Europeans have more time, Americans more money. Which is better? | Hacker News Reader

Europeans have more time, Americans more money. Which is better?

ft.com

As a European, I can tell from experience that my US friends are usually yellow with jealousy (in a good way) when I mention the fact that:

1. I work part-time 2. live rent-controlled 3. have an affordable healthcare insurance (€125 p/m) and car insurance (€50 p/m). 4. and have 15 holidays per year (but I only need 3 days “holidays” to take a whole week off because I work part-time).

True, I earn a lot less than some California friends, I don't drive a new BMW and I don't go to Disney every month. But that's not what my life is about anyway.

> affordable healthcare insurance (€125 p/m)

you sure about that? where on earth do you live to pay this little?

I dont know about OP, but here in France I pay 40€/month, and my children are covered too.

In NL healthcare I pay about €150 p/m, covers everything except dental and vision, which you can add for a bit more

When I read the post, my initial thought that 125 p/m was on the expensive side!

I pay about the same, slightly west of Germany.

One of my tropes is that breaking bad couldn't have been written in Europe, as the cancer treatment is covered for everyone.

"where on earth do you live to pay this little?"

Not being from the US I'm slightly surprised that you are surprised!

I'm surprised because I'm German and I pay 10 times that per month.

Really? Your neighbors in NL are paying ~ 140/mo.

This is standard pricing in Western Europe, if not a little higher. I'm at about €150 a month with everything covered bar Vision and Dental in Ireland, employer provided. Total medication bill per month is capped at €80 as well as part of our National Health Service, regardless of what you're prescribed.

So we are cheaper for insurance but you do actually pay more than that when you include the black hole that is your taxes to the HSE.

The taxes in the US are even more of a black hole considering you get essentially nothing in return

I'm German and I pay wayyyy more than 150€, that's why I'm asking. I'd say it's more like 1000-1500€ bucks, depending on how much you make.

/edit: I checked my pay slip and I pay around 1600€ per month for regular health care (Techniker Krankenkasse). Are we discussing different things here? I'm confused

/edit2: In general it's at least 14,6% of your gross income, for me 15.8%.

I believe that having enough days off work every year makes a huge difference in quality of life. So much so that when our union negotiated the option to forego a 5% pay raise for 12 days more paid vacation per year, it was a no-brainer for me. If I include the optional 5 days of educational leave granted by my state[0], I have 47 vacation days per year. This is a rather privileged position of course, the average is around 28 in Germany, but I don't see myself ever going back. Last year I refused an offer for 40% more money just because it would have only offer 30 days instead.

Maybe I don't have the "drive" that is common in US tech workers, but for me this is simply a job, and more time for hobbies will always beat more money.

[0] "Bildungsurlaub", available for things like language learning, personal development or other educational purposes by accredited providers

Some conferences fall under this.

Since we're on HN and you mention California, it's worth noting that with a good job in tech 2/3/4 disappear, leaving only 1 (which is still very nice).

I moved to Amsterdam after working in the Bay Area for 10 years, I was able to negotiate 70% of my old salary with some stock options/bonus. Now I have the best of both worlds, working towards a permanent residency, paying much much less CoL and enjoying traveling Europe with my wife.

You were either underpaid in CA or have negotiated an unusually high salary for NL.

Finding an NL salary over 100k EUR is exceedingly difficult unless you are C level (or middle management, which is grossly overpaid for the value they provide).

My TC is 200k EUR and I'm a senior engineer with 7 YOE. I didn't find it particularly difficult to negotiate, I sent them my old offer letter and told them how much I thought was fair. They also included a full white-glove relocation of my family and house overseas which was nice.

For talented engineers, it's definitely possible!

I guest kinda tired of Californians being the sole yard stick all of the US is measured by. I think it sucks to live like they do too. It sounds very stressful to live on the edge like a lot seem to.

But like my very poor sister can match you. I'm very middle class and can match you as well in anything but part-time work and rent control, but my rent has never been a significant burden for me. I take a week off every quarter on top of the standard set of holidays. I take off just to spend time with my kid at her school and it's fine. I know I'm pretty privileged, but given you brought up wealth like that, you're talking about pretty privileged Americans in California. My health insurance for me and family is $200/mo. It would $70 if it was just me. These kinds of benefits have been super common over my career.

There are a lot of Americans in less cool states who have a pretty decent life setup. It really varies by state. Like I don't even have student loans because there's a series of state granted scholarships in my home state that effectively mean that attending a state college is tuition free for residents, although you gotta figure out books and lodging.

Your $200 health insurance probably doesn’t cover anything a bit more expensive. You’re one accident away from bankruptcy.

$200 US health insurance is almost certainly dependent on the job the poster works at.

I recently repatriated to the US, and my independent healthcare cost is $460/mo for just me, someone of older but not senior age with zero family costs. The same (better) coverage for me privately in the Netherlands was 140 EUR.

It kind of depends on how much you are willing to "hack the system". If you just want a job for life, the European system is way better. But the American system can be better if you want to work for 5-10 years at a high-paying job out of school, living frugally to save up a lot, and then just quit, move to a very cheap area, and become an independent with a passive income stream. Of course, that mainly works if you do something like STEM (high-paid programmer, finance, etc.) But since the article is about having "more money", I thought it was worth mentioning.

>But the American system can be better if you want to work for 5-10 years at a high-paying job out of school, living frugally to save up a lot, and then just quit

That accounts for about 0% of the population. Well, probably many people want to retire after a few years, but almost no one actually can do it. So saying that it's better for those people at the expense of everyone else is pretty much just saying it's worse.

I didn't say retire, as I mentioned in the rest of my post that you left out. I just said start your own independent thing (like small business, passive income, content creator, etc.)

To be brutally honest, only the Wall Street elites can effectively pull that off. But then finance guys in Europe don’t do that bad either.

Other than the frantic pace of innovation, there is nothing to brag about the American system. It is glorified servitude for the majority, where the real “winners” are at the top and even they aren’t “happy” by any measure.

Financial freedom alone doesn’t equate to living and contentment - that requires a shift in the “I need to X so I can do/have/feel Y” mindset. Sadly, American economy thrives on this - the people pulling all the strings show carrots to the masses because it serves their purpose. The masses keep falling for it and the cycle repeats itself in perpetuity.

Like I said, this is great for innovation (to motivate people towards a capitalistic endeavour) but is absolutely soul crushing and mind numbing. Burnout is imminent.

This would apply to a very few number of people. The overwhelming majority of tech jobs in the US do not pay anywhere nearly enough to work for 5-10 years and fully retire. This would even prove a problem with many of the very well paid devs as you'd need somewhere to sleep.

I didn't say fully retire. I said become independent and start your own business or independent income stream like writing, content creation, etc. Actually, that is what I am doing.

No, you said "become an independent with a passive income", which sounds a lot more like retiring and living off investments than starting a business.

Well, that is not what I meant. Plain and simple.

Surely you see that opening your own store, or content creation, are not "passive income".

In the UK we have neither :)

yes but at least Brexit really happened.

That has worked out well for you...

We don't have time in the UK?

Average hours worked per week 39.6. Annually we're pretty far down the rankings

Many salaried jobs give 20-25 days holiday in addition to public holidays (another 8/9/10 days)

WFH and hybrid is still quite popular, reducing time spent commuting. Average daily commute is around an hour in total.

In jobs where people get paid hourly and have access to overtime, they compete with each other to get those extra hours. Revealed preferences say they want the money more than the time.

In the US, or in Europe?

that's most likely because the people who work those jobs are usually struggling to make ends meet and desperately need every penny they can get. if their needs were met, i'm certain that would change.

Well that amount of money is what Europeans are living on (even with typically higher costs of living), so it's still not a tradeoff people would make.

that statement is absolute gibberish. "what europeans are living on" and their cost of living varies massively by country or even by town/city.

>the people who work those jobs are usually struggling to make ends meet

You are omitting the large swath of government and civil-service type employees - cops, firefighters, transit workers, utility field workers - whose base salary alone avoids "struggling to make ends meet", but they still want that overtime because time and a half or doubletime at their income level is quite lucrative, plus it helps to spike their eventual pension amount (although lawmakers are slowly wising up to that and cutting off the opportunities for new hires, although they can't change the deals the current workers already negotiated).

Ok well it could be that when people get paid hourly and don't make enough money they will compete for access to overtime, but also as the term overtime generally means significantly more money that normal time it makes sense that the hour is worth two hours.

I probably wouldn't compete for overtime at my job, but when I was working as a consultant I would because double consultant wages is a big thing, also because consulting means that one should increase intake during times of employment because you may have times when you have no intake at all.

I basically work to buy myself time to be with my family and in the US that is so expensive that after bills all I’m left with is about 2 weeks a year. And when I go on vacation I go outside of the US as I get a lot more for the money and it is cheaper.

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240505193952/https://www.ft.co...

That one doesn't work, because archive.org isn't great at bypassing paywalls. Use this one: https://archive.is/9DB2K

Previous discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40216986

ok guess it's a dupe :(

You can't buy more lifetime.

The article pretty conclusively says the European model is preferable by most metrics. Yet the author couldn’t resist ending on a “both sides” argument:

> True, the US produces more innovation, some of it beneficial. There is no European Google, Tesla or Facebook.

Which is such an imbecilic argument even the author couldn’t commit to it. “Some of it beneficial”. Yeah, and most of it is detrimental to everyone except the people at the very top of those companies. The biggest innovations those companies are responsible for are all the different ways they can invent to fill their pockets by exploiting workers and users.

I am not sure Facebook existence is some kind of net benefit to ... just about anything. Likewise google, a companies being able to capture that much of a market and market being massively biased toward "winner takes all" instead of creating competition between many lower players is not necessary a good thing.

Likewise Tesla, but for different reasons. There was a unique vision ... but also a lot of lies on their path.

Also Tesla, while successful as a business, cannot really be describe as a champion of innovation. Electric cars did exist before and would have developed anyway because of stricter and stricter emissions laws even if Tesla never happened.

What they did great was targetting the über riches instead of trying to sell inexpensive EVs for urban dwellers first. But that is more market research than innovation.

It’s not imbecilic, it’s actually a very real effect.

If you want to innovate, why bother in Europe? Taxes are high, VC funding is impossible, the workforce is going to spend half the time working as an American.

A friend of mine tried to start a startup in Germany and he said his only option to raise money was to go to a bank for a loan, which would only be approved if he had a profitable company.

He moved to the US.

The siren call is entrepreneurship. But overall how many people win this game and how many people just want normal lives? We tend to hear stories of winners but not so much of wrecked lives.

" VC funding is impossible ". Sorry but wrong.

On a contrary note, many more of my circle in the UK are running small businesses than their peers in the US.

N.B. the distinction between startup and small business.

The US is not a very friendly place to run a small agency or an artist's studio - here in the UK it costs a few pounds to register a company (or nothing as a sole trader), and doing accountancy and compliance is WAY easier. It's fairly simple to employ someone in the UK, but it's hard in the US without a league of accountants and lawyers behind you - hence why stuff like Stripe Atlas exists. I wouldn't run a business in the US with revenue below 150k.

I am so confused by this comment. Accounting software for small businesses is standard. Quick books is so ubiquitous and it's dirt cheap and supposed to be operated by a lay person. There are whole professions here are almost exclusively small businesses. Trucking being a decent call out. I know several moonlighting tech people who spun up single person businesses using a template and carried on that way for years just using very basic accounting software. They do contracts and everything on their own. I have an aunt who has spun up several businesses doing business with the actual federal government and she's never had more than an accountant she has check her receipts for taxes. She has no background in anything and somehow was able to launch these businesses. I have writer friends and artist friends who have LLCs. I've never heard anything like what you're talking about.

I don't know anything about the UK, but it most certainly is not hard to spin up a business in the US.

I agree about QuickBooks being good for small businesses.

Perhaps I've just been so personally burned by how complicated US compliance is from outside (form 5471 and friends being a personal boogeyman of mine) that I've missed that it's quite easy to do business inside the US. I am aware that you have to do stuff like file as a foreign business if you do business between multiple states.

I don't like that you have to pay a private monopoly company (Intuit) to stand a chance of being compliant with your tax obligations over there.

That's not universally true in Europe.

One of the upsides of doing a startup in parts of Eastern Europe, for example, is the ability to self-fund even for normal people. Cost-of-living is ultralow, since medicine is free, housing is cheap and available (at least outside of major cities), public transit is cheap and works, education works without private schools / tutoring, etc. Basically, $10k / year gets you the good life. And if you screw up, the safety net means there's not too far to fall; you land on your feet and try again.

That's a very favorable climate to bootstrap a business in.

You do see a lot of entrepreneurship from there of that type. It's not US-style big tech, but it works well. Your odds of building Google are low, but your odds of building a self-sustaining small-to-midsize business which you own are quite reasonable. The latter of those is likely a better thing to aim for.

If your goal is to raise $100M, give up 98% of equity to investors, and have the business explode or implode, Silicon Valley is the place to do it. Not everyone wants to get on that ride, though.

> If you want to innovate, why bother in Europe? Taxes are high, VC funding is impossible, the workforce is going to spend half the time working as an American.

What you’re talking about is starting a company, not innovation. The value of innovation isn’t measured by “how much money can I make from this”. The World Wide Web was intended in Europe. So were the first truly popular music streaming and VoIP services.

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