>The only reason I go to work is for money.
Don't forget healthcare being tied directly to being employed.
If it was not for that, people could purse their passions versus what they have to do just because.
Don't forget healthcare being tied directly to being employed.
If it was not for that, people could purse their passions versus what they have to do just because.
In my mind, it's rather a combination of:
1) European employees not willing to work much more than 8h a day (whereas US folks tend to work themselves to the bone)
2) European employees living in cheaper countries (so the HR has a ready-made BS answer to "why do I earn less than my US counterparts)
3) What I believe is a bit of disrespect towards non-US employees. If the company's based in the US, the upper management's going to be US, and I often feel like the attitude is somewhat "your education must have been worse than the US one, so you'll probably be worse than US engineers" kind of a deal. This is, of course, very subtle; I've personally never felt that from my immediate co-workers, but the salary policies seem to be geared this way.
Of course, being more expensive to employ doesn't help. I'm sure it's one of the contributing factors too. But, as a European, I feel like it's far from being in the top 5 reasons for the salary discrepancies.
That's with an effective tax rate of like 12% for middle class which is absurdly low. On top of which tech workers can probably afford to shove in the max contribution to an HSA every year completely tax free and then use it for healthcare expenses and/or invest it for retirement otherwise (that's what my wife & I do).
There's a much simpler explanation: The EU simply doesn't have the capital. There are no pools of venture capitalists clustering hundreds of billions of dollars they can piss away on half-ass ideas.
It's as simple as that. They funding money simply doesn't exist.
A Facebook engineer in London is probably earning 70% of what a Facebook engineer in the US is earning, even after taking in to account taxes, benefits and any cost of living discrepancies.
For the specific case of London (and more specifically Facebook), this is driven by the fact that FB/Goog don't count tech people in finance as appropriate comparators. I suspect that this is not true in NY/USA.
Meanwhile the average salary in Toronto is $52k USD per year[3], versus San Francisco's average salary of $109k[4].
So that might give you some idea.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-home-sales-1....
[2]: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/20330/san-francisco-ca/
[3]: https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Location=Toronto-Ontari...
[4]: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=San-Francisco-...
Not only that, but when filing out immigration petitions, most firms will actually file in Canada and the US. Workers who can't meet the higher bar for US immigration will be sent to Canada.
We don't have sufficient birth rates to maintain things and so both economic productivity but also the tax base will be significantly harmed without this immigration.
That's not to disagree with your comment, the large amounts of immigration do cause problems and as you say, much of it flows into certain cities.
With family reunification, it's not uncommon to see aging parents and relatives be sponsored. They add very little to the tax base but are a huge burden long term.
Also, there are some requirements to support those family members:
"You will also sign a Sponsorship Agreement, obligating you to financially support your sponsored relatives if they cant provide for their own needs. The new permanent resident will not qualify for government assistance, even after the sponsored person becomes a permanent resident, separates from you, or leaves the country."
"To sponsor a parent or grandparent, you must obligate yourself for 20 years of financial support."
https://greenlightcanada.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-sponso...
Canada is facing a huge brain drain to the US, for highly paid and in demand professions like in healthcare and tech. It remains to be seen whether or not they can replace the lost productivity of their native expats with mass immigration.
Construction used to happen a lot more than it does now. Demand keeps increasing, but the supply isn't increasing as fast as it used to.
Every homeowner who treats their home as an investment vehicle is game theoretically forced into NIMBYism so that the rich get richer.
We've been okay for a while since we use the influx of cash from new developments to support our existing maintenance obligations, but that adds new maintenance in the future.
It's functionally a Ponzi scheme, and now it's starting to unravel. It'll happen in the U.S. too, just slower since the U.S. is bigger.
Everything is just cheaper in the USA
Canadians have much lower purchasing power than Americans. We earn less than Americans for the same work, we earn CAD which makes it even lower, and on average everything costs more here too. It is shocking to me how cheap things like gas and groceries are in the USA, even after factoring exchange rate.
Nevermind how expensive technology is here.
As for people pursuing their passions if only X... there are many people who for various reasons do not have to work and who don't work, it's not a hard sell to extrapolate that the behavior of more people joining that class would be much the same as people already in it. For most of them, most of their time is not spent on Star Trek-ish ideals of bettering humanity/themselves or on passion projects.