I think many Dutch or French software developers are living better lives than developers in California, all things considered.
I think that totally depends on the individual and their circumstances.
>I think many Dutch or French software developers are living better lives than developers in California, all things considered.
European developers generally earn much less than Americans, especially after taxes you can get to a 2x difference with comparable cost of living depending on area. In generally wages in Europe are much more even, here in Germany you have a heavily bracketed income tax system, even significant increases in wage usually become much smaller if you consider the additional taxes.
But it might just be possible that there's more to life than money.
There is yes, but a house is still paid in money.
Not to the same scale though. IN Europe and especially Canada housing is way more expensive to buy than in the US relative to local wages. Americans forget how good the4y have it.
Pay fast food workers 80k a year and software engineers would start at 300k.
Jobs that require more skill or jobs that are more difficult have to offer more to get people to work for them. Raise the bar at the bottom and all wages will go up, otherwise workers will "demote" themselves. This is a distinct effect from prices raising and workers asking higher wages to counteract inflation (if they could do that why aren't they?).
McDonalds workers in EU countries earn significantly more than their US counterparts, yet a Big Mac costs the same of just a few pennies more.
What? Do you not know how to check Big mac prices online in other countries?
Danish McD's workers earn $20/hr+ but their Big Mac costs just 80 cents more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/li...
Plus it doesn’t pass the smell test, there are plenty of photos online of danish mcdonalds menus going back to at least 2018, that I could find in two minutes of searching. That clearly shows a standard Big Mac meal is 60 Danish Krone. Which was 9 USD to 10 USD depending on when you pick the exchange rate in 2018.
In the US, depending on location, the same meal would have been 5.5 USD to 7 USD in 2018. Maybe a bit more in Hawaii.
Maybe there were a few places in Denmark selling it for much cheaper, and it was being compared to Hawaii prices, hence why this notion came about, but that’s a ridiculous stretch.
This is exactly what inflation is.
The people at the bottom might be making more, but they won't have spending power for very long because the cost of everything will go up. This cycle will just continue forever, unless the government starts fixing prices, which never leads to a good outcome.
When fast food workers wages are raised, we might see a few dollars more for meals. When you raise the wages in every other industry, it has a cascading effect. Just look at the number of jobs between products on the store shelf and how it gets there. Delivery, trucking, packing, shipping, etc. In this one example, it would raise prices 10X.
But more to the point, it neglects elasticities of demand.