No, it isn't. For example,
> 80% of the French earn less than €3k a month (equivalent to $36k a year) and 50% less than €2k a month ($24k a year). This is BEFORE taxes on income.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1564868574879129600
My statutory minimum holiday allowance is 20 days[0], plus public holidays, plus sick leave[1], plus extra leave for things like weddings and funerals, plus parents get 3 years parental leave[2].
[0] my actual paid holiday allowance is higher than that
[1] for example, I opened a tin of tomatoes badly during the pandemic, and gouged out a 2 mm x 2 mm x 20 mm region of skin on my finger, bleeding profusely. I got a paid week off work for it to heal.
[2] Not sure the details, looks like it changed recently, but I think at least some of that is paid leave, between €(300+150) and €(1800+900) per month.
As an american worker, this is unimagineable. My company just announced that they've increased the maternal leave to a whole 3 weeks... To show off how progressive and forward they are
Meanwhile heavily unionized casino workers in Las Vegas are having the company help them finance their houses, months of maternal leave, and will even help people pay for school. All for blue collar work
The costs are irrelevant, you can move anywhere for those three years.
Because at first glance, SF rents are so bad that learning to fly and owning a small aircraft isn't immediately obviously the more expensive option, like it would be in Europe.
Outside that, you're better off in Western or Northern Europe, or Canada.
Hard to employ the entire country as software engineers making 400k in SF.
Money is one of the means to reach quality of life but not the only one. As QoL goes I am much better off here. Having good social security and healthcare (which is entirely free in Spain) are part of that. Not having to worry or paying $1000+ insurance per month like in the US really makes life more relaxed.
I was contacted by a FAANG recently for a job interview but as it was in the US and not remote I declined (I work for another multinational but not a FAANG). I live alone and I like exploring the world, I've also lived in two other countries :) But the US is not one I'd pick. Probably would have when I was younger and didn't have a care in the world though.
I'm in a company where the employees own and run it. We chose to have the company pay all health insurance and the first $8000 of the deductible. 99% of the time there is $Zero out of pocket for families each year.
We has been running like this for 20 years.
But it also means that once you're between jobs you're really heavily out of pocket. It would be a reason to have to stay in a horrible job.
So $2000 a month and there's still deductibles??? Wow.
Not uncommon to have health insurance and not to be able to afford to use it.
Many times, it's just a different way of money routing to run the services that sustain a society. Nothing is free, it doesn't really matter if you first get the money into your bank account and then distribute it to hospitals and schools personally or you don't see the money in your account and it's distributed on your behalf to schools and hospitals.
Fun fact, in Europe they sell plane tickets to America where you can go and pay for your education and healthcare like just like an American.
The real plight of our times is housing anyway and that unfortunately is a global plight.
Its not only about the money my friend !
Please read the next line of my post, the one with the word "rights".
I think you will find it is an indisputable fact that employment rights in Western Europe are centuries ahead of the US.
I mean, there was another thread right here on HN posted yesterday about some guy worrying about mat/pat leave in the US. That's a given in Western Europe and woe betide the employer that tries to mess with your mat/pat rights !
In the US, you need to make good money because everything is out of pocket. If you don't, your quality is life is poor. This is also why whenever Americans compare their life to Europe, it's always numbers based. It's all we know: big numbers, better life.
Not to mention things that are not easily qualified by pure numbers, such as work culture, vacation time, public transit.
Europe has vastly more progressive and people friendly political, economic system and cultural setup. This is speaking as an American in tech with a relatively high income.
"But you have to wait months for a specialist in Canada!"
That's different from the US system, how? Have you ever tried to get appointments? We're also booking many months out.
"Want this live saving surgery? Let's see if insurance will cover it first, you might impact our profits. "
K...
It all sucks, but at least everyone gets it in some places as opposed to the system working for a privileged few. Ironically, the US does have socialized medicine, it's called Medicare, which is wildly popular.
The US healthcare system is one of the strongest arguments for government take over.
Sure there's some waiting lists but when I have something that may be serious I get seen right away.
In the Netherlands I've also had great care and even subsidized housing when I was making minimum wage.
At least in Berlin there's been big movements towards controlling rent prices, building social housing, socialising the current housing that exists. Etc.
So although it is a problem, is it going to be a problem in 20 years? What's being done in the USA, as a counterpart, to solve these problems? Everyone talks about unaffordable housing in the USA but their zoning laws are still horrible. So any changes will have to go through that first.
In that regard, I think European countries are in a much better standing to solve these problems.
I'll just state quality of life is flat out better in the US than Europe, and anything you use to show otherwise just proves that I'm right since you're just trying to reduce it to X metric.
> Net in France means after the taxes your employer pays but before the taxes you pay on your income. I know it's confusing!
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1564875547792080898
The benefits would have to be really, really sweet to consider making half as much a "worker's paradise."
While I agree with you in regards to things like quality of life, health care, food, housing and many services, in a globalized economy certain goods that one might want to purchase don't scale that much depending on where one lives.
For example, consider an iPhone 13, in this case a black one with 256 GB of storage and not bound to any particular carrier: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-13
It costs 929$.
Now here's the same model in a local store here in Latvia, also an iPhone 13, black color, 256 GB of memory: https://www.1a.lv/p/mobilais-telefons-apple-iphone-13-melna-...
It costs 939€ or around 934$.
You hear a lot about people in US making over 100k$ (with varying taxes) per year, over here this year I'll probably make around 36k$ before taxes and 24k$ after taxes. So essentially when the cost of goods in a globalized economy (for these products that cannot be produced locally) remains consistent across different nations, someone in the US will realistically have a purchasing power that is many times larger than mine.
Actually I wrote about my personal finances on my blog a while ago "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
Note: I don't consider myself as someone who can actually afford Apple devices, just using them as one example of that kind of a good; nobody is going to give you a car 2-3x cheaper just because you're from Latvia either, or a computer, or many other goods.
Of course, your argument does hold true for other things, for example it's possible to rent a studio apartment here for around 300-400$ per month. Also my university degrees were free (though people with worse grades might have to pay if there are not enough budget places allocated) and I haven't had any significant healthcare expenses myself as of yet.
Everyone needs these, not everyone needs an iPhone. Which means a country where everyone has their basic needs covered but no one has an iPhone, I would say, is a better country to live in (on average) than a country where half of the people have iPhones and houses and the other half doesn't have either houses or iPhones.
I think a lot of people fall into a trap of looking at their own circumstances and virtually move themselves to the other country, of course, as a software developer living in the bay area it's very unlikely you'll find a better place to live. You already have everything. But if you were to think "which country would you rather have been born in" the equation changes. Because in a country like the USA the chance of being poor or marginalised (think being born a woman or LGBT in a red state) is much higher than, say, France. Of course if you look at developing countries like Latvia the equation might change.
So, really, I think it's important to think about how much of our basic are covered for how much of the population.
This is fair, it's just that I feel like focusing on PPP often makes people miss out on certain aspects of the greater picture.
For example, why many might choose to work for either US companies if possible, or even travel to US to work and build as much capital as they can, before settling down either back home with a substantial amount of money, or alternatively choosing another country.
Of course, at that point one also cannot disregard how good or bad any given country is from a social standpoint, like human rights issues and so on.
I'd suggest that some sort of a smartphone is more or less necessary to function in a modern society, as might some sort of a laptop/netbook and an Internet connection, at least when you intend to live with any semblance of fitting in. Given that complex electronics aren't produced locally, you're dealing with whatever the market prices are.
Essentially, you have to be able to communicate through WhatsApp, or browse the web to use many of the governmental e-services, or do online banking and be able to confirm payments, or digitally sign documents which is getting increasingly more inevitable thanks to the "eParaksts" ("eSignature") system we have. Technically you could go without those, but it'd be a cumbersome life that wouldn't respect your time as much.
And whilst the situation regarding public transportation is better in Latvia and certain other countries when compared to US (or at least so I've been told, possibly owing to the much smaller size of the country), the fact that many might need to own motor vehicles hasn't become untrue either, especially the further into the rural regions you go and the more items you need to transport.
Of course, instead of finding happiness in being able to purchase bread, milk and cheese, some choose to work for foreign companies and make many times more money than they could ever hope to make locally, to lead more comfortable lives, a trend that's also useful to note. Or, curiously, many of them simple emigrate, given that they don't find satisfying local salaries and thus add to the "brain drain" that certain developing nations are facing. This also shouldn't be overlooked.
Another interesting thing I've noticed people utterly miss out on in our own industry is the claim that "developers are expensive, tools/software/servers are cheap", which gets more and more untrue the more in the direction of less well off countries you look. I don't doubt that in some places a beefy EC2 instance would essentially mean the salary of another developer.
Focusing just on PPP and being able to purchase the bare essentials utterly misses out on these finer points of what the differences in the absolute numbers actually mean.
That said, absolutely there is an arbitraged disparities going on where some contractor in India is making $10K/yr while someone in the US is making $250K/yr. Are statically priced global goods fair? Perhaps not, or perhaps the issue is our inability to agree on the worth of a human's labor, and the people who exploit that deficiency. Many US companies are now looking outside the US towards Europe for lower cost engineers, so who knows how long the levels.fyi salaries are going to last in the US.
Overall quality of life umbers suggest the opposite of what you say in the above comment. We should always go by data and objectivity:
https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/compare_countries_res...
Also, HDI for the US is higher that of France:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-co...
It's OK for different people to weight each of those things differently.
It's up to you to decide if that's a more fair comparison or not, but we are not most people so I find inequality an extremely important measure to adjust for.
I think I'd rather be poor or middle class in France than I would the USA. But I would prefer to be wealthy in the USA than in France.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisispress/2021/06/15/weaponiza...
Compare the top causes of personal bankruptcies in the USA and France. Medical debt is one of the top causes in the USA. I wasn't able to confirm this with a quick search, but I sincerely doubt that's true of France.
(The other replies here seem to have missed that Marazan's point was about financial ruin from medical expenses, and was not a general point about quality-of-life.)
Marazan's just randomly equated:
"You could live with dignity here in France on minimum wage"
with
"It means an adverse medical condition doesn't financially cripple you for life."
That is an important component of dignity but not the only one. Homelessness is another component. And frankly, after being in Paris and living in SF, I am much more worried about folks in Paris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
Funny that a perfectly reasonable comment is downvoted to the max because folks here can't deal with an objective truth that goes against their beliefs "US bad Muh Europe good".
I don't know about that, but - your French employer can certainly live off of you when you're making minimum wage.
> how about the US?
It's questionable whether you could live in dignity in the US regardless of what your salary is... just looking at the situation in Jackson, Mississipi right now, or the state of public transport or healthcare in a country as rich as the US makes you feel like someone is playing a cruel joke at people's expense.
This is ameliorated by federalism. If you don't want to live in crazytown, you can pull up roots and move to another state with a government that actually tries to identify and solve real problems.
I think the same dynamic plays out everywhere on Earth in different forms. In some places the folks seeking to avenge their honor, and the false friends stoking their grievances, are fewer, but there are some everywhere.
In my experience there's not much dignity in the US working for minimum wage.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
After taxes and healthcare, adjusting for instability, the median European worker is better off. The top-performing American, on the other hand, is far better off than their European counterpart*. This is the design. Immigration + better life for the ambitious at the cost of a worse life for the median. It’s a recipe for brain drain and it works, though we must be honest at what cost.
*non-aristocratic
It also does not match what the St. Louis Fed says [1], which says the US median individual income was $36k in 2019.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equival...