Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

economist.com

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My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds:

(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.

(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can't be invaded, isn't saddled with war or reconstruction debts.

(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.

(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is "you should lower your expectations". I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don't give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.

(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don't try because there's no "try again". They also have no access to capital, essentially.

(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.

On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.

Consider Japan:

(fact) a single market with a single language

(fact) geographically isolated

(fact) not much space

(fact) burned to the ground in WW2

and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories.

So what is the common thread? Free markets.

mortgage slavery is the common thread

for some reason this motivates people. primordial need for land ownership. the call of the feudalism.

engine runs out of steam once the growing cabal of landlords eat the last marginal production in excess of rate of interest

america has more land relative to its population so takes longer to nimbify it all

Why?

Seems to me owning what you create is the key, instead of having it ripped from your hands.

As if you can cleanly define "what you create". Or "you". Or "create".

Back to the philosophy playpen, John G.

I mean, yeah?

Markets are great at finding how much something is worth. uhhhh

Want to give some examples?

No examples needed. You can't adequately define "what you create", because nobody can. Where does your contribution begin, and end? Where does the contribution of your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your society begin, and end? To what extent did you create anything, or was it just a remix? Is everything a remix? Who are you? You have a unified, continuous sense of self, but most contemporary psychology finds it fairly easy to take people through processes that break this down (as do a number of psychedelics).

We don't need simplistic randian objectivism - it fails to describe the nuance, the beauty, the depth, the wonder, the complexity and the truth of reality.

If it wouldn't exist without your efforts, then you created it. There's no mystery to it. People freely willing to pay for it with their own money is sufficient evidence.

But if it wouldn't exist without other's people efforts too, then what? And they may be people you don't know. They may be people who are dead.

"paying with their own money" ... ack, not this simplistic nonsense again. People temporarily gain control over some measure of various economic resources. It's not their own money, beyond some temporary mutual agreement. Tomorrow, it may not be.

Also, people pay for things regardless of the creator or the morality of its creation. Their willingness to pay for something speaks to their relationship with the thing, not that of the thing's nominal "creator".

You’re mixing different levels of abstraction and equivocating across them.

Sure, no human could produce anything modern on their own, without knowledge, training, support, materials, products, labor, etc. that comes from others. A child raised by wolves will never launch a new line of tennis shoes.

At the same time, no complex effort comes to be without someone’s motivation and effort to take the risk, coordinate the activity and see it through. It doesn’t have to be one primary person to do so, but it certainly can be. It is not difficult to look at the history of a given project and conclude who most acutely put it into motion. The choice to incentivize this acute influence has trade-offs, but many different societies across history have tried many variations of what / where to incentivize. Abstracted, that’s one of the main points being discussed here.

That doesn’t mean all stories about who started / created / produced something are told accurately. But to throw your hands up and say “everything comes from everyone” is completely useless when designing society with the goal of solving problems, providing for its members and improving the human condition.

I didn't say "everything comes from everyone".

I said "nothing comes one person".

Ergo, there is no "what you create", at least in the sense of being able to point at something and say "I did that, it is my creation".

Sure, we may use this a shorthand for situations where the proximal effort came from one person. But it's just a shorthand, and should not obscure the deeper truth.

I'm not discussing the general thrust of TFA or the overall comment thread, just another randian and their simplistic ideas about how the world works.

Oh knock it off.

By your logic you can’t even define what a definition is so your whole schtick goes poof.

Bad unfalsifiable philosophy like this is why people hate philosophy. You’re just deliberately confusing people and trying to make yourself seem clever by sucking people into this silly definitions game.

This sounds like you're in favor of giving weight to religious arguments in economics. But I doubt that you'd agree with that idea. The fact is that some things cannot be determined with sufficient precision and inclination to be dismissive of this fact creates its own problems.

Please give examples!

Ok no examples _needed_ but please provide some.

I made software that helps my clients. I sell it for $1000/mo. I get $1000/mo and pay taxes on it. I have created $1000/mo.

Please explain what's not fair about this? The intricate nuance I'm missing? LOL

Let's say I work with one other person and pay them $1/hr, which they accept. They make my idea. I end up paying them like 100 and I make 1000/mo forever

Where's the nuance there?

1. you didn't create $1000/mo. You did something that caused the (temporary) transfer of control over $1000/mo of economic resources into your hands. That means that what you did was not judged as useless by everyone else in the society where you live - and that's good!

But the value of your software is utterly contingent on the full context of where you live. As many have noted, there are many highly paid jobs in (say) the USA that would simply have no value if you attempted to perform them in, say, Sudan (especially right now). So that $1000/mo is predicated on the work that others have done to create a context where your work actually has some value. Take that context away (or destroy it), and your work is close to worthless. So, where does the value in your work actually come from? No doubt some comes from you ... but how much is a lot harder to define.

2. I never said anything about fair.

3. I have no idea what your $1/hr example is intended to demonstrate.

1. What caused the transfer? If not value creation, why was it worth transferring? LOL

2. Ok, so capitalism is fair, then? you get paid what you're worth and control that value privately ... uhh...?

3. Explain the nuance of ownership there, what am I missing that makes it unfair?

> more land

So does S. America, which has never been prosperous.

argentina and venezuela have gone through periods of prosperity. Rule of law is too unstable for the system to get off the ground. Also political intervention by foreign actors, resource curse.

The great thing about free markets is that any country can do it. Free people thrive wherever they are.

Plenty of underdeveloped countries are free markets as well.

China is attempting to show that not even democracy is needed to be prosperous.

>>Plenty of underdeveloped countries are free markets as well.

All less developed free market economies have been free markets since relatively recently.

The wealthiest economies are generally those that adopted market based rules the earliest, e.g. the Anglosphere and North West Europe, which were free market based since the 19th century.

> Plenty of underdeveloped countries are free markets as well.

Example?

And you're right that democracy is not a requirement for free markets, though they usually go together.

Somalia and Yemen are about as free market as it gets.

(fact) Karoshi

I won't claim to know anything else about Japan. Would love to visit, but I'm not sure I'd love to be part of its economy as a salary man.

The Japanese directly intervened in their manufacturing companies, and shaped their economy via the Bank of Japan to "rebuild" and grow their economy. They also have a notoriously closed (to outsiders) economy.

Cuba's economy is closed to outsiders. Didn't make them prosperous. They have a state run bank, too. Didn't make them prosperous.

Whilst your comparison is problematic on the grounds that Cuba suffered from decades of economic sanctions, it still manages to do better than similar nearby economies, Haiti, Jamaica, etc.

The point I was making was that the person I was replying to was claiming that Japan's economic prosperity was due to it have a "free market" which it does not (unless you count socialism for the companies as "freedom").

One other thing that should be noted about the Japanese "miracle" is the fact that, at a crucial point in time, their manufacturing got a huge cash shot from the USA, due to a need for vehicles for the Korean War.

The USA has given huge cash shots to many countries, and no miracle resulted. Afghanistan, for a recent example. All that foreign aid money, which does not produce any visible results.

All that money probably had very visible results in places like Dubai?

> suffered from decades of economic sanctions

Protecting an economy is the same thing as economic sanctions. You can't claim that one results in prosperity while the other explains economic malaise.

> which it does not

It certainly does. It wasn't a perfect free market, though, as nothing human is perfect. But it was close enough to do the job.

BTW, I wrote that it was a free market.

>> suffered from decades of economic sanctions > Protecting an economy is the same thing as economic sanctions. You can't claim that one results in prosperity while the other explains economic malaise.

Uh, no.

Hard no.

> BTW, I wrote that it was a free market.

Yes, I realised it after I posted, but did not care to update what other people can see for themselves.

Embargo - hitting the other guy's foot with a hammer

Protectionism - hitting your own foot with a hammer

Brexit - swinging at your foot with a hammer and hitting your head.

How do you understand US subsidies on EV, only applying to US manufacturers?

Japan doesn’t have a nearby superpower that makes sabotaging your entire economy a yearly campaign point in order to prove your country sucks. Cuba’s had that for well over half a century.

The US was very helpful in protecting Cuba from the competition from the US economy.

Somehow, that didn't work out for Cuba.

Probably because every powerful economy of the past 6 centuries got there due to strong trade, which the US has gone out of its way to prevent Cuba from doing.

No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.

And yet the same people say that protectionism is good for the economy.

But protectionism is often good and necessary for a country's economy. If country A cannot produce a good x, then another country B can stifle A's technology growth for producing x by selling x outright at a cost A can not produce the good at (yet). If you ban the import/restrict of x from country B, you will have to pay some fixed costs to get the production of x up to speed; but you will end up with cheaper unit costs in the end. The catch is, you can not ban all imports outright because importing the technology to produce x will probably save you years on R&D and related costs. Like everything in economics, doing things are good and bad at the same time.

Protectionism takes many form and is controlled by the country doing it.

For instance subsidies for US EV véhicules in 2023 is protectionism and will probably benefit US company.

The US do that a lot for a free market proponent.

As opposed to sanction where it’s something that is imposed to you.

You mean sanctions?

That's what sanctions are. Protecting another country from your economy.

Cuba can’t control those sanctions. Protectionism imply that it’s a choice to bootstrap a sector.

For instance : Biden subsidies on EV véhicules apply to US companies only. That’s protectionism.

EU subsidies for EV works with any brands. So the subsidies money are currently going to Chinese EV manufacturers.

Cuba is in a unique position to be a ridiculously wealthy country. They can flaunt US long-arm jurisdiction (ie: FATCA) and act as a safe heaven for US/EU monies. The embargo on Cuba is pretty much self-imposed by the their current regime.

Yeah, being a criminal safe haven right next to a country that has no problem supporting terrorists and dropping bombs on civilian targets is a wonderful idea. Can’t imagine why they never tried it.

Communism doesn't have a great economic track record.

That kind of depends, the Asian countries that are communist seem to have struck a balance between capitalism and communism that suits them (China, Vietnam)

The DPRK seems to be a basket case, with regular crop failures (we are told), but its relationship with China ensures that it continues to survive.

Capitalism in countries like the USA seems to work for part of their population, but not all, there are large swathes of poverty and homelessness, and the disparity between the haves and have nots is enormous.

The whole point of an economic system, whether it be Capitalism, Socialism, or the more common middle ground (almost every country has struck a balance between the two, with Welfare states, public housing, public health, etc), is to ensure that resources are managed such that they provide for the population.

Capitalism is great at a micro level, people get to decide for themselves how to spend their time, what they want to eat/drink/wear/grow on their farms, and so forth.

But, it's absolutely horrendous at a state/macro level - can you imagine roading being multiple companies competing by putting half a dozen roads between yourself and your work? Emergency services have tried that model (Fire engines used to be owned by one insurance company, or another, and you would have a label on your home letting the crews know which insurance company you were insured by, so if the wrong fire crew showed up they would just watch as your home burnt down)

It's super easy to say "Capitalism has incentivised innovation" but the Soviets were ahead of the USA in several engineering fields, without capitalism (their incentive was competition with the USA)

Yeah. It's everything state owned that doesn't work very well eg. China in the 60s. But some stuff state owned, some free enterprise can work well eg. China in the 2000s. Or most of the west.

Curiously some of the problems that state ownership has also show up in capitalism - corporations that centralise decision making lose the ability to make fine grained, optimal local condition decisions.

And bureaucracy becomes a major headache.

A very common refrain at the moment is businesses wanting to be "nimble like start ups" but are unable to do so due to a myriad of reasons.

Not to mention the crucial land reform project targeting landlords:

> The government forced absentee landlords to sell all their land to the government. Farmers were allowed to own a small amount of farm land that they could rent out to others ( 2.5 acres or one hectare in most parts of Japan, and 10 acres or 4 hectares in Hokkaido), and had to sell any excess to the government. The government then sold this land, usually to the tenant who had been farming it. The result greatly improved the living conditions of farmers.

http://www.crosscurrents.hawaii.edu/content.aspx?lang=eng&si...

Given the political climate in the US — with accusations of socialism flying left and right — it is fascinating that they were able to conceive and execute literal redistribution of farmland and that is has been held up as a exemplary example of successful reforms. Perhaps there is more to the story, punishing the social class/monied interests that prosecuted the war?

There was considerable appetite for socialism immediately after the war, and the US officials of the early occupation were notably progressive (New Dealers, basically). As US-Soviet relations soured over the next 5 years, a lot of reforms were walked back or discarded, but some were obviously irreversible.

Japan's prosperity did not stem from agriculture.

Japan is a relatively populous single market with a single language -- about 125 million people at present. It's smaller than the USA, at about 332 million; but almost 60% larger than the most populous Western European country, Germany.

Your data are wrong.

Germany is home to approximately 83 million people. Japan 126 million. Japan is 40% bigger than Germany, not 60%.

US is roughly 334 million. Europe is rougly 748 million, of which the EU is roughly 447 million.

What data is wrong?

Germany is the most populous Western European country. The figures that you quote for the EU have nothing do with the comparison we're making in this thread.

I don't see how the figure for a percentage that you're quoting is compelling in any way:

126 / 1.6 = 78.75

126 / 1.4 = 90

1.6 * 83 = 132.8

1.4 * 83 = 116.2

(fact) Market was not free, US imports were taxed for decades and Japanese exports to the US were not effectively subsidizing Japanese economy for political reasons

Nothing is a perfect free market. One can still reap the benefits of free markets without them being perfect.

> So what is the common thread? Free markets.

Not when it comes to Japan.

During the post-war boom era the majority of its largest businesses were conglomerates with interlocking ownership structures that prevented accountability to shareholders. In addition to that a large amount of corporate investment was state-directed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).

It was an effective system (at least for a time) but not one that can be accurately described as driven by free markets.

This is not as cut and dried as you suggest.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato...

Cato has a pretty clear pro-market anti-regulation stance so this isn’t a surprising article from them.

Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes.

The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully turned the corner to being functioning democracies that are still driving economic growth rather than devolving into corrupt dictatorships.

And of course the biggest (in scale) economic success story of our time is China the last couple decades - which is not a democracy at all as well as having massive government intervention and ownership.

China was an economic backwater until they implemented free markets. The Chinese miracle is probably the biggest and most obvious example of how important free markets are to growth.

Not just free market, and not completely free markets (there’s a lot of government regulation, intervention and ownership). More specifically they followed Singapore’s model.

Tell me how Singapore is a democracy ?

They have elections and the government follows the wishes of the people to some extent even if it doesn't change over much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy_in_Si...

While I agree with you that free markets are a very powerful benefit to any state, you're biased in favor of it being the driver of America's success. America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and unimaginable amounts of diverse resources. These alone make for a very powerful state, no matter what system you have. Now add in that it's populace has more small armaments than every other armed forces in the world combined (including it's own), and the free markets, you get a pretty unbeatable recipe, unless theres another continent nobody knows about lurking around the corner waiting to be discovered.

"America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and unimaginable amounts of diverse resources."

If those matter so much, Mexico should be much stronger than it is. Unblockable access to two oceans, big population, reasonable amount of resources.

What is lacking is rule of law...

Well, yes, but that explains other phenomena that lead to this. Mexico has had a lot of state blunders in the past 150 years that have led to it being behind the US, and the US got there first. Once someone gets there, they necessarily have to try to prevent someone else from doing so. Mexico could've, but they made a lot of mistakes along the way that set them behind. Lawlessness is a symptom of these blunders.

It's hard to know who's best when you don't play fair

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

Is the US somehow unique in history for this?

If the US is simply better at it, isn't that relevant?

It's not like other (former) superpowers didn't do the exact same things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_involvement_in_regime_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_regime_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Third_World_relations

Touché. I suppose inwardly focused benevolent systems wouldn't spread because they wouldn't want overthrow other systems

Can a benevolent system be inwardly focused? How benevolent is it to ignore your neighbor?

If we say that it's not a pretend virtue to care about democracy and freedom around the world, then wouldn't it would be a reasonable imperative to interact with the world?

I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one.

Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.

Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.

In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.

It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.

Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.

A big issue for Canada is that the government focused on resource extraction.

The bigger issue is that isn’t just one government. And those governments largely do not allow free trade, especially historically. Only recently was a limited free trade agreement finally signed between provinces.

In the US, the federal government supersedes the individual states. It can come down heavy handed and say that trade between states is there to go nuts with. In Canada, the federal government is only an equal to the provinces and must stay in its lane. Matters like interprovincial trade is beyond its jurisdiction.

I heard (not verified) that every province of Canada trades more with USA than with any other province which I think is quite remarkable.

It's not really that remarkable. 98.6% of Canadas population lives in provinces that border the US. And provinces don't have much population. Outside Ontario, no province has more people than NYC. I would imagine more trade would happen with a land-bordering country with 90x the population than with a neighboring province.

Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.

> Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.

No. No US state has trade with Canada at more than 15% of state GDP <https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_tra...>, and Canada is a bigger trade partner for the US than China.

"No US state has trade with Canada as more than 15%" doesn't disprove that "every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state". GDP and interstate or international trade are pretty different concepts.

And while Canada is a bigger trade partner in total than China, I'm willing to bet that China is more evenly distributed between the states as a trade partner.

>I heard (not verified) that every province of Canada trades more with USA than with any other province which I think is quite remarkable.

As of 2017, international trade was 65% of Canadian GDP, compared to 40% of GDP for interprovincial trade. <https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA...>

Another way to think about this: <https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trad...>

It's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.

I’m Canadian and I think this is insane. Free trade between the provinces seems like a no-brainer. I also think we should be taking a harder look at our protectionism against American companies. I understand the value of having healthy domestic industries but the prices of cellphone plans here, for example, are nothing short of outrageous. We already pay so much more than Americans in taxes, must the services we buy from private companies also be so much more expensive than stateside?

Just to give you additional data point with cell phone prices.

I’m French but I’m living in the Us since a decade or so.

Cell phone prices are considerably cheaper in France ( €30 gets you unlimited everything on mobile and €80 is a combo for fiber + mobile plan )

But yet, that a heavily regulated market. If I’m correct there is 5 licences. All other companies have to buy and resell bandwidth thought those 5 licence. They tend to be French company.

Here I pay close to $200 total for the same service ( actually lesser service, I can’t have fiber where I live )

Maybe those expensive price are not due to that regulation? ( or maybe it is. I don’t know, but I wanted to give you a counter example )

Excellent points, but perhaps part of the reason for the price difference is because the US population is much more geographically dispersed, so the infrastructure costs are much higher.

Most people live in metro areas.

It depends how you define metro area. The US census 80% urban has a very broad definition of urban. My 7000 person town with many houses on dozens of acres is classified as urban because it’s within 50 miles of a major city and near some smaller ones.

30 euro seems reasonable. In the US you can get unlimited everything for $30 a month (well, after some amount of data in the gigs I think it downgrades from 5G in the fine print).

Maybe I missed that, what carrier do you have in mind?

Mint MVO on T-Mo network

https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/

There are a lot. Mint Mobile is $30/mo for unlimited if you pay for a year at once (a little more if you pay monthly). Visible is $30/mo but goes from 5G to 4G after 50GB (more expensive options have higher caps). There are lot of other ones out there, mostly trying to get people in the $20 range but with smaller limits on total data.

Right right right, my bad.

Now I remember why I switched from cricket. From time to time, I need data in Europe. On my US phone. That being said I should just switch when appropriate.

Thanks for reminding that.

I took the opportunity to check what the prices are in France now.

€20/month, and €10/month if you bundle it with your internet connection. ( bringing to a total of €40 )

I just checked the operator that historically has the better price. ( free.fr )

You're welcome for the reminder. People forget those alternatives exist.

Apparently Mint offers a US/Canada/Mexico plan for only a little more.

But when I travel internationally, I get a prepaid SIM when I land. It's cheap enough.

Canada has more expensive cellular service than the US which its self has more expensive service than EU.

It seems likely that population density is playing a role not just regulations. Sure there’s gaps in every country, but companies need to do more than just cover major cities or what’s the point of having a cellphone?

Along these lines, recently Alberta and BC got in a fight about oil pipelines and Alberta threatened to have its province owned liquor distributor monopoly stop buying BC wine lolol.

Canada isn’t a single language market.

It’s more than say, Spain+Germany+France+Italy+Uk

Well I guess the US has this problem too. I lived in a town where a significant portion of the population didn't speak English fluently

I think the downvotes are thinking you are joking about peoples’ english proficiency, while I assume you just mean there is a large Hispanic population in your town.

Ah. Yes correct. The majority of people in my town spoke spanish, and a significant percent did not speak english at all.

Well, even if you put language aside. Each European countries is still wildly différents.

Less and less, that’s true.

But regulation, borders, culture, habits, buying power, taste…

The first startup I worked for was wildly successful in France. We had dream of conquest of all Europe, of course.

Each new country was a headache, nothing to do with langage. ( language was the easy part )

People wanted different stuff. We were able to make it to Italy and the UK, got laughed out of the room in Germany. Never got more than mild traction in Spain and nobody talked to us in Portugal.

Randomly we got Chinese customers. Super hyped.

Then we realized that while doing all that … we had let our primary market down and that someone else was eating our lunch there.

Got bankrupt a year after.

It was poor execution. But I still think that expending from Nebraska to Missouri is easier :)

US has some unifying things, and maybe it isn't on the level of Europe, but there are massively different cultures in the US. States have a lot of power with regards to regulation.

It is true you can do business in other states pretty easily.

Almost the same fraction of people speak English at home in Canada as in the US.

It's an embarrassing example of how insanely big (and thus regionalized) Canada is and how untravelled that most Canadians are that in writing this post I apparently briefly forgot about the existence of Quebec and New Brunswick. lmao.

I haven't been to Quebec for probably 20 years. If it was dramatically cheaper and easier to travel in this country maybe I wouldn't (even briefly) forget that millions of Canadians speak French as their first language.

But interesting point in that it underlines the problems that a Canadian company would have in diversifying across its own nation. A successful Ontarian company would induce significant cost in expanding to Quebec, a remarkably different jurisdiction with important language regulation that needs to be respected, while the same sort of company in Vermont would have less barriers expanding to all its surrounding states.

(Also for completeness sake, one should point out that there are areas of Canada where indigenous languages are significantly spoken (eg. Nunavut) but they are quite small in population)

Couple points:

- Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...

>In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that.

As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>

>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.

Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.

Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.

Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.

As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.

> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault.

All 350 million of them?

And if you mean 'some of them are ambitious', surely you will have to accept that there are people in other countries who also share that property?

Culture is real.

Americans tend to be optimistic and positively inclined towards entrepreneurship. This is often refected in business practices and regulations.

The only thing those business practices and regulations reflect is that the 'entrepreneurs' get a lot of political and regulatory rights, and the people who work for them get very few.

That kind of arrangement works out very well for the former, but just because a king is doing well for himself doesn't mean that the serfs are 'positively culturally inclined towards autocracy.'

----

A country's regulations and politics aren't an average of its culture. They are an average of the culture of the politically powerful. All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.

[1] Way less powerful than incumbents, but for some strange reason, it's not sexy to point at Comcast and Kaiser and Exxon-Mobil and Wells Fargo as examples of brilliant entrepreneurship.

Way to move the goalposts.

> All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.

I haven't demonstrated anything yet. I've only asserted things.

OP is pointing out relative differences and more importantly, culture. The very concept of the "American Dream" is proof positive of that.

I will add that US is a strong "legal platform" for business. It has a very good law system and with more complex cases as precedents that other countries in world. It has also extra territorial reach.

> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying

Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade.

My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and beverage are not that hard to come by. A good house is indeed expensive in most of the world, but after that, what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”?

Build a school for those left behind.

If you want to build schools, why not get a job at the department of education?

Is that a serious question?

Look I know hacker news is biased towards thinking the solution to everything is "do a startup, become a billionaire, use your money to solve it" but there are legitimately other ways of getting things done, for example engaging with the civic process to get things solved through democracy.

I couldn't agree more. Where I think we disagree is the idea that working for the Dept. of Education will have one "opening schools" in the same (meaningful) way as the parent comment intends.

If one invests the ambition into rising into a position of power in the department of education, their impact on educating the youth will be many times bigger than that of the rich guy's who just throws some money at school building, but otherwise has no clue and no impact. This is often why ambitious people choose the public servant career path - they want to have a real impact.

> what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”

Stop working?

Not dying when you no longer have health insurance

Most countries are not like the US with its crazy health system.

You still get better and prompter health care when you pay more money in pretty much every country.

Like most things, it depends.

There’s no money you can pay to get a donated organ faster in most decent countries. There are treatments too expensive for even the best health plans and are only available through government sponsored systems. You couldn’t buy yourself a vaccine ahead of anyone else for any price during the covid peak, etc.

Health is as much a collective issue as it is an individual one.

Those things are all available to the ultra-wealthy.

For your last example: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/03/how-rich-and-privileged-...

That's why I prefaced the statements with “most decent countries”, etc. The U.S. health care system doesn't qualify as decent for the richest country on earth in the XXI century, unfortunatly.

No True Scotsman arguments aren't particularly interesting.

Canada, England, Brazil are far poorer and have way better health systems. I don’t understand how that’s a No True Scotsman fallacy.

The US has the best healthcare in the world, period. It's just not cheap. Brazil isn't even remotely comparable.

The best healthcare is available in the US, but it is not the best health care system. The system is awful in almost every possible dimension. And tying it to employment is one of the worst features.

The best healthcare system is the one available to most people, period.

And you’re right, Brazil’s is not even remotely comparable to the US. It’s universal, completely unrestricted and covers continental distances for over 200 million people. It’s not only free, but a fundamental right guaranteed by the country’s constitution.

If one has a serious disease like cancer and is not a millionaire, guess where there’s a greater chance of survival.

Also, when large scale sanitary solutions must be applied, like, you know, during a pandemic, wouldn’t it nice to have a way to reach millions of people other than improvising mass vaccination campaigns in stadiums and fairgrounds?

I mean, Jair wasn’t exactly a hero in the pandemic. There’s probably better examples.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/27/toll-bolsonaros-disastro...

He was disastrous. Fortunately he wasn’t reelected, may become unelectable and possibly imprisoned.

Any half decent administration could have aced with Brazil’s capillarity of health infrastructure and pro vaccination culture.

He managed to create an antivax movement and embezzle vacine money.

Universal, completely unrestricted, free, fundamental right... What a rosy picture you're painting. You can't possibly have ever dealt with this crap if that's what you think. I gotta wonder if you're even brazilian.

This is a system that tells citizens they have a constitutional right to health and that providing it is the state's responsibility. Rights are incredibly expensive though. Giving people "rights" is amazing when you're up for election. When the time to actually pay up comes, though, politicians can't leave the room fast enough.

The result is of course scarcity. There isn't enough for everyone. How do you manage scarcity in a supposedly universal system? Rationing, triaging. The system is forced to decide who's eligible for medical resources. People show up at the "basic health unit" at 3 in the morning and stand in massive lines so they can try to get a consult. There's often a literal quota of how many exams doctors can order per period of time, even cheap blood tests. The amount of bureaucracy you need to go through to get something like a CT scan or even an ultrasound is truly incredible. It can literally take years just to get a consult with a specialist who will actually fill out the paperwork you need. When faced with all this, most people just give up. Some seek the private sector. Others seek the justice system which just pens out an order for the city to pay up, screwing over literally everything and everyone else. They do that with the private sector too, making it increasingly unprofitable.

So we have a population that demands the best from doctors even though they have few resources with which to provide care. There are places in this country where doctors don't even have a sink they can use to wash their hands and yet they are are expected to attend to patients and solve all their problems in ten minutes each. That's how poorly developed this country is. If you're a doctor in these parts, defensive documentation is a vital skill: you have to literally write down stuff like "I wanted to do X but couldn't because X wasn't available" lest they accuse you of criminal negligence. This is especially true in emergency care, there are places here where you're essentially practicing war medicine. Emergency care basically turned into a dead end job that only doctors fresh out of medical school accept so they can make some money while they prepre for residency. Anyone with options would rather work elsewhere where they can practice medicine with a minimum of quality.

So people expect you to do more with less, sometimes with nothing. Do they value your work more for it? No. Doctor salaries are decreasing, autonomy is decreasing, insatisfaction is increasing. Doctors themselves don't get even paid on time: government being like 3 months late on payments is very common today. Another common practice: some small town mayor offers ridiculously high salaries to attract doctors and then just stops paying them when the money runs out. Sometimes a judge will even prevent doctors from leaving due to lack of payment because apparently the people have a constitutional right to their slave labor. Result: doctors wised up and now these regions just don't get any medical assistance at all because you'd have to be stupid to accept a job there. As a result, Lula wants to import doctors from Cuba and put them to work there.

This is also a huge theme here. Government just blames it all on doctors. Doctors don't want to go work for free in some shitty undeveloped region or the literal Amazon jungle? It's because they're mercenaries who care only about money. Their solution isn't less corruption and actual development of the nation but turning the medical profession into cheap labor. Lula is literally quoted saying "we need to create a new generation of leftist doctors who accept working for less". His solution to all this is to flood the job market with doctors by importing them from Cuba, increasing the number of medical schools, you name it. Low quality medical schools created just to pocket the sweet government student loans, often without even so much as a hospital for students to practice in. Quality of doctors is declining. Doctors screwing up classic myocardial infarction cases are making national news. Government couldn't care less, politicians don't get treated at such places, they go to Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.

Brazilian healthcare isn't cheap either. It's just incredibly corrupt and eternally dependent on political will for funding. In the middle of the pandemic politicians got caught overpricing items like respirators and pocketing the difference. In the middle of the pandemic with everyone's eyes on them. Imagine the corruption that goes on in a normal day.

Brazilian health care system? Better than the USA? You gotta be kidding me.

In the US care, particularly specialist care, is both expensive and de facto rationed by lack of supply. Need a psychiatrist? No insurance accepted and a 3-6 month wait.

Hmm, not true in my experience. Family members have insurance paid psychiatric care and got their first appointments within a couple of weeks. I get that this is variable in different areas and insurance plans, but you stated no insurance and 3-6 months wait as general facts. That is incorrect.

Definitely variable - I am in Seattle and this is the state of affairs. When I was in NYC the same or worse. In WA state there are effectively zero in patient beds to the extent people in crisis are warehoused in ERs or jail. Where are you? Not specifically about wait time, curious where you rank. My experience in WA and NY ranks 11 and 15 in the US, so most Americans fare worse:

https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/mental-health-america-ac...

He's an economic migrant in a country where you don't need health insurance. He won't die.

You can with a lot less.

But the problem is, after a while, you get addicted to working. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

> Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

Status seeking is independent of economic system.

I find “capitalism” has become a placeholder word for “emergent systems we don’t like”. After all, ≈50% of GDP is government spending which is closer to socialism than we might like to admit.

The single biggest drive that seems to grease the wheels is our natural desire for status. For the middle class this often is shown by our property purchases - bidding against others until we can only just afford the repayments for a house in a nice neighbourhood. We then spend many working years trying to pay off the mortgage, and we often upgrade if we get more income.

It appears most obvious when we look at other cultures, where the drive for status shows up in other ways. For example a truck owner in Northern Pakistan spending equivalent of 7 months of wages adding custom bling to his truck: https://youtu.be/1quNm7Ctd-Q?t=21m58s although he justifies it “such decorations are good for business: shows the client I am doing well”.

Once we start talking about "a lot less" the options to not work become scarce.

For instance, my estimate is that with the minimum number of millions ($2M) one can support a family while unemployed in the USA and pretty much the rest of the world. With 4% SWR such family will have $80K per year, which is more than the median household income. They will pay little taxes and will qualify for a subsidized ACA health plan.

If you are talking about less than a million, you won't be able to support a family in US. It is possible in a 3rd world countries, but it is not always an option for a lot of people.

Millions of dollars of product (e.g. gross revenue) is a statement about scale and impact, not personal profit.

Let me answer you honestly and in depth:

Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge.

I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.

Money is also more than the ability to acquire toys. Money is power, and money is freedom. Money is time. Money can pay other people to save you time. You can save thousands of hours over the course of your life paying other people to mow your lawn, wash your car, paint your house, repair your engine, and re-tile your bathroom.

Money can buy you citizenship anywhere you want, and if war comes, you can just pay to fly away.

Money can establish schools, medical research orgs, and human rights charities. Money can buy media and reshape politics, or it can pay for scientific instruments that have no other funding, and it can secure the future for people (or other things) you care about. Paul Allen built a telescope array, the world's largest airplane, the living computer museum, a cell research institute and a brain research institute, and a ton of other fantastic stuff that would otherwise have no funding.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute is still one of the wealthiest charities in the world, he's been dead for 50 years and we are all still benefiting. That wouldn't be the case if he spent it all on yachts and mansions.

Money can keep an old-growth forest from turning into an apartment complex.

Money also makes all kinds of new things possible, and allows you to do things "The Right Way", i.e. to overengineer for the sake of beauty and reliability, cost be damned. Money can replace a cinderblock and plywood hovel with marble and oak. Money can build you a house that can ignore tornadoes and earthquakes. Money can pay engineers and machinists to create things that would never be commercially produced.

Money means I can work on what I want to work on: difficult and time-consuming things.

Money means I can buy the local schools all of the equipment I think the kids should have, and more importantly, I could pay for staff to make that equipment useful and not just sit in storage because none of the teachers understand telescopes or computers or 3D printers.

I could pay for our town to have a planetarium. On that note, if I were rich enough, I could embarass Zeiss and build the most ridiculous optical planetarium projector ever known.

Like it or not, money is also respect, awe even. I want to be the husband most wives could only dream of, in terms of success.

I want to buy my children education they can't get at school, by doing things with them the school cannot afford to do.

Money means you can participate in expensive hobbies that introduce you to people that you'd otherwise never meet. Those people are often interesting.

I want to set an example for my fellow citizen, and show them that it doesn't matter that we live in a shitty town in the middle of nowhere, if you just refuse to concede that our disadvantages cripple us, you can still win. We're human beings after all.

I don't even own a house yet, but I started another company 6 months ago, and this time I have no business partners to blame and no outside investors. It's all me. Moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world just makes it more fun, it's life on a higher difficulty setting. I relish the challenge.

I could probably rant about this for hours, it's not that we need the money, it's that without it, so much less is possible.

We (humans) just achieved fusion, and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.

You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted.

Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direction?

There's a balance to everything. We wouldn't be human without the ability to invent, to use tools, or to contemplate the future. We need to respect that power though, not lean into the shiny objects and power we can buy with a currency that itself is an entirely man-made system designed to feed a system of taxes and perpetual "growth".

This is a bad theory because it could apply to literally any time in the past or in the future. It’s infinitely variable and not falsifiable thus unscientific.

Meanwhile, progress (aka people trying to make the world better) will continue whether you like it or not, bringing benefits to practically everyone forever. Pessimists may temporarily stifle progress, but the genie has been out of the bottle for the last 400 years or so. Good luck trying to stop people from wanting better for themselves aka solving problems.

I specifically ended my comment saying we need to be responsible with this power, not abandon it completely.

I said nothing of pessimism or pessimists, or that progress shouldn't be made. I strongly question how you could possibly know that anything we do with the intent of making the world better could possibly bring benefits to practically everyone forever.

Everything has side effects and more often then not we can't predict them. What we do today with the best of intentions can be a huge mistake that we only realize years, decades, or centuries later. That doesn't mean we should hide in a cave and do nothing, but it does mean we need to be extremely careful with where we lean in and change things and where we don't.

I disagree to some extent that we should not change things just because we can: we grow beautiful ornamental gardens and weave silk and make cheese because these things please us and not necessarily because we need them; nature would never produce such order. We are the masters of our world. Nature, too, has merit, but nature makes flood and famine and disease -- we can engineer against those things.

Money is an instrument of labor also; it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources.

In fact, more efficiency (less resources used to produce a good) means more profit, doesn't it?

Money is the only reason a lot of endangered species are still alive. Here, rats eat ground-nesting bird eggs. Only money to build fences and island sanctuaries and establish breeding programs saved them.

> it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources

Arguably it's currently only possible to do so if you're rich, but as more and more rich people do so the marginal cost of living such a lifestyle decreases.

"humans shouldn't change things" is group-think that has pervaded morals & values.

Nobody really believes that. You're not living in a mud-hut. You've decided the balance should be less than whatever that guy said, but it's all relative. You are ridiculously wealthy and having such an incredibly outsized impact compared to any non-human animal that the relative difference between you and the GP is effectively nil.

See my last paragraph, we agree on this

You know, I'm re-reading your comment again later, and you're right about some of the things we do because we can being detrimental.

We don't often weigh those decisions, we do first and figure out the consequences later. That happens less now with environmental issues than it used to, but we do things just because we can, we fill the night sky with satellites and we build AI without pausing for even a moment to consider if we should. We may regret some of this later. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but we won't stop to figure that out in advance, we'll find out the hard way.

Still though, we eradicated smallpox, hedged famine in most countries, closed the ozone hole, build networks that allow instant global communication by wire instead of by ship.

It may all yet work out, we'll see.

This is wildly unhealthy and un-selfaware.

Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour. Sometimes, that's to the net benefit of the community, since the value of the labour involved is increased by a superior process. Often, that is to the net detriment of the community: for example, a landlord.

The reality is, the impact of a wealthy person is almost always small, and usually negative-on-net. That's why, in the thousands of historical examples of titanic changes brought about by new ideas or state-level policies, we have so few examples of wealthy people changing things for the better.

Who did JK Rowling underpay to get to the top ?

People can make money through success in positive sum games, which wouldn’t require exploiting other people.

Sure. It's just not the norm. JK Rowling is essentially one of a kind. The tech sector is an outlier too, in that it is normal for founders to be significant technical contributors. In most of the economy, rich people become rich through rent seeking.

If the problem is people gaining through rent seeking, then attack rent seeking itself, rather than rich people in general.

There are poor people who make money through rent seeking too, by playing zero sum games. These zero summers should be targeted rather than the entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and musicians who play positive sum games.

There are entire industries behind people like Rowling - book publishing, movie production, etc., subject to all the same exploitation of surplus value.

It’s similar to how we benefit from cheap manufacturing labor in other countries, performed by people we don’t know. Who did we underpay to get our luxurious lifestyles? The fact that we can’t name them is part of the sleight of hand that allows us to ignore the exploitation, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

> Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour

This is actually completely wrong. Believe it or not, many of the richest people get rich because they pay their employees more than they think they are worth.

Explain to me why you would hire somebody if they lose you money.

Value is subjective, you can't point to x worker and calculate exactly how much "value they create" to the company, because many things a company does are not possible or nearly impossible by individuals. If you calculated how much value each employee brings in by subtracting what the company would have made in their absence, that would often result in being more than the company makes for most high skilled jobs.

That's why I said worth not value. You can define what a person thinks they are worth by asking them.

Please provide just one example.

> I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.

Or perhaps energy disparity? The guy who serially starts companies and works from 3am in the morning is probably in the 99th percentile in terms of raw energy available to him.

> We (humans) just achieved fusion

There’s no sense in which that statement is true.

We’ve been doing fusion for 80 years. What was recently achieved was a small increase in efficiency of fusion. We’re really not all that much closer to being able to use it to generate useful power than the first fusion reactor 65 years ago. We’re still not even close to being able to produce more energy than we used to drive the reactor, and there’s a high probability that this won’t change in another 65 years.

> and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.

Not if it’s wasted on impractical ideas like commercial fusion power, or colonizing Mars. Money without intelligence behind it wastes resources and destroys the planet.

> you can still win

The true cost of this alleged “winning” isn’t measured in money.

Most interesting people are not in private clubs. A lot are in public forums, virtual or not, such as this.

If you're looking for wives that are impressed by monetary success I think you're in for a lot of disappointment, but to each their own.

In addition to siphoning wealth, America has been very successful in siphoning talent. Which is why this kind of news should be pretty concerning:

https://sciencebusiness.net/news-byte/scientists-leave-uk-ch...

I imagine 99% of the scientists moving to China were originally from China, and decided to return rather than stay in the US.

I don't think many non-Chinese foreigners are learning Chinese to move to China and chase the "Chinese dream" the way people do in America.

> they will revoke your passport for some time.

Ow, I never heard of this?

> They also have no access to capital, essentially.

This is like the most foundamentally important issue and you have in tucked away in a minor point

Raise invesment in US, you get $million for a minor stake in the company

Raise investment in UK, you get $100 K for a minor stake

Raise investment in Czech republic, you get $50K for 51%

Raise investment in Russia, they break your legs if you don't pay back. They don't understand thw difference between investment and debt.

And if you die they will pursue your family for your debts.

Raise investment in Zimbabwe.. I don't even know.

This is in jest, but the overall point is roughly this:

Non-westerners cringe when they hear 'Don't take China's money for Belt and road, it's a trap'. In 2nd/3rd world, securing capital for non-elites is impossible even if you just came up with a working fusion reactor.

The relevant amount of money isn't just with strings attached, it can be dangerous to life and limb.

> Americans are ambitious to a fault

Plenty of ambitious people in Russia, the problem is their activity is usually something detrimental to society.

Consider the dominance hierarchy

The top of American society is a billionaire entrepreneur, not sure where to place politicians, maybe a distant third. Civil servants are basicallt nobodys, they are treated worse than people working in the private sector, called lazy, etc.

Top of a society in Russia is FSB/ Security services. Second is politicians. Third is civil servants. Fourth is organised crime bosses. What do all these people have in common? They have the powet to ruin your life. And they use it.

Entrepreneurs are like 6th person down the food chain, and they are preyed upon by the layers above.

https://www.rferl.org/a/newspaper-says-russian-businessman-r...

This is also what the right wing does not understand, when life gets harsh, life of crime becomes more attractive. The world becomes god-eat dog, a man who didn't take advantage of a situation to enrich himself, is not an uostanding citizen. He is a loose who failed to peovide for his family.

I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations

My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.

To outsiders, this dogmatic 'exceptionalism' appears revolting.

My 2c.

What is exceptionalism and what is cultural values? Is it equally revolting if Europeans are proud of a culture of having & taking long parental leave?

It resonates with me because it describes me. It’s not uniquely American, but it still describes me & the (American immigrant) culture I grew up in.

I don't think it's any different from the French being proud of their work life balance.

Am outsider and not revolted, nor consider it particularly exceptionalist, now you have 4 cents

I chuckled and cheered at the same time. It is who I am; it is who we are. "The chief business of America is business." - Coolidge

> in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time

Where the h. is this?

I do agree with many of your points here, but just to nitpick...

> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.

So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?

I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.

> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower

The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.

It's relative. There's a culture of ambition, competition, success and financial reward here in the US. Other countries have it, but in the US it's organized. It's so crazy, everything is setup to compete. The latest craziness: top universities have multiple, competing startup incubator programs - each!

(I have many more stories of course)

They never claimed Americans are the only ambitious people, or even the most ambitious. Just “very ambitious”, in a list of factors that (put together) allegedly combined to explain the notable outcome.

There are other countries that can’t be invaded, or speak a single language, or have a large market, or have ambitious people, or culturally permit failure without ostracizing people.

LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause.

Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain.

American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will point to the French and claim that they're lazy and don't want to work, but would never dream of fighting for their labor rights the way the French do.

Definitely not my experience working overseas in a few countries.

There are certainly lazy Americans, but I’ve worked in multi-national offices where youd get fired in the US for the type of slacking i saw.

That's simply because firing people is easier in the US thus, maybe, people slack off less on average.

My personal impression (I'll admit in limited in scope) is that expectations are generally higher in the US. Not expectations around hours put in, but rather how quickly work gets done, quality of the work, etc.

And that's not just management expectations of employees, but also employees expectations of other employees.

If my coworkers in the US pulled what I saw in some parts of Asia, they'd stick out like sore thumb and be generally despised by other employees for screwing them over.

I have not worked in America, but I have worked with Americans so this is hard for me to confirm, but I simply think that weaker work-related laws simply lead to people having on average more fear of losing job and thus there's more internal/social pressure.

Anyway I did travel America though and lived 7 months in Ohio (went to OSU for exchange) and I don't know in which fields do you think where expectations are higher.

Food industry, including fast food in US, has extremely low quality/pressure and expectations. It didn't seem to me like people work harder in that field.

Building/craftsmen too I didn't see any noticeable difference at all, as most of these people are generally self-employed or in very small business anywhere in the world.

People working in shops or supermarkets, again, I haven't seen any noticeable difference.

Thus, I ask, what are those field where expectations are "generally higher"? Dystopic corporate ladder climbing?

Also, I have few colleagues that worked for Facebook, Indeed and Google (specifically Youtube) in Dublin and they recounted that it was American coworkers being consistently late, lazy, and taking every single excuse for class actions and work avoidance (such as getting PTSD or problems over any minor issue).

Also, Europe is a very huge place with different cultures.

I'm speaking of professional white collar jobs. The kind of jobs where you can work independently, nobody is really keeping track of what you're doing and it's not hard to blow off work without causing concern.

I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.

Could you make examples? Do you think European bankers work less hard than their american counterparts? Or who does that?

European software engineers? Or is it European lawyers that do less? Or accountants?

It seems to me like you're overgeneralizing.

While I don't doubt that US can have a more competitive nature compared to many countries (in Europe we care much less about status or what other people think about our car and how big is our house, we aren't that insecure) I still think that the scenario you present is just an average where there's more incentives for great performers and low performers to perform better, but the median isn't different at all.

Bankers might not be a good example. US investment banks work their staff notoriously hard to the point of people actually dying on the job from overwork. But, I've repeatedly heard from people who have lived through it, that the work they were doing was largely wasted make-work and the whole thing had a large degree of hazing ritual about it. One guy I talked to had quit and moved to SF to try and join the tech world because he felt the work/life balance was a lot more sane there.

I never talked about Europeans at all, so no, I don't think they work less hard. I said "parts of Asia".

As with anything, it varies. Software engineers in China routinely put in 72 hour weeks (996), and are required to make up holidays using weekends if the holiday falls on a week day. Even “labor day” is made up on a weekend, ironically.

The workers’ rights Americans are accustomed to might be viewed as lazy or unambitious in places where working more is the norm. And across the other pond, where many Europeans have generous PTO and leave allowances, they view Americans as very hard working while some Americans might view Europeans as lazy or entitled. It’s all relative.

Ambitious doesn’t mean works a lot, not sure why you think so. It means they have ambition to make their life/community/family/etc better

The US doesn't have particularly high GDP per hour worked:

https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm

Slightly above Sweden and slightly below Denmark and quite a bit less than Ireland.

GDP is a complex measure as it depends on what that hour of work produces. And GDP also includes production that required no labor at all (i.e. see Ireland's incredibly high GDP per capita due to multi-nationals funneling sales through the country).

I was trying to think of some objective measure for "hard working" - I don't really equate this measure with simply the number of hours worked.

I get where you were coming from. I'm not sure there is a better measure.

Well, that's probably because companies make so much "intellectual property" in Ireland, which they then have to pay licensing fees to their Irish subsidiaries to use.

I am being a little sarcastic. This is a description of a standard tax-avoidance scheme.

My point, ultimately, is that I suspect Ireland's numbers are inflated by its status as a tax haven for multinationals.

How is this a response to the comment you replies to?

It’s not an accident the French are able to protest for workers’ rights while Americans mostly can’t. And it’s not because of differences between French and American psychology either.

No, the reason is simple: unions. Most Americans aren’t in one, which makes collective organization nearly impossible. Businesses know this, and politicians know this, which is why some of them have made it a point to demonize and defang unions.

Well, it is not that simple, the unions in France have substantial power but rather modest membership:

France

Collective Bargaining Coverage: 98%

Proportion of Employees in Unions: 8%

------

Sweden

Collective Bargaining Coverage: 88%

Proportion of Employees in Unions: 70%

------

United Kingdom

Collective Bargaining Coverage: 29%

Proportion of Employees in Unions: 26%

--------------

From https://www.worker-participation.eu/national-industrial-rela...

If it's true that unions are so valuable, why is it that in most industries in the U.S. workers are far better compensated? Take tech as one example of a non-unionized industry that has still secured for itself work-from-home, sometimes unlimited PTO, extensive maternity and paternity leave, sometimes five to six plus figures in bonus and stock compensation, etc plus pre-WFH the dankest office accomodations which regularly include catered meals, on site yoga instructors, massages, free drinks and more. Do any unionized French companies get such perks?

I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.

Tech is probably an outlier. Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.

As far as why tech workers are better compensated in the US? Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US. Those working in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC are far better compensated than their counterparts in say the Midwest (the pandemic may have changed things, but looking at pre-pandemic figures is useful to gain an understanding of the wage disparity). When you factor in healthcare and other social services provided in Europe, West European tech workers are not disimilarly compensated from their Midwest counterparts.

The reality is that the outliers are these handful of American tech hubs which have outsized outcomes. Which brings us to what’s probably the real reasons for the US’s high economic output.

Immigration and college education, which is what these places have in common.

>I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.

Huh? The US has the highest median disposable income in the world[0], let alone tech which blows Europe out of the water even in the lowest of cost of living states.

You're not going to find accurate income information for service workers because service workers notoriously do not report their cash tips which make up for a large portion of their income. That means the median is even higher.

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

> Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.

No, they're not. The median income wouldn't be higher in the U.S. if the majority of its workers were not compensated more. In particular, with regards to commercial, full-time farming, farmers make far more in the U.S. (median commercial farm income was $186K in 2021 [1]).

Truck drivers in the U.S. earned a median income of $47K in 2019 [2] while truck drivers in France as of 2021 report around 25K EUR [3]. Many such examples.

> Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US.

Sure, but we can compare tech hubs in France (are there any besides Paris?) to tech hubs in the U.S. or we can compare overall U.S. vs France. It doesn't matter how you slice the data: U.S. salaries come on top and by a large factor. This is also generally true across all engineering professions. As an example, take Civil Engineers (37K EUR vs $71K USD base) [4].

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps... [3] https://www.salary.com/research/fr-salary/benchmark/truck-dr... [4] https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala...

It’s not because of unions or the 9-5 work schedule either. It’s because they can’t find parking.

I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.

Except that's just not true. The vast majority of Americans don't actually believe "they can achieve anything." The proof is that they never actually try. It's merely rhetoric that we use to punish the most vulnerable. For the vast majority, we either never reach a spot where we're comfortable because of a lack of skills or training or we get there and then lament our luck when things don't go our way with layoffs and technical obsolescence. This is of course discounting MLMs, which aren't real entrepreneurship.

Neither is part-time work. I get a 1099 NEC from a few companies each year for "consulting," which basically means I get a retainer to fix a few things that break on their servers should something go wrong. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm just getting a few extra checks.

> I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.

My anecdotal experience is that the Mexicans¹ I have known have been way more entrepreneurial than the Americans. If the Spanish-speaking Americas were to establish economic union a la the E.U., I suspect that they would become the dominant economy in the world in a generation.

⸻

1. Speaking here, specifically, of Mexicans living in Mexico and not immigrants to the U.S., although come to think of it, the immigrants are likewise also highly entrepreneurial, but this is a self-selecting segment of the population who are willing to undergo great hardship and go to a whole other country, suffer discrimination and struggle with living outside their language and culture to make a better living for themselves. Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. which is probably a big factor in American (U.S.) entrepreneurship.

what makes america great, is the current system or ie rule of law and institutions. those yeah are being destroyed bit by bit. by oligarchs and nefarious individuals. but in terms of laws / institutions that are not easily influenced by current politics - america is still ahead.

mexico etc the courts etc are easily corrupted. hence they can never be #1.

same for every other poor country.

the other country that I can think of with almost comparable laws to the states is the uk i.e favourable to enterprise -- but they're not doing enough to encourage labor participation

> Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S.

Not necessarily. It's definitely a cultural thing: Latin American immigrants are far more entrepreneurial than Asian immigrants, even after correcting for wealth and education.

> On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.

Can I ask why you chose to move to NZ considering the rest of your comment? Do you intend to move back to the USA in the near future?

The consequences of failure in America are higher, that’s why we work so hard. You are a millionaire, or you are homeless. The in between is a hard and continuous struggle to get to the former and avoid becoming the latter.

So which one are you, millionaire or homeless?

As a fellow American, I can't really identify with some of these points. You seem weirdly almost perversely proud of the idea of overworking oneself, towards what end, economical? I mean it's not as if there is any intrinsic purpose to life anyway, but this one feels rooted in some long-lost rags to riches Horacio Alger Gilded Age.

He's willing to die trying to.... export things lol.

I think you're right, but I'd like to add, a lot of rhetoric surrounds this idea that America is as successful as it is because of freedom. And I like freedom, and it has played a role, but it isn't really true.

America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the original local inhabitants of which mostly no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when it was settled. It has direct access to both the edges of the great old world continent of Eurasia in the form of coasts on both oceans. It has an absolutely massive population, and the government has smartly invested in the past in infrastructure to transport between them both over land.

In past times, america drained the population of the leading power center at the time, Europe, to populate itself. This held back it's competition at a time when the ability to produce depended on the number of hands and minds at your disposal. It currently has the third largest population of any one government in the world. It is also currently doing this to other regions of the world, although comparatively less with the population boom resulting from largely American technological advances decreasing infant mortality.

There have been various theories about the grand chessboard throughout history, ideas like "whoever controls central Asia controls the world", " whoever controls the seas controls the world" and "if one power has control of all of Europe they can then move on to control the world", all with various levels of truth to them (Genghis Khan controlled central Asia for example), and the grand chessboard was tossed into the air when the continent was discovered, but that wasn't really realized until the west coast was discovered. There are ways to threaten America's position, but as long as one polity controls both coasts and the land in between it's mostly safe. You can institute any form of government and it will be a major force, maybe not the big guy, but just the territory and population itself is built to be powerful.

I have never seen any evidence that Americans are more ambitious than people from other nationalities. No studies, nothing. Not have I even ever heard a theoretical reasoning why this would be the case. I assume it's just the general "my group is the best" baseless bragging.

Not sure studies would be particularly helpful for that, anecdotes and feelings are the best you'll get. But FWIW it's been my experience that Americans are more ambitious than people from other countries, including myself.

If you're not from the US and you meet people in the course of business, then obviously the people you meet are going to be more ambitious. It's selection bias. That's what it takes to reach across the ocean to seek out new business opportunities.

I've had friends who never left the US that I made via random channels - chatrooms and the like - and they also were more ambitious and entrepreneurial than me. Yes, people with programming skills so that biases it a lot, but, I also knew plenty of people with such skills in Europe. The difference was quite visible.

You have a strange definition of “facts”.

Your first point, “America is a single market” is a fact, and a pretty uncontroversial one.

America being “geographically isolated from war” is conjecture. Whether Mexico will invade, or whether Pearl Harbor is part of your definition of “America” is irrelevant, it’s not a fact.

America “being able to produce everything” is not a fact and much too vague to ever be a fact. To begin with there are 20 mineral commodities that the US fully relies on imports to acquire. Could these be found in the US? We don’t know, and this is only one example, regardless it’s not a fact.

Americans being “ambitious to a fault” is not a fact, it’s your opinion and generalization based on the americans and non-americans you have met and interacted with.

A fact means something, it doesn’t mean “like an opinion but a really strongly held opinion”.

What are the 20 mineral commodities?

FWIW, the U.S. would be incredibly hard to invade. It does have a number of geographic advantages that no other country can match (not least of which is the Mississippi River system).

Even Pearl Harbor was a hit and run attack. No Japanese troops ever touched shore.

Technically Japanese troops did land in the Aleutians, but it accomplished essentially nothing useful. The US got some extra practice doing amphibious landings though.

A lot of the hard to invade stuff comes from having a bunch of guns and the world's strongest military. When it was inhabited by Native Americans the Brits, French etc. managed to invade ok.

We didn't have the world's strongest military until WWII, and even then, we had to ramp up to that.

The Brits, Spaniards and French didn't invade, they established colonies. These colonies actively engaged in trade and defense agreements with various native American tribes. At various times different tribes were aligned with one European nation or another, with the most famous example being the French and Indian War, with the Iroquois and Cherokee allying with the British and the Wabanaki, Abenaki, Shawnee, etc allying with the French.

Native American tribes and nations had deep seated rivalries and disputes going back centuries (just as the Europeans did), so there never was any kind of single unified America until the U.S. expanded across the continent.

Notably the British did not succeed in the War of Independence or the War of 1812, despite having a superior military and navy.

> The consequences of failure in America are lower;

Several fellow commenters have already pointed out as the contrary is actually true, and I'd like to add a corollary: risking everything you have in a business is simpler in the USA than abroad because the society knows that they will lend a helpful lend should you lose everything.

Safety nets are a thing worldwide, and they cost money; thus some responsibility is imposed to each individual in order to limit the risks.

"(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations."

I'm probably being pedantic, but: the "single set of regulations" really is an oversimplification. Each state has it's own rules in addition to Federal regulations (trying selling cars in California that meet Federal emissions standards, but not California's). Plus, there are state taxes to consider.

Compared to the difference in regulations between France and Germany, _let alone_ the difference between France and Nigeria, US states have very little to differentiate them.

> The flexibility of the labour market helps employment adapt to shifting patterns of demand. Already many of the workers in America who were laid off from Alphabet and other tech firms at the start of the year are applying their sought-after skills elsewhere, or setting up their own businesses. In continental Europe, by contrast, tech firms are still negotiating lay-offs, and may think twice about hiring there in future.

This is the most interesting point made to me. Might change my own opinion a bit on what rights best serve workers. I can see how ripping the band-aid off is better for both parties, even though it stings, vs letting layoffs drag out over months and wasting everyone's time and energy.

Would have been nice to see some sources cited here though.

The European approach makes a lot of sense in other stable industries (Automobile/Steel). But in a fast moving quick changing (e.g. Tech) industries, all it does is prevent new risky companies from starting and making it harder for them to adapt. Maybe it is a good thing. But only time can tell that. So far to me it seems like the American approach is winning economy wise.

It’s also generating insane levels of inequality, so it really only works if you subscribe to the capitalistic illusion that GDP is a good indicator of the success of a society.

At least in the tech world calling the layoffs as increasing inequality is not exactly the same.

Well, the concepts of regulated free markets, free trade between nations, and generally free immigration have created the single largest increase in human living standards in history.

> single largest increase in human living standards.

That's a good point. It'd be useful if the US could raise it's game for it's citizens, and let them participate in that too. :)

Ask someone from a hundred years ago how it's going today and you'll have your answer.

There wasn't a question. ;)

Check your facts. As much as I am a firm European democrat, you might wanna see what Chinese “state driven capitalist communism” has done between 1975 and today. Again, if the measure is number of people lifted out of poverty, China wins hands down.

Now, as much as we can’t consider China’s success without considering the lack of freedoms inscribed within the communist social pact, we can’t take just the good of American capitalism by only using gdp or trade volume as an indicator, because - again - inequality and lack of basic human needs and life safety wouldn’t be included.

Reference: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

Check your perspective. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea all industrialized faster and have a higher standard of living than China.

All did it in the 1980s - 40 years ago. All did it without oppressive communism.

While it might not have been communist, Korea certainly was oppressive when it built the chaebols which did involve a fair bit of government management.

Also re: Taiwan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

Hong Kong has made it to oppressive communism, so that’s going to be interesting to watch going forward (or backwards?).

Yes for sure. From China, to free markets, back to China. I think we’re already seeing the effects on Hong Kong. No so great.

>if the measure is number of people lifted out of poverty, China wins hands down.

>Check your perspective.

>All did it in the 1980s - 40 years ago. All did it without oppressive communism.

Japan industrialized long before 1980 and all the countries listed have miniscule populations compared to China. The only country you can really attempt to compare to China's scale is India but good luck landing the same poverty alleviation conclusions.

Good luck finding examples of successful communism.

An alternative take would be that China only saw prosperity after partially adopting Western economic values. Additionally, Chinese economic development and Western economic development occurred in vastly different contexts. China had access to Western imports to jump start their industrialization and access to the Western scientific and policy know-how needed to build an advanced economy. The West had to figure things out as they went along. This is obviously a broad generalization, I just want to make the point that China is definitely not a slam dunk counterexample

You're reinforcing my point. China grew so fast due to embracing market capitalism with Deng Xiaoping, whereas Mao before wanted Marxist-Leninist central planning, which predictably failed. There's nothing "capitalist communist" about it, they're not even communist at all since workers don't own the means of production. Now I'm not saying the American model is great either, but market capitalism is an incredible invention.

I can see the pros of the European approach, but reducing equality can not be the only goal. If the economy keeps falling behind, the median standard of living will keep dropping. A strong economy can adopt higher taxes and more social services due to election pressures. A fallen behind economy will find it much harder to jump back.

The other problem is that tons of European talent keeps going to the US. The people who have the skills to make higher wages might not care about inequality too much, since they would be the ones benefitting from it. I am not sure how Europe can solve that though.

Economy-wise maybe, but there is more to workers rights than that. They also affect things like life expectancy and quality of life.

There is no actual European approach, there are different levels of worker's rights across various industries and in different countries. In Denmark if you have been working for more than a month than when you are fired you have a certain amount of time that you get paid (unless you find a new job), but you still have to work for them if the company wants you to.

In the tech industry it is generally 3 months and they don't want you to work during that period.

I think “winning” really depends on your criteria for success. Maybe it’s winning on overall metrics like GDP, but on an individual level, the story is far less clear.

Like, is it winning to have the option of starting a company that produces generational wealth for yourself, while living in a city unable to solve its homelessness problem? Is it winning to be a 1%-er but have no safety net so that you're always precarious, at risk of being wiped out by factors you have no control over? Is it winning to have a school system so dysfunctional that you send your kids to private schools that most of your neighbors can't afford?

I expect that from a perspective that prioritizes stability, safety, and sustainability, a model where it's hard to be fired and companies are encouraged to take long term responsibility for their employees (and therefore grow slowly) makes a lot of sense.

> I think “winning” really depends on your criteria for success. Maybe it’s winning on overall metrics like GDP, but on an individual level, the story is far less clear.

This is an excellent point. America does an exceptional job of making rich people richer, but it also ranks poorly in many quality of life metrics. It is now #25 on the social progress index (https://www.socialprogress.org/). If people are richer but their children are more likely to die in child birth (U.S. ranks #50), or be murdered (U.S. ranks #137 in homicide), is that really better?

Your perspective sounds overly mired in tech and San Francisco issues. For most of the country geographically, it’s good to be able to make a business because you can make money doing something useful for other people, create jobs for others. By doing so you improve and create further opportunities for your community, and your taxes pay for the safety nets (that do exist) and decent schools, and you and your employees can be philanthropic on top of that, which is fairly common.

Building quickly and creating good, reliable jobs don’t have to conflict.

Yes but European economies benefit from the American approach without all the downsides. You guys got Google and smartphones and AI in the past couple decades. Europeans lack technical innovation and they don't need it because the innovation comes from somewhere else before percolating into the European economy for free.

The European approach is the winning approach so long as at least one country does all the hard work.

Small companies are typically exempt from mass layoff regulations. And obviously nobody can force a failed company to continue operating. That should cover most of the "risky new company" case.

Maybe there's some marginal effect in the willingness of established companies entering risky new business.

Google spoke about this: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-matt-brittin-...

In my country (belgium) in case of a mass layoff the employer has to first work together with unions to find a way to keep the employees on board, and when no alternative is found has to help the employees find a new job. Also, for workers who were hired long enough ago they may fall under an employment regime where the notice period keeps going up, and may become as much as 15 months. That law was changed a number of years back, but existing contracts were grandfathered into the old system. That may complicate the decision over who to fire.

I worked at a company who had an office in Belgium. We were consolidating offices. Same story ~15 months, of process. Offer employment elsewhere, more grace periods of where every employee takes the full time to consider the offer… just to collect a paycheck and say no.

It was a mess, and in the meantime most of that office was at best worthless / some folks just disruptive.

Many of these were capable people, highly employable, but they weren’t productive at all during this time.

I got along with some folks in that office, I really don’t think all that time did them any good. I think the intent behind the laws in play at that time and how individuals used them was very different.

Does that company still have a Belgium office? If so, they obviously disagree with your assessment of the value of those employees.

No.

It works as long as demand is high, which is true for the US tech job market but not so true for the EU tech job market.

... which is to a large degree because hiring and firing in the EU is so encumbered by red tape.

America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in the US.

But American progress is senselessly hobbled by a broken democratic model that has failed to rebalance policy making power toward the democratic center as people have moved into cities and away from the family farm. Until the country enacts reforms that fix this imbalance, other countries that find their way to greater dynamism by emulating the best of US policies may find they are leaping ahead of America.

And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution. Add in a well designed skills-based immigration process and you have the recipe for something great. I am not saying Canada doesn’t have its problems (First Nations reconciliation and poverty, protectionist industries such as Telecoms to name two), but the political system is more adaptable and these problems can be solved.

I’m less optimistic that the US will fix its democratic imbalance.

> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.

Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...

Utilities in general even. Nobody wants municipal water supplies failing quickly.

But for core commercial actives it seems like a fair observation.

No... but having them spend two decades failing slowly isn't the answer, either.

I agree that utilities are a special case. The main point is that you don't want them to fail at all, ever. If they do fail, well, there aren't any good ways for that to happen.

Agree. I think there's a distinction between infrastructure that must be reliable, and first-order commercial enterprises that must be agile and risky.

Banks are squarely on the infrastructure side. They're a foundation that people rely on to do the really interesting stuff, and as such should be 1) low risk, and therefore 2) not profit-maximizing.

We could let utilities fail if we had a special receivership and continuity process for infrastructure. Think FDIC takeover teams.

The bank argument is usually that banks cause a lot of collateral damage. If Peter loses his deposit at bank A then he can’t pay his landlord Peter who needs it to pay the mortgage with bank B, and his friend Bob might panic and pull his money at bank C.

> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in the US.

This is Denmark's model and it works very well. Denmark is considered the easiest to do business in Europe, and #4 globally (https://www.copcap.com/news/denmark-is-the-easiest-place-for....).

Denmark came to mind as I was writing my comment, but I am not well enough informed. Thanks.

I'm no expert but afaik Denmark combines business flexibility with a decent social net. It is a dessert topping AND a floor wax.

I always viewed Canada as a similar blend, except with frigid winters, more snow, moose and yet still unpleasant summers except on the southwestern and southwestern coastlines.

> And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution.

Feel free to move to Canada if you want half the wages, twice as expensive housing, and a multi-year wait to get a family doctor. There is a reason why so many Canadians end up working in the US on TN or H1 visas.

Yep. I live in Canada and it just feels like our economic successes are due to natural resources and being close in location and culture to America. Couple that with the fact that like 80% of Canada is uninhabited. We may look big but we're a small population concentrated in only a few locations along the border.

I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Or rather, you don't quite realize that it's a feedback loop.

Canada heavily subsidizes the healthcare and post secondary education of all those people who then move to the US, often those people move back in retirement for the healthcare.

That no doubt has a detrimental effect on the Canadian economy as Canada pours resources into people and America reaps the benefits of that while Canada suffers.

They generally don't move back. Anyone who qualifies for Medicare (10 years of employment in the US) will get significantly higher quality healthcare through Medicare than they would receive in Canada.

The problem is that Canada's healthcare system is a command economy. The government decides how many med school spots there are, how many residency places, and how many procedures will be funded each year. In order to keep costs down this results in rationing. You can't even pay out of pocket - it is against the law for Canadians to purchase private care in Canada. The end result is that people with means end up going to the US, and everyone else waits 6-12 months for medically necessary hip or knee replacements. Even critical medical imaging is backed up weeks. I know someone who waited multiple weeks for urgent cancer screening. The same scans are available in the US in 24-48 hours, for a few hundred bucks.

I knew I shouldn't have included the line "often those people move back in retirement for the healthcare" in my comment because it would derail any conversation about the point I was trying to make.

While some of the issues that Canada faces are definitely self inflicted as you describe, the ultimate source of all of Canada's problems are that it is an American vassal state. This relationship results in Canada subsidizing the development of many talented individuals who then make the totally rational self-interested decision to move to the United States where there is significantly more economic opportunity for them. Not only is this a massive drain on Canada's resources and it prevents Canada seeing a return on the investment that it makes in people who are often their brightest and best.

I don't see how "many talented individuals make the totally rational self-interested decision to move to the United States" follows from Canada being an American vassal state. Doesn't this phenomenon apply to every country in the world? If you're born anywhere on Earth it's probably rational to want to make your way to the USA.

It's far easier for Canadians to do this due to the geographic proximity, cultural similarity, and harmonization of immigration systems.

For many Canadians visiting America is a trivial drive across the border, in fact some Canadians make this trip weekly for access to cheaper consumer goods. Hell, I just looked it up and I can get a round trip ticket to Las Vegas for $160 CAD and I'm no where near the border. Hell, I remember a boss telling me that he used to get round-trip tickets to Vegas for $60 and him and his buddies would go there on long weekends. Canadians can travel visa-free and stay in the US for 6 months.

Many younger Canadians who are interested in immigrating may already have grandparents who spend the winter in places like Arizona or Florida[0] so they can draw on the experiences and resources that their grandparents have to make the transition easier.

Additionally most Canadians are native speakers or near native speakers of English usually with accents that are identical or easily masked to blend in with Americans. Canadians who have attended post-secondary have attended institutions that are quite similar to American ones and their accreditation is easily transferable.

I'm not too sure on the specifics but I know that it's easier for Canadians with certain post-secondary education or trade tickets to get work visas in the United States under NAFTA/USMCA.

Culturally speaking the sports are very similar, there are MLB, NHL, and NBA teams in Canada, music is the same, fashion is the same, the food is the same. It's less relevant in the age of the internet but when I was growing up I could watch many local TV stations from the US and watch the nightly news in obscure places like Spokane.

All of this is due to the cultural assimilation and defacto integration of Canada into the United States.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-snowbirds-u-s-winter...

> All of this is due to the cultural assimilation and defacto integration of Canada into the United States.

Well except for Quebec, the Indigenous tribes, and the monarchists/loyalists, who definitely are more doubtful and will likely never allow a full integration.

The media environment is also still substantially different, previously even more.

To be fair...

- The US government also effectively decides the number of US residency places by how much they will fund Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

- Many places in the US won't see you if you are on Medicare.

- It is quite common to need to wait 6-12 months to see specialists in the US too.

As someone with a chronic condition who has had to make many appointments with specialists over the years, 6-12 months is a gross exaggeration. IME the typical wait time to be seen by a specialist in the US is between 2 and 3 months. The worst I've seen is 4 months.

:) I'm glad your experience hasn't been so bad. I've had to wait that long. My partner is a chronic pain specialist and wait times for new patients often exceed 6 months.

Canada's healthcare is so bad that if you are not immediately dying, you get no healthcare whatsoever.

This is not the case.

It is. Add that with the rest of the problems Canada has, it might be the worst of the first world countries.

I, for one counterexample, have gotten excellent healthcare on every occasion that I've needed it, and I have yet to be immediately dying. Obviously not everyone has had good experiences, and our healthcare system fails many people, but to say that you get no healthcare whatsoever unless you are immediately dying is absolutely hyperbole.

Where are you located in Canada? I would be shocked to know you got non life threatening medical care in any of the major cities.

Vancouver. Occasions of excellent and free care include: general precautionary checkups and exams, blood and urine tests just to check on nutrition and general health, corrective surgery for minor conditions (eg. cyst removal), treatment for minor ear infection, hemorrhoid treatment, a great deal of care, MRIs, and x-rays after a bicycle accident resulted in a fractured bone, and of course several drive-through COVID tests throughout the pandemic.

Well in Ontario those are not happening. I wonder if BC recently changed a family doctor rule.

Canada is an oligarchy and retirement home for the unproductive.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but this is my conclusion after spending 25 years growing up, living, working and building startups here.

You haven't done any convincing yourself. I'd like to see what your reasoning is before I even think about attempting to convince you.

How much of your 25 years in Canada did you spend doing each, and what's your reasoning? I was pretty unimaginative when I was 25 too, but the states isn't my vibe.

" America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible."

The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.

When you say “significant portions of the population” and then reference a segment of society that could collectively all fit inside one college football stadium, it feels like hyperbole.

Despite what you read online, the amount of Americans who see unsheltered homeless on a daily basis is very low.

Off by over 5x:

- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1 to Congress. The report found 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2022 (https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...)

- Largest college football stadium: Michigan Stadium (Ann Arbor, Mich.) 107,601 (https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2018-07-30/25-big...)

- The population of Baltimore, MD is 576,498 as of the last census, so would be a closer point of comparison.

Experiencing homelessness for one night is very different than the chronic homelessness which people are picturing. That second population is much smaller and way more visible.

What’s your source for this claim? Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting. In no large city that I’ve ever been in can you go a day without seeing homeless people, unless you work from home and order all your food from an app.

Forgive the nitpick, but absolutely nowhere near 80% of Americans are encountering homeless on a regular basis. Homelessness in particular and inequality in general are major problems! I don't mean to sweep that under the rug! However, I don't think it's true that anywhere near a majority of Americans encounter homeless people on a daily basis.

    Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting

Yes, for the Census Bureau's particular and extremely loose definition of "urban" which includes what anybody in America would call "suburbs" and even a lot of places people would call "rural": https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

The key TL;DR determination factor (there are others, read for yourself) is this:

    In order for a block to qualify as urban, it must have a den-
    sity of 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm).

That is not a lot. I live in a very stereotypical suburb (everybody has a driveway, and a small yard) and population density here is like 8,000 people per square mile... nobody would call this place urban besides the Census Bureau. (For reference, NYC's population density is 26,403 per square mile)

I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person outside a major city... you just don't see it in suburbs or rural areas.

Again, major problem, it's just that most Americans don't see it on a regular basis... which perhaps is part of the root of the problem. Makes it easy to ignore.

I just looked up the math and this is probably right. It looks like 1 in 3 Americans live in a city of >100K people, which, again, just in my experience, is where you’d be hard pressed to not encounter a homeless person. This however probably skews higher when we factor in things like working age adults vs the total population.

If you are American, live and work in the suburbs, it is fairly easy to avoid homelessness from the inside of a personal vehicle.

Even within large cities that have many homeless people, the homeless are not evenly distributed. Police often keep them out of "desirable" shopping and business areas, and homeless often cluster in camps.

I'm most familiar with Philadelphia where you'll either see multiple homeless people every day... or rarely. Depends on where you live and work. Every other city I've been to in my life seems similar.

Anyway, I don't want to get too far in the weeds with my nitpickery. I don't even remember what we were originally talking about!

They’re just better hidden in Europe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

Instead of being in the middle of the city, there are entire tent metropolises hidden in the woods in Berlin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

The US is below most of Europe per capita in homelessness.

I don't think the definitions quite line up. When you look at the linked definition for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_France for example, it says: "Homelessness in France is a significant social issue that is estimated to affect around 300,000 people - a figure that has doubled since 2012 (141,500) and tripled since 2001 (93,000). Around 185,000 people are currently staying in shelters, some 100,000 are in temporary housing for people seeking asylum and 16,000 live in slums." This is very different than the homeless living out on the streets of so many major American cities.

Reading the , the stat on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... for the US is ~500k, while the page linked in the table, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S..., starts with "In the United States, the number of homeless people varies from different federal government accounts. In 2014, approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted." so the higher ~1.5M would seem to correspond to the definition for number reported in the table from France.

Canada has always had a lower performing economy than the US. Though with the current US government policies, the US economy will perform a lot less, and perhaps Canada will overtake it.

> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.

It says it operates on that principle, but the stranglehold that establishment industry has on the country says otherwise.

Consolidation of capital and political power is exactly what we're seeing in banks, fossil fuels, mega-agri-firms, retailers, insurers, and healthcare providers. All of it results in a nightmare that is 'not working' for the public, but works very well for the people at the top.

America has, along with Canada and Europe, rapidly moved toward social democracy:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

All of the empirical evidences indicates this slows economic development. Individuals being responsible for their own safety nets is more efficient, and creates better incentives, than large government bureaucracies socializing the cost of safety nets.

Is that because those who aren't capable of taking care of themselves just... die?

Economists have studied this extensively. Less substantial government social safety nets lead to higher personal savings rates. Personal savings rates reach as high as 40% in countries without social democracy.

This capital is managed by the individuals who will derive the entire benefit from it, so they are incentivized to manage it effectively, and not hand it over to inefficient union-run bureaucracies, which give their employees early retirement at 55 with massive pensions:

https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...

They are also incentivized not to be lazy and draw upon it, as doing so hurts their own interests, by depleting their own savings.

When people pay for their own expenses, their incentives are aligned with the goal of national economic efficiency.

Government, meanwhile, ultimately becomes a rent extraction mechanism, no matter what its ostensible purpose is:

https://twitter.com/SpencerKSchiff/status/125276128577685913...

In aggregate, I'm sure that's true, but there are all sorts in society, including people who have little capacity to earn money in the first place, let alone save it. That includes, for example, orphans, people with severe physical or mental disabilities, drug addicts, elderly people who lose their savings to fraud, and so on. Taking care of these people does create an economic burden on society that might come at the cost of some economic growth. But that's a choice, and for many people, a public social safety net that takes care of people in need is deemed worth the cost.

When you're falling out of a plane, it doesn't matter how strong your incentive to fly is. You aren't going to grow wings by incentive alone.

Sure, but that's not the primary reason it's better for economic growth. A far larger proportion of social program beneficiaries would survive in an alternate timeline where these programs never existed. As for charity cases, there are vast private social support networks that emerge in a society with lower taxes and less government-funded social safety nets.

It's not a perfect system with no one falling through the cracks, but it is a system more resilient to systemic collapse as seen in the USSR when it went bankrupt, and one that produces greater economic/social development overall.

The zero-risk bias means people prefer to bring one type of risk to zero, even if it means increasing overall risk. I believe that is what's at work with government-provisioned social safety nets. Economic growth reduces a host of risks. But a social safety brings one type of risk - that is actually quite insignificant relative to the rest - to zero. So people are willing to trade economic growth for unconditional social safety nets.

> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what's not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.

Microsoft has entered the chat.

There was a mention in, I believe, an NPR article(or podcast) many years ago about Europe vs America.

The main thrust was that someone from Chicago can easily start a job in New York with little to no cultural adjustment or misunderstandings.

In Europe, the situation was quite different with e.g. a Spaniard working with Germans etc. The claim was that someone ended up writing a book called "Managing Spaniards if you are a German".

Labor laws in various countries tend to push companies toward one end or the other of a spectrum. One end of the spectrum is hire fast/fire fast, the other is hire slow/fire slow. The US is very much toward the hire fast/fire fast end of the spectrum, relatively speaking.

For tech companies in particular hire fast/fire fast seems to have worked well. It creates a more competitive labor market. That makes sense because tech is a new industry where things are changing all the time, skills are evolving, so it benefits from a labor pool which can adapt quickly.

Is it good for workers though? Many people would say it isn't great. You become an employee for the sake of stability and in a hire fast/fire fast culture, you have less of that. It's not so good for quality of life when you're always afraid of losing your job.

The counter-argument is that in a situation where it's hard to replace people the cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top and there are less opportunities for top performers to get paid what they're worth (a common complaint in European tech). If you don't mind getting out there and marketing yourself and playing the job market aggressively, you can make a lot of money. If you would rather avoid all that it's a source of anxiety and something you want to avoid.

One place where I think the US system has it wrong though, is in tying health care to employment. This is catastrophically bad from a quality of life standpoint and bad for keeping the labor market fluid as well because it creates perverse incentives which are unrelated to whether someone's actually good at their job or not.

Overall I'm personally of the view that it's good for different parts of the world to have different ways of doing things, and if you truly can't stand the overall package you're getting on a particular continent, maybe you should move. (I did and I don't regret it. I might do it again one day. I am continually surprised by how many people seem to utterly hate the place they live, and yet don't leave it!)

Your comment really highlights the absurdity of having a one-size-fits-all policy across the whole labour market.

But ultimately I don't think it is labour laws that made it so that OpenAI is American and ChatGPT was developed in the US. That is just one aspect of a much bigger picture.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem I would say: labour laws set (or reflect) the broader workplace culture. In a culture where it doesn’t pay (or is even frowned upon) to be a top performer it’s very hard to build the OpenAI kind of org.

Frankly, the US for a lot of people seems more like hire slow/fire fast.

Free markets are a process of creative destruction. Capital (money and labor) are continuously reallocated to more productive purposes.

Adding friction to that leads to a less productive economy.

American declinism is a fantastic narrative which keeps propelling America forward. Never being satisfied and always wanting to do better is part of the American ethos.

The linked article is the leader. I recommend reading the longer form briefing article as well which has lots of interesting information. For example, America's industrial CO2 emissions are down 18% from mid 2000s peaks even as industrial output is up and we have policy headwinds. Good news...

”Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.”

The article casually dismisses the counterpoint that the US trades high income for a lower social safety net.

The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. Even Vietnam and Cuba have significantly higher average life expectancy than that.

lower life expectancy in US in general can be attributed to a more unhealthy diet and less walking, which is on the flip side due to US's economic success - affordance for more food and richer food, as well as affordance for car as transportation. Another attribution is the larger amount of immigrants, which as a segment has lower income level and thus lower life expectancy

> can be attributed to more unhealthy diet and less walking, which is on the flip side due to US's economic success - affordance for more food and richer food, as well as affordance for car as transportation.

people in the US aren't driving because they can afford cars - they have to drive because they don't have any other viable options due to the way american cities are designed

There are walkable US cities, and one can move to NY, Chicago, Boston, Seattle or its outskirts. However, people choose to stay in the suburbs because they can afford it.

Isn't it the other way around? People have to stay in the suburbs because they can't afford to move to NYC?

Yes. I live in the suburbs in the outskirts of a major city. I might consider more seriously the trade-offs of actually living in the city if I could justify the cost of living increase.

not in chicago

Chicago is the only close to affordable walkable city. As in, it's about the price of living in a suburb of LA. Which still isn't that affordable.

>affordance for more food and richer food

yeah, the U.S eats richer food than the French.

More available produce year round. Cheaper imported food from around the world due to dollar's strength. More diverse cuisines in big cities, with a lot better Asian cuisines (sushi!) in general than France, due to large immigrations.

The definition of richness in food is generally heavy in natural fats in proteins, high in butter and cream of a high quality.

American butter and cream is ludicrously bad. There is just enough taste to it to make the stuff inedible.

Sushi is not a rich food.

Sauces with a lot of butter and fats in them are 'rich', pastries can be rich, depending mainly on the fattiness of the cream and butter.

on edit: French cuisine is generally thought of as one of the richest in the world, hence my use of them as an example.

In this case, the parent comment used "richness" as a synonym for being diverse and high quality.

OK sort of like if I used the word distributed in a technical discussion to mean a lot of people in different countries are using our application.

on edit: just seems a weird word to use when that has a precise meaning for food, if they had said a richer selection of food I would understand. But as the discussion was about what makes Americans unhealthy with shorter lifespans, and the unhealthiness of Americans is often synonymous with being overweight, saying it's because Americans eat rich food just doesn't seem to make any sense if what they mean is Americans have a wide selection of food to choose from.

Sushi isn't a great food to point to in all of this.

American sushi is full of sugar and most of the specialty rolls are soaked in even more sugar and five different varieties of flavored mayonnaise.

Corn syrup is the super weapon here.

“Richer” food? UberLOL!

By what standard exactly is pathological caloric surplus funded by big food considered “richer”?

technically a higher caloric diet is considered "richer" :)

Actually if US immigrants were their own country they'd have the best life expectancy in the world. They're holding up our stats, not pulling them down.

> In fact, the researchers say, Americans’ life expectancy would steeply decline if it weren’t for immigrants and their children. Under that scenario, U.S. life expectancy in 2017 would have reverted to levels last seen in 2003 — 74.4 years for men and 79.5 years for women — more closely resembling the average lifespans of Tunisia and Ecuador.

(data is pre-covid)

https://gero.usc.edu/2021/09/30/immigration-boosts-u-s-life-...

> Actually if US immigrants were their own country they'd have the best life expectancy in the world. They're holding up our stats, not pulling them down.

Of course. The sick, the halt, and the lame never made the trip.

The kids who survive the trip through the Darien Gap will do fine.[1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/americas/darien-gap-us-panama...

You might want to think that, but unfortunately foreign born Americans (immigrants) actually have significantly longer life expectancies than American born do.

Part of the reason for that is the much higher death rate in infants in the US, but it is still a very hard thing to explain away. I will also say as somebody who has lived in the US, US food is high calorie, but it is not better on any dimension, than what I can buy in any European street market. Possibly foreign born Americans stick with their original diets more.. who knows. But ops point about trading quality of life for meaningless economic statistics is spot on.

Isn't simply explained by the fact that immigration processes generally select for the fittest individuals? If you are not operating well it is going to be difficult to find the capacity to start the immigration process, and if you do make it that far you are likely to find out that the destination country doesn't want you.

The same kind of phenomenon is seen in college graduates who love longer than non-graduates. There is no reason to think that attaining a college degree somehow cures what ails you. Rather, those who are not in tip top health don't have the capacity to make it all the way to graduation.

It is even likely why we see those with more money living longer. While it is often thought they live longer because they are more able to care for themselves, at the same time if you are not in perfect health it is much harder to make money. The same capacity determines qualities like what kind of job you can focus your attention on, and even something as simple as a few extra unpaid sick days each year can greatly reduce your net wealth potential over time.

Not really. We also have to put this in the context of US life expectancy being significantly lower than comparable European countries. Britain for example has also had a very high immigration rate for a couple of centuries now, but no comparable difference is seen there.

In the US money (and as proxy college education) is a gateway to a lot of things that influence health outcome, notably access to health treatment. So Occam's razor would suggest that is the simplest explanation - Europe has national health programs that provide access to good quality medical treatment for all levels of society. The US simply doesn't. See the infant mortality statistics.

> We also have to put this in the context of US life expectancy being significantly lower than comparable European countries.

Yes, this is due to drug-related deaths. The US loses 277 per million, while the UK only loses 53 per million.

That is a problem, one usually attributed to how the US cares for sick individuals with a more lackadaisy attitude towards prescribing certain addictive drugs. So, again, those who are unwell are in a disadvantaged position.

> See the infant mortality statistics.

The US does has an exceptionally high infant mortality rate, but mostly due to the US counting pre-term births differently to other countries. Canada, with universal healthcare, also has a mortality rate of 6 per 1,000 when using the same methodology although only reports 4 per 1,000 when using its standard methodology.

Most industrialized countries have abundant food and access to cars. That's not the issue.

That's very different from choosing to live unhealthy lifestyles.

> the larger amount of immigrants

France has 10.3 percent of foreign-born population, the US has 13.6 percent. Even if we assume you didn't make up the "lower life expectancy" part, which by some comments seems like it is incorrect, the 3% difference in immigrants seems like a rounding error.

Obesity might play a role...they're eating too much food!

Can you propose an adjusted income metric that takes social programs into account?

The easier method to do a more nuanced analysis is to use data visualization where you put income on one axis and lifespan on another. https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-does-income-relate-to-...

Interesting question though. Someone's probably thought of this already and it's just not in wide use. Maybe something like annual income in dollars cut by average life expectancy?

Maybe something like median expected total accumulated net worth at longest known human lifespan? You'd want something that isn't distorted by income tails and reflects loss due to shortened lifespan.

It's fuzzy though and gets dystopian really quickly.

> The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9

Like 90% of these "gotchas" for southern states (including lifespan comparisons) end up decreasing or disappearing entirely when you condition on racial demographics. Not to say that invalidates the problem; just that comparing Mississippi to France doesn't make sense at all from a demographic standpoint.

Why does race need to be brought into it?

In the US, race is shorthand for class. In the US, class is not supposed to be noticed. Race is difficult (and insulting) to ignore. See also: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520261303/being-black-livin...

Many of these conditioning effects persist even when controlling for wealth. Evidently there are other factors at play. Perhaps dietary differences, differences in medical requirements, etc.

A few confounding factors. Cross-checking and citation left and an exercise to the reader:

Immigrants that get through the (metaphorical and literal) gauntlets to get into the US skew longevity via a Darwinian reading.

Staying to any traditional diet, working with what is in season, has health impacts.

Immigrants form communities out of necessity. Strong communities lead to longer lifespans and has a decrease on childhood deaths.

None of these confounding factors corrects for the race-as-class indicator. They simply have a mathematical effect of smearing the statistics.

There is a difference between wealth and class. Class implies wealth, not the other way around. Hence why many die in hospital, despite having wealth, due to their race implying class. This shorthand leads to many outcomes, including calibration of equipment problems that are masked by the race-implies-class effects.

Sometimes because if you add 'race' to the data then clusters appear that align with that extra data. Of course it doesn't mean that 'race' is a causal factor, it can be that it correlates with some other data that is not included such as poverty.

For many outcomes (including medical outcomes) the differences do not go away when conditioning on wealth/income, so if there's a separate "root" causal factor, we have not yet found it.

In most we have found it and it is slavery.

It's too bad we don't in the US break down Black population statistics into those who are descendants of slaves vs. more recent immigrants - the differences in life outcomes would probably be significant, even at the same income level.

Because evidently it's a significant factor in the problem under consideration. It doesn't "need" to be brought into it unless you actually want to solve the problem.

What does it suggest that we should do about the problem then?

I don't think this is the defense you think it is, that minorities could live in such conditions they skew the statistics of the population is not a rebuttal.

Life expectancy figures are misleading though. Many people take it to mean "this is how long an average elderly person is likely to live" but is an average of all ages at death meaning more young people dying brings down the number. As the article mentions, the primary cause for lower American life expectancy isn't that its old people are dying younger but rather the violence and drug epidemics causing more young people to die early.

Either way the point that America is very rich but we do a comparatively terrible job of ensuring our people have long, happy lives is still true. You can pretty much apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_... to any phenomenon that kills lots of Americans, except cancer and Alzheimer's.

If we are so rich, why can't we provide for the kind of programs that would deal with so many early deaths? Money should be able to deal with the issues at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.

I think America is very rich because it incentivizes people to work their asses off all the time. Or in euphemistic corporate jargon, American society optimizes the heck out of everything to appease Wall St every quarter. If they were to focus on long, happy lives, they would not be as rich in the first place.

> incentivizes

Incentivize is such an interesting word in these conversations. This word has two sides. One side is the word you would use usually with children. You want to “incentivize” them to do their homework? Add a reward. In this case the incentive isn’t that you’re rewarded for hard work. It’s that if you fuck up, and Fuck yo real bad, you can end up homeless, in debt and Ina poverty hole so deep you might never climb out of.

Many people would take "having a long, happy life" as the definition of being rich.

I don't see the substantive distinction in this context. If people are being murdered at higher rates in the U.S., this lends weight to the argument that America is doing something wrong, socially, compared to France.

Not saying it isn't, just that the conclusions people draw, like that is a result of Americans being fatter than the French and dying of heart attacks earlier isn't really the primary cause.

It's more likely that the "value" of income in the US is overestimated in international comparisons. If one compares not only lifespan, but also other measures of human health and experience, the differences between US states and European countries makes a little more sense, see: Top 20 states and European countries with the highest Human Development Index: https://i.imgur.com/jcHhVk4.png

> The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania.

That's a great bunch of cherries you picked there. If you are comparing Europe to the US, comparing France and Mississippi is disingenuous. Compare best-to-best or worst-to-worst [1][2]. The worst European countries are Azerbaijan (66.9), Moldova (70.2), Ukraine (71.2). The worst US states are W Virginia (74.8), Mississippi (74.9), Alabama (75.5). The best EU countries are Norway (83.2), Switzerland (83.1), Iceland (83.1). In the US, it's Hawaii (82.3), California (81.7), New York (81.4).

In short, the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU. The worst of US is fares much better than the worst of EU.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

The article itself cherry-picked France and Mississippi to compare income levels, which is why I continued the example. The additional data points are interesting and valuable, though speaking of cherry picking, Azerbaijan somewhat dubiously qualifies as a European country (neither it nor Moldova are part of the EU or Schengen, for instance).

Anyway, the fact that the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU continues to help make my point, which is that high US income does not compensate for the poorer quality of life.

I think the only point in the statement you're referencing is "Americas poorest state is richer than one of the richest countries in Europe."

You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are comparing a US state to say, eh, Moldova. The countries you named are only European by geography. They are on par or worse than North Africa.

That being said, life expectancy is a very bad measure in my opinion. Americans consume a shit-ton of junk food.

Is there another way to be European than by geography?

You can compare the US to the EU (political entity vs political entity). If you're comparing to Azerbaijan you should also put Mexican states on the American side, being that it's also in the same continent.

It's almost as if people who can afford to eat better, do eat better.

This is wrong. Food is very much linked to culture. Many countries eat better than the US. Most countries in the world (except some in Africa in some situations) don't have problems feeding most of their society.

Except it isn't wrong. Indigenous food cultures know how to get their nutrition and built entire cuisines and cultures around that. Americans who live in concrete food deserts are forced to eat what's cheap and available, which is usually fast food.

> The worst of US is fares much better than the worst of EU

None of those countries are in the EU.

The lowest EU countries are countries that have only just recently joined the EU (Romania 74.35, Lithuania 74.93 and Latvia 75.39), which are around the same as the lowest US states.

Europe != EU

Norway isn't in the EU, nor is Switzerland, nor is Iceland. It says quite a lot actually that the richest/highest life expectancy countries in Europe are not in the EU.

As the article points out, immigration is a key factor behind America’s economic performance. Too many people in tech are hostile to immigration out of a misplaced fear of immigrants lowering wages or ‘stealing’ their jobs. Whatever legitimate merits those concerns may have - and research shows them to be few — let’s never forget that the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants help create these well-paying jobs in the first place.

And we treat them, for that hard work and entrepreneurial spirit quite terribly. As a native born American I’ve been appalled at the mistreatment of H1B workers, and even those on other more “generous” employment terms.

Some of the brightest, hardest working and genuinely wonderful people I’ve worked with have practically crawled over hot coals to get here. They are indeed a source of the United States’ economic dynamism and we would do well to treat them well if we intend to maintain that dynamism.

Let’s make sure we’re distinguishing between immigration of high skilled labor vs sending high skill jobs overseas or hiring high skill workers on low-wage worker visas.

I don’t know a single worker in tech that’s hostile to immigration of high skilled labor, nor afraid of said immigrant stealing their job. Most people I know would be grateful for some help.

I know plenty of people critical of work visa programs (including some of those working on them) and plenty of people critical of offshoring high or mid-skill labor. I also know plenty of people not happy about low-skill workers immigrating illegally en masse.

None of that should be confused with an animus towards immigration generally. Willfully blurring out any nuance in such a complex topic isn’t helpful for finding solutions or common ground.

For one claiming not wanting to blur a topic, bringing up offshoring jobs — essentially the opposite of immigration — is a rather odd response.

Things tech workers associate with “job stealing” (exploitive temporary visa programs and offshoring) should not be characterized as an animus towards immigration. They are different, and that’s the point, right? Nobody in tech I’ve ever met is worried about a high skilled immigrant stealing a tech job.

How would Europe even compete with America in the long run. America just has so many advantages (massive influx of talented workers, one country, better equiped with natural resources, the supremacy of the dolllar). There are many other reasons some of which might not seem clear cut. The average American or European life requires an economy which is on average much better than the average for the world. If you do not have comparative advantage in creating valuable things compared to the rest of the world, it is hard to see why the living standards will keep up.

The Americans might have their own problems, but they keep coming up with innovative products several of which which will be massive value producers for them. All the most valuable companies of the world are in US. What will the EU's comparative advantage be? Yes valued companies is not everything and quality of life median matters but in the long run what will the EU have an advantage at (Not just America but even Asia/ Africa).

No idea, but as an American who moved to Europe it's crazy how much ambition is casually discouraged ("the notions on him!") and investors are chickenshit scaredycats offering tiny numbers. Pathetic pay too.

But I still live in Europe because I prefer well designed cities and everyone (mostly) having ample vacation time.

That attitude can work in the post WW II world when Africa/Asian countries were too new to even work out their government structure. When most companies start making things, all the European policies seem like a recipe for accepting a much lower standard of living.

As a European who moved to California the societal stigma around young ambition in Ireland was brutal. When I started my first company in my 20’s and spoke to friends and family about it a phrase I frequently heard was “ah here, why would you stick your head above the parapet?”[0]

Having seen the kinds of Irish startups that get funding from Irish VCs they both tend to be run by Irish men in their 50’s/60’s who’ve been senior managers at big companies. Having reviewed a couple dozen Irish pitch decks it looks like funding flows based on who you know with little scrutiny given to ideas or even business fundamentals.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/put-h...

Ambition has it's downsides. Risk does not always return with reward and often the reward has a high cost.

Such attitudes exist for a good reason. But at the same time the alternative attitude also exists for a good reason.

It was fun for a while but moving to Ireland was a mistake.

Reminds me of my homeland Sweden.

Having been in both the UK and Bay Area, I agree with your points about VCs.

However, the average age of tech founders in the US is older than you might expect, being well above 40yrs. Experience does count for something.

> Pathetic pay too.

If you're after better pay head to London, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, or Norway. You won't match those San Fran FAANG wages but they're still very good. I live a VERY comfortable life in Denmark and it's such a great place to raise a family.

Pretty much the instant I got the right to do so I started working remote for US companies. I have my own company and am working on moving to the Netherlands and talking to an accountant about how to ensure I can take advantage of the 30% ruling.

Would you mind if I drop you a line? We're pretty in love with NL and have a friend there who describes it as a great place to raise kids (unlike rural Ireland, which is terrible), but DK has come up as an option now and then. Would love to know any thoughts you have to share!

Email is in my bio if so.

Let in a lot more immigrants, and not the refugee kind. Vetted, high skilled immigrants. Let those immigrants have something at stake i.e. provide a path to citizenship. Provide automatic citizenship to children of those immigrants born in Europe.

That is common sense, but saying that for some reasons gets lots of pushback from several people (both in Europe and America). People seem to forget that countries are only able to take modern moral stances due to their prosperity, and once the prosperity is not there, the voters forget morality in an instant.

America wouldn’t be nearly as entrepreneurial without immigrants. Something like 50% of all unicorns currently have atleast one Indian immigrant co-founder. Four out of ten unicorns have first gen immigrant founders.

https://m.economictimes.com/nri/invest/indians-top-the-list-...

In case anyone is curious, the source linked above states that 11% = 66 of 582 unicorns have an Indian immigrant founder.

Yeah it’s 50% of the top 50 unicorns

America takes in more poorer immigrants though

Poor but qualified? Unless it’s through the green card lottery I guess and I’m not sure what percent of new immigrants that makes.

Yes, America has a family based immigration system. My parents came to this country via family sponsorship, no jobs no money or anything. The H1-B system is over-represented on hacker news because of the industry we're all in. Most immigration to the US is family-based.

The "massive influx of talented workers" and "the supremacy of the dollar" are not innate advantages, they are a consequence of the real underlying advantages.

Much of the difference is reducible to American risk tolerance. They accept higher average risk for higher average returns, which compounds over time. They also embrace individual ambition to do great things as a society.

> How would Europe even compete with America in the long run.

Via "Eurasian integration", specifically the development of transport and logistics megaprojects across the heartland of Eurasia, strongly linking Europe to East Asia by land. But conveniently timed geopolitical events have delayed that somewhat.

The said geopolitical events have shown that Eurasian integration is a pipe dream. Unless we see geopolitical surprises with the opposite sign analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While all of that is true, the supremacy of the US in the tech sector is entirely due to policy and culture, and has little to do with other factors, such as geographical wealth.

What is holding us back here in the EU, is bad leadership and lots of outdated corporate, financial and political traditions.

They don't compete. They reap the benefits of technological innovation without the need to push their own citizens to do the same.

It's a smart strategy. Smart phones , AI and Google come from the states, but that doesn't even matter given that Europeans have full access to everything.

Being from Europe, my perspective might be as biased as American fatalism but as the article says I think the key most important aspect is lacking a true single market and I'm sceptical of us ever achieving it.

The more we fall behind the more we'll cling to tradition and avoid further integration, a continuous cycle.

> we'll cling to tradition

I think this is mostly a matter of old voter bases.

Why can't an European company sell to the US?

They do, and unsurprisingly it's the relatively culturally-close countries of Ireland and the UK that sell the most to the US. But no European country has a free trade agreement with the US, and industrial standards are different because the EU is big enough to act as it's own trade centre.

It’s so damn American to dismiss any other way of doing things. No better way than the American way, am I right? Europe is sick and tired to be the sickly buddy of the world’s bully. And we don’t care about the wonderful ways the bully keeps finding to build his muscles and reinforce his attitude. You yankees will never really get it though, so I’m talking to the wind.

I’m American and I’ve enjoyed every country in Europe I’ve been to. As far as know, none of those countries would allow me the freedom to work as I do here and I doubt I could find a house large enough for my family of 6 or the 20 acres for my horses and other livestock. I’m open to any way of doing things, provided they give me equal or better results. My family left England for lack of opportunity in 1750 and we have done fine here since.

Could you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We particularly don't want nationalistic flamewar here, or ideological flamewar. You've been posting such comments repeatedly, unfortunately, and we have to ban accounts that do this.

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.

Can I have a strong dislike of how America conducts its business or is that not allowed? If anything all my comments are ANTI-nationalistic, where the nationalism is that sneaking in so many comments here that subscribe to an entitled, west-centric view of the world. The fact that an always civil -albeit confrontational- discussion is seen as inflaming is quite worrying.

Edit: the entire thread this was an answer to was dismissive and partisan about Europe.

Of course you can - plenty of HN commenters make such critiques. But you need to do it without swipes, snark, name-calling, or flamebait, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Every sentence in your GP comment was flamebait—exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. And yes, if you start a flamewar comment a la "It's so damn $country", that's nationalistic flamewar in the sense that we use the term, regardless of which nation you have a problem with.

This kind of thing ends up producing internet discussion that is equal parts inflamed, predictable, and dumb. We want curious conversation here.

ok, fair. will keep it in mind.

> What will the EU's comparative advantage be?

Europe is consolidating its position as the worlds museum.

Also regulation. Lots and lots of regulation.

/European dissident

My statistics bullshit detector flashed on this line, "Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France."

I was imagining a handful of billionaires "averaged" with a state full of people living in desparate poverty.

The census bureau [1] says that the median income in MS for 2022 (single earner family) starts at $47,446 and goes up from there.

Quite surprising IMO.

Just saving someone else the search.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221

It's true the US knows how to succeed. The top x% is doing really well. The mid is doing well in terms of being able to acquire everything they need to live at a reasonable level. The big question is how do we get the bottom percentage to have a life where they don't have to struggle to find a place to live and making sure they never go hungry?

Success can never be success if we have homeless encampments in our cities. What do we do?

> The big question is how do we get the bottom percentage to have a life where they don't have to struggle to find a place to live and making sure they never go hungry?

I'm sorry this sort of thing is ridiculous. Are you European? The vast majority of American cities have multiple organizations attempting to give away food and unable to find takers. Our own church throws away so many pounds of food that we receive from donations. We are in a west coast city with a large homeless problem. None of them are starving. None want food. Literally we advertise and spend endless hours attempting to give away food. We had the same 'issue' at our former church in San Francisco and my aunt is a volunteer at a food pantry in southern California. Same problem.. too much food.

The United States has a lot of problems but a lot of the problems are not caused by lack of money or goods or food. If anything, the problems are caused by too much money.

There is also food stamps (SNAP) which is meant to be supplemental, but technically speaking is enough to survive off of if you do not have any income.

Ok, that may be but hunger and homelessness is still an issue in the US [0]. Why are there so many people living in the streets of the big cities? I live in a large city in the US. I see streets with tents on the sidewalks with people living in them. The failure is drugs, mental health issues, people unable to understand how to work the system, people unable to work, people just unwilling to work and whatever else. Something failed in their lives. We need to deal with them and fix the system so it does not fail again. You can blame the people and criticize them but that has not fixed the problem. We can say it's their fault over and over again but the problem continues. One of the richest countries in the world has a homeless problem of 100s of thousands. It's shameful.

Even from the most selfish point of view, it's a quality of life issue for everyone that lives in the big cities. No one wants to see tents and trash on their streets every day.

[0] https://hunger-report.capitalareafoodbank.org/report-2022/

> Why are there so many people living in the streets of the big cities?

Because the US is an extremely decadent society and people have a lot of free time to become addicted to drugs. In my home city of Portland, where we have a huge homeless problem, a solid portion of the homeless actually come from families with higher-than-median income, and are choosing to be homeless. I just recently went to a talk by a local homeless non-profit group and the social worker flat out said the majority of the people he interacts with do not want treatment. They exist on the street simply because the city tolerates it.

> Something failed in their lives.

Yes... indeed. The United States is too rich and this is a 'we have too much money' problem, and a 'too much freedom' problem. No one is willing to do what's necessary to force the homeless to live in a civilized, hygienic manner.

Look.. my family is from a third world country. Whenever we visit... we see true homelessness. True homelessness is when families are simply too poor to be able to afford housing and live in slums. This looks nothing like the homeless in Portland, who are all single men / occassional single women. These are mentally addled drug addicts, not simply 'normal' people down on their luck. Contrary to what the activists say, poverty itself does not cause people to behave this way. In my parent's home country, the poor homeless behaved normally, they just didn't have homes, and should one give them enough money, they would move into one. In Portland, no one wants to move into a home, which is why we have empty beds every single night.

The US has 13 million hungry children, whether OP is from Europe or the Moon.

That's cool your church throws away food and your local homeless people aren't literally starving, but we don't need to rely on anecdata for this one.

My mother was a public school teacher in a very poor district. Realistically, the social science researchers that study these things are often well-off academics who have no idea about the reality on the ground. The majority of hungry children are due to flat out parental neglect. Should the parents be interested in availing themselves of the resources, they would have food for their kids. Unfortunately, the social scientists keep telling us to spend more money despite decades of that not working.

I mean... if a parent leaves a child in the home and doesn't come back for days at a time and the child is hungry, despite social programs to pay for that child's food... is that a problem with food availability or parental neglect?

Parental neglect is a real problem, I have no doubt.

However.

13 million hungry children are 13 million hungry children. A government can't just blame their parents and avoid any responsibility; they still gotta feed them.

You don't get to just ignore the problem by pointing at all the food wasted in America either - the 13 million kids are still hungry.

Those children won't learn properly, they won't feel safe, they'll have lifelong problems. We'll all have problems because of their problems.

We'll end up paying for it as a society, in 13 million ways; far more than it would cost to just _feed them_.

And the point - if you remember - is the inequality of it all. There are neglectful wealthy parents, just as there are neglectful poor parents - but only the poor kids are going to school hungry. In a country of such incredible wealth!

If we spent as much money feeding the hungry as we did on interest alone for the "war on terror", we'd have the whole planet fed 7 times over. The money is there - but it's dangerously unequally distributed.

I had a chance to travel abroad a while back and one of the biggest shocks to me was not being able to buy stuff with money. Like it didn't matter how much money I had, the stuff was just not in any stores. Ok, so what can I buy? No one knows, there is no walmart or bestbuy you just have to go to random stores and even then if they do have something it's much more expensive than in the US(in dollars).

Another shocker was how much in demand my dollars were. Everyone from street scammers to government officials massively tried to mess with me in different ways to get dollars out of me. Not because of exchange rates and the wealth it represents because if you want to buy stuff from other countries (not even the west) you need dollars mostly with euro and rmb also sometimes acceptable.

I have since gotten so grateful about so many things here.

But it seems no amount of wealth can cure the divisions and disdain groups of americans have for each other.

It really scares how little americans realize just how much they have to lose. I work in a technical field and get paid good but even when I was making $9/hr I remember thinking I had all my bills and rent paid, I was eating and drinking what I want (including my choice of beer and pizza! Lol), had my own car (shitty car but it got the job done) and I had free time to watch any movie/entertainment I wanted at the time and learn stuff like coding and infosec to do what I liked. And right now with no college degree I am literally doing what I love, I spend weekends on work related side projects even and get paid really good.

The only things I will not feel good about doing in the US is healthcare. If I get any serious sickness I will probablu become a medical tourist to mexico or thailand or something. And I had a glimpse into the prison and criminal punishment side of things a while back and it is truly terrifying. Like it was one of the main reasons I do all I can now to avoid driving a car, so I won't have to interact with the police.

One thing I have learned in life is while you should always work to improve your situation you have to always take bad stuff with the good. There is no paradise on this earth.

Almost every morning, I wake up and pinch myself to have the great good fortune to be born to UMC parents in the wealthiest, most flourishing and innovative place in the history of human civilization.

Also, s/o to the data visualization team at the Economist for some really clever, well done charts. You all are second to none.

What I do not like in these discussions is that there are always a bunch of fellow Europeans, trying to link economic success to economic inequality.

1. Nothing says it has to be this way, and taking the big picture of history in perspective, it definitely is not that way.

2. Inequality comes in many forms. Corporate and financial culture in Europe pretty much says that you are only allowed to be an entrepreneur if you are born in the right (i.e. rich) family. It is a much smaller club. The European corporate culture is also one with a much stronger hierarchy between the workers, the managers and the executives. In Europe, university degrees and other forms of bureaucracy further inhibit career progress. Glass ceilings are much, more prevalent everywhere, many of which would be illegal in the US. The salaries are lower and the taxes much higher. All of these are also forms of inequality. This talk that compares the beggar on the streets with Elon Musk is a bit myopic.

Very good points! I’m born and raised in Sweden. It’s supposedly very egalitarian. But I’ve more and more come to see our social norms as anti-egalitarian in that they prevent equality of opportunity and promote the status quo. Honestly I think American culture is much more egalitarian at its core.

As an European, I have to agree a lot with your vision. I might disagree a bit about the entrepreneurship if you also add in that category small business and self-employed people that does business outside manufacturing and tech, because there are a lot of those works very well and actually make a lot of families to progress economically.

I would make even another point here: At least in Spain, the figure of the "angel investor" or the "venture capitalist" is basically non-existent to normal people who had a good idea. AFAIK most of them only invest in real estate, and those that have some tech investments only invest in projects that are starting to give some benefits, are made by some known person, or have other important investors.

For those who could know more: If this isn't correct, please correct me. Also, I know this could be not applicable to the whole Europe, but I don't know at all how are business outside Spain.

The US not only has found a way to make the puppets dance very fast, but also to make them clamor for it. Remarkable and terrifying.

This is a very 'Economist' article-- looking at macro trends instead of what actual Americans are feeling.

Sure, healthcare has expanded, GDP has risen, even pay has gone up.

But the _cost_ of healthcare has rapidly ballooned, the _cost_ of education, housing, etc has rapidly ballooned.

It's very precarious to live in the US without a healthy savings account. That's why people are saying the economy is shit right now.

even for macro trends, the E likes to cherry pick its graphs. The US PPP trend has been sad for a while now, (thats not even per capita)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-GDP-at-purchasing-pow...

There was another E agitprop piece recently, implying that the internet contributed to 20% TFP growth since 1990s, but the reality is that most of that growth happened before 2005, with a decline since then. I had to check the data because Krugman had just blogged about "the internet did nothing for productivity" (for the nth time?)

https://archive.ph/RgOq3

in both pieces, the E lifts America pretty much by comparison to its closest peers, who happen to be social democracies running out of natural resources and boomers.

It's simple, extortion, theft and murder. Like any Mafia.

Read some Michael Hudson and you can start to understand how the empire was built.

This doesn’t fit in to the “hard working”, “ambitious” and “geographical advantages” narrative so will likely be downvoted lol

Much of the world and even individual economies are becoming "winner take all" due to variations on the network effect: everyone goes there because everyone else goes there.

China became the world's factory by having lots of manufacturing expertise in one spot such that few others could compete. The US lacks certain kinds of tooling, parts, and factory expertise, jacking up costs above China's. (The Chinese gov't initially subsidized their factories.)

The "winners" are convinced they are geniuses, when in fact they were just slightly ahead of the pack or slightly luckier and surfed on the network effect snowball.

As a European I have a feeling this is only the beginning.

TL;DR America owes its success to a relatively young population with high immigration, flexible labour laws, deep capital markets, and a swift and efficient bankruptcy process. But sclerotic politics threatens to derail this progress, particularly given the threats of climate change and China. Please stay the course and don’t forget how you got so rich, basically.

Kind of ignores income inequality and that any benefits are going to top income earners.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

The article claims income-tested benefits have doubled since 1979 and that incomes for the beneficiaries has increased. At the same time, earned income as a share of the economy has decreased - those folks need the extra benefits because they are unable to earn it, not for lack of trying. Life is good at the top an is going sideways or down at the bottom, for a long time. The current situation has a lot to do with Reaganomics and tax policy aimed at 'trickle-down' economics or generally allowing people with money to invest to keep more of their earnings than people who earn money from labor.

Thomas Sowell once pointed out that billionaires are correlated with millionaires, and millionaires are correlated with a middle class. Most countries without billionaires are not great places to live and work. Governments without rich people to tax do not accomplish much in the way of welfare.

Take a look at a map of countries with billionaires.[0] I would argue those with billionaires are much better at providing social welfare than those without.

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

Unrelated but why does Germany have much more billionaires than the rest of the EU?

Germany is the world's #4 economy...largest economy in Europe. They would be expected to have the largest # of billionaires no?

Number #3 economy is Japan but it has less than half the billionaires. Germany's economy is 20% bigger than UK's but has more than triple the amount of billionaires. It's not necessarily correlated with GDP.

Or: those that are are good at providing social welfare provide the means for people to become billionaires?

I'm not arguing against billionaires. I'm arguing that billionaires make most of their money through investments and those investments are taxed at a lower rate than labor, where most of the middle class makes money through labor. If the wealthy can keep a few percent more of their income year after year then you end up with the inequality I'm pointing out. We can have billionaires and fair tax policy. Trickle-down does not work.

Manufacturing is noticeably absent from the list of successes.

US manufacturing continues to grow almost monotonically, it is wildly successful. The only thing that has declined is manufacturing jobs due to the high levels of automation used in American manufacturing.

what are some successful stories of American manufacturing?

The arms industry?

SpaceX?

Tesla certainly. Most of Intel's fabs are in the US.

Boeing, the modern car industry, Macbooks, Pratt and Whitney, Cummins, Caterpillar, the Norfolk Ship Yards,, the modern cardboard/"fiber" packaging industry, our incredibly green Forestry industry, the growing modular housing industry.

Apple Google Amazon Rocketdyne Tesla HP Cisco Systems

The Permian basin uses technology that is almost all made in America and is now the largest oil producer on Earth. The industrial base in TX is absolutely incredible and rarely discussed.

Likely a big reason SpaceX moved there.

But America bet on the winning horse. Manufacturing no longer brings in the big bucks. We are living in the information age. In particular, there is only so much growth that you can have in a well developed industrial sector.

Information is an illusion. What are you going to do with pure information? Nothing.

For information to be worthwhile it must be actualized into physical reality.

There is huge practical evidence for this. China. The technological rise of China is unlike anything ever before seen in history. The reason why china rose is because of the massive transfer of industrial knowhow of manufacturing aka the actualizing information. We gave them the means of becoming powerful while we ourselves moved higher up the stack.

The USA manufactures more than it ever has. The horse we bet on is relying on our tech to automate much of it so factory workers are unbelievably productive. Whatever we can’t automate we ship out to China, etc.

This is a slap on the back for... no real reason.

Sure the USA has led in some quarters, but that's more to do with the close of the second world war where European invented technologies (and the brightest creators) were confiscated (from Allies and Enemies). That head start encouraged more external talent to congregate.

I have no problem with that, but this idea that it's "Labour laws" or any magic is about as compelling an argument as "Twitter or Facebook are providing their networks with the best experience and that's why they're so big"

You can also see that China is currently getting on par and ahead in some areas, and that's also because they are taking knowledge (for free) from outside (mostly the USA). And they have terrible Labour laws.

Meta-criticism: https://www.unz.com/runz/china-america-and-the-economist/

It’s a land of freedom, bravery, respect, kindness, love, law, and innovation. Of course great minds will abound and innovate faster in those places. America is amazing. The land of innovation. A land of huge scale and growing rapidly still. Just wait and see how much more growth ahead once they resume QE now that the money supply is tight enough again that inflation is under control.

Time for brand new mega cities and EMP-proof Grid 2.0 and massive infrastructure projects and more money supply for new business development efforts.

> Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.

Damn...how does a country get so rich?

Well, being the only country left with any manufacturing after a catastrophic world war is one major reason.

Also, navigable waterways. Transporting goods by water costs 1/100th what it costs to transport over land. After the US established a corp of engineers to dredge our waterways to make them passable, the ability to transport goods increased substantially, making internal trade extremely cheap.

> Well, being the only country left with any manufacturing after a catastrophic world war is one major reason.

This is not the reason. Post WW II Europe was able to rebuild and for a long time they had some of the biggest companies and for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU. And there are no signs of slow down.

WW II can not be the reason EU has few big tech companies. (relatively compared to the US, few exceptions always exist)

I think it's just luck. In terms of big tech most of the US is like Europe. It's only silicon valley that has this type of innovation.

But the innovation has been around a singular avenue of software. It is a mistake to think that software is the most important driver of economic growth.

> for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU.

Interesting. I couldn't find a good graph showing this. Do you by any chance have a graph or a source?

I don't know when it was larger. However in the 1960s it was of equal size.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-domestic-product?ta...

Starting in the 1980s US GDP inflected and EU did not. The gap appeared then and has got wider ever since. What happened in the 80s? Probably tech?

They were able to rebuild… because the US funded it.

The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent.

That’s about $187B in 2022 dollars. In addition to technology and trade.

… followed shortly after Breton Woods, which secured trade for the rest of the world in exchange for not joining up with the Soviets.

> navigable waterways.

Not for much longer. But, hey, we created a lot of shareholder value along the way, right?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/bodies-water-north-america-drying-...

Anyone who has spent time in both places will recognize this comparison as self-evidently flawed, probably for reasons underlying the statistical methods used.

A comparison of the human development index between US States and European countries produces a result more in line with the lived reality: https://i.imgur.com/jcHhVk4.png

In case anyone is curious, as of 2021, 40 of the 50 US states have a higher Human development index than France. (France was chosen because as the OP and GP note, all 50 states have a higher average income than France.)

It's intriguing. GDP per capita comparisons between the US and Europe would suggest that almost all of Europe should have a lower standard of living than the US. However, this is not the experience of people who have lived in both places, principally because one needs a greater income in the US for the same standard of living compared to most of Europe. Perhaps this reflects over-valuation of the US dollar?

As to the Human Development Index, 2021 data places 13 European countries above the US as a whole [0]. This would be more in line with the experience of people living there.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

I think you may be conflating “standard of living” with “quality of life”, they are not the same thing. While I think quality of life is typically better in Europe by many metrics, there is no doubt that the standard of living in the US is commonly higher. They are not as tightly correlated as I think people assume.

EDIT: As an example, I split my time between Seattle and London. Cost of living is quite similar, but the median household income in Seattle is almost 3x London. That creates a large and very visible standard-of-living gap.

"Standard of living" would include access to education, healthcare, work-life balance, the public environment (e.g. within cities), vacation, parental leave, etc, not just material goods.

While access to material goods and size of housing is normally certainly higher in the US, education and healthcare are notably more expensive for the same quality in the US compared to North and West Europe, and the public environment of most American cities is abysmal.

edit: my personal experience is in the SF Bay Area, London & SE England, and BeNeLux.

Work life balance is much better in the United States. The salaries are much higher so anyone who wants to can save enough to quit and take a vacation whenever they want.

I mean I regularly take more vacation than most Europeans do in a year and every once in a while I've just quit for a break.

America is what you make of it. Many Americans like grinding it out. I like making a shit ton of money and enjoying my life.

Europeans are obsessed with what benefits their governments will grant them and Americans are just not wired that way. This is not unique to me in a high earning tech job. Even qualifying for free health care is not as difficult as some people think. Case in point, I accidentally signed my family up for Medicaid when I was recently laid off. I paid nothing. So many of my fellow colleagues paid their own way because the common narrative is that healthcare is not free in the us.

I was making 240k a year but because my income was zero for one month my kids got free medical and my wife and I was a hundred something a month. If I truly had earned nothing that year it would have been free for everyone. Unfortunately, my colleagues, due to the common narrative that America does not have free healthcare, chose to spend money on cobra or private marketplace insurance when it would have been free if they just applied. did I mention the state also gave me free money during my sabbatical and that finding a new job was absolutely no problem due to how hot even the bad tech economy is.

What do I realistically have to complain about? Everyone in my family, despite their job and I come has retired early and loved out their life on their own terms (all immigrants here too if that matters). I truly sympathize with those who are shackled by debt and other issues, but they are largely choice of their own doing. For any arbitrary person choosing to live in the eu or the us, the only question is who is better at finances... You or your government. If you are better than America will work out great. If your government is better. Maybe europe.

Debt. So much debt.

Another way to say this is foreign investment. So much foreign investment.

China (and other big surplus countries) put a lot of money in to keeping the cost of things in the US low, due to their own mercantilist policies, directly at the expense of their own household sector.

I mean sure, one way is keeping yuan cheap against the usd.

But the real issue is still the commoditization of debt.

Does not seem to have been mentioned:

- Oil resources and the "petrodollar"

- The uniquely stable currency (shall we say) has enabled decades of government and current account deficits. Deficits which are effectively injections into the economy and the GDP.

Fun fact: Ireland has almost double GDP per capita (PPP) compared to the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics

Freedom (less government bureaucracy, regulation, and interference) is the major advantage America has over other nations. Politicians try to gain more power by scaring people, but the gov has a terrible track record of making promises it never keeps, but also never returning powers it has taken.

It is to a large degree government policies that drive US success. For example, the steps taken for energy independence (and then some), or moving manufacturing back, and support future tech - see the current disagreements with Europe about trade, or how they supported private space companies. There is soooooo much policies stuff going on that gets lost in the headlines about more visible things, fortunately, on this very website alone I get to see a g glimpse occasionally. The rest I see when I follow other headlines, such as the mentioned trade disagreements.

You can see the hand of the US government in a lot of business places, trade, subsidies, it's trillions being moved in support of US business interests. And I like what I see a lot more than what I see here in Europe, and I notice that no matter who's president, these things happen regardless.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-manufacturing-factory-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-03/us-and-eu...

The investments into chip manufacturing too, they cost so much this always has to happen with loads of government support, directly and indirectly.

https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2023/02/biden-h...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-require-companies-winn...

> $52-billion U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and research program

You can keep blaming "inept government", but without it the US would be an insignificant backwater. Always and everywhere, since long before industrial revolution, business and government had always had to work hand in hand to create success. England did it, in support of the merchants, later of the new capitalists, Japan did it, South Korea did it, China did it, everybody did it. Very early even the church occasionally played a role, Mendel's famous beans genetic experiment wasn't a random fluke but part of an organized program in support of the textile industry, to find out the rules of inheritance to be able to select the right sheep more efficiently for more and better wool.

Silicon Valley was made possible by government too: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo

Any level of income growth at the expense of income disparity and safety is not worth it. US will slowly become a net emigration center during this decade. The symptoms are already mushrooming.

Really? You are forecasting that the US will have a net loss in people coming in vs leaving this decade, meaning checks watch prior to 2030?

I guess let’s see how this ages but I can’t think of any sober analysis that would lead me to that conclusion. Who’s leaving, with such desire and the means to do so? Who’s desirous of coming in? What’s the strength of motivation in first group vs second (how much gain vs loss do each have at stake)? The numbers seem severely lopsided.

even for macro trends, the E likes to cherry pick its data. The US PPP trend has been sad for a while now, (thats not even per capita)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-GDP-at-purchasing-pow...

https://archive.ph/RgOq3

in both pieces, the E lifts America pretty much by comparison to its closest peers, who happen to be social democracies running out of natural resources and boomers.

Noob question but how does archive get a screenshot past the paywall of these articles? Doesn't that cause any legal issues for the company or there is an agreed time after which the article is old enough to be archived?

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