Pretty sure there must be affordable small towns in the US without SW engineers to drive up the cost of everything.
But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc.
And it's not like many large German cities aren't already gentrified and overpriced despite wages being lower than the US. Try moving to Münich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, look at real estate market then at the local wages. It's the same disease everywhere.
How dare they want a better life? /s
You can always build up or denser but NIMBY's don't allow that so here we are.
>>everyone wants near good jobs
>How dare they want a better life? /s
>You can always build up or denser but NIMBY's don't allow that so here we are. reply
FWIW, I hope that WFH starts to revitalize all these dying small towns that exist on 90% of our landmass. They were nice back in the day.
There are. Cedar Rapids is great! It would be even better if we had more industry in those places, and less of the industries that generate outsized returns for a few, like tech and finance.
> But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc.
It's not worth the tradeoff. I've only visited Munich, but it seems much less shitty for an average person than NYC or SF.
You need some critical mass of finance, tech, etc., but you can manipulate industrial policy to generate more of the jobs that create broad prosperity and less of the jobs that create outsized returns for a few. Contrast say the heavily financialized economies of the U.S. to the more industrial economies of Germany or Japan.
That's definitely not true. When I was at Groupon I met a couple of people in sales who didn't have a degree and yet were most definitely not second class citizens. If you can make it rain, companies nobody cares about your traditional credentials. The same is true for marketers, too.