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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

It always amazes me that some Europeans look to the USA as some goal to aspire to. As an American, all I’m trying to do is get rich enough to move to Europe someday. There are greater goals than growth at all costs. Things like respecting the humans that live there and putting their well-being above corporations. If that thwarts “growth”, so be it.

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> As an American, all I’m trying to do is get rich enough to move to Europe someday.

How do Europeans get rich enough to have that life you dream about in Europe once you're rich enough from making money in America to move there?

They do not need to because their social systems are structured around public goods and services for humans instead of profits. Americans have to get rich to buy into a functional system, because they were unlucky enough to be born on the wrong soil.

My health insurance for a family of 4 in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, $20k+ (premiums, copays, etc). Why? Combined market cap of UHC and CVS as of this comment is $391B. (Just one example, there are many)

https://finviz.com/map.ashx

(am American who splits his time in Europe, and agrees with thread parent Europe > US; the US is an extraction engine, at its core)

Yes, but can you eat out once a week without breaking the budget on a European salary?

We are perhaps optimizing for different things. Dining out is not important to me versus affordable, accessible healthcare, for example.

yes you can, there are European cultures where eating out more than once a week is common.

Yes, even most days in the week if you want.

I don’t know about Spain, but when I did some brief research it looks like senior software engineers in the UK make often substantially under £100,000. Away from London even £60,000. Most seniors at my company in the US make about £150,000. £50-70k of incremental salary pays for a hell of a lot of health insurance premiums and retirement contributions.

UK is not Europe since Brexit happened.

You earn locally and spend locally. It's about local buying power and wealth, not about $197.644,50 > £60,000.

I only know Britain because that’s what I researched for my own reasons. But are you suggesting EU salaries are better? And also, that cost of living is like a third of US?? Remember that you can earn $200k working remotely from Ohio. Not just talking absurd SF or Palo Alto rents.

Believe me, it amazes many of us Europeans too. We have a real life example of how those policies will eventually play out (and tens of years of research that confirm the immense disbenefits of such an approach), and yet here we are.

Problem is that there's also a "real life example of how those policies will eventually play out (and tens of years of research that confirm the immense [benefits to the billionaires] of such an approach)". Just as in the US, the billionaires wield enormous influence. Maybe not quite as much, but pretty close. So as long as there are benefits to the wealthy of these policies, I think the Europeans will pursue them. (At least until the French start doing that thing that the French do when things get too unfair in this regard. And then the cycle will start all over again.)

The American billionaire class absolutely controls Europe, and American politics dictates European policy. There is the illusion of European ascendance right now because the American soft power is being channeled through Europe because the faction of the US government (that still controls the majority of soft power) is out of power politically, so they project their values (and funnel their money) through Europeans.

When a Democrat returns to power in the USA, nobody will care what European vassal governments and corporations say or do anymore.

American projection through Europe has made Europe weaker and more subservient than ever.

Have you travelled Europe? Other than in some countries like Germany or Ireland the job situation is quite bleak. For example, look at average wages vs living costs in Madrid

Living costs in Ireland are crazy though. Dublin is more expensive (on average) than London, I'd say.

That's why you need to get rich before moving to Europe

Or just live like a European? The cost of a Latvian investment visa is something like the price of an average new car. It's obtainable to most anyone gainfully employed in skilled labor in the USA. Virtually anyone here that wants one can get it and move there.

Okay, besides being of Latvian descent, why would one want to move from the US to Latvia?

Homebase for smuggling French cheeses into Russia?

Exactly. I think people think it means you get an EU passport immediately or something and can spend 364 days a year in any EU country?? You only get a Schengen visa and are restricted to 180 days total outside of Latvia, inside the Schengen. But you can do that without a Latvian residence permit...

AIUI it's 10 years to get an EU - sorry, Latvian - passport and for an individual year to count towards that you need 183+ days a year in Latvia

Other than years to citizenship, isn't that the same deal anywhere in EU?

The point is getting a residence permit in EU country is step 1, and step 1 is accessible to fairly average white collar US worker who wants to move to the EU.

Especially given that odds are better than 50% that you will find yourself in a new, larger Russia at some point in the next 5-10 years. Not cheering the prospect, but it seems like Putin knows the US won’t get involved in Europe anymore, and therefore Russian expansion into all former Soviet territory, at minimum, just makes sense.

Latvia is more likely to defend itself successfully than Ukraine, Latvia joined NATO in 2004, an aggression there spells the end of the whole Russian oil industry, and after that Russia's North Korea.

NATO is dead. Latvia, if defended, will be defended only by anemic EU forces. Trump has made clear that he views alliances as purely transactional, and he’s obviously correct that due to geography the US has nothing to fear from any non-nuclear scenario. Therefore, I doubt either Europe or America will honor Article 5 for the other anymore.

* Good "Base" salary: around €30,000-35.000 gross annually is considered a good base for a single person in Spain, including larger cities. From there, thech workers might be able to get a better salary. This is before taxes, of which there are plenty, so you can count that final effective take-home money is around 60-70% of that. VAT is 21% so that's another chunk that you'll contribute each time you purchase stuff.

* Median rent price in the city: one-bedroom apartment is around €1,000/month; 3-bedroom apartment around €1,500-€2,000.

Always did find it curious that Spain seems to have few suburbs. Just apartment complexes up to the city’s edge and then farmland…

There are some aspect of the US culture that are truly fascinating and IMHO most Europeans are jealous of but the rest is a cautionary tale about how you can be very rich(as a number on the bank UI) and have horrible life. The next iteration of the Christmas Carol could be one where they take a European aspiring to be American to US to show him the consequences of greed and isolation.

Honestly, US is currently in a stage that Europe was long time ago. Greed, nationalism, military might, fast paces unchecked advancements in tech, rampant religious fundamentalism and sectarianism etc. All those thing are stuff Europeans went through.

That's why the Charles Dickens stories fit nicely.

One problem about it is that without growth, there's no way European pension commitments will be paid. Growth was baked into these promises and we don't have any.

What kind of stupid idiots would ever design a system that assumed indefinite growth?

We get what we deserve...

Democracy. Vote yourself money.

What about a political outlook where nothing ever gets better in the future

You have to go deeper than that, I think in the end our whole species’ goal is growth at all costs and this is subconsciously baked into every decision we make…

The system is not designed, and it does not assume indefinite growth. But another way to capture your point is to say our society strives toward constant improvement, which I don't really see an obvious end to. It is always possible to improve, isn't it?

Yes, but this only works as long as the economy remains competitive. Europe is rapidly squandering the human and economic capital it has accumulated over centuries, while the US and Asia continue to grow. Welfare exists as long as someone pays for it.

In the US and Asia, wealth is concentrating in a few individuals. Those don't pay welfare anyway and pay less taxes than me.

This is a problem, but unrelated to what the parent is saying. If you taxed 100% of the wealth of all US billionaires it looks like it would pay for social security, medicare, and medicaid for about a year and a half.

You still need a strong economy and middle class tax base to have any sort of welfare state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

The top 1% of the people hold 30% of all the wealth. The top 10% hold 60% of the wealth.

I was like that when I was growing up.

The cultural influence that the US exercises outwards with Hollywood, music, etc cannot be understaded.

> As an American, all I’m trying to do is get rich enough to move to Europe someday.

Why not directly work in the EU?

Personally, I'd love to do that. Good luck actually getting one of those jobs though; particularly if living in a city is important to you.

Are you ready to live in a 300 sq feet shoebox apartment instead of a normal single family house?

I don’t understand how expensive Europe is yet income is proportionately low. I don’t mean to live a life of luxury — just basic survival.

Sure restaurant prices are about the same … for 1/3rd the amount of food.

You don't have to be rich to move to Europe. The cost of living in most European countries is less than the USA (which you would expect, given their lower salaries).

The need to be rich comes from the need to get a visa, language training, and rebuild your social structure. Also, the cost of living is nothing to sneeze at if you are a city person.

I’m reading a book by a British author called Against the Machine which you may enjoy. It distills this pervasive unease so many have felt of this growth at all cost system that has been rapidly eating the world. The environmental, humanistic, moral, and spiritual costs of this “machine” is sometimes hard to see when it’s all we’ve known.

On a very related note, I can recommend Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. To quote Wiki:

> It explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism", which he describes as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."

> The book investigates what Fisher describes as the widespread effects of neoliberal ideology on popular culture, work, education, and mental health in contemporary society

Thanks added to my list. I do believe that with the inevitable obsolescence of most work the system will continue to destabilize and some alternative will arise (maybe not in my lifetime) although I’m not optimistic it won’t by dystopian.

But haven’t many countries not only imagined but tried very different alternatives to capitalism? What have we learned from those countries?

It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.

Personally, I am far from enamored with the apparent equilibrium state of capitalism, if that’s what we have in the US. However, when you compare how I feel about American capitalism to how I feel about North Korean totalitarianism, Venezuelan corrupt socialism, Soviet murderous communism, Cuban destructive communism, etc etc. suddenly I appear to be a booster for capitalism.

> It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.

Seems no different in capitalism.

Ever considered that the failures of other methods does not inherently mean the success of the current method.

Nobody said it did, but the other methods fail much harder. A fuckton more people died of starvation under Lenin, Stalin and Mao than will ever die of starvation in even the most right-wing capitalist country, because communist and extreme authoritarian socialist countries have all the same moral failings of their leaders as capitalism has, but also ruins their economies as well.

Society as a whole needs to decide what is to be done with the additional resources generated by on-going technological efficiencies and how the societal aspects of such will be handled.

I wish that folks would consider reducing the work week, or universal basic income --- the total amount of human labour necessary to feed, clothe, house, and entertain humanity is decreasing --- how does society handle vast swathes of the population being not just unemployed, but unemployable, and to the wealthy, unnecessary?

One view on this is to be seen in Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":

https://marshallbrain.com/manna

>There are greater goals than growth at all costs.

Those greater goals are easier to achieve when you are the biggest economy of the world.

That is true and the EU benefited greatly from that status pre-Brexit. However, it still has more than enough leverage to pursue said goals.

The key insight here, however, is that being the biggest economy in the world or growth is not a goal in itself. It is an enabler of all sorts of quality of life goals, but don't make the mistake of sacrificing the end for the means.

Vacation every day, right?

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