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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This was a great read. I think the true value of money is one of HN's biggest bubbles: the average person on here (but not all of us!) jumped right from their undergraduate career to making a six-figure salary in a city with lavish public amenities (by American standards). It's very easy to forget that the average American salary is less than half of that, and even that hides the number of people living well below the poverty line.

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This is a public website, there's no security check for "Is american, went to Stanford and lives in SF pulling 100k/yr".

I know plenty of software developers that frequent this site and make around 20-30k a year in Europe.

Certainly true, but by a process of self-selection, the population of the site does seem heavily skewed.

to be fair a 30k job in Warsaw or Prague gets you a living standard you get for 100k in SF so that perception has always been skewed. When I for the first time saw what people in SF and America more broadly pay on rent, education, childcare and transport I had a culture shock

The average rent for one bedroom apartment is 2.5k in SF, even in Berlin you're maybe paying 800 bucks.

No kidding, I see people posting pictures on Reddit of street food they bought in European countries like Europe for 1.50 euros that would easily cost 10 bucks + tips in the US.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FoodPorn/comments/thvk4e/a_casserol...

That salary seems very low, other than maybe for a junior. And even then - maybe. What sort of company pays that in 2022?

Anywhere in Southern or Eastern Europe that’s pretty much always the case.

I can attest to this

Sure; I’m not claiming that everybody on this site is those things (I’m only 1 of them myself.)

The point was about the average reader, and I think that holds. But I don’t actually have statistics to support that.

Sometimes I forget that those 6 figure jobs require one living in US, then I remember and I'm a bit happier with my not 6 figures job.

This is obviously a dig at quality of life in the US.

However, if you must choose between quality of life or higher salary, choose higher salary. Quality of life isn’t a liquid asset.

Also, in the United States your life is substantially better the more money you have.

> if you must choose between quality of life or higher salary, choose higher salary

Strongly disagree.

Literally probably the dumbest thing you could do. The point of money is for quality of life, if you can improve it without money that's perfect.

Money will buy you a good quality of life anywhere. If you settle for built in quality of life somewhere, then you are stuck at that location.

It depends quite a bit on location too. High COL cities you may as well halve the effective salary compared to generic Northeastern Suburb, even in a place like Princeton.

If you’re smart it’s a much better deal to live in the USA. It’s why you see so many Europeans move here and not the other way around.

Europe is better if you’re dumb as there are better social systems. You can just exist more easily there.

I presume you're trolling but I much prefer my life to my higher paid US colleagues lives. I don't work a second more than I'm required. I get more holidays. Better parental leave. Can't be fired at will.

Also requiring help from the welfare state has nothing to do with a persons intelligence. Sometimes there are massive recessions + unemployment...or global pandemics. Shit happens and when it does knowing that I'll be taken care of is worth a lot.

Just stating an observation that way more people come to the USA for work than the other direction. This is simply data.

Your feelings are anecdotal. My anecdotal evidence comes from my European friends here, sone from the greatest of social safety nets. The money is so insanely good here and they want to earn it.

That's unfortunately the reality of America, intelligence plus motivation are greatly rewarded. If you want to do anything more than exist on the standard scale it's considerably harder outside of the US.

I had the impression people don’t move from the US to Europe because they speak only English. In Berlin I’ve met many that gave up because of the language barriers.

On the other side, I have friends regretting their move to the US - citing a workaholic culture, high living costs, lot of cars and shopping, no safety, etc.

> On the other side, I have friends regretting their move to the US - citing a workaholic culture, high living costs, lot of cars and shopping, no safety, etc.

Lol this isn’t true. These are things you’ve been told that simply aren’t necessarily true. People work similarly to euros. Professionals get paid significantly more, get as much or more time off, and essentially get free healthcare if you understood our model. But let’s spin it a bit:

Things may cost more relative to the euro because the dollar has been so strong. We make much more income so things cost a bit more. Owning a car is awesome. Shopping is awesome. Only some sort of weird propaganda would convince someone that having freedom of travel and the ability to buy things is bad. No safety? You’re the guys with WW3 on your doorstep. Our entire culture is built on seeing the critical mistakes of Europe over the last 400 years and not repeating them.

As for language barriers - why aren’t Americans flocking to London? It’s a far more important city than Berlin. It’s because the living is inferior to here if you can earn a living. Less pay, small houses, less to do, bad weather, etc. Fun to visit though

I understand money and material wealth is very important for some people. Well, not everyone think this way. You can't buy happiness with money.

Traveling and learning new languages may help to see things from another perspective.

Yeah safety nets are weak, screw our fellow man, I mean after all everyone on the entire earth is born genetically and socioeconomically tabula rasa, amirite guys? GATTICA GATTICA GATTICA!

You stated it in terms of social privilege ("jumped right from their undergraduate career to making a six-figure salary in a city...") but it's just as well intellectual privilege. I have a blue collar background and high school criminal career that looks like any poor person buying $20 scratchers, but after four years working in software I was a 22 year-old making six figures also. It makes it harder to feel sympathy for those struggling: Indeed, repeatedly making wrong decisions has poor outcomes. At 18 it was pretty obvious that in the most basic sense, code = money.

It's not the poverty that makes it hard to relate, it's that they seem to almost live by instinct and emotion. I wish them well but don't know what's wrong in their heads or have the slightest idea of how to durably improve their lot, apart from setting an example of worldly rationality (aye, there's the rub).

"It makes it harder to feel sympathy for those struggling: Indeed, repeatedly making wrong decisions has poor outcomes. At 18 it was pretty obvious that in the most basic sense, code = money."

You have a LOT of work to do on emotional intelligence and having empathy for others bud. I am sure you worked really hard to get where you are and that you are also an intelligent person, but you obviously have some massive blindspots about how cruel society is and about how your own struggle through life has stunted your capacity to feel empathy for others.

Even if you were right and other people were struggling because they kept making wrong decisions when they simply could have made the right decisions, do you want to live in a society that treats these people with an intense degree of cruelty? What is the point of you being rewarded for making all the right choices when all around you people who aren't as smart or hard working as you are being utterly ground to pieces by the society you live in? Sure if you develop a sense of distance from the suffering of those people I suppose you can sleep good at night but that is doing a damage to your soul (in a vague meaning here, not implying religion necessarily) by numbing your capacity to connect with the rest of humanity.

That's why I self-deprecatingly concluded with "(aye, there's the rub)". My thinking is irredeemably worldly if not outright myopic. Then there's the futility of "setting an example" -- when I was young and poor, would I listen to or learn from someone like my older self? Doubtful. The exaggerated bravado of a Jay-Z was more meaningful, that is, fuel for meditations.

So, away from rationality and towards Romanticism? In any case, I contend that our smug, enlightened "emotionally intelligent" society wears no clothes as far as treatment of the poor is concerned. It looks a lot more emotional than intelligent.

As bad as America treats their poor it's far better than any other country truly contemporary to the US. Which is a high bar at any rate. The European social safety nets exist only due to the massive support given by the US over the last 100 years. Same for SK and Japan.

Exactly.

As someone who has been privileged to be naturally inclined towards the more lucrative parts of STEM, I still don’t want to see a society which rewards people like me in a vastly outsized way, while being indifferent or punitive to others whose interests or abilities or life experiences landed them outside a handful of in-demand professions. It’s very easy to attribute success to the choices we make, but so much of it is out of our control (where we live, what our society values, what advantages and disadvantages we inherit).

I have no sympathy for those who decided to spend high school smoking weed and screwing around and for those college students deciding to get a useless degree only to end up at Starbucks as a barista.

I know people who were _actually_ poor and had to drop out of high school to support their family. Those same people worked their ass off to go to community college and transfer to a better school and ended up successful. The idea that we should tax successful people like that to prop up leeches is just fundamentally wrong to me.

I know people who are poor and therefore were too poor to have their learning disabilities addressed early on with unsupportive families inflicting childhood trauma which results in them smoking weed as a teenager because there are no structures to support them towards health, but fuck them right? It’s so easy to judge people making seemingly bad decisions. Teenagers are still children whose behaviors are caused by their environments.

At what point do you draw the line between individual responsibility and blaming the system? When do a person's failures become their fault?

Frankly I believe people always make reasonable decisions once you account for their circumstances(this includes the circumstance of being too mentally ill or poorly socialized to make better decisions). If you want people to make better decisions then you must incentivize appropriately.

Bitterness and finger pointing are easy cognitive shortcuts using the just world fallacy. I’ve decided not to use easy logical fallacies to simplify the behavior model of other human beings.

Given that we don’t consider minors to be “individuals” for legal purposes until they become adults, waiting until they’re adults to assign responsibility seems like a reasonable first blush for a standard.

(More flippantly: we all know kids are stupid, even the smart ones. We also all understand, intuitively, that strong support systems are some of the best predictors for social and economic success in children. It doesn’t make any sense to sentence future adults to lives of indigence and poverty because someone else hasn’t given them the support they require.)

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