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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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