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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

The question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost.

Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following.

Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe.

It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.

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Just because GDP isn't a measure of affordability or security or industrial strategy doesn't mean it's not useful. It means you should also have measures of those (which in fact do exist because economists are not idiots and do fully understand these kinds of problems).

Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal. On the same period the stock grew even more (ex: S&P x4.5 from 2000). So, if you want to say that if you lived 30 years ago in Munich AND did not save anything you would have lived better, I will have to answer that it was just delaying the issue of not being able to save - the ones that were able to save (maybe not living in Munich, maybe other ways), might at some point come and buy something in Munich. Accumulating wealth too much into some hands was the issue decades ago and remains an issue today. Just that decades ago people might not have been aware...

The electronics industries of a couple decades ago were producing stuff that are incomparable to what we have today. Taking that into account, I would say today is "better".

> Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal.

It always is but not everyone has the option of buying. It takes investment and not everyone's parents are wealthy.

Renting is actually a better deal, financially, in Israel compared to purchasing. Rent is cheaper than the mortgage payment, by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a month, in a society where the average price of housing is more than 14x the average annual salary but most people are highly emotionally compelled to purchase housing as a symbol of stability and wealth creation - an emotional decision instead of a financial one.

As always, local circumstances matter.

We calculated when buying the house near Munich that we pay around 140000€ more than renting our flat forever with moderate rent increase. At the moment of signing we needed bigger apartment. Few years later we see, that despite heavy construction in the old house we will save at least 200000€ as buyers. Rents in German cities are out of control. Probably it’s different in regions with solid real estate supply. Here’s nothing.

That progress in India comes as an excuse to weaken their democratic institutions. The fallacy is that Modi is to praise - the progress comes mostly because of enormously positive global trends developed in the past decades, the ones that are now being threatened.

> Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars.

A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.

Progress in India is due to policy in India. The idea that India can handwave it's successes and failures on external forces might have been well justified in 1955, but in this century they get to choose. Best hope for the anti-Modi-policy crowd is maybe it isn't Modi's policies specifically.

In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.

> Progress in India is due to policy in India.

This is an extremely bold claim. Always was, but especially in today's world it is. I am not saying that Modi's policies are bad, what I am trying to say is that he is basically playing the game on the easy mode. He has access to the unprecedentely dynamic and resilient global economy _and_ he has access to cheap Russian resources Europe doesn't want to buy anymore. All Modi needs to do is not do anything really stupid - the economy will perform well unless clubbed to the head.

And that is all fine, and I am genuinely happy for India. My problem is that Modi is using that easily achieved success to erode democratic institutions - and that will become a problem in the long-term, as it always historically has, everywhere.

Russia wasn't the group that stopped selling oil to the Europeans, the Europeans refused to take it and have a military policy of arming people to blow up the means of transporting that oil to Europe. They're very proud of not using Russian oil. Modi could have joined in with that, he had a lot of people asking him too. Doing nothing (if he did nothing, again - I have no idea about the details of Indian policy) is a rather decisive policy given the pressure the Europeans have been putting on people.

The world has been in easy mode for 70 years now. Any government can choose to sit back and let people get wealthy. It is literally so easy that even the communists figured it out.

Whats the point of this progress which is completely destroying nature and giving people all kinds of cancer, India's oligarchy is more destructive than any other country on Earth. Indians used to be the most naturalist people in the world and now look at the state of the country.

Obviously it depends on your point of view. That entire region (India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) still has a lot of work to do.

Indians are generally too patriotic to trust and its like talking to MAGA sometimes.

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