90% of my drive for more and more money is the fear of long term unemployment and knowing there's nobody to come save me. If that fear didn't exist, I'd probably work for half the price to be honest.
We have socialized health care, and even private care is like 1% the cost of american healthcare. I got elective surgery without insurance which included full anethesia in a private clinic and they were very sorry because the total would be 600 euros.
> retirement
Public retirement is ~50% of your average lifetime salary though the age was recently raised from 62 to 64 (in the face of massive protests).
> losing a job
Firing is harder to do in the first case, they have to have cause, or the company has to be facing bankruptcy, there's a long notice period. Unemployment is also a decent percentage of your salary and can go on for months.
Frankly on 60k a year, you live well even in a city like Paris, you're not living a life of luxury but that's comfortable upper middle class levels (in Paris).
Socialized healthcare is pretty much a given in other similar countries in the EU though, it's the US which is an outlier.
But as you pointed out, other european countries have since caught up and provide the same benefits.
600 Euros for elective surgery with full anesthesia is insanely cheap. Even by EU standards. There must be some subsidies involved from the public health sector for that surgery or something to knock that price down. In Austria a surgery is thousands.
Doctors at a private clinic won't even get out of bed for 600 Euros let alone pay for the whole staff and clinic.
In the UK, Sweden and Estonia (the only places I have data for) it would be within this ballpark, never more than €1k (in their respective currencies).
I think making any broad EU statement even if it applies to many/most is fine.
There will always be some outliers in the data.
There is a similar argument about generalisations on behaviour, ie: statistically average behaviours of people.
You have to be able to talk in broad strokes with the knowledge that it doesn't apply to everyone.
It's also in 100% of the countries I know about. What does that mean?
Would you like me to investigate the propensity of this EU wide, or are you being glib about knowing only a single country and that technically is 100% of your knowledge?
How many are your 100% of the countries?
I could probably speak a little to the surrounding nordic countries to be honest, it is fair to assume they have similar systems because they are very similar in many areas.
I think we might have a different understanding of what "upper class" means. Upper class is the likes of Trump/Bezos/Musk/.
3200 Euros/month will not let you live even remotely near that. It's a decent middle class and that's it.
Rich and famous isn't really part of the class system.
(Disclosure: I'm one of those relatively rich people in Scandinavia and I pay lots of taxes but I also enjoy that wealth inequality isn't so extreme over here.)
A proper taxation of inheritance would make income and wealth even stronger correlated, but that's hard to do as long as you can take your extreme wealth abroad. Family dynasties do exist even here and it's still an issue society needs to solve.
I don't know for Norway, but Denmark is one of the most wealth inequal countries in the world, while also being one of the most income equal.
I think this is what differs from EU to the US. EU is great for subsistence seekers while the US is much better for aspirational people.
The issue is just that you need both to have a good country. An aspirational person also need to be able to shop, eat, etc. And subsistence people also want access to the newest comforts such as being able to access newest medical treatments.
As an aspirational person myself, I tend to be negative around the subsistence arguments thinking people need a notch to work. Just like subsistence people tend to take for granted the amount of effort is takes to safely make accessible a new treatment and feel entitlement around social security, health, and retirement services.
The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule. That's just propaganda and a narrative spun by the rich to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Not backed by any data.
> The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule.
You insinuate that I was talking about people living of welfare which is absolutely not within the "subsistence" definition. That would be more akin to a rent-seeker.
Also, I did not make any political statement. I merely setup a taxonomy: That of subsistence people vs. aspirational people and proposed that EU is better suited for subsistence people while the US is better suited for aspiration people.
That is not at all controversial.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Aspiration seeking and the desire for a strong social system are not mutually exclusive. Whether somebody cares about there being a social safety net for themselves and everybody around them does not indicate how aspirational they themselves are but correlates positively with empathy and negatively with egocentrism.
> That is not at all controversial.
It's a false dichotomy and as a way to cast the comparison it is quite obviously controversial.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.