https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-and-lisa-su-f...
Still, I always loved how immigrants to the US always ended up in high level positions, starting or leading top US companies, something that never/rarely happens here in Europe where maintaining the status quo and the "natural order" gets priority at all cost.
Most of the money here is old money. There are dozens of implicit rules. In France having a teacher as a parent is a better indicator of whether you'll get into a top school than being rich. Because you have to know all the tricks in the book to get anywhere. From my POV getting into Ivy League seems as simple as getting a high SAT, applying, getting approved for a loan. In France, most immigrants kids don't even know the possible paths to get into a top school.
Also yes, salary plays a big role, if you're part of the top 1% of your country intellectual elite, I'd bet you'd rather cross an ocean for 6 figures than for 2000 euros a month and free healthcare.
Under those conditions I’d estimate your odds of getting into at least one Ivy (or equivalently good school) at around 50%, which might seem low but remember 99.6% of college students do not attend an ivy.
Your POV is simply, factually, wrong; more people get high SATs and apply to the Ivy League schools than they can admit by a wide margin, and there are a lot of tricks (many of which leverage accidents of birth, wealth, and social circle) beyond that which go to getting to the top of the list.
The bigger ones involve the hyper rich buying buildings, and the merely very rich engaging in bribery which is higher risk when discovered, but legacies, padding applications with extracurrriculars for which opportunities are very much not equal, etc., all play a role.
Legacy and extracurricular are the big ones. Very, very few people are buying buildings or bribing.
I don't doubt your characterization of the situation in France at all, and there are certainly a plethora of great universities in the U.S. that have reasonably accessible admissions, but the "top" schools (Ivys, MIT/Caltech, etc.) are certainly beyond the reach of many, and favor those who know how to play their game.
Here's a different view. More than 2 million people take the SAT each year. The top 1% score between 1550 and 1600. They number more than 20000 people each year. You can have straight As K-12, achieve a 1570 on the SAT, be president/captain of three clubs/teams, play two musical instruments, be a National Merit Scholar, serve on the board of some national organization, win 12 state championships, and still not get accepted to an Ivy League school. Or you can have a B here and there, score a 1500 SAT and get accepted.
My point is that it is not as simple as getting a high SAT, applying, and getting approved for a loan.
In France having a teacher as a parent is a better indicator of whether you'll get into a top school than being rich.
No, not really, most people seems to still believe it.
>Most of the high education school in France have a somewhat fair competitive exam to filter the candidates
Yet preparatory schools are still disproportionately full of rich white kids.
What do you mean? As an immigrant to France when I was in 3rd grade [0], I knew in a couple of months that I had to go to a good high-school, to get into a good prep school, to get into a good grande école. Everybody knows this. And everybody knows how to get there: be good at math, and have good grades in general.
[0] In France, school grades are "reversed". Grades 6 to 3 are "collège" / middle school / junior high. Grades 2, 1, "terminal" are high-school.
I kind of slacked off when I was in post secondary school, I didn't go to "classe prépa" but did a DUT because I was bored of studies, still ended up afterwards in an engineering school after my DUT because my parents kind of pushed me to contest for an entry. I ended up even more bored, fell in love with a girl I met that was living in another country, dropped from the engineering school after the first year, moved abroad to join her, applied there for a job, got it at first interview. Being motivated in a work environment (compared to a more meaningless to me educationnal one), I quickly climbed the echelons to be considered an "engineer" in the industry meaning, without having an actual engineering degree. I did so during the few years it takes someone to finish engineering/grandes écoles and find an actual job in France.
I learned that in many places outside of France having a few years more work experience and verifiable credentials is actually more valuable than a nice degree when applying for a job being 25 and that at 35 nobody cares anymore what degree you got in the first place.
[1] I am taking the assumption that your kids will or have already obtained french nationality and a european passport.
- Get them into a decent high school, e.g., Henri 4 or Louis Le Grand in Paris.
- Hope they have good grades and manage to get into a good preparatory class [1], e.g., Henri 4, Louis Le Grand in Paris, or Hoche and Sainte-Geneniève in Versailles.
- Make sure they don't slack off, and hope they get into a good engineer school, e.g., Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Mines, Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussés, CentraleSupelec.
(Lists are not exhaustive)
If they manage to get into one of these schools, they will most likely end up not have any difficulty to find a somewhat well-paid job in France.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classe_pr%C3%A9paratoire_aux_g...
Very often, when a kid is good enough its school main teacher will mention the possibility of going to a prépa: it's good for a school reputation when they can send kids to prépas.
For sure it's better when the parents are already in the known, but it wasn't the case for me and it was not a show stopper. There's plenty of public information and the importance of "grandes écoles" in France is not a secret.
Yeah you're set for life if you succeed there, but the student suicide rate in those schools is also astonishingly high because of the pressure/competition.
If I were you, I'd just teach my kids to code, learn, build stuff, sell stuff, and use AI correctly. IMO school is an outdated concept, in any country.
Plus, if you have French citizenship, u get cheap access to some pretty good universities.
Not true.
What happens, and not only in France (it's like that in the UK as well), is that primary and secondary schools that are in not very good areas are not ambitious for their pupils. They'll say average is fine, going to a technical college is very good, etc. so in the end those pupils do not think of taking the "high road" because they've been convinced it is not for them.
On the other hand, if your parents are highly educated and you go to one of the top secondary schools you'll be pushed and told that you should work hard and that you can get into a top university.
And where do you think the vast majority of immigrants live? In Boulogne Billancourt?
It's more like the teacher in France example, except you also have to be rich.
One other difference is that all the major companies in Germany are very old, and around half of them are either privately owned, or state companies. BionTech, the last company to really rise to the major players was actually founded and is being led by immigrants.
1. more innovation 2. high economic growth 3. better salaries
Whatever you are doing works.
How do we quantify it? And how do we know that it is not the result of metric-hacking, as the GP commented, and is actually true "innovation"?
> 2. high economic growth
Same as above.
> 3. better salaries
Only for a small slice of the population. Income inequality is growing across the country, and it is not an obviously good thing if a small fraction of the country is getting boundlessly richer while the rest of the country/world suffers.
The other thing is, is there more real innovation going on or is this just some local hyper optimization of making the numbers go up?
I don`t claim to be the judge/arbiter on this matter, guess i`m glad we can compare both on this world
You are right about this being different:
> On the contrary, here in Germany these positions are usually filled through either familial connections or company-internal mentorships.
Some government jobs are notoriously products of nepotism and inbreeding, but private industry is, in my experience, invested in recruiting the best candidates available to them.
It’s hard to explain in a comment, and it’s easy for locals to take it for granted, but private industry in the US incentivizes speculation (risk-taking). It feeds into how we start companies, how and when we invest, where we live, our liquid financial markets, and I think we idealize hiring not from academic titles or genes but from merit. This idea that we settle on the same things for the 30 years is somewhat antithetical to that.
Not in Germany. All management positions I saw at big auto makers there were filled based on connections instead of competence. Who you rub shoulders there is very important for your career progression.
I know it because I've seen a long delayed project of a hybrid sports car be even more delayed thanks to the project manager being replaced 3 times because he was an incompetent moron being given a golden parachute to be replaced by an equally incompetent moron, 3 times in a row.
I bet you're correct with other industries such as investment banking or finance though.
this is a myth. even if you just look at asian immigrant groups alone, many groups do very poorly economically - the burmese, hmongs, nepalis etc are all poorer than the average american. in fact, i think the only asian ethnicity that is over-represented in business leadership are not the chinese nor the japanese but the indians, and i don't even think that's true specifically for first-generation or even second-generation americans of indian origin.
While it's ingrained in the culture, to be the best you can be for certain communities, having tons of people with the same ethnicity/community/caste benefit you as well. People don't go climbing up the higher echelons on pure meritocracy.
There is a reason Indians are over-represented among other Asian ethnicities and that is not pure meritocracy.
It is using a very well established (i.e., has been used for a long time) terminology to describe familial relationships.
The "first" refers to how many horizontal genealogy lines are crossed (self -> sibling -> first cousin -> second cousin -> etc.) the "once" refers to the vertical, so the "first cousin once removed" refers to either your cousin's parent or child, and as we refer to our cousin's parents as aunt or uncle, we usually conclude that your "first cousin once remove" is your aunt/uncle's grandchild, ergo your [first] cousin's child.
do people just not know how to Google things these days?
Difficult to get the exact stats because it is illegal to measure demographic breakdowns in many European countries.
It really isn't illegal to measure, where did you come up with that?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/france-and-ger...
From where I read the article, it it says the contrary, Germany has racism and discrimination on the labor and housing market, but it can't be proven because it gathers no data.
So having no data actually makes the problem worse since racism and discrimination will continue to exist in practice (humans gonna be tribal) but you can't prove it because you have no data because you don't wanna be seen as racist.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You're just turning a blind eye on racism while touting yourself as a crusader against racism.
If anything, your claims are unsubstantiated.
Edit: here is a good source, see page 16 https://one.oecd.org/document/SDD/DOC(2018)9/en/pdf
My original wording was clumsy. Most EU countries do not collect race or ethnicity data. Those that do are all in Eastern europe and the UK, Ireland are the only Western exceptions.
in europe most of that should correlate with the questions we want to answer since there shouldn't be many immigrants that have been here for more than a few generations and speaking the local language fluently. those who have been here longer should be well integrated by now.
in the US that wouldn't work because discrimination happens despite people having been there for many generations all speaking fluent english.
Is there not discrimination against black people in Europe? Might be hard to tell considering that the designation isn't even recorded. The only other large minority racial group I can think of there is Arabs, but most of them migrated very recently.
there is. my point is that you can discover them by tracking their origin and language. no need to track their race. it's extremely rare that any have been living in europe for more than two, maybe three generations (maybe a bit less rare in france, belgium, netherlands due to their colonies).
EDIT: the guardian article actually touches on that and argues that migration background is being tracked, but doesn't work, but if i understand it correctly, they don't track previous generations.
but anyways, my suggestion is just a hack on the current law. what we really need to focus on is identifying factors that lead to discrimination and statistically track them. skin color is such a factor. if the law prevents that, then and we can't find another way to solve the problem, then maybe it should be changed.
> I lived in 2 EU countries and government had ethnical data on citizens.
Could you provide that data for France? I never said it was true of all EU countries.
e: Actually, reading your comment I am left a little confused - aren’t your latter paragraphs the exact point I am making?
Never understood the fixation in US of breaking every stat by ethnicity or skin color.
Without taking these stats, the Jim Crow South suddenly looks like an even-handed application of voting tests.
e: I will say, the number of comments I get from European commentators favoring the “putting your hands in front of your eyes” approach when it comes to racism in Europe does make it completely unsurprising how non-diverse their C-suite is as well as why they have difficulty attracting high-skilled immigrant talent.
Out of the richest 1000 Americans how many are blacks? 1? 2?
And what's the % like in prisons?
Wasn't Oprah the only black billionaire in US like for a decade?
US attracts talents because there's much more money in US than elsewhere and the political and bureaucratic environment favors entrepreneurship.
Please quit lecturing people around the world bantering a moral ground you don't have.
I agree. The attitude towards immigrants doesn't seem to affect how well they do anyway. The opportunities matter much more than anything else.
My dad grew up in a European country with colonies in Africa, with state sponsored racism against africans, but yeah it’s all reverse now.
Like it took until 2023 to finally outlaw intentional racial discrimination in American universities; that was A-OK and widely practiced before. And some of Google's internship programs publicly list what races they prefer, which is common in tech.
Anyway comparing it to a country that's been built on immigrants killing and banishing natives is plain lunacy.
Maybe so, but even Sony and Nissan had non-Japanese speaking CEOs for a while and Japan is not really know for its openness and progressiveness to foreigners.
Also, we're talking about global tech companies which reap profits from the global economy, so fluency of the local language that's only spoken by 5% of the world's population shouldn't matter that much, when those mega-corps hire teams of cultural and language experts for each market anyway.
I'd say it's more culture, mentality and protectionism of the status quo, than the language itself.
I think the Nissan case is a bit of an exception and if anything demonstrates how reluctant the Japanese are to have major Japanese multinationals run by someone not Japanese.
It was already there, but depending where you're from, "first cousin once removed" might not mean anything to you, especially if English is not your mother tongue. Seeing a family tree makes it clear for everyone regardless of language or culture what the relationship is.
I wager most native English speakers understand the concept of cousin, but not first/second/etc cousins, nor once/twice/etc removed.
1. Your parents' [first] cousins' children are your 'second cousins';
2. Your parents' second cousins' children are your 'third cousins' (and so on);
3. Your parents' [first] cousins are your '[first] cousins once removed';
4. Your parents' second cousins are your 'second cousins once removed' (and so on);
5. Your parents' [first] cousins once removed are your '[first] cousins twice removed' (and so on).
I'm obviously not a native English speaker.
The 'once' here means 'one time', not 'when it has happened that'. cf. my 'twice removed' example above.
Few of my friends that launched startups, despite being based in Europe, working from Europe, and everyone being European, incorporated in Delaware anyway.
US is simply friendlier to ambitious and greedy people. You can be so anywhere in the world but you won't get the same benefits you get in the United States.
VAT needs to be done over around $100k/year turnover 4 times a year, but again that is possible to do in a couple of clicks via APIs and accounting packages.
And finally payroll taxes are pretty simple too, again can be done via accounting packages.
From what I know this is much less hassle than most/all US states. But some EU countries (germany especially) are horrendous, so it's not a clear picture.
It's a deadly combination for entrepreneurs UK can't offer.
European society is constructed around sharply defined ethnic groups, often identified by name and appearance. Ethnicity cannot be changed.
Curiously, Indians and Chinese nationals tend to do well in the USA because their motherlands are poor. This means that only the most well off can even contemplate moving to the USA. Obviously, these folks do well relative to poorer immigrants. Europe's other problem is that it attracts mostly low skilled, older immigrants.
First cousin means they share a grandparent, second cousin means they share a great-grandparent, etc. Once removed means they’re offset by 1 generation, so one person’s grandparent is the other’s great-grandparent. There is a directionality; the person who is “once removed” is the one whose parent is first cousins with other other person.
This kind of harkens to the optimality surrounding meritocracy based systems.
I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and zero have earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it.
How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech?
That's not a thing unique to Europe. Same goes for almost every Asian company with Korean, Taiwanese, etc. roots.
It even goes further then the Asian continent. For example the president of Samsung Benelux is June Young Park.
In addition, for immigrants from Europe/Asia/Africa, the US has almost complete power to pick and choose candidates whereas Europe is physically attached.
One last factor I noticed as an immigrant is that newer societies, like the US and Canada, are easier to fit into. For older ones like in Europe, it's just harder to change your identity and gain acceptance. This isn't a fault on Europe's part, it's probably just natural progression.
I felt that doing things “differently” or having unique background is more often perceived positively in the US than in the EU. In the EU, the norms force you to fit in, whereas in the US, you are allowed to pave your own way, whether that means success or failure.
I'd say it is, considering they/we have decades of data on what makes immigrants successful and what not.
But take a country like Japan - they have near zero immigrants and they seem to like that.
If you have an open society with a flexible identity like the US, Canada, Australia, and maybe others, then you get the benefit of ambitious immigrants coming to grow your economy. But this isn't doable by or desirable to every other nation.
What's your definition of "always" ?
You and your children are first cousins. Your children and your cousin's children are 2nd cousins. Your children and your cousin's children's children and 2nd cousins once-removed.
The English PM is the son of Indian immigrants though
It's a young country built on the premise of immigration and kicking out the natives, that might be part of it.
Yea, we are all tech CEOs over here
Completely ignore the family cartel thingy and focus on the American dream.
The US lets people rise to higher heights, but income mobility is better in many parts of Europe. That is, the odds of moving from low or lower-middle class parents to the upper-middle class are higher in most major European countries (e.g. UK, France, Germany, Scandinavian). For that matter, it is also better in Japan, Australia and Canada. [0]
Or maybe what I saw is flawed and biased. I haven't spent a lot of time confirming it. I definitely have seen the claim pop up from time to time. It makes intuitive sense that society could prioritize either goal but that policies that help one hurt the other.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
got it. so here in the US, the overachieving immigrant stereotype is an assumption that is waning in popularity, specifically because it further marginalizes all the immigrants that are not overachievers and do not have the cultural or socioeconomic support system, while other residents assume those immigrants don't need support simply by factor of looking similar to another immigrant.
the phrasing is important. its fine to admire that there is a frequency of visible acceptance and elevation into high level positions. your words say you don't realize how rare that is.