Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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The thing is, stuff might not be priced correctly. The US is a superpower in many areas but in a lot of cases the productivity is beancounters magic. Maybe US has the superior beancounters and not necessarily the superior production.

For example, an appendicitis creates an economic activity of at least $7000 dollars in US and much much less elsewhere even if the work done on the human body is the same.

Similar situation for the software, for some reason writing a for loop in SV is at least 3 times more valuable than writing it in London.

So I would argue that the forumula of country's currency = How much stuff it produces / How much money it prints doesn't necessarily be working the same everywhere.

Why? IMHO it's for 2 reasons: barriers on people moving and the US being de facto reserve currency. There are too many artificial barriers on the free market around the globe, the capital flows much more freely than the labor around the globe and this creates artificial valuations of properties and economic activities.

> for some reason writing a for loop in SV is at least 3 times more valuable than writing it in London

I mean, yes, writing the same line of code at Google, Uber or OpenAI is more valuable than doing so at a British neobank.

You're correct in productivity being a nefarious beast to measure. But the examples given--extending the life of a high-GDP-per-capita person or doing identical work in dramatically different contexts--aren't making your point.

The multiplier is roughly the same even if the dev in London is working at the exact same company as the one in SV.

> multiplier is roughly the same even if the dev in London is working at the exact same company as the one in SV

Sure. Because they’re doing different work, in proximity to different people and different resources, within different economic contexts. A developer in Silicon Valley is fundamentally more productive than one in London, in part solely by virtue of being in Silicon Valley. (Not true at the individual level, of course. But statistically, of course.)

Yes, the setting is different but its different because people can't just go around and work wherever they find employment because there's artificial barrier called nationality and visa.

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