Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>Will this still be the case in 30 years when India and China’s economies have matured and high paying tech jobs can be found elsewhere?

Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU), what makes you think India and China can?

> where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US

To develop companies that can threaten the established US ones you need more than educated capable brains, you need massive amounts of VC funding, which even the EU doesn't hand out, let alone see India and China match not only enough money to catch up with the US, but also to overtake it. Returning Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists means nothing if there isn't tens of billions waiting for them in funding when they get home.

View on HN

China salaries are surprisingly high for skilled specialists (IT, robotics, biotech, etc), if you factor in cost of living and taxes, they would be higher than EU ones even now.

As an Indian techie who moved away in 2011 and still living in the West(US & EU), I was recently shocked by this revelation. A fellow Indian engineer who moved to Amsterdam recently scoffed about the economic state of affairs here, and said he was able to save so much more while living similar lifestyle back in India. I blindly asked “how could it possibly be?!, with Indian salaries..” and we got down to details. Boy was he right. The purchase power of an Indian techie is so much more than one even in Amsterdam. Although he, and I chose to move and live in Netherlands for many reasons(cleaner air, cleaner/saner/safer/more equal society, etc.), the case still holds true purely by numbers that a techie working in tier-1 companies in India earns more(after expenses and taxes) than the same metric in EU.

As like most things in life, to each their own. But, I was surprised to learn of this shift in balance.

The biggest shock my indian colleagues percieved when coming for few weeks into Europe - wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands? Why are you living so poor? Their star-struck eyes about Switzerland very quickly sobered up, life aint a Bollywood movie.

I've spent 6 months backpacking all over india, seeing all the dirty underbelly some decade and half ago, interacting mostly with poor and poorer. Life-changing, extremely intense, beautiful and harsh experience. Those indians getting to the west are mostly from those top layers like brahmins, not your usual poor hard working common indians - 'american dream' is hard to achieve anywhere, but is nigh impossible there, regardless of talents and hard work put in. Everybody knows it, and profit from it as much as they can. Young brahmin couple telling me its fine that 5 year old kids work in fireworks factories instead of going to school, at least they bring some money home. Small kids with various medical situations begging on streets. Some sights and their utter unfairness still haunt me to this day.

I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core, for millenias. Upper castes dont give a nanofraction of a fuck about poorer people, their suffering. Yes, you can live there like a king on IT salary, maybe not in central Bangalore or Pune, but India is bigger than Europe in more than 1 way.

Yet once you stop being poor, money is of little concern. Things like clean air, water and nature, safety, not having 50 C during summer, free good healthcare if not in US, free good education or social services are things we often take for granted, so do the immigrants over time. Life with some poor immitation of that is not that great, and it doesnt matter how high are the walls you build around yourself to shield yourself from the crap behind them, it simply ain't a great life.

So, comparing how much one earns, or saves is largely meaningless in longer scale. You decide which system overall you want to live in and often raise your kids, the rest are details.

Well, a lot to unpack here.

I'm not going to disagree with the inequality, bad air quality, or the gap in development between the classes of people in India.

But, as someone with one foot on either sides of the world, I'd like to caution against a closed-off narrative that sounds like "Look, this, this, and this are bad, so overall it is conclusively bad!". We humans all over the world develop as a society and are posed with different challenges that we solve very differently. I certainly have made my personal choice and moved around (US, Denmark, and now Netherlands), but that doesn't entitle me to say any particular world view _must_ be the good one. I for one, certainly miss the cultural openness, family bonds imposed on one by the typical South Indian society. I miss the attitude of "how do we get by and do this? no point in complaining that the government is failing to do blah, or relying on the safety net of a social system" - weird, I know. But, it gives you a certain mindset to look at things differently. I see this in my daily life with my Austrian wife and my son born in Denmark and being raised in The Netherlands - we(including myself) expect things to be in certain place, and feel entitled to them that we almost do not care. Look up the energy use and water use per capita in any western country versus that of India's and you'll see the eye-opening difference. India simply cannot afford to be as wasteful as the Americans or Europeans when the world is already lit on fire.

Sure, western societies do not have underpaid home maids and servants, but the society here has been developing for a long time, and haven't had the misfortune of another country colonising them right during the industrial age and loot all of the resources and treating people like underpaid home maids and servants. Neither did they have the constraints of a warming climate dictating what or how much fossil fuel to burn to build out their infrastructure.

India is huge, it has a different set of problems than the ones encountered by the western countries while they were developing. Over time, things will rationalise and I'm optimistic that the society will move towards the same priorities that the West has. But, I already cherish the secular credentials, diversity, innovation, and hard working populace of India. The scale of elections that occur that lead up to the election of the prime minister is a marvel to observe. I was only surprised to see the creme of the labour force(IT, one I happen to know) is already on par with the West that already seem to have it all. The rest will follow.

>wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands?

My colleagues from Israel also said they missed having cheap Arab maid back home that would take care of the house chores whereas in EU they'd have to pay over 20 Euros an hour which is out of their budget, for the wages here.

Yeah mate, it sucks not having exploitable labor. /s

>I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core

Both India and China have a pretty nasty caste system.

To whatever extent you want to misuse the term, America has more of a caste system than China.

Okay ... how, in America do I get in-house "help" for a dollar, let's say per hour?

>Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workf...

>13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)

So, just make a timemachine to go back over 100 years, easy right?

Which system is China's caste system in your mind?

From what I've read (which admittedly limited to media available to an American), there is an urban/rural differentiating system whereby rural folks can be identified by their identification card (I think by number) and need to apply for low-paid migrant labor work in urban centers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingong

The distinction between this and implicit systems of caste found in Western countries (like US racial inequality), in my mind, is that it is a caste system that's embedded into and enforced by their legal system.

It's disappointing to me, too. If there's one noteworthy plus-side to any communist system, it should be an unyielding commitment by the communist party NOT to allow a legal system that enforces a class system. It's like the one thing they should be good at, even if nothing else.

Thanks for clarifying. Hukou itself is indeed very bad. There's a few subtle details which made it not feel like a (traditional) class system to me. tl;dr it's no longer a urban/rural class system, it's more of a born-in-Beijing/Shanghai vs others class system.

AFAIK, the urban/rural differentiating part (农业户口; "agricultural hukou" vs urban hukou) is no longer relevant. The "you can't have social welfare where you want to live/work; you can only have social welfare where your hukou is at" part is still relevant and unlikely to be changed in the near future.

Thanks to capitalism, what type of hukou you have no longer limits what kind of work you can do. Most of the mingong-s do low-paid migrant labor work because on the market that's the best they can do with their skills. I have talked with a software engineer at Tencent who was claiming to have rural hukou. This is generally true, to the point that rural hukou holders no longer want to convert their hukou to the urban one, from [1]:

> A recent study [2] finds that only one-fifth migrant workers are interested in converting their rural hukou to urban hukou, as they are unwilling to give up their rural land – valuations having increased sharply in recent years.

It is still unfair to them because of the welfare thing mentioned above, though. But it is not because of the urban/rural difference: for example, if someone has a urban hukou in, say, Zhengzhou (a city with 12mln people), they still can't have welfare in Beijing even if they lived in Beijing for 10+ years. Which is also why they don't convert to urban hukou unless it's Beijing/Shanghai one - benefits of poorer cities are meh, and it is not possible to convert back so they lose their lands permanently.

[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-hukou-system/

[2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Rural-Chinese-in-no-hurry-to...

Sorry for late response. Yes, I did some further research and it turns out your characterization of the Hukou system is much more accurate than mine, which is why you find disclaimers and such on my comment. Mea Culpa.

East-Germany also has some amazing skilled wages when you factor in the cost of living, but there's a reason the cost of living there is so low. Nobody wants to live there.

US is still much more attractive for ambitious people from Asian countries than India, China and even the EU.

Can you explain briefly why nobody wants to live in East Germany? Is it a holdover from the before the wall came down?

I'd assumed, perhaps wrongly, things were more unified by now given the age.

Right wing mentalities are present there.

I make about the same as a very good offer in EU would get me, but my costs are much less and taxes are about 5%. I guessing I save 2-4x as much. This is in China.

How do you get ~5% effective tax rates? With EU-level salary you should be hitting 30% in their progressive income tax system. China has hidden sales tax (in the form of VAT), too.

IIRC As long as you work in tech (OK, there's some more subtle rules but let's assume parent gets it), Shenzhen caps your income tax at 15%. Still nowhere near 5%.

Shanghai has a foreign employee tax system, which works out to about 5% income tax. This system is only available to choose at some companies and provinces. At a previous company I did indeed pay something like 25-30%.

And what are they going to do with those salaries? Buy unbuilt or unfinished apartments in sinking tofu-dreg towers from bankrupting construction companies?

Right now it seems the answer has been buying up western real estate: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-investors-buy-6-1-150...

Probably but an apartment in a nice, modern building, which China has plenty of.

> Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU)

1. Because EU isn't a centralized nation. Maybe one day.

2. It is a vassal of the US.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-05/us-pushin...

> what makes you think India and China can?

Because they have to.

> To develop companies that can threaten the established US ones you need more than educated capable brains, you need massive amounts of VC funding

I don't think china is desperate for funding. And china has already created such companies. That's why china is being sanctioned.

To a considerable extent, Europe has ceded it's tech sector to the US. We use American search engines, retailers, social networks and messaging apps. China especially has fervently avoided that mistake. India not so much, Facebook, WhatsApp and Amazon reign supreme, but even they have blocked tiktok. So they provide the space for domestic competitors to build up in a protected environment before having to compete with US VC money.

> Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU), what makes you think India and China can?

India and China tolerate more inequality than continental EU. Software engineers probably only make 2 to 3 times as much as teachers or nurses here, rather than maybe 4 to 10 times as in the US (and probably also India and China).

>Software engineers probably only make 2 to 3 times as much as teachers or nurses here

No, 2 to 3 times more than nurses or teachers is huge an unrealistic by socialist western EU standards. More like 10 to 40% tops is realistic.

For context, a nurse earns 3k to 4k/month in Austria while a SW dev in the ballpark of 3k to 5k tops, so not that much more.

There's no companies paying you 2 to 3 times more than a nurse.

What has socialism got to do with large variations in salary?

Flatens the pay gap. Taxes high corporate wages and profits and pays it to public workers.

You mean like the US in the 50’s? Labeling reducing the pay gap and taxation as socialism is not intellectually honest.

Just FYI, the apostrophe would go before 50 in that a la '50s rather than as a possessive.

You're confusing socialism with Soviet communism and the red scare.

Some of the EU countries I talked about are social democracies, and are ruled by socialist parties and have socialist policies who's consequences are a healthy lower class at the expense of a hot sw engineering market due to high taxes on businesses.

Maybe do some reading before talking fud.

Social democracies are not socialist, which means that workers own the means of production. Any other twisting of the word socialism is simply wrong. This changing of definitions is not helpful for both true socialists nor for those who oppose it, as both sides will misunderstand each other. If you mean to say social democratic policies such as high taxes and generous social safety nets, say so, but that is not socialism inherently.

>Social democracies are not socialist, which means that workers own the means of production

You're confusing socialism with communism.

No, I'm not.

> socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. "we want a real democratic and pluralist left party—one which unites all those who believe in socialism"

Or, if you want the Marxist definition:

> a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism. "socialism is the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism

And therefore:

> Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).

Reading further into communist societies:

> A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour.

How ironic that you tell others to read when you yourself don't know the definitions of words you use.

Thanks, it gets a bit tiring seeing people claim that any form of fair pay is communism.

Especially with things like medical workers, who aren't even state employees in most of Europe.

Indeed, it's really something that grinds my gears too, when people don't use socio-politico-economic terms correctly like the above commenter. It just makes it hard for either side to be on the same page when debating because they're essentially using different definitions from one another.

Like the other person already said, no way an average sw engineer makes 2-3 times more than a teacher in Western Europe.

In countries where teachers are well paid (such as Germany), it's not rare for developers to earn less than teachers. Otherwise it varies by the developer seniority, but 0%-50% more would be a realistic range.

Is the VC funding part important or just the lots of money part? I've got the impression that VCs aren't really interested in hardware so it's governments that have to step in and fund it.

I also believe the Chinese government is throwing crazy money at this sector at the moment, I heard they were giving money out to anyone with a PhD that mentioned RISC-V or semiconductors. This was a couple of years back so not sure if this is still the case.

This is an excellent read on the subject https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-noth...

> Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU), what makes you think India and China can?

Wages aren't the only point though. Life is not all about money. I had to take a pay cut to move to Spain but quality of life is so much better here.

We're talking about what attracts top talent to move somewhere in terms of geopolitics. The US is vastly more attractive to top tech worker than Spain, even if you choose otherwise.

>Returning Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists means nothing if there isn't tens of billions waiting for them in funding when they get home.

China has a huge trade surplus and they are starting to trade in the BRICS currency. Why shouldn't there be billions? Once the investments pay off, why shouldn't there be even billions more?

> what makes you think India and China can?

They don't have to do anything. The US visa system already excludes most of the Chinese and India people eager to immigrate to the US. The brain drain is bounded above by the US policy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com