Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for healthcare and standard of living (2019)

Both are overpopulated now. I live in a peripheral suburb outside of Phoenix, AZ, first moving to the state in 2007. My rent has gone up by $500 just in the last 6 months. There's talk among the locals that the water supply won't sustain this growth.

Florida is in much worse shape from what I hear but I can't speak on specifics. I know the cost of living there is insane though. I'd pick Idaho or maybe rural CO if I were to do it over.

It's a complex issue.

First, expats are not a homogeneous bunch. In a lot of developing countries in SE Asia, for instance, the expat communities are not made up of large numbers of truly affluent people. Generally, the expats who live in the expensive buildings/houses and employ local help (maids, cooks, etc.) work for large companies (in higher-level roles), embassies and NGOs. The majority of the "digital nomad" types don't actually live affluent lifestyles in my experience. Sure, they make a lot more than the locals, but they're not spending $3,000/month on an apartment in Bangkok or HCMC. This doesn't mean they don't have an effect on local economies, but there just aren't enough expats in fast-growing, fast-developing cities to cause negative gentrification effects like you see in places like the SF Bay Area.

Second, in some places, like Bali, the economies are totally built around the presence of foreigners (expats, "semi-permanent" foreign residents and foreign tourists). Take them away and the locals suffer massively. Bali has been absolutely bleeding because of COVID. I guarantee you if you asked the average Balinese person if they want "normal" to return (which means a heavy foreigner population), they would tell you "yes x10000000000000".

Finally, a lot of developing countries, while still poor, have fast-growing economies and there is a lot of development taking place that is driven by the growing wealth and urbanization locally. I worked in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) for a time and while you could see the effect expats had in a neighborhood like BBK1, other neighborhoods were clearly changing more as a result of the growing wealth of locals and increased urbanization (people coming from the countryside to find opportunity in the city).

Open up your closets, cabinets, etc. How many of the goods you own are made in the West? How many are made in places like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc.?

How can you say that Western society is "relatively egalitarian" when the majority of the goods Westerners consume are produced in poor or developing countries where inequality is the rule not the exception?

For heaven's sake, for decades, the West has literally shipped its trash to these countries for disposal or "recycling".

The West is only "relatively egalitarian" so long as you pretend that the West is a closed, self-contained society. In reality, the West has outsourced poverty, ultra-abusive labor practices, corruption, pollution and environmental destruction to countries most of their citizens can't locate on a map. Out of sight, out of mind.

If a Westerner is "morally defective" for choosing to live in poor, polluted, corrupt countries, what should one make of the Westerners who wouldn't want to even visit them but have no problem filling their lives with products made in them?

> In these third world countries, the lives of affluent expats and the natives who serve them pretty much don’t intersect at all except through the service relationship.

Ever lived in, say, the SF Bay Area? The dynamic between the affluent and the people who serve them isn't as different in the West as you make it out to be. The hotshot FANG engineer making $400,000/year and living in a $2.5 million house in Cupertino likely isn't "intersecting" with the cook at a Chipotle who shares an apartment with 3 other people in the worst neighborhood in the East Bay and commutes with multiple people to Mountain View every day.

How is this any different from in the US (or anywhere else, really)? Most well-off (or even just "comfortable") people don't mix much with low-income folks, outside of service relationships.

I say relative poverty because most people there aren't that badly off and their economy is booming, growing far faster than the UK one.

(Believe I read something similar once about folks trying to help the homeless. If the helper benefited one iota as well, the helper was branded a "monster.")

I don't believe this is a healthy or valid take. We should all be helping each other, and a win/win situation is the best outcome imho. Because it incentivizes more.

To play devil's advocate, say it's not about having servants or "living like a king", but about having the freedom to do things that don't make money.

How many bad things are done because someone thought it was "necessary" to pay rent, or to afford college for their kid?

If, instead of optimizing ad engagement to pay a mortgage in Palo Alto, I buy a modest house, outright, in a little Columbian town nobody's heard of, and open an ice cream shop out of the first floor, is that so bad? There's an electrician on YouTube who did that.

Or if I spend my days building strange concrete domes and planting banana trees? There's another guy who does that.

Or running a backpacker hostel that employs (and pays fairly) a local cook and a maid? Probably a lot of us have stayed at such a place.

I had friends who backpacked through South America after college. They ran into an American who, one day in the States, said "fuck it", got in his pickup truck, and started driving south. Eventually he fell in with an Amazon tribe; he doesn't speak the language too well, but he has the truck and he knows how to drive, and that's how he contributes. He's much happier now. Who knows what he'd had to do to pay rent in America.

What if all I want to do is walk around, and drink tea, and chat with people? What if I'm somehow tired and bored at the same time?

What if I get a donkey and work as a traveling children's library?

Do I have to keep my position at the top of World Empire, or can I just take my good fortune and use it to drop out and chill?

I'm no savior, but maybe I can get a well drilled or something. Maybe I need the water too. Or maybe I can do the bushes in the local park, if everybody else is too busy with some other thing that earns dinero.

Hell, there's a white girl on YouTube who met a Maasai dude in Africa, married him, and now lives there doing... I don't know what, but it can't earn much. Granted I think she's going to be a little more independent than is, uh, traditional in that culture. But he's like, "ok, whatever, I have a good wife". Doesn't demand much, is happy.

Surely if you're born inside the harem, with all its advantages, there's got to be a way out.

Hell, if I'm an American, maybe me leaving creates a slot at a company that'll be filled by an H1B, and the circle of life continues. "Have at it, brother; I'm done."

What not-so-few people try doing is to establish "on paper" residence in a lower tax country while staying most of the time in the (usually) state where they were born, have family, relations and often also economical interests.

While (again usually) most retired people actually move to the other country, often because - besides the tax lowering - it offers better climate, lower costs, etc., a number of people still working try that way to simply save on taxes, particularly if having a large income and thus being on a higher tax bracket.

Once a month or so there is a newspaper article here in Italy about <put here the name of a reknown athlete/singer/musician/actor/artist/whatever> having been fined for high sums for having established residence in (say) Montecarlo or in the UK (before Brexit) but actually being in Italy all the time or nearly so.

See this webpage from this official European Union website. Click/press on “Retired Person Abroad” (https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/taxes/double-taxa...)

“If you have retired to another EU country and spend more than 6 months a year there, that country may consider you a tax-resident. If so, you may have to pay tax to that country on your total worldwide income - including pensions you receive from other EU countries.

Exception: public sector pensions are usually taxed only in the country of the administration that employed you.”

But yeah, the above website is called Your Europe, and it is extremely useful for such information.

* Ingredient costs go up rapidly too.

* Because of that, the profit margins are narrow in the restaurant business at all restaurant price levels. There are rich restauranteurs here and there but owning a high end restaurant is still a very risky business venture and many are barely scraping by.

* You become talent bound. Finding chefs who can prepare food at that level is hard. Designing a good menu is very hard. Food is like any other creative art, you can't just arbitrarily decide to make amazing food—many try and fail.

* There is limited demand. Most people can't afford to eat high end food often and even those who can often don't want to go to the same restaurant over and over.

I don't see how any of this maps to the topic being discussed.

I would implore you to not hold your breath on this

>The odd thing to me is I don't see our relationship as any more or less valid, who the fuck cares that we married for a different reason than someone else?

It's only odd to you because you're not affected by it. Men in local populations have a MUCH HARDER time finding wives that are local. When a foreigner jumps in and snatches up one while barely speaking the language it's a little "wtf."

Let's put things into reality. The fact of the matter is women marry up. They are attracted to men with higher status. Globally, white men occupy this status. Not officially mind you, no white man or person of any race would say this, but subconsciously that's the hierarchy. That's why white men, if they date women of other races often have a much easier time. Women everywhere tend to just put white men on that pedestal. In terms of status, a white man can get better results if they date another woman of a different class and race then they would if they dated some women of the same race and status. That's reality. The statistics on dating sites verify this racial phenomenon.

So of course if the tables were turned and rich asian and black men came stateside and started taking away white women the resentment would exist in the other direction. And such resentment does sort of exist (not in the dating scene) in terms of employment and jobs.

It's normal there's nothing wrong or right about the situation, but it is what it is.

This is a very new cultural assumption (something like the 1960s ?)

Prior to that marriage was a lot less about contemporary concepts like "emotional love", "my forever best friend" etc.

Vietnam still has a very old religious under pinning (idk the exact definitions, but something like daoist - bhuddist - ancestor worship). Marriage and family means something very different there than in the US meaning (nearly formless these days)

The aggressor ended up getting in trouble and appeared on the local news but I'm sure a lot of people shared his toxic views.

[1] https://youtu.be/zagZ_ys76SA

That is, if they're insensitive selfish pricks who don't care about the suffering and injustice to others near them.

China is a Han supremacist society and I suspect that would be a more recent experience for them.

In my opinion, for their faults Americans are they are still more trustworthy than the Chinese.