures/facts in the article.

Indeed, I was just skittish about hanging my hat on a single article.

I have founded 3 companies in Germany and I have lived in the States.

A couple of comments:

1. Founding the companies was complex I have to admit, and costly. But I would not refrain from founding the next one. It’s just a matter of practice I guess. Still I’d love to have an easier, less expensive way.

2. The EU is a composition of many states, just like the US. People, processes differ a lot.

3. FWIW, filing personal taxes in the States was way more than complicated than over here.

Hmm so 1) the corporate tax rate and other tax benefits in many EU countries is much lower than the US (I imagine you must have heard of US companies using their European operations to dodge us taxes)

2) The quality of labor you can hire is generally higher in europe (for example its common knowledge that facebook london has better engineers)

I think what the us has is access to venture capital which i agree is difficult in europe.

I have a really hard time believing theres higher quality talent in Europe in general.

Why? The EU has a higher population than the US and it has many top notch universities.

Europe tends to lose many of its tech talents to the US, but if you pay comparable salaries you'll keep them.

Because on average all of the top talent goes to the US companies that pay an order of magnitude more than the locals (FAANG).

Hyperbole much? I earn around 100k€ in Munich. You‘re saying the local google or apple would pay me a million per year? Wow.

My point was that there is local talent. Just pay US salaries and it will stay put.

In Europe college and university is cheaper (and in some places free). Also kids and younger persons are more tech savvy in Europe.

Actual tax rate dont matter, the US system allows you to easily not pay any or very little, compared to Europe. Tax benefits are very little. Please show me a company in the US that pays 25% Corp tax + all the other stuff you have to pay in most European countries.

> show me a company in the US that pays 25% Corp tax

In 2020, the companies in the S&P 500 paid an effective tax rate of 23.77% [1]. On average, it's about 25%.

[1] https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios...

You are exaggerating as you say yourself, but these things are mostly not issues at all. You just hire people (and that does not cost much: made a company including employees a few weeks ago for 1000E first year including accounting and payroll, no work from me; if 1000E is an issue, maybe do something else) to handle them, and, you put some provisions in for the stuff you mention, like in the US, to use your ranting language, you do for the over the top insane crazy bonkers legal crap you have there and find normal. At least paying some poor sod I have to fire a few months more does not keep me up at night as I know this upfront. Legal shit does but that's not relevant in the EU (sue me, see where that goes). You are used to the one, I am to the other.

The real EU problem is on the one hand conservative nature: almost no way to get significant investment here without actually proving you already (before you started!) can pay it back 10x. And then what you rightly say: this is not a union (yet): most countries just don't mesh and the language and culture barriers are somewhat crippling. Not how you say because those barriers do not exist anymore for decades already. Not like the current US yet but things take time: think you had some civil war and such. We are still recovering from border altering world wars and some idiots cutting up this continent like it was a cake after. Let's give half to an idiot Russian dictator and let's not bother to remove Franco. This takes time. Unless you install an actual dictator for the entire thing, this takes time in any place.

Not sure if these will be solved ever but not in my lifetime.

And another cultural thing: I like free time: that you do not probably means something you might want to discuss with someone, but working all hours of the day is something I do not miss and do not wish on anyone.

And as last point: what company do you run or what is your yearly turnover? Because, besides all your ranting, there is the real meat. How is the great US of A working out for your personally with all its blessings? Because I am afraid it will be slightly disappointing after all this. I mean with my 8 weeks a month vacation I have time to write tripe like this, but you...

This comment gets it. I would say there is a European identity in the sense that we all kind of know our ancestors have been here for a long time and have dominated world history in most regards. Our fellow Europeans neighbors have the same identity, since they did the same thing in general. They also created successful nations. We created humanism in the process. But that’s about where it stops. We mostly killed each other in the whole process after all.

There is no such thing as a European work ethic. Maybe a Spanish or a German, but even those places are diverse.

I can confirm with the anecdote of an acquaintance in the EU. Nothing fancy. Just a hair salon. He was complaining about the authorities coming down to inspect it, looking for the smallest details to fine him. Sign was the wrong size, it wasn't illuminated the right way. Something about serving tea. It seemed absurd to me. On the other hand, it was a nice place to get a haircut.

Can confirm. My parents own a restaurant in Italy and if the authorities come it’s a € 2000/3000 fine for sure.

For a small seasonal business that’s substantial.

For example if you give a receipt and the customer misplaces it on the way out and can’t find anymore, you’re liable for tax evasion. Never mind that the POS has its own registry they can check. For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”

When the restaurant was opened about 20 years ago, all sorts of departments came to check it out and suggest whatever ridiculous change.

Food safety in Italy however is probably among the best in the world due to this.

> For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”

Honest question: is this actually the law, or a tactic of an official seeking a bribe?

There is a very similar situation in Germany. The reason behind this is that you can use older POS systems for tax fraud (I never fully understood the details), which apparently was quite a thing amongst smaller businesses. The tax authorities then demanded a perfect chain of paper records (apparently the paper recipe contains some kind of a reference to earlier transactions). Bizarrely, they actually asked customers to keep these receipts which pretty much no one really did, but it was a public topic for a couple of weeks.

German source:

https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/FAQ/2020-0...

"It uses blockchain" eyeroll

On old POS systems you can just roll back the transactions and put the cash in your pocket, as if it never happened…

In Italy, that’s law because there used to be/is (don’t know which is true) a culture where, some/many cafes and restaurants let some/many visitors pay ‘under the table’, dodging VAT taxes.

That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)

In Poland the tax office clerks just go shopping and if they are not offered a receipt, the store will be heavily fined. The customer is not liable, but the shop is, so pretty much everyone will offer you a receipt immediately.

I’m not really familiar with the matter but this year they started requiring immediate reporting from the POS as far as I know. That should tell you how serious they are about receipts in Italy (because there is/was widespread fraud.)

This is the same on Germany, maybe it's an EU thing

It's the law

The number of times restaurants tried to defraud me makes me happy that authorities are getting stricter. Waiters make "errors" on the handwritten receipt that somehow are always in the restaurants favor, or they "forget" a 20€ bill when giving you change.

Even with the new EU laws regarding receipt, it's surprising how often you are told that you can't pay by card because the machine is broken, or that the waiter "accidentally" hands you the wrong kind of receipt (they hand you an order summary, which was not yet finalized and is not an official invoice, and after you pay they cancel everything so that the payment is not recorded).

Just curious, mind messaging me the restaurant? I'm in the US but my family is from Milano and have had a family shop for decades. Hoping to visit again soon!

Nice try, Italian tax police /s

Did he fill his shop windows with flashing TV screens in a historic area, which there are a lot of? Did he think he can serve beverages without a hygiene pass?

There maybe be reasonable explanations.

It makes no sense to talk about how hard it is to start a company in the EU because it will differ between every country. Better you say which country your experience is from.

Having moved to the EU from the US nearly a decade ago I really have to agree - everything happens at a _glacial_ pace. Not just business - everything. Buying a house takes months, getting anything built takes months, medical appointments take months, paperwork for immigration takes _years_, the "grants" from the government for innovation are maybe a few months' pay in the US, and notice periods you have to give your employer are customarily _shockingly_ long. Why the hell should I have to work for 3 months after giving notice?!?!!

The EU gets a lot of things right but starting a company here would be playing on hard mode, to say the least.

>the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly)

I'd say we better keep our lifestyles and worldviews and be corporate also-runs, than be slaves also-run-by-corporations like the US.

This thread is full of people explaining that Europeans are lazy and unproductive workers lacking ambition based on anecdotes of completely normal occurrences like an employee taking a vacation.

Disagree. It’s the mentality, not the vacation. My job in the US gives 5 weeks vacation per year. You are expected to disconnect and it’s embarrassing if email/text while on leave - people think you’re nuts.

But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that idea” and “i can start on that after the holiday”.

I’m not knocking the lifestyle at all! If work is just a paycheck, then hats off to you. But don’t expect innovation and money to flow. It’ll go elsewhere.

I think it's worth understanding that there are two categories of employee.

The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.

The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.

There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.

So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.

For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.

We’re clearly talking about technological work here.

So? Just because you are a tech worker doesn't have to mean you love your job. Lots of companies fill your day with so much bureaucracy and unrelated stuff to your actual tech work you might hate your job none the less.

Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.

Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?

Work is just a paycheque. If they stopped paying me, I'd stop showing up. I really doubt I'll greet the reaper with the regret of not spending more time at the office.

I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.

I guess it depends on what you consider cool. I work in drug discovery and no, I couldn't do that without some deep pocketed investors.

You could still do it with 6 weeks vacation though, with the sort of balance Europeans have come to expect.

The work mentality is more like "we're the slaves to the coproration, our lives belong to it".

It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”.

That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations.

The hundreds of millions of US employees in BS companies, with BS products, who don't like their jobs, and don't think they're building something cool, and so on, also don't get to enjoy any significant vacation time.

Heck, papers pushers, burger flipers, and corporate cubicle drones don't get to enjoy vacations. And it's not because the McDonalds employee "wants to build something cool" while burger-flipping...

It's a distortion to make it about "lets do something cool” US mentality vs "I don't care for my job" European mentality. It's purely the puritan work ethic culture, as established by the religious minded people that dominated early America, plus the rampant release of corporate rule and cut-throat neoliberalism post-80s.

No, it's clearly not slavery because these are folks who could work anywhere.

The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.

>No, it's clearly not slavery because these are folks who could work anywhere.

Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.

Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.

That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.

>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.

Innovation is not about the hours.

Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.

And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.

And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).

If work ethic = employees working very hard, I don't think it is a good indicator of a business doing well. From my experience in software at least, Europeans tend to have an excellent work discipline with healthy work-life boundaries. When you look at aggregates, the productivity is pretty much on par if not better, and you have to question why other countries promote this culture of peer pressure where employees constantly feel the need to outcompete each other, while the business thinks it's extracting maximum value out of its resources.

> the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly)

No country has 8 weeks of vacations. Not even counting statutory + public holidays

> Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice

I don't think even Italy is 6 months. Germany isn't. But way to go generalizing it for the whole EU. (also pop quiz, what do the acronyms GmbH, SARL and OÜ mean?)

> with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US)

Not my experience, but not surprising given the amount of fiction in your post.

Yes, vacations are financed as a hidden tax on normal working days - the worker pays for it from his labor cost. What exactly is the problem with having 10% lower salary in exchange for 10% more time? How is it supposed to be a drag on business formation? btw, LLCs are a possibility everywhere

Every EU country I've been to has a concept of probation periods - during the first ~3 months, the employer can freely terminate the new employee, or at least choose not to extent his contract. Also, collective dismissals are about equally as difficult in most of the EU than in the US (1)

What is unarguably easier in the US is to capriciously fire an individual on the spot for trivial reasons. I wouldn't call that a feature, though

(1) - https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_OV

I found that opening a company in one of the most bureaucratic countries in EU (Austria) was very easy. I did everything online, from my personal immigration to founding an LLC. The only in person meeting was for establishing a permanent residence.

Yes, the taxes are high, social security is high, but being a programmer makes things much simpler as we are the high earners in this age.

Ah, ”the EU”, only something like 27 countries with highly different laws and economies..

… languages, markets, histories, governments etc etc

In Sweden you can more or less fire anyone as long as you're a small company, without any long notice. I don't recognize the other negative comments either. Taxes are high, but VAT doesn't matter at all unless you're a B2C company (and really it's the consumer paying for it, not you). Vacation is 5 weeks which I realize is a lot compared to the US (I've worked in US so know how it works). But if those extra 3 weeks are what kills your company?

Tax on salaries are quite high, but salaries are significantly lower (especially compared to the level of competence you get - but it varies).

On the other hand we have free health care (with a quality level similar to the top 20-50% level you get in the US is I'm not mistaken) and great support systems should you fail or something happens.

Admin is not obscene and you actually get a lot of help should you need it from the government agencies like the tax authorities.

Then Sweden has a similar level of entrepreneurship per capita as California or the SF region even I believe.

Access to capital do suck compared to the US (based on my limited perspective).

Fear of getting sued for silly shit is unheard of here compared to the US.

TLDR; It varies a lot between countries in the EU. It can be problematic to be overly generalistic in your description. It's for sure different, but I'm not sure everything just sucks compared to the US.

I agree on most things on the list, but work ethics? At least here it seems pretty strong, and result focused (so getting things done is more important then doing overtime).

> Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.

The US is a great hopping off point. As in, its great to start from here and take advantage of any system almost anywhere else in the world.

But I would say a wealthy EU or wealthy Swiss starting point is good too. But I wouldn't incorporate there and especially not have employees.

Both systems work the best for business in intangibles.

Many US states are very incompetent and bureaucratic and slow in business formation as well. Its just that those states are completely ignored for the ones that excel in those products.

I do not want the EU to become like the US.

All those things make for a stronger top 0.1% at the detriment of the rest of society.

It used to indeed be the case that in Belgium to fire someone the notice period could be quite literally years. However, Belgium changed its laws in 2014. For firing someone it's now 1 week the first 3 months, and then it goes up more slowly. For example, for someone who's been there 4 years it is a 3 month notice period.

As for free movement of labor inside the EU, it is mostly irrelevant how easy it is because of cultural barriers. People don't want to work in a region where they don't speak the language. See for example how workers in Belgium mostly do not cross the language boundary between north and south, despite having an identical legal regime. Europe's polyglot nature makes it quite literally impossible to match the U.S. or China wrt the movement of labor.

China and Japan were both rife with incompatible dialects for a long time. Japan fixed this using a ruthless campaign that basically analogized non-eastern dialect speakers as hillbillies and through standardized education abd media. China did some of that. Both did language reforms.

The US also has a program like this, albeit much softer and mostly generational.

India is a massively polyglot nation that has used a program of education and incentives to maintain and grow English.

The fact that Europe has not nominated a cross-EU language and taken action to move toward linguistic unity is actually an outlier. Note that I’m not saying that this would be a good thing but it certainly would have upsides.

> I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once).

I moved here from the US to start a company, and for anyone reading, listen to the above advice. (I'm not a US citizen, so non-trivial to do a startup).

Since we are piling up anecdotal evidence. I am in the NL and starting a company took, I don’t know, 30 minutes of my time? Filling in a form on a website and a 10 minute appointment at the Chamber of Commerce.

Filing taxes is really straightforward. E.g., for VAT , the administration program that we use spits out quarterly numbers, a submit them through the tax office’s website.

Having started a business twice, both times I was surprised how easy and straightforward it is.

I have to add that the overhead of starting a company probably varies a lot between countries. We once considered opening a company in Germany and it seemed like a lot of paperwork. The problem was not the language barrier — my wife is a native speaker.

Was this an eenmanszaak ( sole propietor ) or VOF ?

Sounds like an awesome place for workers!

Low pay and not meaningful/interesting work but otherwise it’s good as a “lifestyle” gig.

Where was DeepMind founded?

in London, UK, which is a different beast than the continent.

Still part of Europe and until recently the EU as well.

Yet again, people start companies all the time and succeed - just not megacorps like in the US. Maybe you just hadn't what it takes?

> the low work ethic

Incredible to read this... the top-15 of most productive countries [1] are all European save for the US and Australia, which are populated with a huge population of European descent.

[1] https://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/

having lived and worked in Asia, I have to say that table looks weird. i have found no other place in this planet where people work longer and better than certain places in Asia.

If they worked "better" then they wouldn't be working longer.

Their French counterparts do the same job in 5 hours instead of 10.

The table is not about work ethic, but about how much money is made. The latter is probably correlated with the former, but only partially.

I think the whole western world has been fed a pile of anti American garbage for a generation. My wife actually said she wouldn't live there because she was afraid of getting shot. Ridiculous. Meanwhile everyone in the non western world wants to get to the USA. I'm in the UK and I'm now glad we have left the EU. The vaccine debacle has maybe shown us what the eu actually is: a massive bureaucracy where no one takes any responsibility for failings. (I voted to remain, I shouldn't have)

As someone who isn’t an American but has lived/worked in half a dozen countries, yes, the US is pretty great.

Is it perfect? No. But claims of it being a “living hell hole” are just internet tough talk.

As someone in a similar situation, the US is extremely variable. It can be great or it can really suck. If your standard for greatness is that there are parts of it that are great then most countried in the world are great.

What is more interesting is the bottom quintile and the worst it can get. Because you'll find developped cities and rich neighborhoods with high safety and good healthcare in a lot of places. How bad it's likely to get and how much you have to worry as the average person is the better metric.

On the other hand, people here don't tend to go bankrupt and lose their house, healthcare (ironically) and life (from a social aspect) in general when they don't have a perfect health. They don't have to hide their state of wellbeing from their employer in the hope of not getting fired, and they don't have to worry about living on the street because they don't have a job for a bit.

Businesses are fun and all, but in practical terms, they are just sociopaths when compared to what people actually need.

Don't misinterpret this as "and therefore it should be hard to have a business", but the American way is one I'd run away from if it ever tried to apply over here. I run a business and it's fine. Not amazing, not a hockeystick and I'm also not interested in either. It's fine, and that's all it needs to be.

You need to be employed in order to get Healthcare in most of the EU countries anyway, so it's not all that rosy as Americans tend to think.

No, that's false. At the very least, all residents are covered, regardless of their working status in Austria, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Serbia, and Sweden.

In Romania you need to be employed to have the public health insurance. There is a long list of other exceptions, but being an entrepreneur who just started a company and doesn't have income is not one of them.

Add the Netherlands. Healthcare insurance is mandatory.

The subject is about mobility of workforce.

add Germany to that list.

Which countries is that exactly? I know for a fact Finland and Spain have free healthcare for the unemployed.

Is that for everyone or the Unemployed that you have to register to be a part of with terms & conditions? Because Estonia also gives healthcare to the Unemployed, but you have to be signed up at the job agency and I think you have to have had a job recently. If you don't fulfill some other criteria you can be taken off the list.

For everyone in Finland at least, don't know for Spain...

What? I think citation needed here.

As far as I am aware, healthcare in most EU States is universal and not dependent on employment.

Sure you can get private healthcare through employment, but the state systems is there for everyone if they need it.

I think they probably mean if you move countries, for example it took a few months for me to get setup with Iceland’s health service when I moved here.

But there’s easy schemes to retain cover like EHIC. https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=559

>On the other hand, people here don't tend to go bankrupt and lose their house, healthcare (ironically) and life (from a social aspect) in general when they don't have a perfect health

Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.

> The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.

Maybe that 4% is correct, but for sure how to deal with paying for medical care is a big worry for many people in the US.

There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?

I'm the slightly higher tier of low-wage worker that does get decent hours and benefits, and I still don't go to the doctor.

My general experience when not going in to deal with a discrete injury is that I pay 50 bucks to have someone ask me some questions, shrug, and give me the card to someone else who would cost another 50 bucks that I can no longer spare.

>There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?

Details vary by state, but generally Medicaid, a public insurance program, kicks in for those below a certain income level.

Contrary to what Reddit would have you believe, 91% of Americans have medical insurance (<https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...>), whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers.

Two thirds of Americans have private medical insurance. One third have public insurance of some type, including 20% from the aforementioned Medicaid.

Some large chunk of the 4-6% differential in the US versus other countries is illegal aliens who don't qualify for public insurance and are working cash jobs that don't provide private insurance. The only such national systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366487/

Here is a different take from a newer paper.

> The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.

Really though it suggests the US has both a medical bankruptcy problem as well as a missing safety net problem. I know I’m seriously thinking about leaving to avoid a likely major medical event killing my net worth in later life.

>Here is a different take from a newer paper.

This paper is by Himmelstein and Woolhandler, the same authors who wrote the earlier one that the authors the Post piece cites was responding to. As the Post piece says:

>So Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started with the illness, and asked how much more likely people were to declare bankruptcy after they got sick. That’s a much better way to tease out causation than asking whether someone who just went through a financially ruinous divorce also owed his or her dermatologist thousands of dollars.

In other words, it's not surprising that someone who declares bankruptcy owes medical bills among all the bills he is behind on. While "correlation is not causation" is used far too often by people who don't really understand its meaning, this is an example. Again, from the Post piece:

>That jibes with what we’ve seen in the bankruptcy data since Obamacare passed. If medical bills really were driving so many people into bankruptcy, then we would have expected filings to plummet after 2013, when millions of people gained health insurance coverage. Instead we see a smooth decline from the recession-era peak.

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